In Alvilde Lees Milne & Derry Moore’s
book 'An Englishman's Room' (1986) there is a photograph of the architectural
historian Gavin Stamp standing in his study in St Chad’s Street, King's
Cross. It is the mid-eighties. He is surrounded by the mounting
piles of paper and books, paper littering the floor, the walls of the room
stripped of the decorative accretions of the years down to the naked plaster,
ready for re-decoration. That re-decoration never happened. The
house, which he shared with his first wife, the journalist Alexandra Artley,
and their two children, remained for years in the state of possibility but
never becoming. It is said that Artley's book 'Hoorah for the
Filth-Packets' (1987) is based on their domestic arrangements.
Gavin Stamp (1948-2017) was more than solely an architectural historian. He was an author and journalist, conservationist,
and polemicist. Given to 'pronouncements'. Most likely a bit of a contrarian too, with an ability to fall out with people. But fascinating none the less. He has been described as
a ‘scholar activist’, but that has such a negative connotation these days I
prefer not to use it; however, you get the idea. GS was also a rather good amateur artist at
the graphic design end of things. It was
during or just after his time at Cambridge that he designed the fascia and the
menus for the legendary Cambridge eatery ‘Waffles Café’ on the corner of Gold
St and Fitzroy St – all now gone, I’m afraid.
Judging by a single photo from his time at Cambridge he seems to have
been a bit of a dandy. He also designed rather
precious posters in the style of Martin Travers for the spikily Anglo-Catholic
St Mary, Bourne St, London. In the
capital he moved in the (equally fascinating) Bohemian circles that orbited the Art Workers Guild in
Queen Square. He got to know the likes
of Osbert Lancaster and Sir John Betjeman. In a recent article in the ‘Oldie’
his parties, held in his flat in Pocock St, Southwark, were described as ‘rumbustious’.
‘Interwar’, which was left incomplete at
the time of Stamp’s death, can been seen as a culmination, or perhaps a
distillation, of a life’s work or if not that, then of that period which I have
outlined above and which was, perhaps, the most productive and interesting.1 For it was during that time in
London GS worked on two exhibitions that would help start a critical
re-assessment of the architecture of the interwar period. In 1977, at the Heinz Gallery, Stamp curated a
small exhibition, ‘Silent Cities: An Exhibition of the Memorial and Cemetery Architecture
of The Great War’ exploring the architectural response to the horrors of the
First World War. He was on the
organising committee for the landmark exhibition of 1981 ‘Lutyens: The Work
of the English Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens 1869-1944’ at the Hayward
Gallery. In addition, in 1979 he was one
of the founders of the ‘Thirties Society’, which was soon to become, and remain,
the ‘Twentieth Century Society’. In the
mid-80s he campaigned successfully for the preservation of the Red Telephone
boxes, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and synonymous now with the United
Kingdom.
Make no mistake, for whatever the book’s
faults and there several, this, even in its incomplete state, is an important work. It is essentially the first overview of British
architecture of the 1920s & 30s. A
period that has, Stamp would correctly argue, been neglected by architectural
historians. At best, possibly, seen as
some sort of interregnum between the heyday of the Edwardian period and the post-war
Modernist hegemony. At worst, a sort of
repository of the bad taste and the fleeting fashion; of Art Deco, Tudorbeathan, the Egyptian Revival, and Neo-Georgian – the architecture that really isn’t worth discussing. Well, not in polite company anyway. The
strength of Stamp’s book is that it rightly discredits such views and also considers
serious such non-U phenomena as the suburban semi2, which like it or not, does warrant serious critical investigation. Stamp
shows the vitality of the period – that last (great) period of eclecticism, of what
is often disparagingly called ‘Historicism’.
The period, (to give one example), in which Sir Edwin Lutyens produced
some of his greatest work: the Cenotaph and related monuments to the Fallen of WWI,
the imperial city of New Delhi, and the (unbuilt) Liverpool cathedral.
Yet, for as much as he deeply admired the
work of Lutyens, it was those architects, such as Giles Gilbert Scott, Oliver
Hill, and Harry Goodhart-Rendel, who happily moved between styles or attempted
synthesis that, in this book at least, interested him the most. And I think, just as much as his inability to
decorate that house in St Chad’s St, it actually reveals quite a bit about the
man.
1 In the late 80s GS left the London he loved
and moved up to Glasgow to teach Art History at Glasgow School of Art. And it is at that point, according to one
obituary, that the graphic design essentially ceased.
2 Stamp was himself a child of the suburbs
being raised in a ‘Tudor’ bungalow in SE London.
