Rusticus

by Martin S. Briggs

But even if an occasional example of these old factories has some vestige of architectural merit, nearly all of them were unsuited to their purpose. It does not seem to have occurred to their builders that a “mill” existed for any object beyond the grinding of the last penny out of the sweated men and women and children whom it housed. Light, warmth, decent sanitary conditions—all were utterly ignored. It is hardly to be expected that the slave-drivers of early Victorian days would produce buildings of any interest, and in fact the great gaunt prison-like boxes that desecrate so many Yorkshire and Lancashire hillsides are a very fair expression of that greedy scramble for money that has caused such a backwash in our own day. For it must not be forgotten that some of the most beautiful places in England were violated in this way. Many people have never visited our northern counties, which they regard as a foreign land, yet which contain scenery at least comparable with anything south of the Trent.

But if one takes, for purposes of comparison, the two valleys in which the ruined abbeys of Fountains and Kirkstall now stand, one obtains a very fair illustration of the effects of industrialism. They are only some twenty miles apart, they were founded by monks of the same Order at about the same time, and in their original state they must both have been attractively situated. The modern visitor to Fountains, as he rounds the bend that has hitherto concealed the Abbey, invariably gasps at the beauty that bursts upon him, for here a nobleman’s park protects the site and no coal or iron lies near. But Kirkstall is blackened and overcast by the huge ironworks that sprawl over the adjoining hillside, a sooty mass of tumbledown sheet-iron sheds, bristling with tall chimneys belching out smoke; and the river that formerly fed the monks with trout is now covered with an evil-smelling and iridescent film of factory waste.

Yet, many and various as were the insults heaped upon rural England by “captains of industry” in the good old days when England was making money hand-over-fist, they sink into insignificance compared with the early Victorian achievement in housing. The golden age of self-help, philanthropy, missionary enterprise, evangelical zeal, individualism, and all the rest of it, produced the “back-to-back” house. The meanest streets of the East End, the worst slums of our Northern and Midland cities, were built while the Romantic Revival was in full swing and while Ruskin was lecturing on the Seven Lamps that he had discovered hanging in Venice. The wind sown in those prosperous days is quite clearly producing a whirlwind for us to reap in more difficult times, and one recalls another text about the sins of the fathers. This is not a faddist or an extreme view. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in his new History of England (p. 683), writes of “the ever-advancing bounds of the realm of ugliness and uniformity, in its constant destruction of the beauty and variety of the old pre-industrial world. Indeed the more prosperous and progressive the country was, the more rapidly did that increasing work go forward.” And he quotes the grave words of another critic: “The Nineteenth Century did not attack beauty. It simply trampled it under foot.”

Proceeding with our examination of the various symptoms for which we shall eventually have to prescribe, let us now consider what are the shortcomings of the houses built for the people in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and more particularly how they have affected the appearance of our countryside. In themselves they were, as a rule, either entirely sordid, or both sordid and pretentious. The former were erected by manufacturers and colliery-owners in long rows to provide shelter for their “hands” at the minimum price, the latter were more often the work of that public benefactor known as the “jerry-builder,” and were erected as a speculation. In the former case the tenants had no option but to accept what was offered, so paid the rent required and occupied the house without demur. The jerry-builder’s houses, on the other hand, had to attract tenants, hence the pretentious element was introduced in order to ensnare the tenant’s wife. In those days, nearly all small property was held on weekly rentals and architects were hardly ever employed to design cottages or small houses.

But the houses had to be designed somehow, so the builder had recourse to sundry manuals or copybooks of designs for “Villas and Terrace Houses” in the worst style of the day. The idea of using such books originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when numerous little calf-bound volumes appeared, but they contained little more than details of the Roman “Orders,” and such features as chimneypieces, doorways, etc. The result was that the speculative builder, who made his first appearance about that time, continued to build in the traditional manner, but added a classical porch and interior panelling and similar trimmings, which, even if they were often rather pedantic and un-English, were always in excellent taste.

The nineteenth century copybooks sprang from a very different source. “Gothick” architecture, for two centuries a byword and a reproach among all cultivated people, had been rediscovered. From Queen Victoria’s coronation to her jubilee, architects romped over Europe and brought home sketches of Gothic detail from France and Flanders and Venice. Ruskin, who was not greatly enamoured of English Gothic, but loved it in its French and Venetian forms, spread the glad tidings among the middle-class; and the famous architect, Street, ransacked Italy and Spain in his quest. All this mass of drawings was broadcast over the country at its period of greatest industrial prosperity. Once I worked in a provincial office facing a replica of a Venetian palace, and witnessed the erection of a factory-chimney copied from Giotto’s campanile at Florence.

Naturally the smaller fry in the building world aped their betters. Second-rate architects and hack draughtsmen set to work to adapt and caricature these fashionable forms for use by the builder on shops and villas. Terra-cotta manufacturers gladly joined in the game, so that soon scraps of Venetian carving and ornament came to be turned out by the mile and capitals copied from French churches were moulded in artificial stone in tens of thousands. To this movement may be ascribed a very large share in the deterioration of English towns and even villages, for the “Gothic” craze naturally spread from the centres of fashion to the smaller places. A travelled and studious architect, set down in a street of suburban villas to-day, should be capable of tracing the ultimate source of the pretentious porches, the tile cresting on the roofs, all the mechanical ornament reproduced down the row; and in nearly every case he could derive it from a Gothic church in France or Italy.

The sad thing is that these revived ornamental forms were only a travesty of the old. Gothic architecture was, perhaps, the highest form of natural and legitimate building that the world has ever seen: as adapted by the speculative builder, it had no structural meaning whatsoever, and consisted in mere chunks of crudely caricatured ornament, generally misapplied. Ruskin preached truth and honesty in architecture; but his pigmy disciples missed the whole spirit of Gothic. The barns and cottages of old England represent that spirit as well as the French cathedrals and Venetian palaces on which he concentrated with such disastrous effect, yet the English village has suffered terribly from the Gothic revival.

For the movement spread to village shops and banks, and, of course, all new churches erected after 1830, or even earlier, followed the new fashion. Because every old village already possessed a parish church, now becoming too large for its needs, there was little for the Church of England to do outside the towns, though there are many cases such as that at M—— in Middlesex, where an amateur effort in church-design by the saintly William Wilberforce, just a century ago, has ruined a beautiful old village highway. But the Nonconformist bodies, now flourishing and sometimes even wealthy, were not to be outdone in the race: so they abandoned the stark galleried chapels, that had hitherto followed the Protestant type invented by Wren for his City churches, for an ambitious and often flamboyant variety of “Gothic” that has created a discord in many a village street. There seems to have been a prevalent idea that every place of worship must be decorated with a spire, with tracery, and with a quantity of ornamental features, quite regardless as to whether funds permitted of a single one of those features being worthily executed, whether any of them symbolised the entirely English and healthy movement that produced Nonconformity, or whether they harmonised with surrounding buildings. Our final conclusion must be that the Gothic Revival, which, in the hands of a man like William Morris, who loved England passionately, might have done so much to save her countryside, was in fact largely responsible for its defacement.

Another characteristic of this singular movement was its utter disregard of what we now call “town-planning.” When Ruskin advised his audience to treat railway-stations as “the miserable things that they are,”[2] because he disliked railways, he seems to have been voicing the spirit of his day, which was quite content to speculate on the symbolism of a piece of carving in a remote foreign city while men continued to build the most appalling slums. No town was “planned” in those days: it “just growed.” Occasionally a manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily bad business.