Chapter XXIV: Dublin in 1924 201 (4)

In New York Mr. Bush had chosen a site for his venture in 42nd Street, a street which seems to me roughly to correspond to the Strand. That is to say it is a street half way between the City and the West End, near to the great commercial hotels, most of which are indeed in it. It is in a growing neighbourhood too, into which important industrial concerns are continually moving from the crowded down-town area. Hence under American conditions the surrounding buildings are continually getting larger and higher. The site Mr. Bush was able to buy was a very narrow one, some fifty feet wide, in the centre of a city block. It would only get light, therefore, back and front. Further any buildings rising above its fellows must be prepared in such circumstances for the blank return walls, which are one of the ugliest features of American building conditions. If the site was a narrow restricted one it was however 200 feet deep, and compares therefore, in total area to about two-thirds of that occupied by the central block of the London building. To develop fully such a site it is obvious that only a portion of the building could rise to any height, because only a portion of the total depth could be lit from either end. Mr. Corbett chose to take up the front portion using some 90 feet of depth for the purpose. We, in England, with our duller climate, would consider 90 feet a great depth to be lit from either end, or from a small enclave in one side, which might some day be built up. To get his exhibition floor area then, and to give the striking character his building demanded, this area of 90 by 50 feet was made into a tower, and a very lofty one at that. It is 450 feet high—higher, that is to say, than the cross on St. Paul’s. To build a great tower on so narrow a base was in itself no small engineering undertaking, especially as the large exhibition rooms on each floor made cross bracing against wind pressure a difficulty. To make an oblong tower with the two longer walls not only blank, but devoid of all projections, however slight, for adjacent owners in America do not grant accommodation of that kind, a beautiful and graceful object was an architectural undertaking which it required no small ability to accomplish. The choice of Gothic as the form of expression to be used was probably dictated by the simple fact that Gothic lines would emphasize the height of the tower—its main characteristic—and any other style would diminish it. One can at any rate imagine the architect trained in logical French methods arguing in that way. The difficulty of the blank returns was overcome very ingeniously by imitation details of long mullion-like lines in three coloured bricks, black ones being used for the darkest shadows, which are made to correspond to the natural average angle of the sun, while white bricks are used for the high lights. The very thought of this would make Ruskin turn in his grave. Yet the result is undeniably effective, and one cannot see how so good a result on an absolutely plain face could be otherwise obtained. But the tower, of course, does not really rely to any great extent on this successful architectural camouflage. It relies on its undoubted grace, which is largely due to the very beautiful double lantern or 8 or 9 stories which surmounts it. This lantern by being set in from the main wall faces is freed from restrictions. The upper portion of it sets in again and the architects have here their own office with all New York from river to river and mountain range to mountain range at their feet. At night the lantern top is illuminated by flood lighting, and floats high in the sky, a golden casket of extraordinary and romantic beauty.

The building is Gothic throughout, with elaborate bank and club rooms on the lower floors, but one must frankly admit that while it is far better Gothic than that of the Woolworth Building, it is like the interior of our own Houses of Parliament, Gothic without the touch of the Gothic craftsman, and the variety and interest of Gothic designers. My own feeling is that no human being can design Gothic detail on paper in the quantity which these great buildings require and give it the real interest and spontaneity of the old work. Sir Giles Scott has got nearer it than anyone in his Liverpool Cathedral by departing very largely from precedent. Mr. Corbett has departed from precedent too, but his thirty odd floors, like the endless corridors of the House of Commons, call for a greater output of ability in Gothic designing and craftsmanship than the whole world possesses at the present time, and it must be remembered as stated above, Mr. Corbett is his own designer.

Let us turn now to his London building. It is so well known and so much has been written about it that it is not necessary to describe it in any detail. One may notice, however, how the dual aspect of the problem has here too been solved. The great doorway with its giant columns and semi-dome facing down Kingsway, with the crowning tower above, emphasize the semi-public character of the proposed commercial exhibition or museum. The great mass of plain stone face showing everywhere in cliff-like walls, among its complicated neighbours, all piers columns and architectural trappings of every sort, marks the London Bush building as being as distinctive a unit in London as is the graceful tower piercing the sky in New York. If it ever fulfils its owners’ conception and becomes a great depository of current articles of commerce, it will stand out to the world as such a depository. The man in the street will easily recognise it as such. There is rightly more than a touch of the warehouse character in it. The architect seems to me, therefore, to have solved that side of the problem better even in London than he has in New York. The New York building is a more obvious advertisement. Its tower is simply a beckoning finger. No one would expect a graceful Gothic tower to be a storehouse of samples. The other half of the problem is equally well solved by the London building. The great floors, admirably and evenly lit by the evenly spaced windows, make excellent exhibition galleries. In the meantime they make almost equally good office floors. The regular spacing of the windows, which allows them to be smaller than is usual in London and thereby gives the greater wall spaces we all desire, makes each floor readily divisible to suit tenants. The practical conditions of the problem seem therefore to have been solved as admirably as the more spiritual ones.

The measure of success which this central block only of the whole London conception has achieved is extraordinary, when one remembers that a great deal of it will not be seen when the two big wing blocks are built, and was so designed. There is a baldness about the flanks as at present exposed, which will be very suited to the two garden courts, when they are completed, but which is not so happy now. The fact, too, that the main central block is not axial with Kingsway will not then be so apparent. It is not axial because its axis is a necessary compromise between the centre of Kingsway and the centre of the curve on the Strand front. This deflection of the axis of the central block was, in my opinion, very much to be preferred to a break in the back of the block itself—the only alternative.

The clean lean character of the exterior, relying for its final effect on the mass of the building rather than on any excitement of detail, appears to me to fit with our current post-war ideas in a way which is little short of marvellous, when one remembers that the building was designed before the war. One may ask what has the war got to do with architectural styles? I think that the answer is that the war with its consequent economies is enforcing a healthy movement, which had already started, towards buildings, which answered their programmes more directly and without unnecessary fallals. The Adelphi Hotel and the Cunard Buildings at Liverpool, both pre-war, are early examples of the same trend. The main impulse, however, came from America, where commercial buildings had become so large that columnar orders could no longer be fitted to them, while the windows had become so small in comparison to the structures as to be mere texture to the wall surface. Buildings like the Port of London Building are already _demodé_. They mark the end of an era. The young men now coming from the Schools of Architecture are coming forth with very different ideas. To them the London Bush Building is a welcome advance in logical expression, which they themselves hope to carry still further. Its discreet detail is based indeed on tradition, but is no thoughtless copy of old dead things. It combines reserve with boldness, logical character with great taste and knowledge. No better background for large sculptured figures standing clear could be imagined than the great rich semi-dome to Kingsway. This portico marks the public entrance to the whole building as appropriately as does the smaller one in the Strand the entrance to the bank or insurance office to occupy the Strand portion of the ground floor. Fitness in expression seems to me as much inherent in the detail as in the general conception. It is because of this logical fitness and efficiency throughout that the Bush Building holds out hope for the future. It has not been born dead as are so large a proportion of our modern town-structures. Viewed from this standpoint, it seems to me far more alive and valuable than the corresponding New York tower. The idealism and hopefulness, which all who have met him know to be so leading and interesting a characteristic of Mr. Bush himself, has, thanks to his architect, found expression in his London building. Here is honesty, simplicity, faith in and hope for the future. It is no small gift he and Mr. Corbett between them have made to London, especially at the present time. May they soon complete it as planned!

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XX.

BATH OR BOURNEMOUTH?

BATH is our one architectural city. Sufficient of it, that is to say, has been built on an harmonious plan and with harmonious architecture to give it a unity no other town in Great Britain or Ireland possesses. Dublin, before the recent fighting, was nearest to it in this respect. When the fighting is really finished and rebuilding starts in earnest, it will probably fall a little further behind, for to-day there is nowhere any canon of taste sufficiently strong to force any sort of uniformity on new buildings. That is where we differ most strongly from the 18th century. Bath was not built by one architect, though one was responsible for most of the lay-out as must always be the case where there is any plan at all. The actual buildings of Bath were built by a group of architects no more closely connected, except in general ideas and taste, than are modern architects. Yet how different the result! Think of Bath with its stately procession of noble streets, squares, circuses, crescents and other architectural forms and the modern town which most nearly answers to the same requirements—Bournemouth. The contrast could not be greater and in itself is a good measure of the difference in ideals which separates the builders of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from those of the latter half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the place of a dignified neighbourliness and sense of solidarity which led folk to live in terraces of houses, which externally did not differ from one another, we have, as exhibited in Bournemouth, or in any other modern recreational town for the matter of that, the evidence of a desire to live as far removed as possible from one’s neighbours in a house which differs in shape as much as possible from theirs. In Bath in the eighteenth century one did not show one’s superiority by any outward display. The greatest in the land were ready to live cheek by jowl with the least famous. A circus or crescent might house for the time being, at any rate, great ministers of state, dignitaries of the Church, members of the aristocracy and retired tradesmen in houses whose exteriors were identical. We often pride ourselves a little superficially on the superior democratic tendencies of the age in which we live, yet if architecture is used as a test we see at once how much more really democratic a city layed out on the lines of Bath is to one on the lines, or rather one like Bournemouth, for the latter has no lines at all in an architectural sense. I do not want to say that the garden city idea of which Bournemouth is an early, if unconscious example, has not beauties of its own. I only desire to point out what a very different ideal of beauty the two towns and the two centuries they stand for exhibit.

Another difference, which is really involved and implied in the two different conceptions of what a town for rest and recuperation should be, is to be noted in the way each town approaches the country. The modern town has always its indefinite region surrounding it, which is neither town nor country, but an ugly and generally an untidy overlapping of each. The whole of a town of the type of Bournemouth is suburban. That is involved in its idea, but there are parts of it on its outskirts where its suburban qualities lapse into meanness. In eighteenth century Bath there was nothing of the sort. The town and country did not mix and consequently neither spoilt the other. There was perfect town and perfect country co-existing side by side. The proof of this is still to be seen to-day in Great Pulternay Street,—the most dignified and perfect town street I know. As you walk down it you feel that you are, at any rate for the time being, a citizen of no mean city. Its urban flavour is of the most refined and exquisite kind. It has its proper climax in Sydney House, and there are no loose ends to distract the view in any direction. It might be a street in Paris, but devoid of Parisian noise and push and with statelier architecture. Yet a hundred yards to the right, through New Sydney Place, you have to-day open fields and completely unspoilt country. On the opposite side is the modern suburb of Bathwick, and you can note the difference. When Pulternay Street was built, however, it ran straight out into the open country, and its four-storied town houses must have backed on to the fields. Portland Place and the Bloomsbury Squares must have been very much the same when they were first laid out. The creeping of the modern town by means of inferior houses growing up higgledy-piggledy or in long dull streets leading nowhere, with all the squalor and discomfort to everyone such a condition implies, is, I am afraid, a modern conception, or rather the absence of any conception at all. When in the eighteenth century, owing to its sudden rise in fashion, Bath burst its medieval walls, as did so many English towns, it did it deliberately according to an architectural plan. The result was, instead of the area of muddle through which one drives as quickly as possible in approaching a modern town, no muddle at all, but fine trees and stately country adjacent to fine houses and stately streets, each enhancing the other. Let us consider a little more closely this method of town building and town planning as exemplified in Bath.

The man who transformed Bath from a small medieval town surrounded by its walls and with its two main, though irregular, streets running roughly at right angles towards its four gates, after the pattern of a Roman camp on which, no doubt in this case, it was based, was a young Yorkshireman of twenty-one years of age, named John Wood. He was born in 1704 and employed as a surveyor of roads in his native county. He appears to have been introduced to Bath by Ralph Allen, the post-boy who rose to be the great merchant prince of the town, owner and developer of the quarries of the famous Bath Stone on Coombe Down from which the town is built. In “An Essay towards a Description of Bath,” which Wood published in 1742, he says “In 1724 a subscription was opened by a deal merchant of Bristol for carrying the navigation of the river into execution, so that when I found the work was likely to go on I began to turn my thoughts towards the improvements of the City of Bath by building, and for the purpose I procured a plan of the town, which was sent me into Yorkshire in the summer of the year 1725, where I, at my leisure hours, formed one design for the ground at the north-west corner of the city and another at the north-east side of the town and river.” This latter was afterwards laid out by Thomas Baldwin, and includes Pulternay Street and part of the Bathwich estate. “After my return to London,” Wood continues, “I imparted my first design to Mr. Gay, an eminent surgeon in Hatton Garden and proprietor of the land, and our first conference was upon the last day of December, 1725.” Wood must obviously have been an extraordinary young man, not only to have conceived at the age of twenty-one in his leisure hours, a plan for developing a strange town on what were then very novel lines, but to have had the energy and capacity to convince the owners of the land and push the major part of it through to completion. “On the 31st of March following” he says, “I communicated my second design to the Earl of Essex, to whom the land on which it was proposed to be executed then belonged, and in each design I proposed to make a grand plan of assembly to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another place no less magnificent for the exhibition of sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third place of equal state with either of the former, for the practice of medicinal exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City.” In the November of the same year Wood fixed his preliminary articles with Mr. Gay, who then empowered him to engage anyone that he could bring into the scheme for the building of a street, 1025 feet long north and south by fifty feet wide east and west, for an approach to the grand part of the design. In this way Gay Street, leading to the Circus, was eventually formed and Wood launched on his numerous schemes for the betterment of Bath, which even included a canal from Bristol to that city. For the canal he obtained men from the Chelsea waterworks, and he says “till that time the real use of the spade was unknown in and about the city.” “I likewise provided,” he adds, “masons in Yorkshire, carpenters, joiners and plasterers in London and other places, and from time to time sent such as were necessary down to Bath to carry on the building that I had undertaken”; for this astonishing young man was not only an architect and town planner but his own contractor as well. “It was not till then,” he goes on to say, “that the lever, the pulley, and the windlass were introduced among the artificers in the upper part of Somersetshire, before which time the masons made use of no other method to hoist up their heavy stones than that of dragging them up with small ropes against the side of a ladder.” There may be some exaggeration in this statement of Wood’s—there probably is—but it is sufficient evidence of the primitive state of affairs in the city when Wood found it, and it makes more remarkable still the work which this young genius achieved. Not only, apparently, did he transform a medieval town into one of metropolitan and even Roman dignity, but he displaced medieval methods of handling materials and workmanship with modern ones.[1]

Footnote 1:

For the above facts and dates concerning Wood and his work, as well as
for much else, I am indebted to Mr. Mowbray Green’s excellent volume
entitled “The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath” which will be
found a mine of information as to architects and owners of most of the
18th century work in the city.

Let us now take a walk through the formal portion of Bath, which Wood laid out, and on which he and his son built their famous groups of houses. Starting at the top of Barton Street we enter Queen Square, the first of Wood’s formal conceptions of a group of houses to be actually carried out. Queen Square was designed by Wood in 1728, and is roughly a hundred yards either way. It consists of four blocks of seven large houses on each side, combined into four architectural compositions. Wood claimed that he was the first architect in England to unite into one design a number of separate houses, but Inigo Jones had forestalled him in Covent Garden and other places. However, Wood was clearly the first to do it on this scale, and what is more important, first to combine one fine shape, like Queen Square, with other fine shapes like the Circus and Royal Crescent, and in this way to present the idea of an architecturally conceived town. The north side of the Square consists of a Corinthian composition with a central pediment over six columns and two square end projections with four columns and flat Corinthian pilasters in the links between. The order stands on a finely rusticated basement with moulded heads to the piers between the windows. The whole is strong Roman work but not lacking in refinement. The east and west sides of the square are conceived as the wings of a palace of which the north side is the main front. In the centre house of this north side under the pediment, Wood lived for a time, and died there in 1754, king of the domain he had created. The east side of the square was completed in accordance with Wood’s design and has richly moulded and curiously carved doorways. In one of these houses, Dr. Oliver, of biscuit fame, lived. The west side, however, had to be altered to meet the difficulty of securing building owners and was not finished till after Wood’s death. The central block, with an Ionic Order in the Neo-Grec style, was added about 1830. All the houses of Wood’s have fine interiors and well shaped and finished rooms and rich staircases with turned or twisted balusters and panelled dado. The staircase of No. 15 is perhaps the finest in Bath. Its alternate twisted and fluted balusters and handrail are all in Spanish mahogany. Above is some baroque plaster work very much like similar Italian work in the Georgian houses of Dublin.

Of the Square garden, Wood says the ground was enclosed with a low stone wall bearing a balustrade with a wide gate and gate piers on the centre of each side. In the middle was a basin forty feet in diameter supplied by a spring, and the four quarters of the garden were enclosed with espaliered elm and lime trees, though, as Wood adds, these must have somewhat obstructed the view of the houses opposite. The interesting thing to note is that all this careful finish was added to a scheme essentially speculative in character. The same remark applies to the houses themselves which Wood built here and in the Circus. Though the work was speculative there was nothing jerry about it. Wood used the best materials, especially in stone, the proof of which is to be seen in the state of the houses to-day. With the prospect of wealthy clients taking up his leases, he was content and indeed too much of an artist in his work not to build well, in addition to designing well. There is something therefore to be said, unprofessional as it sounds to-day, for this combination in one person of architect, builder and owner, which is to be seen too in the case of the brothers Adam, who so closely followed Wood and his son at Bath and elsewhere.

Passing up Gay Street, named after Wood’s first Bath client, which has a number of the good houses in it, Bath accustoms us to, but nothing remarkable, unless it be the interior of No. 41 with its circular ended rooms, where John Wood, Jnr. lived, and “The Carved House,” No. 8 on the opposite side, we come to the Circus, which is the finest of all the elder Wood’s conceptions. The diameter of the Circus is about 100 yards and the height of the houses 42 feet. It is laid out with only three streets entering it and not four cross roads as at Oxford Circus or any of the other London ones. This at once gives it more solidity and a greater sense of enclosure as a circular court. It also enabled Wood to place opposite you as you pass up the gentle slope of Gay Street, a large unbroken segment of the curved façade, so providing an architectural finish to that street. In the Circus, Wood has departed from the strict Palladian manner as understood in England and, instead of great columns stretching over two stories and standing on a plain basement, he has provided a range of smaller coupled columns to each storey. Each of these rows of columns carries its full architrave, frieze and cornice and the top one a balustrade as well crowned with pine-apples. There is, therefore, a great profusion of strong horizontal lines which emphasize the curve in whichever direction the eye is cast, while the rounded surfaces of the numberless columns give a sense of richness and fine modelling, impressive in the way that the exterior of the Colosseum or any great Roman Amphitheatre was. Indeed, walking round the Circus, you cannot help feeling that you are in the Court of Honour of some magnificent palace, yet by the absolute similarity of treatment to each house there is no individual ostentation or vulgarity. The Court is to-day splendidly enhanced by the magnificent group of trees which rise from the lawn in the centre. No wonder rulers of Empires like Lord Chatham (No. 7) and Lord Clive (at No. 14) and artists like Thomas Gainsborough (at No. 24) once took houses in it, while to-day it is almost entirely inhabited by members of the medical profession who have a knack of settling in the best houses in any provincial town. This Circus took fifteen years to erect, and was therefore completed by Wood’s son, whose work was always in sympathy with that of his father. The exterior was, of course, determined once and for all with the first house built, but the interiors of the houses differ considerably and were probably designed to suit the requirements of the intending tenants.

From the Circus one passes by Brock Street, built by the younger Wood, to the Royal Crescent, another bold and magnificent conception on an even larger scale. It was commenced in 1767 and finished eight years later. Though the work of the son, it is in perfect keeping with the ideas of the father. It consists, too, of one continuous range of buildings with unbroken roof, forming in this case, a semi-ellipse, 538 feet long. Including the two terminal blocks, it contains a range of 114 great Ionic columns, here combining in the Palladian manner the first and second floors and standing on a plain base of the ground floor storey. The whole crescent, with its noble stretch of grass in front of it, looks south across the valley now containing the Victoria Gardens and has therefore, as it breasts the hill, one of the pleasantest outlooks in Bath. So successful was it in combining stately architecture with a fine prospect that it has been copied further up the hillside in other crescents, such as Lansdown and Camden Crescents. The individual houses in the Royal Crescent, being later than those in the Circus, depend more on plaster decoration for their interior finish, while the main doors are generally of veneered instead of solid mahogany. The ceilings of the chief rooms are particularly beautiful in a similar but rather stronger manner than that one is accustomed to connect with the name of Adam. It is again very like similar work in Dublin, and has like it in addition to the ordinary classical _motifs_ an occasional touch of very effective naturalistic ornament, such as one finds in contemporary French work. The marble chimney pieces in the chief rooms are of the various eighteenth century types but with fine simplicity and restraint. Everything indeed was done to make these houses, while identical on the exterior, full of interest and refinement within. In this way they satisfied the ideals of the eighteenth century gentleman for whom they were designed.

All these houses indeed of the two Wood’s and the fine shapes into which they combined them seem to show that in times of good taste in the world it is almost as impossible to do wrong in architecture as in times of bad taste it is to do right. How otherwise, except by a general atmosphere of right feeling in such matters and the general acceptance of a canon such as the Palladian one, are we to explain the fact that John Wood, hardly more than a boy and an untravelled one at that, came down from the wilds of Yorkshire and was able not only to change the whole character of a city, but to make it a model of fine urban housing for all time?

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XXI.

REGENT STREET, OLD AND NEW

IT is so easy, especially in middle age, to be for ever decrying the works of our contemporaries and praising those of our predecessors. This is particularly the case in an art like architecture, where old forms by continued use retain their meaning for centuries, and the significance of new ones is difficult to grasp. The temptation to condemn the new at once as upstart and vulgar is obvious. In comparing therefore the new Regent Street with the old, let us try to keep an open mind. What is it we have lost and what is it we have gained? Let us consider the former first.

Old Regent Street was our one definitely metropolitan street. By that I mean that not only had it a unity, although the individual buildings were by diverse hands, that no other street in London possessed, but it had a superior and welcoming urbanity. It was a smiling sunlit thoroughfare with restful architecture in large and dignified units. Being built in stucco, it could be repainted every spring, and consequently in pre-war days always looked bright and clean. The height of the buildings in relation to the width of the street was such that the sun could reach the façades and be reflected in the bright plaster. There were fine broad wall spaces, particularly in the curved walls of the Quadrant, in the Circuses, and in many of the blocks, which seemed designed to catch the play of passing light and shadow which is a characteristic charm of our climate. But better even than these general factors in the design was the courteous attitude of one building to the other. None were overpowering in height and outline; each deferred to the other by giving some echo of its neighbour in its scale, detail, or composition. The idiom used was of the utmost delicacy, suitable to the material, yet the ideas expressed were masculine and powerful. Each block was conceived like a palace stretching from side street to side street, broad and big in its parts and to a larger scale than any of the new buildings in the new street, however much taller the latter may be.

It was the aristocratic qualities of restraint and dignity, combined with a very urbane good-nature reflected from the brightness of the street and the easy flow of the buildings one after the other which made old Regent Street the happy, lovable place it was not only to London but to the whole Empire. Everyone remembered delightful walks there. To country cousins it was the very essence of the West End. For them it set the note and gave value to all that part of the town. It was, therefore, in every sense of the term, metropolitan. No other capital in Europe had anything like it. The uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli or even of the Avenue de l’Opera was dull and mechanical in comparison. Starting at the base court of Waterloo Place, we saw that Nash had created a magnificent procession of fine shapes, rectangular places, recessed courts, avenues, circuses, the Quadrant and further avenues and vistas, and had lined them himself, and with the help of his architect friends, with a series of stately yet thoroughly English and lovable buildings—a unique achievement in the history of architecture. To the Regent, accustomed to the dark brick buildings which formed the mass of the London of his day, when he first drove down his friend’s street it must have seemed as if Nash had possessed Aladdin’s lamp and with it had created a new and glistening fairyland. To us who remember it before it was broken into, or its plaster and paint allowed to deteriorate, it seems to-day a lovely but almost equally unreal dream: so far has it already receded into the past.

Let us now turn to the new Regent Street which has taken the place of this unique and beautiful possession. Let us remember first that the conditions of control have remained the same. By this I mean that the property is still throughout Crown property, and that the control could have been as tight, and as wise, too, if the same wisdom had been used, as it was in Nash’s day. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who administer the Crown Estate, now public property, pass all the designs and lay down any restrictions they desire. They can even impose designs and architects upon their tenants, as they have done in the Quadrant and are doing in Piccadilly Circus.

Let us consider the new street as a whole before we discuss any individual buildings. What is its character? What does it stand for in our civilisation? Has it anything to offer different from, but comparable in value to, the old? Let us take the most obvious effects first. The height of the buildings is different and much greater. So much sunlight will not now enter the street, and the general air of spaciousness is no longer there. The great majority of the designs no longer stretch from return street to return street. The units, therefore, are narrower, more closely packed, and jostle one another. Under such circumstances we cannot expect the same suavity, and we certainly have not got it. The chief place where the present controllers have tried to give it to us is in the Quadrant. We will return to that directly. Then the new street is in a different material from the old—in Portland stone instead of stucco. This has given the buildings a much heavier appearance and in itself is sufficient to alter the whole character of the street. On one side of the street the stone will go black. We can see that already in the Quadrant front to the Piccadilly Hotel. On the other, and in places where the weather catches it, we may expect the stone to take on the beautiful pearly quality Londoners know so well. Now that most of it is white and clean it possesses at the moment a temporary advantage which must not be expected to last. Soon we shall have a black-and-grey street, with occasional high lights like Broad Street, Bishopsgate, or any other City street in the same stone. But it will be a street of big stores instead of the City banks, or of the little shops of old Regent Street.

As we walk down new Regent Street we can already feel its new quality. It is that of parts of Oxford Street, of Corporation Street, Birmingham, or of Lord Street, Liverpool. That is to say, it is a provincial quality. The street is no longer possessed by any dominant idea. The buildings do not harmonise and melt into a single whole. They bear the ordinary anarchic relations to one another we nowadays unfortunately expect everywhere else save in Regent Street. True, the main cornices are at one level, but it is often difficult to distinguish which is the main cornice, so complicated are the new designs. Domes and turrets breaking the skyline and other individualistic advertising features have been allowed. Kingsway, especially in the lower part, is informed by more general ideas, and consequently is a better street. It is this want of submission of the individual building and trader to the whole which has changed the character of the street, and has lowered it from its old high level to that of a commonplace bustling thoroughfare, efficient enough, no doubt, for those who consider it a suburban shopping centre, but not for those who would have wished to see it symbolise again some of the best aspects of our civilisation.

Let us give the Commissioners and their advisers credit, however, for trying in two places to produce a continuous design. Of one, Piccadilly Circus, re-designed as Piccadilly Square, it is too early to speak, except, perhaps, to say that the work already done shows a slightly countrified feeling very different from the abstract character of the old circus. Of the Quadrant, however, where, like all vacillating people who do not wholly know their own minds, the Commissioners changed from the irregularities they had allowed in Lower Regent Street to an attempt to impose upon the shopkeepers a continuous and highly monumental design, more can be said. From the section which was rebuilt some years ago as part of the Piccadilly Hotel, one can envisage the effect of the Quadrant as a whole, if, and when Norman Shaw’s design is carried out. One can see that its character will be something very different from the old Quadrant. In place of that bright and happy spot, with its bold, sweeping, unbroken lines against the sky, we shall have a curved gorge lined with heavily articulated monumental architecture, of a municipal or governmental flavour. If the heavy arches are maintained the little shops will timidly peep out from beneath them. Few trades will survive such heavy-handed treatment. The little milliners and jewellery-sellers will have to give place, perhaps, to tombstone-makers and the agents for cemeteries. The gay character of the street will certainly have gone. We shall emerge from this curving cleft in mountains of stone in no mood to saunter down the rest of the street, as in the old days. But who saunters by great stores? One takes an omnibus or a taxi-cab to the store one selects, plunges in and stays there, perhaps an hour buying anything from socks to tomatoes. The character of shopping has changed, and with it necessarily, the character of the street.

Nevertheless, I am convinced, even by certain of the new Regent Street buildings themselves, like Mr. Verity’s fine St. George’s house near Conduit Street, on the left-hand side going north, and some shop fronts by Mr. Arthur Davis—a perfumery, in particular, in Upper Regent Street—that had the best architectural brains of the country been employed on this new problem of giving appropriate character to a street of great stores it could have been successfully solved. The problem, however, would have had to have been boldly faced from the start, so that when we had lost the old unity we should have had a new one to put in its place. What we have achieved is but a few isolated, disconnected, and singularly unfortunate attempts at unity and a street which is no more and no less than any other English shopping street—a cockpit for competing shopkeepers. The Regent Street we have lost was definitely—almost infinitely—more than this, and by so much are we, who own and use the new, the losers.

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XXII.

FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

FIFTH AVENUE is the most exciting street in the most exciting city in the world. At any rate, this is true in the daytime. At night, Broadway with its exaggerated Earl’s Court effects, its great drawings in electric light high up against the sky of giant motor cars, pyjama-clad men and women, appearing and disappearing, is so fantastic and absurd, and withall so thrilling, that for a few hours round about midnight it displaces the other thoroughfare, not only for the careless multitude, but for the serious person, too, if such there be when he or she has once trodden its stones. Long after twelve o’clock vast crowds line its ample sidewalks, pour in and out of its endless theatres and its always open shops, and get carried away with the carnival spirit of its illuminated advertisements. It has its sky-scrapers, too, which Fifth Avenue has not, and these are always strangest at night. To see brilliant windows and towers of light floating in the sky, where ordinarily one expects to see stars, means that one treads the pavement in no solemn, downcast manner. One walks on air, not knowing what to expect. A vermilion giant may suddenly grin at you in place of the moon, and if you stand agape you may, with equal suddenness, find yourself surrounded by artificially brightened eyes from all parts of Europe. Certainly, Broadway has its thrills with which Fifth Avenue cannot compete. It would, of course, scorn to do so. Its wonders are for the saner hours, when Broadway, in its turn, is apt to look a little dingy.

Let us return, therefore, to our proper subject, and try to form some general idea of its ordinary aspect. I think if one imagines a deep, dark, strongly flowing river, gliding swiftly and silently between great white cliffs of varying height, one will come near to it. The surface of the water is black with occasional spots of green. The black is due to endless streams of sleek, satin motor cars, eight abreast, in four lines either way, which all glide along at the same pace. The green is due to the motor omnibuses, free from all advertisements, which dot the surface. I have not seen a horse-drawn vehicle in Fifth Avenue—perhaps they are not allowed. The black river surface, which flows on for the five miles or so of the street, has an occasional rock in the centre of it. These rocks, which are really wooden towers from which the traffic is directed, are placed on the crests of the slight rises in the undulating surface of the street—I am afraid my metaphor is failing. In them a big green or red light shows night and day, and with its appearance the whole five miles of river suddenly stops, or equally suddenly, flows on again. When it stops, the waters divide, and vast crowds—mostly Israelites as of old—pass over dry shod. Only those who inhabit the land of the brave and the free would allow themselves to be so strictly regulated in this and other matters. But we have spent enough time on the stream itself, thrilling as it is to watch; let us examine now the perpendicular cliffs and the shore on either side.

The cliffs in the early part of the street are more even in height. They begin with some old residences, revived in recent years as the homes of artists, but very soon are chiefly inhabited by agents for dry goods. By Twentieth Street, however, hotels and big stores begin, and the street loses such continuity of skyline as it ever possessed. From there onwards it is a series of strongly competing buildings which rarely extend even across a whole block. The effect, therefore, against the sky is very ragged, like an ill-grown set of giant teeth. No long cornice lines run through. There are no continuous roofs—indeed, very few roofs at all to be seen. In a sense, therefore, it is not a street at all, only a collection of buildings, just as a checker-board town, like most of New York, is not really a town at all, but only a collection of city blocks. Unity of some sort, some continuous thought or character, is required for both. It is this lack of unity which makes Fifth Avenue at once so exciting and so tiring. One never knows what to expect, there is no place for the eye to rest without distraction. If the individual buildings were bad the streets would be a nightmare. As it is, they are extraordinarily good, and the street becomes a museum of fine specimens, and one knows how tiring that may be.

These specimens represent European architecture of many modern phases. French and Italian predominate, English is conspicuous by its absence. Gradually, however, especially in the banks and in buildings over ten storeys high, for which no European precedent exists, a true American type is beginning to emerge. Roughly, it consists of a rich group of stories near the ground and an equally rich group near the top, with a plain stalk between.

One of the earliest good buildings round about Thirtieth Street is that for the famous firm of jewellers and glass-workers, Messrs. Tiffany. I am told that the founder of the firm was a Venetian merchant. If so, his architect very appropriately founded his building on the Grimani Palace on the Grand Canal. He founded his scheme upon this; he did not copy the original, as is often ignorantly stated. Instead, he made a peculiarly refined building in marble and bronze, using the general composition and great scale of the Italian building as his model. A palace on the Grand Canal, with its rectangular shape and great size, is singularly like a big building on this other great canal of wealth and traffic. The same firm of architects, Messrs. McKim, Mead and White, built the Italian building for a rival firm of silver-smiths—the Gorham building—on the opposite side of the street. This building has a giant cornice and an open belvedere under it, and though built twenty-five years ago, and consequently an old building, probably in danger of destruction, it is still one of the most striking in the street. Between Thirtieth and Fortieth Streets are most of the big stores. Unlike similar buildings in England, these are solid masses of stone, brick or marble architecture standing squarely on stone piers, instead of, apparently on plate glass. These stores do not seem to rely, as ours do, on the multitude of goods shown in the windows. Everyone knows that it is possible to walk through them and examine the endless counters without being asked to buy. The windows, therefore, can have one or two typical or seasonable articles well shown. Later on, as we approach the Central Park, the shops become more specialised, and consequently smaller. Here are the dealers in pictures, in jewellery, in _bric-à-brac_, and very exquisite are their bronze windows, and indeed, their whole fronts. Gradually they are displacing the private residences from this section of the street, although a few multi-millionaires still maintain a French château or so, mostly closed, for the delectation of the rubber-necks.

With the Central Park, however, the character of the street entirely alters. One cliff disappears, and in its place you have the small trees, grass and taxi-cab race tracks of the park. On the other side you have individual houses, a few very vulgar, most of them very restrained and elegant. The park itself, though, is a failure. Its winding drives and small hummocks of hills cannot hide its rectangular shape, which the increasing height of the buildings is every day making more evident. It should be all levelled into terraces and relaid out in a formal manner. Fifth Avenue practically ends where the park ends at 110th Street and before then begins to degenerate. But out of its five miles of length it has maintained its standard of fine if competing architecture for three miles, and I know no other street of which that could be said. Apart from the green of the park, there is one restful thing which we have passed by. It is the one building of a non-competitive character, with nothing to sell—material or spiritual—the free public library. It occupies at least a couple of city blocks, and sets back from the street with low cream-coloured marble façades and porticoes. Though not entirely successful as a design, except in the rear façade to its stack of books, it comes as a very pleasant break to the commercial buildings, where between Thirty-ninth and Forty-second Streets they reach their maximum intensity.

It is not only the vast scale of the street as measured by its width, which seems enormous when one looks at the sea of traffic, but which seems narrow when one looks at the towering buildings, nor the beauty of those buildings or the delicacy of their detail that give Fifth Avenue its peculiar character and interest. Without the great masses of well-dressed men and women which crowd its wide pavements all day long it would seem dull and heavy. I have noticed that on Sunday mornings when searching for its half-buried cathedral and churches. Nowhere else have I seen such floods of beautifully-dressed women. They appear, too, to belong to all classes of society. It is only by some subtle and slight restraint in the line of a cloak that one can distinguish the woman with a few generations of wealth behind her from the stenographer or shop assistant. All wear fashionable clothes, all have brilliant complexions. The men are not so distinguished, but none are poorly dressed. Indeed, in all New York, from the furthest east to the furthest west, I could find no one in torn or dirty clothes. The air of prosperity is everywhere, the rush and flow of life goes on unceasingly. There is only one backwater, only one place where the competitive view of life is put aside. It is in the interiors of the clubs, such as the Metropolitan, the University, the Century, the Union and the Players. Here the very reverse is the case. I know no clubs in any town so spacious, so reposeful, so dignified and so pleasant. I imagine, the human spirit tired of endless competition and the unceasing striving of the individual to assert himself, instinctively makes a refuge where communism in the arts of living reaches its highest point. Some of the best Clubs are in Fifth Avenue or just off it. When one has had an overdose of the street they are the only restoratives.

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XXIII.

LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL.

LIVERPOOL has now entered into possession of a great work of the imagination. This work will go on growing until its mastery is evident to the whole world, but from now onward Liverpool can follow the growth of her Cathedral with confidence. It is no small thing that a great town should pursue an ideal of this sort. In doing so, Liverpool has herself shown something of this great quality of imagination. As a citizen I like to think whatever may be her failings, it is her outstanding attribute. During the last twenty years she has not only taken the great step, which she has lately celebrated, towards the creation of a temple to her faith, to be, I believe, some day as great and as noble as any yet made, but during the same space of time she has had the imagination and faith to follow other enterprises of this spirit, such as the establishing of a great university, and, among lesser projects, but still indicating something of the same devotion to non-material things, a town’s theatre. If the artist who has been responsible for giving life and form to the Liverpool Cathedral has risen to the heights demanded by so supreme an occasion, we must, nevertheless, remember from the outset those who have had the courage during these years to conceive the project and to provide the means for its realisation on such a scale unattempted since the Reformation. They, as well as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, have laid the whole town under an obligation and have done a service to us all. Pericles built the temples on the Acropolis, at Athens, to direct the eyes of the Greeks, flushed with the spoils of victory, away from material things. To all Liverpool, irrespective of creed, the great building on St. James’s Mount, in its austerity and beauty, is a similar symbol and a similar gift.