Chapter XXIV: Dublin in 1924 201 (1)

AUTHOR’S NOTE 206

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I.

THE CHARACTER OF OUR CIVIC BUILDINGS.

IN civic architecture the clothes are the man. We can judge other people’s buildings only by their appearance. From the depth of the window jambs and door reveals we may gather something of the apparent thickness of the walls; and from the point of view of appearance it is the apparent thickness, in spite of Mr. Ruskin, which counts.

As citizens we are interested only in the exterior of the vast majority of buildings. We want them built of sound materials, which will last and weather pleasantly, because we do not want to see our towns look shoddy. These towns are the most self-revealing things we make, because they are to a very large extent the unconscious expression of ourselves in the mass. There is very little conscious direction in the matter, even since the passing of the Town Planning Acts. Each person within the limits of certain rules laid down for public safety and health builds as his fancy dictates. Only one town in England so far insists on the elevations of all new buildings on its streets being submitted beforehand for approval by the public authority, and in that town—Liverpool—the authority has not yet taken steps to secure that it is better advised in matters of taste than it was before it had these powers.

There is every reason, therefore, that the public should take as keen an interest in its new buildings as it does in its new books and plays—more reason, indeed, because the latter need not be seen, and the buildings must. No man builds to himself alone. His building is there, if in London, for some ninety years or more. It may even descend to our great-great-grandchildren to show them what sort of animals we were. The unveiling of a great building when the scaffold first comes down should be an important event, much more so than the unveiling of the ordinary statue.

For instance, very shortly Sir Edwin Lutyens’ great building in Finsbury-circus and Moorgate for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company will be exposed to view. Here is the first great modern block of offices being built by one of our leading architects. Will Sir Edwin, who has been so successful in giving suitable character and individuality to a vast number of country houses, be equally sucessful in imparting the impersonal dignity and reticence required for the due expression of a solid commercial undertaking? From the drawing in last year’s Royal Academy one is pretty sure that he will, and that by this building he will set a new standard for the city. But one may safely say it will be some time before the general public discovers the building, and perhaps a hundred years before it takes any genuine interest in it. We are apparently just waking up to the beauties of the Bank of England, built about 100 years ago, now that it is threatened.

Architecture, then, for some obscure reason, although she is the ancient mother of the plastic arts, and the one from whose embraces none of us can escape, herself escapes criticism. No one writes to the papers to say what a vulgar and pretentious building the new War Office is, or how badly Mr. Selfridge’s great block is behaving both to its neighbours and, indeed, to the whole town by its arrogant bearing. You would think from looking at its vast ornate colonnade that shopkeeping was really the height of our ideals, and that there was something after all in Napoleon’s gibe.

In these days, when in the Arts, at any rate, national feeling is dying down—have we not recently gone so far as to erect a monument inspired by German art to Nurse Cavell?—and when the ages of faith are past, and there is no great wave of enthusiasm for any particular form of expression, such as existed as late as the Gothic Revival of last century—a time, and one remembers it with gratitude at least for its seriousness, when architects’ offices were opened with morning prayer—it is all the more necessary to make sure that the character of our town buildings conforms to some standard of public decency.

In clothes we all feel the necessity of this. We have a code of urban manners in dress and a code of country ones. The town code unfortunately of late years shows some signs of weakening. Men in “plus fours” have been seen in our best streets, but buildings in similar garments are there always. A great insurance company has built itself a new building in the Strand, and roofed it with the split stones of a Gloucester farm house. Why not thatch our banks straightaway?

We often hear of the damage the town is doing to the country, but do we so often realise the far more serious damage the country is doing to the town? Think of its inroads in every direction, town houses masquerading as country ones and suburban ones as village ones. There was a time when suburbs were proud of their connection with the town, and showed it by their architecture, and even by the carefully selected trees in their gardens—the pendant acacias and laburnums, the rounded weeping ashes, which consorted well with the classical buildings. Now suburbs are only too anxious to turn their backs to the town, and pretend they belong to the country—a thoroughly snobbish and suburban proceeding, when but for the town they would not exist.

In the eighteenth century most people lived in terraces of houses, in which externally each individual house did not differ materially from its neighbours. This was a fine sign of urbanity, a tribute to the community, just as much as the black coats most people affect in London to-day. Any excessive expression of individuality or of personal importance in a building was considered bad manners, just as it is in dress, only with this important difference, that bad manners in dress soon disappear, while bad manners in architecture remain.

In the real country things are different. The spaces between buildings are wider, and there is little bond of corporate union to be expressed. In the depths of his own domain every Englishman feels he can do what he likes, though in other matters he is even there a sufficient stickler for good form. “Good form” in every sense of the term is what is needed more than anything else to-day in civic building. The old words, “civil architecture,” express exactly what is desirable. Our town buildings should pay a conscious tribute to our civilisation instead of being merely an unconscious revelation of it.

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II.

OUR RECENT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.

SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT once caused considerable irritation, especially amongst architects, by applying some words of Byron’s to New Scotland Yard and calling it the most recent, but the least decent, of our public buildings. Immediately a great number of architects began writing to the papers to say that Mr. Norman Shaw was a great man and by inference his Scotland Yard was a great building.

It certainly was, and is, in many ways, and yet I think Sir William Harcourt was quite justified. Scotland Yard departed from our national tradition in public buildings. Till then we had not taken as a prototype, even for a super-police station, a German _Schloss_ or a French _Château_. Scotland Yard is that clever and impossible thing, a compromise between the two—a sort of reparations settlement with England left out. One is inclined, therefore, to call such a compromise indecent.

Now one assuredly does not want to stress too highly national character in architecture, but if it is to show anywhere it should be in the national buildings. In these since the Renaissance (and it is not much good going back earlier, though we did it to our cost in the Houses of Parliament) the established custom, amounting to a tradition, has been a Portland stone building in the palatial Palladian manner. Somerset House is the great example. It is thoroughly English, yet dignified without being dull or pretentious. Great columns are used sparingly, as accented syllables, to emphasise certain portions of the façades. It is obviously related by cousinship of design to a number of the larger private mansions throughout the country, but in a British Government office one must expect that. Looking at it from all sides, from the Embankment, Wellington Street, and the Strand, it is not only of sufficient height and mass to be impressive, without being overwhelming, but it has the right London scale. Its parts are neither too big, like Selfridge’s, nor too little, like the Savoy Hotel’s. No doubt when the water washed into its magnificent rusticated arches and it stood reflected in a clear Thames it must have been finer still. But there it is to-day, setting an unsurpassed standard to all the newer work. In the pearly beauty of its Portland stone it seems to be calmly rebuking both the provincial note of red brick in Scotland Yard and the domestic note, which the great red-tiled roof gives to that offspring of Scotland Yard on the opposite side of the river—the London County Hall.

If, then, with the memory of Somerset House in our minds, we walk down Whitehall we shall have a standard by which to judge the great new Government buildings. There are three of them, the upright rectangular block of the Woods and Forests building, the great colonnaded block of the War Office, with its two corner domed turrets, and the large Home Office block at the bottom on the right hand, which goes on endlessly with more and more towers and projections, as a palace should, down Great George Street. If we cannot quite retain the quality of Somerset House in our minds we can refer to another genuine antique, as we do in our furniture, for a standard—Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. Any building which can live up to that in scale, repose and refinement, though it was the first of its type, will survive for all times.

At first you think the Woods and Forests building is rather good. It is big and bold and strong. It is well made, its composition is satisfactory, and it is weathering to a beautiful colour. But it has no distinction. It is better than Joe Beckett, but not as good as Carpentier. Its columns are the ordinary unfluted columns of commerce, while its entrance porch might be the entrance to a new Whitehall hotel—in Bloomsbury. However, one must not say too much against it or there will be no epithets left for the War Office.

The War Office is another of these buildings which at first glance is deceptive. A great Liberal peer once announced in reference to it, “There’s a model of what public building should be!” If he had made his money since the war, or because of it, I could have better understood him. I think what takes the public fancy in the War Office is its silhouette coming up and down Whitehall. It stands out very prominently at a break in the street. Its great range of independent columns in perspective is very effective. So are its two cupola-covered turrets at either end of the façade. Its composition is an obvious one, easy to grasp. It is such a good advertising front that Messrs. Robinson and Cleaver have made a caricature of it for their new premises in Regent Street. But when you have glanced at it from the top of a passing omnibus you have seen it all. It will not bear looking into. If the Woods and Forests building has no real distinction of manner the great pile of the War Office bears itself like some tired Titan. No consideration or feeling has been given to the detail. The same meaningless blocked columns appear endlessly to every window and door. Cast your mind back to Somerset House or look further down the road to the Banqueting Hall, or across it to the Horse Guards, and you see that another race built these things. It is sad, but it is true. Otherwise how is it that an eighteenth-century building is as seldom wrong as a modern one is right?

The one that is nearest right of our three great new offices is the last, and that it must be confessed is because it is nearest to the eighteenth century. Mr. Brydon, the architect, worked in Bath. Now in Bath you cannot escape the eighteenth century unless you are an extraordinary person like the designer of the Empire Hotel in that town. Mr. Brydon did not try. He absorbed as much of it as he could digest. Yet his big Home Office block is no mere “as you were” building. It is not an eighteenth-century copy, but it is sufficiently eighteenth century not to be vulgar. I will not say it is great architecture, like the Banqueting Hall, yet it has a certain amount of dignity and distinction. The great columns, for instance, have been fluted, but the delicacy of the fluting does not reappear in the rest of the building as it does in the old Treasury block close by. That is all of one piece and at a high level. Rarely do we achieve that nowadays, and certainly not in a great public building. When we do we have to go to an artist like the late E. A. Rickards or to Sir Edwin Lutyens, men whose personalities and taste are both sufficiently vivid and strong to fuse the diverse elements of modern work into a consistent whole.

If I were asked to name the best modern public building in London I should unhesitatingly say E. A. Rickards’s Town Hall at Deptford. But that is some way from Whitehall.

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III.

THE OFFICE BLOCK.

BUSINESS and busy-ness are not the same thing. One does not necessarily imply the other. The designers of our modern blocks of offices, especially in the City of London, do not seem as a class to have grasped this. Had they done so the City, where a greater amount of new building has been done in recent years than anywhere else, would not look so trifling and unconvincing as it does. The buildings have not the same serious air as have the lower portions of those in Wall Street and the end of Broadway—one takes no notice of the upper portions when close at hand.

No one from its recent architecture would realise that the city is still, in spite of the war and unheard-of debts, the centre of the world’s money market. The new buildings, for instance, which now line King William Street, compared to an old building, like the Sun Life building in Threadneedle Street, or to the modern American banks and Trust buildings, are skittish and flamboyant. In spite of the size and apparent wealth of these King William Street ones, you would expect exaggerations in any prospectuses issuing from them. They have that air—an unfortunate one—of over-emphasis.

In Lombard Street, which I suppose is more expensive still, so expensive indeed that only concerns of the highest financial standing in the world can afford to exist beside its narrow road-way, there are even worse examples. In so narrow a thoroughfare every canon of good taste would call for flat reserved façades, yet instead we have in the newer structures, buildings of the strongest modelling and the highest ornateness. In one case a great group of colossal half-naked women is leaning out over the street from the pediment of the main entrance, and in so commanding a way that you are tempted from it to make a guess at the purpose of the building. Is it a slave market, or something worse? No; it is only a highly respectable insurance company of the very finest status and credit.

Even in Kingsway, where a much higher standard of taste prevails than among the average city buildings, we find great new blocks of an extraordinarily complicated architecture. Pelion is not only piled on Ossa, but is interpenetrated with it. We find the buildings like this till we come suddenly to the great new American building which closes the vista—Bush House. Here is a clean-looking structure with regularly spaced windows, all of the same size, devoted to ordinary office purposes. Even in its present unfinished state, with only about one-fifth built, anyone can see that it is a strong and effective mass, with no fuss anywhere to interfere with its outlines. Riding down the Strand on an omnibus one carries away from it, in one’s mind, a definite impression which one certainly does not of its be-whiskered neighbours. One remembers its clear-cut appearance and the interesting detail about its arched entrances. It is an impression of dignity and character obtained without any obvious struggle. No complication of columns decks its façade in the false pretence that it is a palace or to be used for palatial purposes.

In this respect compare Bush House with the Assurance Office on the opposite side of the Strand, which combines a farmhouse roof of split stones with an order of giant columns, and below these a disorder of large ladies leaning out above the ground-floor windows in considerable déshabille to watch the traffic. Nevertheless, in spite of, or rather because of all the extra excitement, one forgets it. It leaves no image on the mind. By overdressing, in place of the simplicity of a good cut, the building has become ineffective.

The Bush building, by a good cut and little ornament sparingly used, is highly effective. Its great entrance on the Aldwych front must be judged in connection with the great plain wings yet to be built on either side and the tower to crown the group. This front is, of course, designed as a terminal feature to Kingsway, and a magnificent one it will make when complete. The building will have, I imagine, a very great effect on all subsequent office blocks. In such matters it introduces, not only American efficiency with its well-lit and easily divisible floor space, but American economy of expression. We have, in reality, always taken business seriously in this country. Perhaps, at last, we shall appear to do so.

I trace a good deal of the flamboyance which has spoilt our business buildings in recent years not only to the flamboyant and rather vulgar architectural period from which we are just emerging, but also to the narrow frontages on which so many of our business premises have in the past been built. The building owner is anxious that his new building shall be distinctive, shall possess what his estate agent calls “a good advertising front.” As the site is a narrow one something extraordinary has to be committed on the façade to mark it from its neighbours. The extraordinary things demanded have been forthcoming, and our streets have, in consequence, become the haphazard muddle, not unpicturesque in general effect, of which Fleet Street and New Bond Street are good examples. Economic reasons, however, are now bringing about bigger buildings. To develop economically one site, another is added to it. The same battery of lifts, for instance, which the greater number of stories calls for, can serve both. With this increase in size the composition of the buildings is an easier matter. They can have breadth, in both senses of the term. They often stretch now from side street to side street, or at any rate have one flank showing. The total mass, therefore, is not only big enough, but has an opportunity of telling, and the architect is no longer so tempted to strive for his effect with extravagant ornament and eccentric forms to his smaller features.

Sir John Burnet is building a fine stark structure, called Adelaide House, at the foot of London Bridge. It rises sheer from the water to a height of some 120 feet. It has little ornament, yet the building is going to be one of the most powerful in London. It will tell like the Bush building by its general shape and mass, and like it, too, its detail is free from all ostentation.

The square sites provided by the gridiron plan of American cities are one of the reasons for the simpler shapes of American buildings. We shall never reach the monotony of such a plan, and we may be thankful for it; but with the bigger buildings which are now coming into existence we, too, may have the advantage of more island sites, and of buildings therefore, which rely on solidity for their effect, and not on narrow faces, ugly or not, as the case may be, but always trying very hard to catch one’s attention.

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IV.

BANK BUILDINGS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

WHY does a New York, a Montreal, or a Toronto bank differ so much in the character and quality of its architecture from a London or Liverpool one? All appear to the average man to serve the same needs. Money may be more powerful on the other side of the Atlantic than it is with us, but it is hardly more respected. Yet there the banks provide temples for their customers while we provide saloon bars, mahogany partitions and all.

The modern American or Canadian bank consists of a great dignified hall, so large and lofty that the counters and such few screens as there are appear, in relative size, like the furniture in a ducal drawing-room. This hall is not generally of ornate architecture, neither are multi-coloured marbles used. It is usually a well-proportioned, lofty apartment of simple rectangular shape, free from intermediate columns, not unlike the best rooms in the British Museum. If a polished stone or marble is used it is generally Roman travertine, with its quiet, warm texture. It is difficult to generalise, but one might state with some degree of accuracy that the architectural scheme is mostly one of large flat pilasters, with a Roman coffered ceiling. That is to say, it is one of architecture reduced to very simple elements. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the great impression of dignity, even of solemnity, which awaits you directly you pass through the revolving doors. You are impressed almost in the same way and to the same degree as you are when you first pass into a cathedral. The service may be going on—it is all the while in the bank—but it is the building which holds you.

When you come to examine it in detail you see about the base of the big pilasters, and evenly spread over the floor of the larger part of the cella—one cannot get away from the temple feeling—a number of small human beings busily at work. These humans are protected by low stone enclosure walls, surmounted in some places by the most delicate and beautiful small bronze grills and screens, or marble ones with bronze in-filling.

I noticed with interest in the National City Bank, New York—the Bank, I was informed, of the Standard Oil magnates—that these screens were of delightful Early Christian detail. I did not complain of any inappropriateness. I admired them intensely. They provided a charming foil to the great Roman interior, with its detail derived from the Pantheon. They may have been at the same time some private tribute to early martyrs in the cause of oil, but that did not matter.

Across this expanse of heads you see, or think you see, the presidents and vice-presidents of the institution. There seems to be no concealment in private rooms. Everyone is there to be shot at when the hold-up comes, and not merely a few cashiers. Architecturally, the result is magnificent. The most insignificant depositor can walk up and down the great hall and either enjoy the architecture or watch the machine working, according to his taste. If he wants to talk to the head of a department he is not taken away to a small room, but to a low armchair placed beside that official’s desk. So great is the floor area that there is perfect privacy by the mere space between the desks.

Think what all this means to the architect designing the bank. Apart from vaults below, his work consists in giving dignified expression, externally and internally, to one great hall. The finest materials and workmanship are at his disposal. Was there any problem like it, at once so simple and so splendid, since the days of the Greek temples?

Instead, what do we do? Firstly, we very rarely consider a bank worthy of being an independent building. It generally has other offices over it. The only one I remember which expresses the banking hall as a single unit is the fine National Provincial Bank, in Bishopsgate, which was built some time in the ’seventies by John Gibson, and still remains externally our finest bank building. But one would not mind the offices over—they have sometimes to have them in America—if the banking hall itself were realised by the bankers and their architects as the splendid opportunity it is for noble architecture.

It is difficult to think that we really believe in banking, as the solid serious profession we talk about, when our banks are not only nearly as numerous, but very like our public-houses. Both are more often than not glorified corner shops. There is the public bar and the private bar in each. The public bar is of any shape so long as there is sufficient counter space, and the private bar or manager’s room has the same mahogany and frosted glass. Externally, each shows, too, a nice taste in pink, polished granite.

In the smaller country towns, however, there is a good deal to be said for the more domestic character of our banks, though, as the greatest builders in the country at the present time, the five big banks have not a very distinguished record even there for good and suitable work. One does not want in a Cotswold village the Ionic temple of Main Street. In the Metropolis or the big provincial cities, however, it is clear to anyone who has crossed the Atlantic that our banks have not yet risen to their architectural opportunities. It is not that they have not spent enough money. It is that their buildings have not been fine and austere enough. They have, in short, not treated their banking business sufficiently seriously.

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V.

THE SMALL SUBURBAN HOUSE.

NOT only at election times, but always under modern conditions, the very small house is the most important unit in our towns. As long as the mechanic, the small tradesman, and the black-coated poor prefer to live in separate dwellings under separate roofs, each thinking of his little box of bricks as an Englishman’s castle, their little houses will occupy a larger space than any other type of building. Even the escaping motorist, leaving his responsibilities and his smell behind him, cannot be entirely unaware of the miles of dreary side streets down which he glances for an oncoming bicycle or milk cart before he reaches the open country. Those who travel by train, omnibus, or tram car, are even more conscious of them, the former seeing not only their little grinning faces, as alike as a row of Mr. Studdy’s puppies, but also their untidy Mary Ann backs, with their strips of desolate garden or yard, each decorated with a pole for wireless or for washing.

What stale, vulgar mind or minds brought about this desert of mean streets, all potential if not actual slums, which is one of the most distinctively English features of our towns? As far as I can see, the minds which were ultimately responsible for them were minds replete with the very best intentions engaged in drawing up model by-laws in Whitehall.

Beauty and by-laws do not at any time live very happily side by side. The few towns like Chester which have none, may have slums, though not very many, but they still retain some of the beauty which a good building tradition alone can give. Model by-laws destroy tradition, destroy independent design, and for all small town property put architects out of work. Let us see how this comes about.

Following the Public Health Acts of 1875, which at any rate gave us water-tight or approximately water-tight drains, most municipalities, instigated by Whitehall, thought they could apply to buildings with equal success the same sort of rules they had applied to drains. They began, therefore, to lay down the minimum thickness of all walls, the minimum strength of all floors, indeed, the minimum size of practically everything. We were not to be allowed to fall through our bedroom floors even if we wanted to.

So far so good. But what was the result? At once the minimum became a maximum, but that alone would not have mattered very much. More happened. Anyone could now build to satisfy the authority, because everyone was told how. Hence arose the standard minimum little house and the jerry builder who dealt in them as others dealt in peas or potatoes. Why go to an architect, why have any thoughtful design at all? Copy the model by-laws, and all will be well. Your plans are bound to be passed. They were, and the result is what we see—minimum roads, minimum houses, maximum repetition, and maximum vulgarity.

You may ask why the latter? The answer is because the jerry builder was not wholly a bad man. It would have been much better if he had been. He had just a little conscience, and that was represented by the decorated bay window, and the stained glass over the front door. I use the past tense, for he has practically gone, clever man that he was in many respects, and has retired probably to a multiple edition of his own residences, all gables and conceit, at Bournemouth, or some similar place. But before he went he left his indelible mark on all our towns where there is a belt of his work, one to six miles wide, as a permanent memorial to his pre-war faith in model by-laws.

The position has altered because the margin of profit on which the jerry builder worked does not now exist in the case of the smallest houses, and because the model by-laws have been remodelled. The speculative builder—we will no longer call him by his sobriquet, for we are all very anxious he should start work again, if not quite on the same lines—has now to confine himself to slightly larger houses which he can sell. There is a chance, therefore, that he will have to consider the external design a little more carefully, and perhaps even employ an architect, though the newest little houses in places like Bournemouth have all the same old flapper-like features, the same ostentation and desire to make an immediate impression, while at the same time turning a cold shoulder to the neighbouring house. These are the marks of an uncivil, unurbane, suburban mind, in the modern and worst sense of that term.

The hope is in the smaller houses, which are too expensive for the speculative builder at the rents that can be charged. These are therefore being erected everywhere, though not nearly fast enough, by the municipalities under the various Government schemes. Everyone must have been impressed by the general improvement in design which has come about. The loosening of the by-laws has meant the employment of competent architects both for the lay-out of the roads and for the houses themselves. Instead of long narrow roads of closely packed minimum houses we have now groups of three and four houses of simple shape, which being simple can combine into some sort of unity.

The fault in the present housing schemes, good as they in general are, is, I fancy, that the units are too dissociated. We have gone too far in the opposite direction. We want, I think, more terraces, of anything up to a dozen houses, lineable with the road. We want more of the effect of a village that has grown, rather than of a lot of little model houses squeezed out of the same mould and dotted about on the landscape. But the change has been wonderful, and the chief step towards that change has been the un-modelling of the model by-laws.

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VI.

OUR BIG RAILWAY STATIONS.

ONE reads in the daily papers that one of our biggest railways has commissioned a set of posters from most of the painter-members of the Royal Academy. Whether the R.A.s are equal to this effort in design remains to be seen, but one may take the action of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway as a sign of grace—if not exactly a death-bed repentance. After the spirited and successful deeds of the London Underground in this respect, the bigger railways had to do something. Being big, they naturally thought of the Academy; from a great combine one cannot expect any very tiring effort in clear thinking.

But what has all this to do with the big railway stations? I think it lies very near their heart. It gives at any rate a clue to the strange mystery of their shapelessness. The big railway termini in America have no posters, but are in themselves fine architectural schemes. The big termini in this country, especially the recent ones, like Victoria, have no architectural scheme, but plenty of posters. One can imagine the English director saying, “It does not matter about the shape of our stations if we plaster them with these,” and then, more touchingly, “If we go to the Royal Academy for the plasters, all will indeed be well.”

This state of mind, of course, exhibits a fundamental error of the most primitive kind. Our railway companies to-day seem to have as little faith in their own enterprises as do our banks. If railway transport is the great and important thing a great many people, not even excluding all railway directors, think it to be, the thing in itself is worthy of fine expression.

The terminal station is the gateway of the town, but a gateway through which people are brought from the uttermost parts or through which they set out on illimitable journeys. What structure in the whole of our civilisation should make a finer appeal to the imagination? Yet if we think of our London termini, only King’s Cross and Euston express in any sense this gateway idea, and in the latter an hotel belonging to the railway has been allowed to impinge upon and spoil the great gateway symbol—the Doric Propylea—which Hardwick, the architect, invented for this very purpose.

For the rest, our main railway stations are big railway sheds, leaning up against hotels or blocks of railway offices, the details of which are necessarily entirely out of scale with the spans of the train-shed roof. Sometimes this roof, as at St. Pancras, is in itself a fine thing; sometimes, as at Waterloo, it is, in the words of Mr. Roger Fry, a series of hen-roosts. In no case in England in recent years has the real dignity and importance of the railway as a railway been allowed or given anything like full expression.

In New York the problem has been approached quite differently. There the town has seen in the first place that the railway tracks are below the ground level, and that no steam engine enters the town to befoul it with its smoke. At the Great Central Station there are two tiers of tracks, one for main line and one for suburban traffic, one above the other and both below the surface. With us, especially in the southern lines, the reverse seems to be the general rule. Our railway companies, regardless of all amenity, carry their tracks high in the air, thereby cutting off large districts by embankments and generally deforming the town.

With the sunk railway tracks in New York the structure above ground is left free, and the station problem resolves itself, on the practical side, into gathering together the passengers in the most comfortable way and sending them down to or up from the right railway track at the right time. On the architectural side, the American method has meant that an architect of repute has been called in to express above ground the majesty of the particular railway, while using, of course, the plan forms most convenient to passengers. When he has done that and has thereby made the finest possible advertisement of that particular railway, no other kind of advertisement, either of the railway itself or of anything else, is permitted within the station.

I remember well a New Yorker’s first view of one of our own termini. He turned to me and said “Say, man, it’s a vaudeville show.” And he was right. Compared with the great halls of the American stations, our Waterloos and Victorias are comic opera inside and out. Theirs are monumental structures, through which pour with ease vastly greater crowds than we deal with, for New York, with practically the same population as London has only two great terminal stations.

The fact is our stations take any shape left over by the engineers. No architect of the first rank has been employed since Hardwick at Euston, on any great terminal station, whereas Charles Follen McKim—the Christopher Wren of America—conceived and designed the Pennsylvania Station, and two slightly lesser men had almost more success with the Central Station. Our railway companies are generally content to give the engineer an architectural assistant or to keep in their employ a tame architect, who works for no one else, which is in itself but another confession that they consider the shape and form of their stations a question of very secondary importance.

Such a view is, of course, at once vastly unpatriotic, an insult to the intelligence of the community, but also a mistake, one would think, on purely commercial grounds. No American walks through the immense concourse hall, lined with Roman travertine, of the Great Central Station in New York or penetrates the series of halls, like some vaster Baths of Caracalla, of the Pennsylvania Station, without a sense of pride in the two great railway companies who have given the country such noble monuments. The average New Yorker feels to these two stations as the average English schoolboy does to express engines. He takes you to see them. Who takes anyone to see Waterloo or Victoria? Who is impressed by their combined red brick and stone cinema-architecture? But no one fails to be impressed by the vast, simple Roman architecture of the New York stations or the great triple arched façade of the Union Station at Washington.

The Americans believe in architecture; they know its value at its best as both the most abstract and at the same time the most powerful form of human expression, and their railway magnates have the sense to make use of it. Instead, ours go to the Royal Academy for pretty pictures with which to cover up their disgrace.

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VII.

RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS OF TO-DAY.

NO one could call ours a temple building era. Yet more, and more truly, religious buildings seem to me to have been built during the last twenty or thirty years than in any equal space of time since the dissolution of the monasteries.

This may seem a strange statement when we look back on the fervours of the Tractarian movement and the endless Gothic churches it produced—and one might almost add the endless Gothic cathedrals it destroyed. Looking at that handiwork one begins to wonder whether the medieval movement of last century was after all really a religious movement based on any real feeling or just a sentimentally romantic one.

How is it that this so-called irreligious age in which we live, and this certainly a vulgar one if we are to judge it by its civic buildings, has produced ecclesiastical buildings which are living and vital things, while that Victorian age, in spite of its hymns and its prayer meetings, its battles of the styles and its religious arguments, produced mainly, if not entirely, dead copies, or rather travesties, of worn out past architecture?

It is a strange paradox and one which I think can be explained only by the fact that under the mass of neglect and indifference with which religion struggles to-day, a few enthusiastic artists are able to work with a freedom which was denied to their fellows in the second half of the nineteenth century, when every layman was an ecclesiologist and every parson had some half-baked theory of medieval art of his own, which he felt it his duty to run. What chance had the poor architect when his style was dictated to him and confined to some fifty years of a century itself five centuries old? Yet that was everywhere the common practice. Archæology reigned supreme, the only difficulty being that the exact fifty years for imitation and revival changed from time to time. It was a case of the dead not only burying the dead, but burying the living too.

To my thinking it was the interior of Bentley’s great Catholic Cathedral at Westminster which finally broke the idea that Gothic, in one of its many past manifestations, was the only religious style. That grave and vast interior proved indeed that the requisite conditions for solemn building lay really in the opposite direction. It showed that lofty plain wall surfaces, even of common stock brick, were more important in giving the idea of remoteness and seclusion from the world than the richest clustered Gothic columns. One felt after first seeing the Westminster Cathedral that even the Abbey nave, probably the most perfect piece of Gothic in England, if it were new to-day and fresh and unhallowed by endless associations, would not have the same power over the mind, the same humbling yet inspiring effect that this vast dimly lit hall of plain brickwork and concrete possessed. The very simplicity of its round arches, its sheer unbroken walls and piers, its plain sedate domes gave it a solemnity which richer and more articulate structures like correct Gothic ones could not from their nature possess. That it was, however, foreign and to a certain extent therefore esoteric in its appeal, while it made it no doubt very convenient to its particular purpose, rendered its style difficult if not unsuitable to general adaptation to ordinary and smaller churches.

The effect of Bentley’s work, however, was none the less pronounced. It showed the Gothic architects of our churches, or certain of them who were open to new inspiration, that there were very impressive qualities to be obtained in church building which a strict adherence to past forms of Gothic could not give.

Gothic is essentially a linear style in which the eye travels along the well-marked lines of deeply indented piers, arches, and vaulting ribs. The interior of the Westminster Cathedral, on the other hand, especially before its decoration was attempted, had all the Byzantine feeling for large and finely modulated surfaces. Of strongly drawn moulded lines there were few. The world, we know, was shut out by high walls and another world suggested by the broad arches and domes, and by the very blueing of the atmosphere which their great height enabled them to bring about. How to get some of the strength and solidity of those walls and domes into ordinary church building was the new problem.

The solution was found in a new and free Gothic in which walls and solid piers took the place of Gothic columns and plain vaulting that of ribbed, in which the coloured stone lantern to which the old Gothic church approximated gave way to some form of massive interior lit by an occasional rich window. The new churches which I have in mind are buildings which look in on themselves rather than out on to the world. To the outside world they present a plain and often uncompromising exterior. They are in the world, but not of it—perhaps that, too, is symbolical of our time.

If it was Sir Gilbert Scott to whom we owe so much of the harder and less pleasing Gothic of Victorian times, as well as much destructive restoration of our Cathedrals, it is to his grandson, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to whom we owe to-day some of the best of these new free Gothic churches as well as, at Liverpool, the one great new Gothic cathedral of our age. If anyone ever made good the sins of his grandfather, this architect certainly has. Though still a young man he has already built sufficient work to mark our era and to start a new renaissance in church building. It is a veritable renaissance in that the spirit of adventure necessary to a renaissance is there. His work, even the smallest, such as his church of the Annunciation at Bournemouth, has qualities of imagination and scale which place it in an entirely new category. While using Gothic detail for decoration he builds with the solid bigness of the Romans. It is too early yet to speak of his great cathedral, when but a third of a structure second only in size to St. Peter’s, Rome, among Christian structures, has yet been completed, but there is already enough to be seen (especially now that a portion of the building is enclosed) for us to feel that at last we are to have a building which in the grandeur of its scale and the daring of its design will represent a greater individual effort of the imagination than that called forth by any cathedral yet erected in these islands.

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VIII.

THE USE OF THE COLUMN.

THE classical column, together with its entablature of architrave, frieze, and cornice, commonly called the order, is one of the most abused features in modern architecture. It has, of course, come down to us, full of meaning and character, from Greek and Roman times by way of the Renaissance, each age, as it were, having laid its own deposit upon it. It has always, however, in the course of its long journey, retained something of its pristine importance and glory.

Coming to maturity, if not born, in temple, palace, and forum, the column has signified, even in pilaster form as in a wall decoration, something apart from and superior to the common daily activities of eating, sleeping and trading. It has been used on great churches and cathedrals, on palaces—though the Italians, unlike the French and English, seem on the whole to have preferred the latter with plain, cliff-like walls—on the fronts of town halls, theatres, and opera houses. It has come to mean, therefore, especially when of great size, something public and monumental or, in Georgian times, aristocratic. This feeling persisted even into the nineteenth century. We see in Regent’s Park and the London squares terraces of houses with some columned or pilastered feature in the centre, or it may be the whole block is so treated. I suppose it was felt that what would be ostentatious in a single house was still permissible to a group. Where no one owned all the columns all could partake of their reflected glory and share it between them. In that way the order was not oppressive. With a duke, of course, it is different. He can have a columned house all to himself, but, then, both he and such a house are in themselves anachronisms.

So it was with the club. The Carlton might have columns—it had them galore, and still retains them—but the more austere clubs, like the Reform and the Athenæum, are above even a communal display of Corinthian glory. That they gain by their restraint all will admit. The order in these buildings is implicit, but not shown; as if the members of the club said, “We are, of course, as good as the Conservatives and the Guards; indeed, we are really such superior people that we have no need to advertise the fact, as they have to do, poor things!”

What, now, is the modern English use of the great order? The answer is, everywhere for every purpose. Where do we find its most conspicuous example? In a great drapery store in Oxford Street. The particular store I have in my mind consists of nothing else—a great range of over-ornate columns, with a metal screen of windows between them. There is, of course, an imperial simplicity about such architecture. It might have been designed by a Roman Emperor in his cups. But he, at any rate, would have kept it for some Imperial purpose, if only as a house for his menagerie or his gladiators. Here, however, it is in the main an advertisement for “soft goods.”

I maintain that that is all wrong, however well the columns and their accessories might be designed. If we use up our finest symbols on such structures, what have we left for really national buildings? The front of this Oxford Street store, when completed, will be more imposing, and in a way more effective, than that of Buckingham Palace.

Something is wrong here in our sense of civic values. Perhaps one need not mind very much about the front of Buckingham Palace being overshadowed (as long as the garden front remains untouched), but what are we to say to the British Museum? That is really important, and has of late years had a magnificent range of Ionic columns added in Montague Place by Sir John Burnet, who is, it is ironical to remember, the very same architect who is increasing the range of giant columns in Oxford Street. Having erected the one, he was probably considered the right person to erect the other. No doubt, too, he was, if the thing were right at all. That is the rub. I maintain it was not.

In the same way every lesser commercial building, except the few really great ones, like Bush House, at the bottom of Kingsway, ape the palace. Immediately opposite the Athenæum Club, on the other side of Pall Mall, is a new bank building, which is covered on every side with the commonest kind of unfluted Corinthian columns—the sort of columns a first-year architectural student draws because he can draw no others. Not content with adding large ones to the building as a whole and lesser ones to the attic, the designer here, whoever he may be, has added baby columns to the doors and windows.

Well, there it is, and you can contrast this early twentieth-century bank, aping royalty and achieving clownishness, with the early nineteenth-century club, refusing all such symbols (except in a small porticoed entrance, where the columns, serving a definite practical purpose, have another meaning) and achieving a nobility which seems almost past our dreaming about to-day. Yet Decimus Burton, when he designed the Athenæum, was only twenty-seven years of age. I am beginning to think we shall not again get architecture in England approaching his till we go to the young men of to-day of twenty-seven and there-abouts who can not only dream dreams, but, like Burton, have received a complete training in the meaning of the symbols they use.

Columns having, then, a special meaning and significance, have, of all architectural detail, to be used with the greatest care. In Bush House, on the Aldwych front, they are used with great boldness, where they symbolise a great gateway at the end of Kingsway to what was designed as a great exhibition building, and with great reserve on the Strand front, where they chiefly announce the entrance to the office of the insurance company or bank which is to use, or uses, the ground floor. In an ordinary drawing-room we know what distinction they can give if introduced discreetly, and, on the other hand, what vulgarity if flamboyantly.

There is, however, a use of columns which has come down to us from classical times to which we do not, I think, sufficiently resort. It is the rostral column, independent and free-standing. Sir Reginald Blomfield has put one up in St. Paul’s Churchyard and adapted it well to the architecture of the Cathedral. The Cunard Company in Liverpool have put up another as a war memorial in front of their magnificent block of offices on the river front, and have, appropriately enough in this case, completed it with ships’ prows and a beautiful figure by Pegram. A free standing column, crowned with a figure, is a form of memorial which is always effective and rarely vulgar. The column in Waterloo Place to an obscure royal duke, called the Duke of York’s Column, is perhaps, and especially in its setting, the finest memorial in London. If Liverpool ever decides to erect a war memorial it could not do better than repeat at the other end of St. George’s Hall the fine column a better age put up to Wellington, so that the greatest post-classical building in Europe would lie evenly between the two.

Such single columns unattached to buildings necessarily take the severest conventional form. That is their safeguard, and that is why the Doric is better for this purpose than the Corinthian, why the Duke of York’s Column is to be preferred so much to Nelson’s.