The House Of The Past

Just what is it that makes yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? Over 30 million people visit stately homes annually in the UK. The National Trust has grown to 3.5 million members in recent years, making it by far the biggest conservation group in Europe. Countless period dramas further sate our seemingly endless appetite for gazing at the sumptuous interiors of historic homes. Clive Aslet’s book The English House is very much a part of this nostalgia industry.

The English House is a pretty loaded title for a start. It suggests something innately distinctive and valuable in both England and its houses. Immediately it puts us in the realm of a highly mythologised Englishness where country estates and the families that own them are seen as an organic part of our heritage.

Aslet is the former editor of Country Life a magazine so this should be no surprise. Country Life occupies a very particular place in British culture as the in-house journal for the land-owning classes. It’s the place to look if you are planning to purchase a few acres outside Cheltenham, or want to announce the forthcoming marriage of your daughter, accompanied by a picture of her fondling a horse. Only the former editor of Country Life for example could describe Milton Keynes as “occupying 22,000 acres of formerly good hunting country". As a sentence it’s hard to top for sheer beside-the-point snobbism.

From this lofty vantage point the author uses a gently novelistic style to tell the stories of a number of individual houses in the manner of an invigorating country ramble. He begins in the 12th Century with a Norman Manor and strides on, flat cap on and walking stick in hand, past a Tudor mansion, a castle by Vanbrugh, a Georgian townhouse, a worker's terrace in an industrial mill town, Edwin Lutyen's Marshcourt, an early 20th century semi and a post war pre-fab.

It sounds on the face of it a plausibly eclectic selection. But there are just two entries from the 20th Century: the suburban semi is from 1905 and the pre-fab is a curiosity within the wider scheme of things. There is a gaping hole in this book and it is modernism. Its high points are mentioned only in passing, almost as an aberrant phase when England became temporarily influenced by obscure continental notions. Aslet dismisses a vast swathe of the history of houses, as they don't fit into his quaint geneology of "Englishness". It's a shame because I would like to see one of the book's delightful pencil sketches depicting a nice bit of Brutalism.

"Little about the English House was colourful in the 1950's, ‘60's and ‘70's" Aslet declares, sweepingly. It is Thatcherism that, according to him, brings the colour back to England's cheeks. The percentage of home ownership in the UK went from 54% to 65% during the 1980's as a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy policy. Aslet suggests that this policy together with our obsession with home ownership is the logical end point of the English love of houses.

The English House is more an example of this obsession than an analysis of it. The final chapter is entitled Whatever Next?, a phrase epitomising a very English penchant for mocking innovation. Nothing in this book is allowed to be in the least bit disagreeable. Instead, the author remains in thrall to a self-perpetuating myth of loveable English eccentrics and their charming houses. This amiable conservatism hides an ideologically driven fear of change though. In that sense, the books startling lack of interest in the architecture of the last century is entirely consistent. It is a lament for a lost England.

Ornament is Fine: Neon Houses, Electronic Cottages and Instant Architecture

I spent Christmas in Kent by the sea. On New Years day we walked along the sea front and then up through the quiet dark streets of the town. Lights blinked in the windows of the houses. Occasionally we came across one completely covered in lights, their roofs, walls and chimneys picked out in pulsing fibre-optic light, like a glowing, coloured drawing rather than the real thing.

Here was Archigram's electronic cottage made manifest, an instant electronic architecture sitting in a cartoon winter landscape populated by mythical creatures and flickering messages of peace and love. On one lawn a family of fibre-optic reindeer nodded their heads in unison. Two more skulked below a window in an adjacent garden with some glowing miniature bearded men for company. It's only not weird because we have seen it so many times before.



I'm a sucker for coloured lights just as I am for the flashing bulbs and painted signs of the seaside pier. It may be futile but I admire the effort and every now and again it looks like magic. Here the banal architecture is transformed into a bizarre pageant of signs, sentiment and nostalgia as sinisterly saccarine but sweetly perfect as Disney. Ordinary suburban houses aiming for the romantic uplift of Bollywood.



A single tree stood glowing in the dark, lighting up the pavement, more beautiful than any number of public art installations or other official improvements to the urban landscape.

And the next day they were all gone.

Happy new year people!

Brahms and List

Forgive the rubbish pun and for going all list based but here, in the absence of any other inspiration amidst all the social drinking and family bickering of christmas, are my favourite blogs (architecture or otherwise) of 2008. There are many others that I've enjoyed reading which aren't included, either because they have stopped posting altogether (The Impostume) or simply gone a bit quiet (Kosmograd, Candyland) or because I have only just started reading them (Loudpaper) but here we go......

Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy. Owen Hatherley's blog is the one I read the most consistently. The writing is always elegant but that isn't the best thing about it. Perhaps because he's neither an architect nor a 'proper' architecture critic Sit Down Man remains unaffected by conventional architectural wisdom. He has admirably dubious taste, being a fan of such unloved brutalist behemoths as Owen Luder's Tricorn Centre. Somebody has to be and I mean that most sincerely. As well as architecture, he writes well about pop and politics. Brutalism, techno and The smiths. What's not to like?

Things. A consistently fascinating site that is also an invaluable source of links to just about anything tangentially connected to design from Lego to celebrity cribs to (suprisingly often) the early 1990's shoegazing scene. Unlike most blogs Things is also incredibly restrained and disciplined in its format, regularly posting two or three times a week in a flannel-free style that draws out connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Totally admirable.

Pruned. A beautifully put together blog that ruminates at length on landscape issues with a particuarly strong ecological element. Fascinated with disappearing landscapes and the disastrous effects of climate change, Pruned is hugely enjoyable despite its occasionally apocalyptic subject matter.

I Like. A total joy, I Like features design, packaging, places, toys, typography and occasionally music collated with a sharp aesthetic sensibility. Also, as it turns out, a useful source for christmas presents. Stylishly laid out and with beautifuly photography, more of which is on I Like's flickr site. It also has a sister site called Nothing to See Here where Anne writes about the kind of everyday places not normally considered worthy of our attention including power stations and Poundbury.

Aloof From Inspiration. Brilliant recent posts on The Smiths and, in her previous Fan Girl blog incarnation, the wonderful Triffids. Emmy Hennings even manages to make vegimite interesting.

A456. A relatively recent discovery but exactly what an architecture blog should if you ask me. Recently featured long and in depth posts about landscape in Westerns, Madison Avenue chic in Mad Men and a fabulous recent piece on Kraftwerk videos and modernist space.

Blissblog. The first blog I read back when dinosaurs roamed the earth listening to pirate jungle stations. Blissblog's author Simon Reynolds is one of the sharpest and, of late, most perverse (Pubfunk?) music writers around. He writes with a mixture of studious precision and rapturous abandon about anything from 'ardkore to MBV to Ian Dury, thus managing to avoid like the plague any kind of critical consensus.

Entschwindet und Vergeht. Doesn't post that often but when it does E&V is wonderfully acute and enjoyably vitriolic. Wrote a fabulous post on brutalist tendencies within Zaha Hadid's work, a scathing attack on Make's Nottingham campus and also has a nice line on high tech.

The Sesquipedalist. Has been gone for a while but appears to be back. The central conceit of this blog is to look at articles and media representations of architecture rather than architecture itself. The author delves into past publications including old copies of AD and the Prince of Wales Institute's Perspectives magazine to shed a suprisingly illuminating light on contemporary preoccupations.

Architecture In Berlin. I love this blog partly because I lived in Berlin for a while some years ago and remember many of the schemes that AIB writes about. But it is also because he writes about them with an open minded enthusiam, wrestling with liking unfashionable and often beyond the pale Post Modernism while giving a sober judgement on the early work of current stars of architecture such as Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman.

Most Sadly Missed

Part IV. The blog that got me blogging and not only because the late Sir Norman Blogster once suggested that FAT's Islington Square housing should have won the Stirling Prize (although that helped). Part IV seemed to suffer a terminal meltdown sometime over the summer which is a tremendous shame as it provided an acerbic and astute critical commentary on mainstream British architecture, a kind of alternative Building Design.