A blustery day, but sunny. A bus ride (finally!) across the city to that most salubrious of Swansea's suburbs, Newton. To a place of private roads, hidden villas, occasional glimpses of the sea, and St Peter's church. Another Late Victorian/Edwardian church by that prolific architect Edward Bruce Vaughan, but in far better condition than poor old St Paul's up the valley in Plasmarl.
St Peter stands on a corner amongst pine trees, solid, well-massed and not a little comfortable. Quarry faced snecked masonry of Bridgend Sandstone. Some rich detailing (Bath Stone) all in the best Bodley and Garner mode. Some of it put me in mind of Melrose Abbey, that remarkable Late Gothic building in the Scottish Borders. Incomplete s tower, massive and intriguing. As at St Paul's Plasmarl the e end more interesting than the nave.
The rich detailing continues inside, but on the whole it's a rather dull interior - short nave of three bays and longish chancel, oddly the walls are in the same snecked masonry as the exterior. No fittings of real note. Sedilia.
In all a bit disappointing, really. Perhaps Bruce Vaughan can be thought of as a competent though pedestrian architect with, however, flashes of brilliance.
Apologies, for the version of this article I posted earlier, for some unknown reason an previous draft was published ,and not the finished article. Mea culpa.
I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead. (I really can't show you the scene in question, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.) It serves as a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis. It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.
St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council, and was opened by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970. It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council that the Prime minister should give his support in such a way. What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War. It had neither church nor green, nor school. Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents. There was no traditional urbanism. It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it. A sort of ghetto.
The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry. He talked of a 'village community', but all that actually meant in practice is that, like a good many architects and planners of the period, he wanted the strict segregation of pedestrians and motor vehicles. The site was a steep slope on the south bank of the Tyne, opposite Newcastle city centre, between between Bensham Rd and Askew Rd.. The estate overlooked a rail marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that carried the East Coast Mainline into the midst of the city. Historically, the area had been known as Windmill Hills, and before slum clearance in the mid 60s, the site had contained a dense network of terraced housing.
The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd. The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short). The estate consisted of a single tower, or point, block and a dense checker board of four, six & eight storey maisonettes, everything connected by a series of aerial walkways. It was designed to house 3,500 people. Construction began in 1967, and the cost all in, was, I believe, £3,700,000. At the time it won a government award for 'Good Design in Housing'.
1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Court and six-storey blocks The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project
1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Village The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project
However there were problems almost immediately - flats were damp and roofs leaked, and it was difficult to heat the flats. The project limped on for some 25 years before it was demolished. Its fate matched that of another council estate of the period, the nearby Clasper Village.
I now want to skip over the Pennines to Manchester and this BBC documentary, from 1974, about the redevelopment of the city on the 1960s. The documentary presents the council as struggling to keep up with the effects of its redevelopment policy, including apportioning blame to its own tenants. We underestimate the complete dislocation that working class people suffered as a result of these schemes. By the end of the 60s the Post-War vision of the New Jerusalem began to crumble and few years later it seemed that Modernism was itself defeated. For some on the left, including perhaps the director of Get Carter, Mike Hodges, it caused a cognitive dissonance. The failure of such estates as St Cuthbert's Village, really wasn't the result of corruption, but an intellectual failure. I think, that in some respects, it caused the breaking of the social contract.
A second tranche of images from Terence Conran's 'New House Book' of 1985.
The first image is a page of photographs taken in Leon Krier's Belsize park flat. In the mid-eighties I began to know the place quite well. There was, I think, a grand piano in the room, though I may be mistaken. The library was at the front looking out on to the street. The rustication in the hall contained all sorts of storage, with a tiny bathroom at the far end on the right. Anyway, outside of the world of the country house, I think it must be one of the stylish rooms I have yet experienced. I wonder if it still exists.
A day of sunshine and half-hearted showers; a blustery day with the trees just beyond the garden sounding like the sea. A welcome return to normal weather.
A return also to the world of Terence Conran, and his second big book of interior design: 'The New House book' of 1985. My edition of the book is published by Book Club Associates; the original by Conran Octopus. 'English Style', by Stafford Cliff and Suzanne Slesin, was published the previous year and the difference could not be more marked. Like the original House Book, this is a collaborative effort. The usual names appear: Stephen Bayley, Gillian Darley, Susan Collier (of Collier Campbell), and the aforementioned Suzanne Slesin, and Stafford Cliff. Cliff was the Project Consultant, and Hilary Arnold the Project Editor.
So the mid-eighties, and many of us will have an idea of what that entails, a notion gleaned from journalism and the internet. The same applies to the proceeding decade, as though 1970s decor comprised solely of garish wallpaper. I cannot stress enough that since the end of the 18th century we have been in period of eclecticism. So what do we find here? Firstly, much that I wrote about the first 'House Book' (Mitchell Beazley, 1974) could equally apply here. Those six categories of interior which were there as a guide for the perplexed remain, but their presence is by implication. Secondly, let me say that not all the interiors on display are contemporaneous, some are the creation of the previous decades, centuries. Realising also, that these images are a selection, an editorialising, so not entirely objective, it is still possible to make some general comments on what, it has to be said, is a very middle class selection.* On the whole it is 'all done in the best possible taste'. The outlandishness that was the hallmark of a certain strand of 60s/70s taste is largely absent. An elegant sobriety rules. After all, the interview with Conran which fronts the book is entitled 'A Taste for Simplicity'. Colours are on the whole subdued. There is a tendency to isolate items, endowing them some sort of signification, which may be the result of the increasing interest in the 'designer' object. Many of the rooms are very serious, if not intellectual; austere to the point of loosing a sense of domesticity. They are rooms of parade, not comfort. As I have written before these sort of rooms begin to take on the quality of public space. All that said there is much to admire. The design of the book is excellent (with the exception of the Dust Jacket). Perhaps those rooms which hint at the Mediterranean are the best. You may recall that 'Mediterranean' is one of those six categories of the original House Book, and is one that in this book Conran sought to emphasize, it being the only one mentioned in the introductory interview.
Unlike Habitat, this Conran publication happily takes Post-Modernism in its stride. One of the reasons, I think, that things went a bit awry at Habitat in the 80s was the inability to come to terms with the change in taste in the late 70s. Perhaps a bit strange that, as I believe, and I'm sure I've said this before, it is possible to make a case for Habitat being in a state of eclecticism if not Post Modernism since its inception. It was always a bit of a dressing up box. This book is no different.
* A book like this is a complex enough thing; at one level it functions as a survey of contemporary taste, but it is also in a quiet, polite sort of way, a polemic, and a manifesto. And that's before we get to the book as 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua'.
