A History of British Architecture with Simon Jenkins and Rory Stewart
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest today is Guardian columnist and best-selling author Simon Jenkins. His books include A Short History of England and Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations. In this episode, Jenkins will discuss his latest book, A Short History of British Architecture, From Stonehenge to the Shard.

Joining him in conversation to talk about Britain's rich architectural history and how to protect it is co-host of The Rest Is Politics, Rory Stewart. Let's join Rory now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Rory Stewart and my guest today is Simon Jenkins. Simon is a former editor of the Evening Standard, former editor of the Times, chair of the National Trust, columnist, author, writing a great deal on The Guardian.

But he's also an expert on history and I suppose what we call the built environment of the British Isles. So his books include Short History of England, Cathedrals, Masterpieces of Architecture, Feats of Engineering, Icons of Faith, and his latest, which we're here to talk about today, which is a wonderful book called A Short History of British Architecture. So I guess, Simon, first thing to start on, where did you become interested in architecture? Where does this begin in your life?

I don't really know, except I've always lived in buildings. My eyes are open and I'm always interested in what covers buildings. And the one I'm living in now has got strange stripes up the front of the wall, which I never really noticed until I got interested in the buildings. I discovered that they were actually what are called pilasters with Doric inscriptions.

bases and tops on a working class Victorian old terrace house. I'm just intrigued by them. I think I got genuine interest in architectural style, which is what my book's really about, the vagaries of style.

when I visited Greece, then I visited Sicily. And in Sicily, I went to Suggesta, the Temple of Suggesta, which is one of the most sensational Greek temples. And I thought to myself, hold on a minute, that looks just like the terraces of Regent's Park near where I was brought up in London. What on earth has Greece, Suggesta and Regent's Park got in common?

And the answer is classical architecture. And classical architecture has dominated British architecture for 2,000 years. And it was that dominance of a completely puzzling style that intrigued me about architecture. I mean, it's a wonderful book. And you do pretty much everything from Stonehenge through to brutalist council houses or council blocks. But could you start with a sort of basic thing for the general audience? Why, when you go to Florence or Venice,

Or in fact any number of small Italian villages. Do you get a sense of these kind of sort of perfect? charming medieval towns and villages and They seem a bit few and far between in Britain. I mean I I sort of feel if I'm traveling through the Italian and French countryside I'm more likely to come across something that will make my heart soar than when I go into a British city What's what's going on there? Well in the first place you're right. I

In the second place, I have to say that the...

The slightly grim reason for the difference between Britain and them is that they were very poor for the period when the British were destroying their cities, as blunt as that. And we rebuilt our cities in the Victorian style when Siena and Bologna weren't thinking of doing anything of the sort. And then we rebuilt them again after the war, destroying much of the Victorian city. And the result is that our cities now are very hardly worth going around.

Whereas the French and Italian ones, to which you draw attention, have always been, since the 17th and 18th century, have always been in the style of urban architecture, which I always think has been unsurpassed, which is the 17th and 18th centuries.

And Simon, given that Italy after the Second World War was very poor and presumably, not presumably, we know very, very corrupt. There must have been crime families. There must have been property developers. There was money swilling around. The economy was growing very quickly.

Why did that corruption not result in flouting planning regulations, smashing down historical buildings in order to build horrible excrescences for profit in the way that you might predict if you look at a rapidly growing economy with a lot of corruption in the way that you can in China?

That's the second answer to your first question. It is actually, and I'm afraid it really is true, they simply have a better standard of taste than we do. You probably know London well. I showed an old Italian friend of mine, we were walking across Waterloo Bridge and we looked, he lives in Rome, we looked at the city of London from Waterloo Bridge and he hadn't seen it for about 10 years and he absolutely gasped. He said, what on earth have you done to your city?

And I said, well, I'm afraid that's the new London. He said, listen, I come from the most corrupt city on earth, Rome. You would never do that. What have you done? Who paid you how much? He was completely aghast at it and he assumed it was corrupt. Well, it was, much of it was, I have said, in a manner corrupt. But the fact is that I can only walk, when I walk around London, I just, I sort of weep because I think some town planner approved that building.

And it's still going on. We just don't have the same standard of public...

I'd say, as the French and the Italians undoubtedly do have. So to come back to the bits that you love, let's talk a little bit about some of the bits of British architecture which make your heart sing most. Give us a couple of your very favourite places that you talk about in the book. Apart from what we've been talking about, there are plenty of very nice places to go in Britain. There really are. And I suppose, maybe someone would say I'm biased, but I do find two particular places

delights in British architecture. One is ecclesiastical churches and cathedrals. And these are the great buildings of England and Wales and Scotland, particularly England and Scotland. And they are magnificent. And our churches are as good as any in Europe. They sit in cathedral cities, which are as handsome as any in Europe. And they are particularly lovely.

My other favorite is the Georgian city. It was in the 18th century that we evolved a style of terraced architecture, terraced housing, handsome civic buildings, buildings that you'd want to live in or look at when you walked around the city. And we created...

primarily in London first, and then in Edinburgh, Bath, Newcastle, all these cities had really very handsome Georgian quarters. And some of them are still there just, clinging on by the skin of their teeth. But they are the finest things to see in London. I mean, I think the finest in Britain, I think the finest street in Britain is Grey Street in Newcastle, which is a wonderful curving street going up the hill. It's absolutely magnificent. And thank God it's still there.

You've got an amazing horror story. I want to stay on the positive, but there's an amazing horror story from Newcastle where you describe a developer who agreed that he was going to rebuild an entire terrace and he numbered every single one of the blocks and then having demolished the whole thing, simply chucked the whole lot away shortly before he was put in jail. He wasn't a developer. He was the mayor of the city.

P. Dan Smith. He was a great, he was a leading figure in Newcastle. And he was someone who took an old, rather battered city and it was very dynamic and he wanted to galvanize it. And to him, galvanizing it meant pulling it down. Unfortunately, it was one of the handsomest cities in England. It's absolutely unbelievable. Yeah.

So Dobson's Royal Arcade. As he was putting it down, someone in London, I think, pleaded with him not to pull it down. There's a Royal Arcade called the Royal Arcade, which is the most handsome arcade in Britain. And he said, no, don't worry about it. I'll number every stone and I'll put them all back somewhere else.

threw them in the river. I mean, I'm afraid English cities have suffered such fates, is all I can say. And let's talk about, I suppose, three periods. Christopher Wren, and then back to your Georgians, and then on to the kind of brutalism of the 1950s. Tell us a little bit about what happened after the fire of London and the opportunities that Wren had

and the limits that he faced. Well, the Great Fire of London gutted. No one really knows how much damage it really did. The old city of London, medieval city of London. And every building was more or less ruined. It's believed that the walls were much more substantive than people at once had first supposed. So when people came back into the city weeks after the fire, they immediately started rebuilding.

Well, that wasn't Christopher Wren's idea, nor Charles II, the king. Christopher Wren and John Aubrey and two or three other people raced forward with plans for a new London. And there was a race to get the plan on the king's desk and Christopher Wren won it. I think he did it within a week. I mean, five or six days. That's planning. But his plan, and this was the point, his plan was based on Sixtus V Rome.

In other words, it was a plan of rather like Washington, of diagonals and round points and grids. And it looked like a very formal, in many cases, you'd say 18th century city in place of the existing city of London. And the alderman of the city and Charles II said, I like it. Let's go with it.

The alderman said, you must be joking. This is going to take 10 years and cost a fortune. We've got to get back to, you know, we're a business. We've got to get back to business next week. And all our people are pouring back in. They're bringing bricks. They're bringing plaster. They're bringing wood. They want to start rebuilding right now. We just cannot do something crazy like Sixtus's Rome.

And it was only until Charles II immediately said, oh, I'm terribly sorry. I wasn't worried. I mean, the city was a powerful place. And so they rebuilt the city. The one thing the government insisted on was that he rebuilt a brick, not wood and plaster, no thatched roofs, can't believe it, but tiled roofs. And it had to look reasonably handsome.

And it was quite interesting. They had two things. One is if they took up, and the streets had to be wider. If they took up someone's property by widening the street, they would pay compensation, which is a quite extraordinary thing. If anyone disobeyed the rule, they were whipped on the site by the local constables, which as a way of enforcing planning permission, I think is absolutely excellent. But the end result of this was very interesting because Christopher Wren failed to get his city built.

All he could do was rebuild the churches, which were tiny plots of land in the medieval city. So a Wren church in the city has no outside, almost. It's really just an interior plus a tower. And the towers were the feature of Wren's London.

And the Canaletto painting of Rennes, London, which is absolutely majestic, is of St. Paul's Cathedral and about 50 or 40 towers looming over it. And I just think to myself, that's his towers. Now look what we've got.

But that went on. The only other thing that happened after the Great Fire was a lot of people didn't go back. A lot of people simply moved west. And that is when Covent Garden, St. James's Square, all these areas of West London on land previously owned by aristocrats were developed, but as quite high density terrorist housing.

There's a very lovely bit, which is obviously a lot of my life when I was in government rotated around, which is the bits around St. James's Park. So horse guards and then those rows of clubs from the Athenaeum and the Travellers heading along Pall Mall. And then finally, it's connecting with St. James's Street. It's the sort of place where you imagine Bertie Worcester.

Wumbling up and down. Do you like that area of London? What do you think its strengths and weaknesses are, those great clubs and the whole facades along Pall Mall? Well, the strength of it is where the original buildings survive. There's a wonderful handsomeness about St. James's Square, even though quite a lot of the buildings have been changed. But it's a handsome language of architecture, the London Georgian streets.

And although the Victorians, interestingly, thought it was terribly boring. I mean, almost everybody talking about a Georgian street in the 19th century said, I mean, Gower Street was regarded as the most boring street in London. Disraeli said it was like an unattractive child in an unattractive family. And a lot of feeling went into this business of taste. And it's a matter of opinion, clearly.

But what I have to say, finishing up on Wren in many ways, the result of Wren's plan for London not being successful, the result of the alderman of London saying, anyone can come back to where they were before, rebuild your bank as soon as you can and get back into business, was that the street pattern of the city is still the medieval street pattern. It's tiny alleyways. They're still there. And there were thoroughfares they had right away so they couldn't be blocked off and filled in by comprehensive development and

And today, the weird skyscrapers you've got in the city, their one virtue is they're weird. They've all got to respect the medieval street pattern. So almost none of them are square. They're sort of fitted in as if in a jigsaw puzzle. And that's the saving grace of the city of London is its street pattern. And Sam, what happened to the city? I mean, you know, I go there hoping to sort of, presumably the reason I can't sort of see Shakespeare's London is because of the fire, but...

Why is it also quite difficult to feel Dr. Johnson's London? I mean, why is there so many modern buildings slapped into the middle of the city? The reason for that is money. I mean, simply money. I don't think the city authorities since the 17th century have had any sense of architecture or feel for architecture. They built wonderful buildings, the Mansion House, the Guildhall, the churches, of course. I mean, their forefathers built wonderful buildings.

particularly since the war. I mean, Victorian London, the city of London was quite handsome. But since the war, I'm afraid rampant greed has broken out. The worst of it all was Canary Wharf. When Canary Wharf was built by Thatcher, the city suddenly panicked and they said, we just got to build skyscrapers.

The competition between Canary Wharf and the City of London has produced some of the ugliest buildings in London and now in the city, I'm afraid. The other analogy that you draw in the book is between Christopher Wren's grand master plans for London and the later post-war brutalist plans of Abercrombie. Just before we get onto that, there's a story in the middle of this which we don't talk about much, which is what Haussmann is doing in Paris.

Why is it possible for Haussmann to produce the Paris that we know today, which must have been colossally expensive, involved incredible confrontations with people in terms of what he was doing to the life of the city, the work of the city? How on earth was Paris able to do it, afford it, get the consent of the population to do it? What was different about Paris and London in that respect? It's a very simple answer to that. It was run by a dictator.

I mean, Napoleon III was a dictator, no doubt about it. He was persuaded by Houseman in a way that Charles II was not persuaded by Wren. The parallel is very close. The City of London is almost, it still is, almost a

autonomous body. The very few rules of local government apply to the city. It's still run by aldermen and a very weird structure. And the reason is that when William the Conqueror arrived in England,

He smashed everything to the ground except the City of London, which he needed. And they said, leave us alone. And the city has been like that ever since. So there's a special governmental structure for the City of London. And I think that's the reason why it is as it is. And certainly their respect for historic buildings is almost zero. The one thing I love about the city, as I said before, is the street plan, which is just terrific. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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Simon, now let's jump forward to this extraordinary moment that you write about so well, which is this moment in the 40s and early 50s where planners, theorists...

celebrated intellectuals from the architectural review, men who presumably, and they're mostly men, must have been incredibly articulate, compelling, confident, would have made everybody else feel very belittled for challenging them, produce things which seem at least to me to be not just ugly, but tawdry, poorly constructed, uninhabitable, and

I mean, how is it possible for the prestige and charisma of these great, highly educated intellectuals to inflict something quite so awful?

Well, it's the story of the second half of my book. And the answer is really, I don't think they were that intellectual, to be honest. They were members of a very arrogant profession. I love architects. Many of my best friends are architects. They do not do humility. They were completely taken in by a man called Le Corbusier, a Frenchman between the wars. He became an absolute cult.

They were obsessed with trying not to be revivalist. They were trying not to be Neo-Tudor, which the dreaded suburb was. They hated suburbs and they hated classical revival and Lutyens and people like that. They genuinely wanted to be new. They also thought the war licensed them. And the war was very important. It licensed them to be radical.

And it licensed politicians to believe in them and planners to agree with them. And by the end of the war, by 1947, the Great Planning Act then, the modernists, and there really weren't that many of them, it was basically an architectural cult, had taken control of planning in Britain.

And every city under Manco Patrick Abercrombie in central government, every city was given its plan. The plans for the cities of Britain after the war were to demolish them. They were described in the plan as obsolete. These buildings are not fit for the car, the age of the car. They're not fit for the modern society. We've got to get rid of them, start all over again. And this is what we fought the war for. This is the psychology of it.

And what then happened for about 10, 15, 20 years was an attempted desecration of the cities of Britain.

It was not happening in Germany and France. In Germany and France, they were trying to rebuild what the war damaged, but they were trying to rebuild it as a sign of their confidence. We can rebuild the Germany we loved, the France we loved. Britain, we didn't. Britain, we were told to hate by Abercrombie & Co. And it was a decree by Churchill and Attlee and all these people. And the demolitions began and the...

the scars of it now are in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Coventry, Newcastle. London's got off

Fairly likely. The City Corporation, who we mentioned before, decided they were going to be terribly modern and built the Barbican. And the Barbican was the only bit of the original sort of Abercrombie-designed city that got off the ground, really. The idea then was all traffic should be on the ground. The ground floor should be for traffic. And the first floor should be the podiums where people walked and had their being. The podium at the Barbican, I think, is the most deserted spot in London.

And I'm afraid this is what happened up and down the country. By 1960s, it had gone sour. People weren't enjoying it. They thought, well, this is, I mean, I think 40,000, 50,000 houses in Liverpool were demolished, actually without being replaced. It was incredible what was being done.

And I mean, I don't think most Londoners know that probably, if not in their lifetime, in their parents' lifetime, it was proposed and it was planned and it was going to happen that the whole of Whitehall would be demolished. Piccadilly Circus would be demolished. Covent Garden would be demolished. Carlton House Terrace would be demolished. Fitzrovia would go. These places were going to be flattened and turned into the Barbican. And it was very, very narrow battles in the 1970s that saved Covent Garden. Wow.

What is it about British cultural, British mentality after the war which meant that while the Germans or the Poles felt that what they wanted to do was rebuild what they'd had in the past, Britain seemed not to have that kind of fondness for its past and its tradition?

I think it's a very good question. I think probably, and I do sort of ponder on this one, I think probably it's that the Poles and the Germans and the French were in some sense defeated and they wanted to prove that they were capable of rebuilding themselves and being what they'd always been. The British had a sort of arrogance that we won the war and therefore we can start afresh.

and we'll show the world how they should go forward. And it's this business of being futuristic and thinking that these new cities, these modernist cities with no architectural style to them at all, they're just masses of concrete, are the future.

And that to me is the failure of the architectural profession. I think probably a hundred of the developments that took place after the war have already been demolished. They were so unsatisfactory. I mean, the great red road flats of Glasgow, I mean, there's six or seven huge towers that were demolished in the 1980s and 90s. They just had to come down. No one wanted to live in them. Thamesmead in London. No one knows about Thamesmead. It was the new town of London. People refused to live in it.

And it's really that, it's been that desperate and that expensive. And there's never been an inquiry into it. There's never been an apology for it. No one has asked, where did we go wrong? Architects just assumed that it was their right to do what they wanted. I mean, it's kind of a sort of astonishing story. It's also, I mean, the only place I can think of which is an analogy with it is potentially Tokyo, Japan.

where, again, very, very sadly, the incredible wonders. I mean, Edo, Tokyo was the greatest city in the world in the 17th century. And of course, terribly, terribly affected by the firebombing during the war. But interesting because Japan, like Britain, is in many ways a very traditional place with a huge amount of reverence. Didn't really have a full revolution, kept a lot of its sort of royal structures in place. And yet,

totally through aside its architectural past. I mean, it's very sad in Japan that you go and see these wonderful ancient shrines and they're sort of hidden places

between these enormous ugly buildings. Well, I agree. I don't think modern architecture's failings are uniquely British. I don't really know the answers. I mean, engineering has a lot of responsibility for it. The fact that you could build huge buildings and architects universally like building big, not small.

The most beautiful architecture in Britain by modernists are the Maggis centres of Charles Jencks. They're tiny buildings for terminally ill cancer patients. And Charles asked all the architects, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, he said, "Will you please build me something very small?" And they had to build small and they're beautiful. They're the most beautiful modern buildings in Britain at the Maggis centres.

Now, I mean, going back to your question, I mean, the answer is very big buildings appeal to arrogant architects and, for that matter, developers, I have to say, and, for that matter, civic leaders. I mean, Johnson and Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone wanted tall buildings because they thought tall buildings looked important to them.

sort of priapic obsession. And I'm afraid we're all the sufferers of that and the people have to live in them, the people have to walk around their bases. A lot of work's been done on the happiness people get out of the buildings. I mean, they can time people walking past new and old buildings. They walk more slowly past old buildings. It's really quite significant.

It's very strange, isn't it? So I finally, as we sort of come towards the end, we're now in a situation in which there's a huge amount of pressure on the incoming Labour government to build a lot of houses. We're told that we need to build 300,000, 350,000 houses a year over the next few years. And there's talk of many of the things that your book is about, about new garden cities, about redevelopment, about medium density, high density, urbanization.

presumably a loss of the arguments that would have been familiar to planners and developers for decades now. What's your instincts on what the lessons from your book might be for Britain as it thinks about building over the next 10 years?

Well, first I think it would be nice if people worried about how buildings looked. In other words, the beauty of buildings. We worry about how pictures, films, book, we worry about all kinds of beauties. Curiously, the thing we got around is all the time, 100% inescapable. Someone said it's a gallery you can never leave, are the buildings. It is completely ridiculous to think the only way you can provide people with more space is by building in country.

We have absolutely no need to build another house in another field ever. The number of houses, in first place, the figure of 300,000 has totally got out of the air. It doesn't mean anything at all. Everybody wants a better house, period. What we do know, however, is that we've used buildings very inefficiently in Britain, extremely inefficiently. A lot of houses have got two, three, four bedrooms they don't need. In most of Europe, people tend to fit into the house that they need.

In Britain, it's so expensive to change houses because of stamp duty. Houses are taxed very low. Property taxes are small and inefficient. There's no sense of economy in how we use buildings. And this particularly applies to old buildings where you can now convert buildings very easily into various forms of residence.

All I'm saying is that all the demand there is for houses, and it's largely in the southeast, I may say, can be met by properly using the houses we've got and using the tax system to promote the proper use of those houses. And are there... I mean, a lot of what we're building at the moment are estates, housing estates, of detached, semi-detached houses built by the big developers. How would you characterize that style that you now see

around the edge of Carlisle, around the edge of Perth, around the edge of Cree. What is this British style?

Well, I'm glad you refer to it as the British style because, I mean, no architect would refer to it as that. To them, it's the fag end, if you like, of the suburban style that we've had in this country for a century and a half now. And it is, and I deal with this in my book in some length, it is actually what we've always done. We've always looked to the past and tried to build something that looks like the past but behaves like the present.

An interwar suburban estate, it was Neo-Tudor or Neo-Georgian, almost all Neo-Tudor. People just loved a black and white timbered dormer window above their front door. I mean, doesn't know what else is going on. Give me the dormer window, black and white timber. And I think millions of them were built, just millions.

And they love them and they still love them. And architects can't stand it. And so almost everything that you see designed by an architect is made of concrete with vertical streets or whatever it is about it. You know, it's complete nonsense. If you ask people what they want to buy, they point at Persimmon Homes.

and Berkeley homes, and they're the ones you're describing. And it just fascinates me that ever since the turn of the 20th century, the marketplace of people who want to buy a house they want to live in themselves with their own money will not opt for modernism. They'll opt for neo-Tudo. And how about attempts to sort of find a third way? So you do have everything from the king through to create streets,

Trying to say they don't want to go down a brutalist route, but they also want to get away from the Persimmon Holmes model to envisage some sort of other thing, which is more boldly trying to recreate traditional street patterns and, I don't know, Jane Jacobs style street.

urban residential living. Well, you're right up to a point. I'm afraid that Persimmon and Berkeley homes aren't fools. They do know what people want and they do design accordingly. I mean, one thing that I would love about the early interwar suburbs around London, Gideon Park and places like that, they said, whatever you do, don't make the house look like the one next door.

And yet the very expensive houses are still Georgian. Per square foot, the most expensive place to live in Britain is in a Georgian house. So your upmarket clientele do want traditional houses. The more downmarket clientele, although not that downmarket, some of them, also want traditional houses of a different sort. They want Tudor.

And I delight in the fact they haven't actually changed. They still want what I regard as a pretty classy sort of house. Modern architects do try and do what you're suggesting. An awful lot of work. I mean, we're much better today than we were 20 years ago. We really are. A lot of work goes on now in converting muse houses, old warehouses, mills up north into various forms of modern housing.

There's a developer in Manchester, there's a documentary about him recently. He took over three mills and was allowed to build a fourth modern block. The three mills immediately sold out.

The modern block, he found it very hard to sell. People wanted an old building. And I think that's deep in us. We want some sort of security. It always fascinates me in Chicago, in San Francisco, after the great earthquake of 1906, the most modern city on earth, San Francisco, absolutely booming. This was the future.

After the earthquake, what did they do? They built every single house in Queen Anne Revival. And they called it Queen Anne Revival. And you go around San Francisco, it's absolutely wonderful. These are old Victorian houses. You ask the estate agent in San Francisco, could you describe that house? Oh, it's Victorian Queen Anne Revival. It's a foreign country. Anyway.

Anyway, it's wonderful. Well, Simon, thank you. And I strongly recommend to anybody listening to the podcast to pick up the book. It's a beautiful book. It is, as it says, short. It moves very, very quickly through everything from the Neolithic through the Victorian. It's politically astute and aware, interested in intellectuals, interested in fashion, interested in politics and money.

in taxation systems, but above all, a sense of somebody who is really responding to the built environment, somebody who feels a sense of delight and horror almost whenever he steps out into the street. So many congratulations, Simon, on the book, and I encourage people to read it. Thank you very much indeed, Rory. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Leila Ismail.

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