'Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39'

     

     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.