Victorian features are all the rage nowadays, pity most if it was destroyed in the 50’s!
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By Finlo Rohrer |
The Victorian Society is celebrating 50 years of trying to save the UK’s 19th Century buildings. We love Victorian architecture now, but once their public buildings were being listed for demolition, their terraced houses were being gutted. What changed? For many people today, the dream home is “period”. And for many of the many, that “period” is Victorian.
Victorian terraces with their cornicing and patterned brickwork and bay windows are home to vast numbers of Britons.
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VICTORIAN TERRACE FEATURES
Bay windows Slate roofs Coloured glass in front door Cornicing (decorative plaster mouldings) Decorative patterned brickwork Sash windows |
And away from the urban areas where these robust little houses dominate, many in the UK feel an emotional connection with the major public buildings of the Victorian age.
But it was not ever thus. In 1958, the poet Sir John Betjeman and the architecture guru Nikolaus Pevsner set up the Victorian Society to save the nation’s Victorian and Edwardian architecture from predation.
And predations there were plenty. The post-war years saw a crystallising of scepticism about Victorian buildings. The most zealous harbingers of modernism felt animosity towards buildings that were a contradiction of the white heat of technology.
“In the 1960s, ‘Victorian’ and ‘monstrosity’ were two words that seemed to be inextricably linked,” says architect Robert Adam.
Two battles
Victorian was fusty, excessive, old, impractical, self-indulgent, snobbish, aloof architecture, utterly opposed to the age of space travel.
But the Victorian Society fought two battles that helped to slowly turn the tide, both involving buildings designed by the great George Gilbert Scott. One was against the mooted demolition of London’s opulent Gothic revival St Pancras hotel and station, recognised with a statue of Betjeman in the newly Eurostar-hosting and fully renovated buildings.
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Sarah Beeny |
In the 1950s it was considered really hideous… Victorian fireplaces went in the skip 
The other was over the neoclassical Foreign Office. In 1963, the then minister of public works Geoffrey Rippon decided the department had outgrown its grandiose buildings and that they should be flattened.
The Victorian Society’s members were prominent among those howling with outrage over both plans. And after fierce debate, both buildings were Grade I-listed and saved.
By the 1980s the mood had changed to the point that Victorian houses were again in vogue. Much of the concrete public housing of the 1960s and 1970s had not stood even a short test of time. There was understandable appreciation for a category of house that looked like it could withstand all but the most determined wrecking ball.
Unsympathetic custodians
“They have a solidity which people enjoy,” says architect and Victorian Society campaigner John Scott. “They have a character and a traditional sense which people like. They represent the… point the English terrace house was perfected. It was the absolute pinnacle of Britain at its most confident and technological.”
As well as its rock solid build qualities, the Victorian terrace possesses an adaptability that is appreciated by the modern buyer. Renovation to modern tastes is not difficult. But many owners want at least a taste of former glories - features that have been obscured or obliterated by less sympathetic custodians in the 1950s and onwards.
Sir John Betjeman was instrumental in saving St Pancras |
“In the 1950s it was considered really hideous, [with people] hiding the detailing inside,” says property developer and Property Ladder presenter Sarah Beeny.
“Victorian fireplaces went in the skip. In terms of detailing it did go out in a very big way. If you think of Barry Bucknell, the first DIY guru, his main theme was how to get rid of the Victorian detailing in your house. People bought hardboard in vast quantities.”
This hardboard went over fireplaces and banisters as the cheapest possible erasure of the past, often leaving them essentially intact for future generations to restore.
“We are now discovering again that this is a very satisfactory building type,” says Adam.
“It is very straight-forward and easy to decorate. The terrace is very effective in terms of land use, the internal layout is very simple. Report after report produced by the government shows this is the most effective way of producing high-density housing.”
Embellishment mania
The nation’s terraced houses were built to cope with massive movements of population to urban areas. Yet again the UK is struggling to cope with burgeoning population and may look for inspiration from the terrace.
“The only bits of Victorian houses that people regularly change are the kitchen and the bathroom,” Scott says. “Everything else still fits family life. And you can’t say the same for virtually every other era of period of house.”
There is certainly great fondness for the features of the originals as well as for an age of architecture where even the most functional of buildings were embellished, water towers with elaborate brick motifs and register offices with Greek columns.
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10 THAT WERE SAVED
Tyntesfield House, Somerset Foreign Office, London Shadwell Park, Norfolk Llanfyllin Workhouse, Oswestry Albert Dock, Liverpool St Pancras station, London Albert Memorial, London Temperance Billiards Hall, London Undershaw house, Surrey Kentish Town Baths, London |
But not everybody is a part of the Victorian love-fest. Adam admits he is “reviled” by other architects for attempting to incorporate historical themes in his buildings.
And Beeny suggests some people can be too slavish in their aping of Victorian style.
“It isn’t a glory day of fabulous architecture,” she says. “We didn’t think that 50 years ago. We have to put it into perspective. Victoriana is very fashionable. If you’ve got a house of any period it’s quite nice to keep the original detailing.”
And she sees an amusing irony in houses that were seen as rather temporary at the time being restored in a slavish fashion over a century and a bit later.
But for the campaigners at the Victorian Society and elsewhere it is just a relief to no longer be fighting over major public buildings. The fashion is to respect the Victorians’ buildings.
Now the battle has moved on to less well-known structures, threatened with demolition for practical rather than ideological reasons.
And the threat now is often as much an unsympathetic conversion as outright destruction, as architectural historian and long-standing society member Gavin Stamp notes.
Grand houses are split into flats, churches become antique shops and police stations transform into restaurants. But such a change of purpose seems much more welcome than demolition.
And as Stamp insists: “The really good Victorian banks make wonderful bars.”
……….REPRODUCED FROM BBC NEWS, FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES. WE RESPECT THE COPYRIGHT OF THE BBC.
Posted by a user of the site http://www.neverpaintagain.co.uk , the online magazine for exterior paints and wallcoatings.