Chapter I: Part 1

RUSTICUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

_For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book._

RUSTICUS

OR

THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

BY
MARTIN S. BRIGGS

_Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis._

Horace, _Epist._ I, i, 42

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

_In the Heel of Italy._ 1910.

_Baroque Architecture._ 1913.

_Through Egypt in War-time._ 1918.

_Muhammadan Architecture in Egypt and Palestine._ 1924.

_A Short History of the Building Crafts._ 1925.

_The Architect in History._ (_in the Press_)

Made and Printed in Great Britain by

THE BOWERING PRESS, PLYMOUTH.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. “SO THIS IS ENGLAND!” 7

II. BEFORE THE DELUGE 12

III. KING COAL (_c._ 1810-1910) 26

IV. THE AGE OF PETROL (_c._ 1910 _onwards_) 46

V. THE FUTURE 61

SOME ADDRESSES 95

I.

“SO THIS IS ENGLAND!”

On every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its steady progress, rapid as it has been. To realise what has happened, let us put ourselves in the place of an Englishman who is now returning home after a sojourn of twenty years in some remote Eastern outpost of our Empire. Imagine him as a sensitive observer like Doughty or Kinglake, a man who has learned to appreciate the savage beauty of the Arabian desert, the very antithesis of his own land. But now at last the sand has eaten into his soul, and he is longing to see the English countryside that he remembers so well. He thinks of small green fields, of little grey churches with rooks cawing among the elms, of running water, even of grey skies, in fact of everything that is most characteristically English. There is nothing in our poetry that better describes this England than Kipling’s “Sussex,” and Kipling knew all about the East.

Our traveller lands at Folkestone eagerly anticipating his journey through Kent, and, in order to see as much as possible of hedgerows and villages and fields on the way up to London, he charters a motor-car. There is something rather daring, to his mind, in this business of the car; on his last visit to England in 1907 cars were not entirely unknown, but there was then a touch of novelty about them. His driver gingerly threads his way up from the harbour through a maze of hooting charabancs and yelping Fords, with several hairbreadth escapes which make the traveller wish himself back on his lurching camel. But soon Folkestone is left behind, and he settles down to a contemplation of the number-plate of the car in front, while the fumes of its exhaust mingle with those of his own Corona. He expects to find some changes in the aspect of England, but then of course there was the Town-Planning Act in 1909, so that nothing very unpleasant need be feared, and at any rate one misses the East Kent Coalfield by coming this way. The road is very wide and very straight; there is no dust. A small lighthouse with black and white sides, crowned by a red lamp busily blinking in broad daylight, indicates a cross-roads. Yes, this new route avoids the streets of Sandgate and Hythe, which must be very crowded in these days, but the wire fences are a poor substitute for green hedges. And these terrible petrol-stations every few yards with their glaring red and yellow pumps are very trying to the eyes. Still there are some old landmarks left: the hoardings are bigger than ever, and some of them bear the familiar legends of Edwardian days.

He looks forward to passing through Lenham, Charing, and Harrietsham--three beautiful villages on the main road--but as each is approached his car swerves along the new racing-track and thus avoids the village High Street, rejoining the old main road, widened beyond recognition, a little farther on. He passes through a great cutting gashed through the chalk. Felled trees lie by the road, old walls are pulled down, all bends are straightened out, everything is cleared away to allow the cars and charabancs to roar through the countryside. But is it countryside any longer? More than anything else in this nightmare drive he is impressed by the New Architecture, which appears to consist mainly of bungalows.

The bungalow as he knew it in the East was a large, low, cool, white building surrounded by verandahs, as un-English in appearance as anything could be. But these bungalows are quite different, and seem to be thrown haphazard all over the place, along the main roads for miles beyond every town. Shoddy, ugly, vulgar shacks they are, recalling to his mind some of the worst aspects of life in the Middle West as depicted on the films. The materials of which they are constructed are cheap and nasty. Round each bungalow is a collection of smaller shacks, where the Baby Austin and the chickens live; and in place of embowering trees he sees a jungle of wireless poles and clothes-props. Untidiness, vulgarity, Americanism, discord of colouring and form, seem to have invaded every village through which he passes.

Nor is this change confined to roads and buildings. The whole character of the villages is altered. Smocks and sunbonnets have gone for ever, and with them most of the old village crafts. The blacksmith’s day is done. Artificial-silk leg-wear and gramophone-records fill the windows of the village store, a blatant cinema has appeared next door, and most people do their shopping in London.

So this is England!

II.

BEFORE THE DELUGE

In order to understand the changes that have taken place in the English countryside during the last century or so, and in order to forecast probable future tendencies, one must first endeavour to analyse the charm of the unspoiled English village and landscape before coal and petrol began to dominate our whole life. That charm is universally admitted but not always rationally appreciated. To begin with, ruin in itself is not a worthy subject for admiration. An American critic is said to have observed to an Englishman:

“What thoughtful people your ancestors were; they not only built
churches for you to worship in but ruined abbeys for you to
admire.”[1]

The worship of ruin is a sign of decadence, though it has appeared from time to time in history for hundreds of years. There is a social, even a moral, reproach implied by the sight of a tumbledown cottage; and to the present writer’s mind a ruined church is as much inferior to a perfect church as a dead dog is to a live one. Nobody who really loves architecture can really love ruin; his admiration for the fragments of a great building only makes him wish he could see it in its original splendour. But there is a mellowness and softness that comes to a building with age, and that is a genuine æsthetic attribute. Moreover, the element of historical association is a legitimate cause for our pride in our old villages and towns, a cause by no means to be neglected in this survey. But, apart from these two factors, the charm of the English village, for our purpose, is to be judged strictly on appearances.

Up to about 1810, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the face of England seriously, the village remained almost unaltered from its medieval state. Though its “lay-out” varied greatly according to its situation, on a hill-top or in a valley, it was generally grouped round a “green” and along the road that ran through it. The “green” was the focus of communal life, at a time when each community was inevitably far more self-contained than it is to-day. Here took place such sports as wrestling and bear-baiting, and revels and dances round the Maypole, of which a rare example survives in Otley, Yorkshire. Here too were the stocks for malefactors, the pound where stray animals were temporarily confined, the well where all water for the smaller houses had to be drawn, and perhaps a stone cross. Usually adjoining the green stood the village church, which gathered the rustic inhabitants within its ancient walls. Gray’s _Elegy_ gives us the ideal picture of a country church and churchyard, but in only too many villages such an ideal was unrealised. On the village green would also be found the inn, but the heyday of the roadside inn came with the introduction of stage-coaches on the main roads in the nineteenth century. There might be a group of almshouses, but no post-office or bank and probably not a school. Down by the stream stood the mill with its great water-wheel, or if there were no stream there would be a wooden windmill such as we see on the Sussex downs. To an extent that we hardly realise, industry was self-contained in these little communities. Nearly all the simple wants of the cottagers were provided for within their own parish. The blacksmith and the carpenter, the saddler and the basket-maker, practised their crafts in every hamlet. Weaving and spinning, baking and preserving were done by the women at home. Shops were few and small, storing rather than displaying their wares. The comparatively rare goods that were brought into the place from other parts of England had to be carried on pack-horses, so that naturally they became expensive luxuries. There were no newspapers, and hardly anybody in the village--except perhaps the squire and the parson--possessed any books. All these factors, though they may not seem germane to this study, had a bearing on the outward appearance of the village. The squire, as he came to be called, was the great man of the community, for, though he himself might be the “lord of the manor,” that celebrity was more often non-resident. Hence the squire’s house, then “Manor House,” “Hall,” or whatever it was named, was a substantial building standing in a good garden, and because of its size and position it has seldom been affected by the unfortunate tendencies that have so often played havoc with cottages and barns. Barns usually adjoined the squire’s house and sometimes were attached to the rectory as “tithe barns,” for there was collected the tribute of the fields. These barns are invariably simple in design but often of great beauty, and the two qualities are not unconnected. Then there were a few other houses of medium size, and lastly the humble cottages where most of the inhabitants lived, standing close to the road with a small garden behind them. Such were the components of the old English village.

Beyond its doors was the common where the cattle grazed, and beyond that again there were common woods where the pigs picked up their food and where fuel could be gathered. Then there were fields for pasturage and for cultivation, divided up into one-acre strips, of which one man might hold any number. These long strips, separated only by a foot or so of rough grass, must have resembled our modern allotments in this country and the great open fields that one sees in France and elsewhere abroad, where hedges and fences are seldom found. The system of enclosing fields within hedges did not become common until about the time of Queen Anne, so that one feature of our landscape that we rightly regard as characteristically English is comparatively modern. In many cases it is also immoral, for enclosure of common land proceeded apace during the eighteenth century.

Yet of all features of the English countryside the one that has changed most is the road. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century roads were simply open tracks through fields or over commons. They were not fenced in, their boundaries being vaguely assumed; and they were not metalled. Their condition was so bad in North Herefordshire in 1788 that they had to be levelled “by means of ploughs, drawn by eight or ten horses; and in this state they remained until the following autumn,” Each parish was held responsible for the “repairs” of its roads, but this process seldom involved more than a cartload of faggots or stones in the worst holes. Hence wheeled traffic was impossible. Everything and everybody had to travel through the mire, on horseback or on foot; and at a time when the population of London amounted to 700,000, its fish was coming on horseback from the Solway, and its mutton was walking up in thousands on its own legs from Scotland and Wales, disputing the road with vast droves of geese and turkeys. Such was the state of affairs up to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when turnpikes and tollbars began to take effect, but the good coaching-roads of Telford and Macadam were not constructed till the nineteenth century. Nor were bridges very common at a time when there was no wheeled traffic, for any shallow stream could be forded by a pack-horse. But such bridges as then existed were almost always a pleasure to behold.

This picture of rural England at the end of the eighteenth century is no more than a descriptive inventory of the contents of the average English village at that time. Yet everyone who knows such a village, unaltered by the march of civilisation since 1810 or so, can be relied on to say that it has an undoubted charm of its own. There is certainly no charm in an inventory, so we must now seek for the ingredients that are lacking in our list.

The first is, without doubt, the perfect harmony of Nature and art. The colours and texture of the old buildings harmonise admirably with the colours of the surrounding landscape. In some places that is due to an actual identity of material. Thus the old stone farm-houses that one sees in the Yorkshire dales are built of the same sandstone rocks that jut out from the hillside all round them. But, on the whole, that is unusual. There is no similarity between the rich red brickwork of East Anglia and anything in the surrounding earth or vegetation, nor between the Cotswold stone cottages and the green slopes on which they stand. After making all allowances for the mellowing that time produces, all we can say about this matter of colour is that old building materials seem to harmonise with their natural surroundings, whatever colours are involved and whatever may be the surroundings. That is not quite accurate. In Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales, where the prevailing colour of the landscape is in dull tones, buildings of local stone with roofs of sturdy thick local slates do undoubtedly merge into the general colour-scheme more successfully than buildings with red-tiled roofs; whereas the warmer colouring and more generous sunshine of the southern half of England allows of a greater range of tone in buildings, even assimilating the “magpie” half-timber houses of the West Midlands.

But texture, too, has a part to play. The materials used in old buildings were all “home-made”; therefore they lacked the smooth mechanical surface that is so antagonistic to Nature, and thus the very defects of their manufacture prevented any clash between nature and art. But, above all, most of these old farms and cottages were simple, spontaneous, unsophisticated, and English. Their design and their construction were traditional, born of the soil on which they stood. The snobbery of the Victorian suburban villa was unknown to the village yokels who produced masterpieces of cottage design. The very simplicity of their “programme” was their salvation. They had to provide a dwelling-house of given size from local materials. There was no question of deciding between Welsh slates and red tiles: only one form of roofing was available locally. The rooms were shockingly low, according to our ideas, but as an external result there was a long low roof, and low eaves, all assisting to produce an unobtrusive effect attuned to the landscape. On the other hand, the fireplace and the chimney above it were large, for wood was the only fuel available, and thus bold chimneys are found externally. The windows were glazed with small panes because nobody then could make large ones.

The old-fashioned cottage, a truly beautiful thing, was the work of competent men who, generally speaking, were content to satisfy a utilitarian demand without trying to create a sensation.

On the other hand there is a question that I have not yet heard asked: was there never an ambitious tradesman or tradesman’s wife in the past who wished to create an architectural sensation in the village? Surely a flamboyant half-timbered inn must have looked rather startling when first erected? And the village “highbrow” of 1750 or so who procured from an architect in the nearest town a design for a Palladian façade in the latest mode, did he not create a discord in the harmony of the village street? The answer to this compound question must be in the affirmative, but the results are less obtrusive than they would be to-day. The black and white inn would have the same proportions, the same fenestration, the same doors and chimneys, as a brick building in the same street; and the “genuine antique” façade from Palladio would become a little less exotic by the time that the village bricklayer had finished with it. The harmony and repose that characterises the old English village is mainly due to its isolation: there was no disturbing influence from outside, no filtration of alien ideas, and no introduction of discordant materials. But the “silk” stockings and the gramophone-records that now decorate the shop-window of the village store have their counterpart in the modern architecture of the village street.

An endeavour has been made in the preceding paragraphs to picture the unspoiled English village as it appears to the ordinary intelligent observer of to-day. No attempt has been made to glorify village life, past or present. There are some people who see nothing but cause for regret in the invasion of the villages by what we call “progress,” but for the most part those people are not sons of the soil: they are either “week-enders” or people of comfortable incomes who have retired to a cottage _orné_ amid congenial surroundings. They see and know little of the monotony that drives the young people into the towns, or of the hardships of lambing and winter work on the farms. There are other critics who say that architecture is so much a reflection of social conditions that a beautiful village could only have been produced by a happy and contented people.

It is a question whether such a village is, or ever has been, specially attractive to the eyes of its inhabitants, if indeed they have the ability to consider such things at all. Admiration for the beauty of the countryside seems to be a very modern cult, if we are to take our great writers as typical of their time, though in fact they were usually ahead of their time. Scott, Wordsworth, and other poets of that period certainly saw something in it, but prior to their day there is little evidence that even cultured men noticed anything worthy of comment in the English landscape or the English village. There are exceptions of course, and we find evidence of love of the English countryside even in the work of so classical a writer as Milton, and later in the poems and letters of Cowper. But probably Dr. Johnson is typical of eighteenth-century men of letters. He declined a country living on one occasion, and in several passages of Boswell’s _Life_ we find Johnson making fun of country manners, country conversation, and country life generally, while of landscape and of the beauty of the English village he has little to say. William Cobbett, writing a century ago, is so obsessed with indignation about agricultural poverty and the iniquities of the governing class, that he seldom comments in his _Rural Rides_ on the charm of a village. Sandwich is “as villainous a hole as one could wish to see,” Cirencester “a pretty nice town,” and so is Tonbridge. But he waxes furious about some of the tumbledown cottages that modern well-fed tourists would call “picturesque,” and he regards the barrenness of the New Forest as a blot on our civilisation. Cobbett provides a very good antidote to an over-sentimental view of country life.

III

KING COAL (1810-1910)

The “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part of England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers out of their homes into factories. About the same time came the construction of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of population, and the slow improvement of the roads. But none of these important changes greatly affected the outward appearance of our villages until about forty years later, when, as the title of this chapter indicates, the steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the factories, and when coal began to make its influence felt all over the country. Simultaneously there grew up a system of macadamised roads and stage-coaches, which gave place in thirty or forty years to railways. For a century coal was the dominant factor in English life, but since 1910 petrol has played the main part in altering the aspect of the countryside.

Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation. The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual grouping of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields continued all through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of violent agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the arguments in favour of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life was to squeeze the small man out of existence and to perpetuate the big farm employing workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher.

And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-supporting village community, changes in the means of transport brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another type, the flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been conceived, but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness to the cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very little cottage-building was done, for though the population was increasing very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to be near the new factories.

The network of canals that spread over England between 1760 and 1830 or so did not greatly influence the appearance of the countryside, though their numerous lockhouses and bridges have the merit of severe simplicity. But the system of new roads introduced by Telford and Macadam early in the nineteenth century had an immediate and far-reaching effect. With them we enter on the brief but glorious coaching-period, which holds such a grip on the English imagination that it still dictates the design of our Christmas cards. The “old-fashioned Christmas” that has been such a godsend to artists implies unlimited snow, holly, mistletoe, and plum-pudding, with the steaming horses standing in the inn yard and the red-nosed driver ogling the barmaid. Dickens made the most of it in literature, Hugh Thomson and Cecil Aldin in art. For the stage-coach immediately enlivened every village and town lying on the great highways. The roadside inn came into its own, but after some forty crowded years of glorious life declined again until the motor-car provided it with a new lease of prosperity, or at any rate until the cult of the bicycle gave it a fillip.

The influence of railways on the appearance of the countryside has been mainly indirect, in the sense of having destroyed the isolation of villages and hamlets and with it the local characteristics that they possessed. For example, the use of purple Welsh slates was almost unknown outside Wales up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they came into common use, for though their colour and texture is unpleasing, they are relatively cheap and can be fixed on lightly constructed roofs. So first canals and then railways combined with factories to spread machine-made goods all over the country. Otherwise the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape as a whole, for there are still large tracts of country where one can be out of sight and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the modern motor-car. Many village railway-stations and cottages are inoffensively designed, and in the “stone” districts of England are usually built of local materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule from the dead hand of central and standardised control. The habit of erecting enormous hoardings in the fields bordering a railway must go far back into the nineteenth century. Presumably these eyesores have some object in view beyond merely annoying the traveller and defacing the landscape, but certainly they must come up for consideration in the last chapter of this essay.

Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous and prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring counties. Agriculture, sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the main source of wealth: and the only notable exception was the iron industry of the Weald, where a sufficiency of wood fuel was available for smelting. Between 1750 and 1850 the great northward trek took place, and King Coal became supreme. He ruined an appreciable part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared his ugly fingers over mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere, created the “Black Country” in his own image, and last of all produced the terrible blot that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole landscape looks like a bad dream.

The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries, blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country. From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a private garden. At the present moment half the total population of England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts: “Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black Country” and Tyneside.

Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills. They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the earlier method, and a tall chimney was one immediate result. Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs, and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere. Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in Charlotte Bronte’s _Shirley_, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight against progress.

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.

At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person. English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be done to save the English countryside from complete uglification. Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth.

Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. Tripe-dressing, sausage-skin making, and one or two other “noxious” trades might be prohibited in a few favoured localities; the obscure and often absurd law of “Ancient Lights” occasionally restrained his ardour. Otherwise, so long as his building was strong enough to remain standing, and provided with adequate means of drainage, he was as free as air. Building was essentially a commercial business; the rights or needs of the community did not enter into the question. Each man built for his day and generation: the future was left to take care of itself. Yet even from a financial point of view this was a short-sighted policy. When Wren’s plan for rebuilding London was upset by vested interests, a chance was lost of making wide streets that are now urgently necessary but cannot be formed except by payments of incredible sums for compensation. A more modern instance is to be seen in the Euston Road, which was a residential thoroughfare looking over fields when my grandfather knew it a century ago. Then shops came to be built over the front gardens as the old residents fled from the invading streets: and now these shops have to be swept away with heavy payments for compensation to allow the road to be converted into the great artery that any intelligent person could have foreseen when it was first built. This phenomenon is not peculiar to towns: it applies with equal force to the country districts that are continually being absorbed by towns. Half the squalor of modern suburbs is due to indiscriminate development. Trees are cut down and houses are run up along a main road. Traffic increases, and the tenants move away. The houses are clumsily converted into inefficient shops, extending over the front garden, or into seedy inefficient tenements. Empty plots are covered with hideous hoardings. Without undue interference with the liberty of the subject, much of this feckless muddling could be avoided by the exercise of a little rational foresight.

For this is a question deeply affecting the whole community, not a petty professional grievance. The mad race from towns to the fringe of the country is destroying the country for miles round: and the pathology of destruction is now clearly understood. A brilliantly realistic description of the growth of “Bromstead,” a typical London suburb, is to be found in Mr. H. G. Wells’ _The New Machiavelli_. All who have witnessed the slow spread of this malignant disease will agree that he does not overstate the case.

IV

THE AGE OF PETROL (1910 ONWARDS)

It may well be objected that this is a mere journalese title, for the influence of motoring on the appearance of the countryside is not always apparent, and many other factors have been at work, among them the Great War and its considerable legacy of troubles. Moreover, some readers may point out that motor-cars were to be seen in England long before 1910. That is true; but they did not appreciably alter our countryside before that date, and the number of them was relatively small.

The most obvious influence that motoring has exerted on England has been in the direction of road “improvements,” especially since the War. Few of us foresaw that the clumsy and not very speedy vehicles which made their first appearance on our highways some thirty years ago, preceded by a man bearing a red flag, would eventually cause so radical a change in our ideas of the nature of a road. For a long time nothing happened. As motors increased in number and speed and bulk, they continued to become more and more of a nuisance to the cyclists and pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles still forming the majority of road-users. Clouds of dust whitened the hedges, and choked the inhabitants of all houses anywhere near a main highway. Accidents became frequent. All this was unavoidable, because even the best roads made by Telford and Macadam were unequal to the new conditions, and the far larger number of narrow winding country lanes were altogether inadequate for the strain that was now put upon them. An excellent instance of the resulting state of affairs may still be seen in the Isle of Wight, where several of the “main” roads are tortuous narrow lanes sunk between high banks topped with thick hedges. In the summer months a stream of huge charabancs tears over the whole island every day. At many places there is no possibility of these Juggernauts passing each other. Even a hay-cart presents such a complete obstacle that one or other vehicle has to back till the road widens, and in places the blockage caused by the charabanc forces a cyclist or a pedestrian to climb up on to the steep grassy bank while the monster with its cargo of yelling hooligans pushes past him. Either roads must be widened almost everywhere or motor vehicles of all types must be abolished, and, as the latter alternative is out of the question, we must accept the former as inevitable. How it may be effected with the minimum of damage to the beauty of our countryside will be discussed in the next chapter. England has not yet sunk to the level of the Western States, where it is a simple matter to shift a barbed-wire fence a few yards back on each side of the furrows that do duty for a road, and where the iron or wooden shacks that constitute a “home” may readily be wheeled to a new site on the prairie. England is a crowded little country full of sacred associations that go back to the beginnings of our race, and that is why we hate to see crazy new bungalows lining the Pilgrim’s Way. Their very appearance is an insult to our English sense of orderliness and decency, such as we should feel if a negro cheapjack started selling mouth-organs in Canterbury Cathedral.

In some parts of the country there are stretches of road that can be widened without material defacement of the landscape, but they are few. Ancient landmarks hamper progress in most places. Old bridges, for example, are altogether unsuited to heavy and fast motor-traffic. Often built askew with the line of a main road, they are nearly always very steep, very narrow, and, though often sturdy in appearance, are incapable of bearing the weight of a heavy lorry and trailer moving with the speed of a railway train. Here again is a problem requiring solution. Some people would attempt to adapt the old bridge to modern needs, others prefer an entirely new structure placed parallel with the old one, and, of course, the third alternative is complete demolition. The first method is generally impossible, and there is much to be said for a frankly modern design in reinforced concrete, provided that it does not stand in too close proximity to the ancient monument that it supersedes.

Another familiar rural feature that must perforce give way to the insistent needs of the motorist is the ford or “watersplash.” Much as we may regret its disappearance, it has to go.

But most difficult of all is the question of dealing with the narrow High Street of a town or village through which a main artery passes. Occasionally the jerry-builder has anticipated us here, and has erected some terrible Victorian nightmare of a shop right up to the old building-line of the historical cottages that he has demolished. In such a case the children of the Petrol Age may be able to expiate the sins of their fathers by pulling down that shop. But more often there is a building of real merit standing at the very bottleneck through which the procession of traffic has to squeeze its way, such as the old church at Barnet or the Whitgift Hospital at Croydon; and then we are in a quandary, impressed on the one hand by the legitimate needs of our time, deterred on the other hand by an almost religious sense of the sanctity of the past. Sometimes the obstacle is a mere cottage, a barn, a pump, a stone cross, or a quaint structure such as blocks Hampstead Lane near the Spaniard’s Tavern, yet even these must be treated with respect. The “by-pass” road, as suggested in the next chapter, is sometimes the best solution, but is not practicable everywhere. And lastly, there are the trees. As I write these lines I can hear the crashes of falling elms and yews that I have known since childhood. A snorting tractor is pulling them down bodily with a steel hawser, so that the grass-lined lane that runs near my home may be widened for the growing needs of what was once a pretty village.

But a wide straight road does not exhaust the motorist’s requirements. He becomes thirsty at times, and the village inn has already risen to the occasion, usually, it must be admitted, without detriment to the village street. The architecture of licensed premises is looking up. His car also becomes thirsty, (hence the petrol-station), and its occasional liability to gastric trouble involves the provision at frequent intervals of telephone-cabins and repair-shops or garages. We may profitably consider the design of these accessories and their relation to country surroundings in the next chapter. The phenomenal development in the use of motor charabancs has involved the provision of extensive “parking-places” in all pleasure resorts, e.g., at Brighton, where a large part of the sea-view from the Esplanade is blocked. The provision of a “park” at Glastonbury has led to an outcry recently, and everywhere the problem is pressing.

Finally comes the very vexed question of housing, municipal and private, that has grown so acute since the War. In this movement the motorist has played a prominent part, for he has helped to extend the “Housing Problem,” from its obvious location on the fringes of our towns, away to the remoter parts of the country. From Kent to Hampshire the bungalows line our southern cliffs. Housing needs may be divided into three groups: those of the townsman, the rustic, and the week-ender. The first concerns us here only to the extent that new housing in urban districts must of necessity be provided in the adjoining rural areas: thus London is now so congested that its County Council has had to acquire large estates in Essex, Kent, and Middlesex to provide houses for city workers, who are quite properly dissatisfied with the tenement-dwellings that are their only alternative. Then, although in many country districts the population is decreasing, new standards of decency impel the newly-wed to demand something better than the leaking and verminous hovels where their parents dwell. All these new houses, whether in country or town, have been provided in increasing proportion by municipal enterprise since the War, and hence their design is subject to a measure of control. Whether that control is sufficient to ensure a tolerable standard of architectural expression is a matter for further consideration: at this point it is important to realise that practically all the post-War “Housing Schemes” have been scientifically laid out on rational lines, with due regard for the future. It is that central control, whether exercised by a public body or by a properly constituted private organisation, which makes all the difference between the “lay-out” of Becontree or Port Sunlight on the one hand and an average bungalow settlement on the other. One is a design, the other an accident,--and the Italian word for “accident” is _disgrazia_!

Some sixteen years ago I endeavoured to interest the inhabitants of the district where I live in the possibilities of the then newly-passed Town-Planning Act. The more enlightened among them readily responded, but there were some who said that this was a rural area and that they had no wish to see it turned into a town. Since then it _has_ turned itself into something resembling a town, but its growth has been spasmodic and irregular. A few years later came a proposal to acquire two fields in the centre of the district for a public park. Again the objectors appeared; what does a semi-village need with a public park, at a high price too? Fortunately the fields were acquired, and already they are nearly encircled by building plots. Meanwhile a great Arterial Road has been driven right across the new park, cutting it in half and reducing its attractions. Under a proper town-planning scheme such things would be impossible. Roads and parks would be laid out on paper years before they were required; and, though modifications of the first plan would become necessary from time to time, the ultimate gain would be enormous. Groups of adjoining authorities are already preparing regional town-planning schemes in concert, so that trunk roads may be provided in such a way as to pass through each area to its benefit and not to its detriment. If “Rusticus” stands too long while the river flows by, as the quotation on my title-page suggests, he will find the countryside engulfed.

In my last chapter something was said of the possibilities that the new science of Town-planning has to offer us, as a result of many years’ experience and experiment. We have seen the appearance of innumerable municipal housing-schemes, of “Satellite Towns” like Letchworth and the new Welwyn, of model industrial communities like Bournville and Port Sunlight, of communal efforts like the Hampstead Garden Suburb, of many admirable achievements in the developments of private enterprise. Originating at the time (1876 _et seq._) when Bedford Park was laid out, the idea developed slowly before the War and has made great strides since. It is one of the brightest spots in the history of English progress, but it has not been sufficient to stem the rush of _ersatz_ building that followed the War.