 Well, good evening, good evening everybody. I'm Martin Porcel, I'm the Deputy Director of Grants and Publications here at the Paul Mellon Centre, and I'd like to wish you a very warm welcome this evening, especially to those for whom this might be their first visit, there might just be one or two. Before we get into the main event, I just have to give a pre-event safety notice and this is important and it's mandatory, so I'm just going to simply read out what it says in front of me here. There are no fire drills scheduled for the duration of the event. If the fire alarm sounds, please leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building. The nearest fire exits are on the ground floor, either through the front doors or the centre, through either of the front doors, that's 16 or 15. 16, as you know, is the main one that you come in. We assemble outside 28 Bedford Square, 28, which is to the right. Just so we all bear that in mind. Well, 2020 is a remarkable year for us at the centre as we celebrate our 50th anniversary. If you're curious as to what's gone on over the past half century, you can find out more in this special beautifully designed issue of PMC notes if you haven't seen it before. It's totally free of charge and you can pick it up before you leave. It's called the Paul Mellon Centre in 1970 to 2020, a brief history, and it was written by Mark Hallarty, our centre's director, and it is a good read. Now, we mark off 50th anniversary with a series of special lectures, events and publications, and among the most prestigious events are the scheduled Wednesday evening seminars, which are led by prominent figures who have in various different ways made significant contributions to scholarship in British art and architecture. Tonight, on the occasion of the fourth of these seminars, I'm delighted to introduce the eminent architectural historian, Dr Stephen Brindle. Stephen began his academic career at Kiebel College Oxford, where he read modern history, and he studied subsequently for a doctoral thesis on late medieval architecture in Spain. Some scholars quite understandably are content to intensify their knowledge of their particular specialist area to the point where they gain universal respect for a particular expertise. Stephen, although he has such expertise in spades, has through a long and distinguished career extended the breadth of his knowledge to cover a wide and varied terrain. All the more remarkable since Stephen has had a rather demanding day job all his life, having worked for English heritage since 1989 as an inspector of ancient monuments and presently a senior properties historian. Stephen's publications stretch back over some 30 years, going back to 1992 when he made significant contributions to the blue guide to the country houses of England, which I don't even know, it's a rather whacking volume, and Stephen wrote I think about 30% of the entries. In 1997, with Brian Kerr, Windsor revealed new light on the history of the castle. Also a number of very detailed articles, notably Pembroke House, Whitehall, which was for the Georgian group 1998. Stephen of course has written several major books such as Paddington Station, Its History and Architecture, published in 2004, and that was the first full history of Paddington Station. And then immediately afterwards in 2005, the biography of Isenbarth Kingdon Brunel, Brunel, the man who built the world. For English heritage, Stephen has produced a variety of publications including Shot From Above, Aerial Aspects of London, Whitby Abbey, Wellington Arch, Chapter House and Picks Chamber at Westminster Abbey, Dovercastle. Stephen also wrote several essays for the Magisterial Exhibition catalogue William Kent, designing Georgian Britain, which was edited by Susan Webber, was an exhibition in 2013. More recently he was editor and lead author for Windsor Castle, A Thousand Years of Royal Palace, published in 2018. In spring of 2017, against stiff competition, and I do mean that, Stephen was awarded a senior fellowship by the Paul Mellon Centre to work on a general history, architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530 to 1830. A successor to Sir John Somerson's canonical book, which was published in the Pelican History of Art series, first of all in 1953, and most of us have probably got a copy of some edition or another on our shelves. Stephen's book is to be published shortly by the Paul Mellon Centre. It's this book that forms, this book project that forms the background of Stephen's talk this evening, Architectural History after Somerson. On that note, I'd like to welcome Stephen to the podium. Thank you very much, Martin. That's very kind. I've incurred an embarrassingly long and lengthening list of debts of gratitude in the course of my current project, ladies and gentlemen. But for this evening, I would just like to sing a line of thanks. Yale University Press, and in particular Sally Salverson, for initially commissioning me to write this book. The Paul Mellon Centre for adopting it as a project and for giving me a senior research fellowship without which I'm not really sure where I'd be. I'll be somewhere in the 1630s still. Mark and Emily, in particular, for all their encouragement and moral support. I'm saying I've lots of other debts of gratitude, but I'm afraid I'll have to come round and thank them all in person. I'll say later date, otherwise we'll be here all evening. Right. Now there's a few questions to be going on with. Doesn't do just to take all these for granted, I think. So a few questions to carry at the back of your minds, and we might think about them again at the end. Why do we do all this? And to get the ball rolling, here is a case study from Dublin in the 1960s, which I think encapsulates some of these issues rather nicely. Back in the 1760s, Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merion was developing his estate to the south of the Liffey, and that included Merion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, and between them, Fitzwilliam Street. And Fitzwilliam Street had until the events of which on that speak, the longest continuous row of Georgian heritage houses in existence, the Georgian mile they called it, and people of Dublin were very proud of it. And they said and wrote things like this. The Irish Times, God bless them, said, what would Camilleto have made of this view good for the Irish Times? That's lovely, a mollus craig, who's a really wonderful writer, has this sort of wonderful poetic response to it. But of course, because I'm telling you a story, of course something bad is going to happen, and is going to happen to these specific houses, numbers 13 to 28, which belonged to the electricity supply board of Ireland. But unfortunately, again to the villains of the peace here, they had their head office there, and around about 1962, they decided this was no longer fit for purpose, as they say, and they wanted to replace it with a new building. Now you might think that this state, Irish opinion in relation to this kind of architecture, would range from indifference to hostility, but you would be quite mistaken. Whatever Irish people might think or have thought about country houses, in relation to Dublin, well they have long loved their city and felt very proud of it. And when the ESB's plans went public, people said things like this, the president of the Royal Irish Academy said, will the next move be to feed the books in the Library of Community College, the boilers of the Pigeon House, that's Dublin's main power station. Manchester Guardian, God bless and said, is there a public opinion in Ireland sufficiently concerned to put a stop to this vandalism, and if not, why not? And the Dublin city architect said, how important is the book of Kells, and see what else he wrote there. And there was an answer to Manchester Guardian's question, because there's a public meeting at Dublin's mansion house, to oppose the ESB's plans, was ended by 900 people, that is the 900 that could fit in, another 300 left outside the door who didn't. So Dublin was fiercely opposed to this idea, and a battle started to rage, but the Elecruces Supply Board, of course, a well-connected public body, the Earl of Pembroke, rather surprisingly, as heir to the Fitzwilliams, was the ground landlord of all this, and he offered the ESB an alternative site, a couple of streets away, and they rejected his offer. And instead, they served a compulsory purchase on him, and they bought 16 of these houses for a derisory of £1,000. And at this point, the Elecruces Supply Board, against fierce and mounting public opposition, held a competition to find a design for a replacement. And it was won by a Dublin practice called Gibney Stephens and Associates, and it is fair to record that the Irish institution of architects were in support of redevelopment. At this point, the ESB called in Sir John Somerson, who had already expressed himself in favour of redevelopment to give his opinion, and this is what he wrote. It has no special architectural coherence. It is not a planned facade, nor an architectural entity. It is simply one damned house after another. This does not constitute architectural unity. It does not even constitute uniformity, for the houses are a sloppy uneven series. I do see that for the sake of uniformity of character over wide area, there was some real point in considering preservation, but on balance, it seemed to me wrong. It is nearly always wrong to preserve rubbish, and by Georgian standards, these houses are rubbish. Now just think for a moment where such a judgement would leave most English high streets. And let's move on. Simply one damned house after another. So as you see, down they came and that's what replaced them. I make no judgement. I leave you to form their own. The battle raised another two years. The Irish Georgian society and the old Dublin society organised meetings and petitions, and in September 1964, the day before a new planning act came into force, which would have saved the houses, the minister for local government signed an order granting planning permission for demolition. And the 16 houses were demolished in the summer of 1965. So there they are, and there's what replaced them, and you won't be entirely surprised to know that their replacement is now obsolete and scheduled to be demolished. And you also won't be surprised to know that the Irish have never forgotten all this. Here are two recent posts where you read Dublin block that ruined the Georgian mile and Brandidaz, an act of vandalism. And Sir John Somerson's reputation in Ireland has understandably never recovered from this episode and certain other slights which we may consider. But in England, I think relatively few people know about all this. I'm going to have a show of hands for those of you who knew this story. A good few. Well you are a very well informed audience after all, but even so it's only a good few. And it can still seem surprising to an English audience that this judgement should have come from the author of Georgian London. Well he is a very very considerable man indeed and you might say that he's one of our holy trinity or of our three knights, the three great knighted architectural historians who dominated the subject from the 1940s to the 1990s. And the remarkable thing about them is how one can in a loose kind of way characterise their contributions to our subjects. Starting with Howard who is the only one who I knew personally and the astonishing achievement of his biographical dictionary. Howard of course like all three of these figures had a very broad range. Those of you who are medievalists will know that the White Cans in England is still by far the best book on the subject, but what he's famous for is the great biographical dictionary. It is true that the biographical approach to architecture, putting architects in the foreground, arguably distorts the picture, is arguably subject to criticism and a good many such criticisms were made at the conference held about Howard and his legacy and in the volume which was published after. And I have to say I was a little shocked by some of the criticisms which I thought unjust as applied to Howard because this is an astonishing achievement and I would suggest that this is the only book in our subject which really is indispensable and will remain so for the indefinite future. So a great man and a great historian to my mind. And then we come to I think perhaps the greatest of them all, this great and admirable German scholar whose work had such remarkable range and who probably more than any other individual taught British people to value their architecture in a more systematic way to understand it in a European context, but also to value it at a local level. And understand the relationship between what they had locally and what we possess as an inheritance nationally. The breadth of his achievement is astonishing. The buildings of England and the companion volumes to the other nations and achievement is remarkable as called in the dictionary and as expressive of intense personal commitment and effort. Pefson's achievement, of course, was not capable as Howard's astonishingly was of being brought something like fullness in one lifetime. He himself said with characteristic generosity that the revised editions will be the really valuable ones and what gold mines they are turning out to be under Yale and Paul Mellonsent as benevolent hands and under Simon Charles' superb editorship. Pefson, of course, as the true Renaissance man of art and architectural history in Britain in the 20th century, also gave us the pelican history of art and one of the first authors he commissioned in 1947 was the third of our three nights, Sir John Somerson. Now quite a lot of what I'm going to say this evening will be on the whole critical because I think you'd probably be disappointed if it wasn't and it would be a slightly feeble sounding lecture if it wasn't. So I would like to say at the outset, and I'll probably release it at the end, that I think Somerson was indeed, was by any standards a great historian and one of the great makers of our subject. But obviously he is certainly the most enigmatic and the most contradictory and his legacy has been the most contested and we'll think about some of the reasons for that in due course. Now if Howard's great achievement, Colvin's great achievement was to provide an extraordinarily comprehensive base of knowledge of architects was biographical and if Pefson's greatest achievement, the greatest of his many, was topographical, a topographical approach, the cataloging of buildings by place and understand them in their context. What then is Somerson's USP? Well it has to be the narrative of architectural style embodied above all in his great book Architecture in Britain, written in six years, 1947, 53, his most important work. The book embodies an architect dominated, aesthetically driven, a view of architecture, which to a large extent does seem to have been shared by the other two by Colvin and Pefsner. And Somerson's book is the definitive statement of this view and long remain so. It was in print for over 50 years until well after his death in 1992, I think almost to the end of the century. And in it, Somerson created the narrative of English architectural history based on the evolution of architectural styles and he helped to create a canon of great works to which the story has customarily been told ever since. Like both of the other nights, Somerson had a broad range, his sport, the range of his work extending much further than this and indeed at first he did not seem destined to be a historian at all. He abandoned a place at Cambridge to attend the Bartlett School of Art and Architecture and graduated from it and he had periods of pupillage with a number of practices, but they did not lead to a career and in some ways I think he remained an architect and monkey. In the 1930s, after this uncertain start, he became an architectural journalist and writer committed to the modernist agenda and the chance discovery on a stall of a bundle of drawings by Nash and Reptum launched him on his career as a historian, culminating in his first book, his superb biography of John Nash in 1935. And during the war, further good fortune led him to a place in the newly created National Buildings Record, recording war threatened buildings in London and the beginnings of a fruitful career as a broadcaster for the BBC and a further even greater stroke of luck in 1945 when he was appointed curator of Sir John Senn's Museum in succession to Arthur Bolton. Sommerson's achievement at Sir John Senn's Museum alone was a remarkable one and would probably have merited a knighthood, as Margaret Richardson has pointed out, it was to turn what had been an almost insolvent charity running what amounted to a private house with very limited access into a much-loved, well-organised National Museum with crusties, exhibitions and its superb library, a centre for the study of classical architecture. And all this was very largely Sir John's achievement. And these post-war years also saw the publication of George in London in 1945, a reaction to his experience National Buildings Record, one of the great works of urban history of the 20th century. But Sommerson in the early 1950s had a marked shift in his career. He withdrew from journalism and engagement with contemporary architecture and he never commented on this decision or made any kind of explanation of it. There does seem to be a turning point in his career and his attitudes between about 1945 and 1955. Peter Mandler, writing in a collection of essays after the Victorians, sees Sommerson as a disappointed figure, disappointed with the way that modernism and urbanism moved in the 1950s towards corporate and political control and disappointed with the brutalist values and that he retreated into architectural history from active engagement with contemporary architecture as a result in the mid-50s. Alan Powers, writing in 2000, noted the difficulty of reconstructing Sommerson's attitudes to modernism, noting that to do so you have to read lots of articles scattered in different places which all seem to say different things, noting Sommerson's critical mindset and his undefined ideals that shifted constantly and the degree to which he was apparently temperamentally averse to satisfaction with anything. I think this is part of the problem. For despite his undoubted status as a member of the establishment, there was always an oppositional quality to Sommerson and his writing and this was reflected in his last grade public statement about modernism and contemporary architecture, his RIBA lecture of 1957, the case for a theory of modern architecture. Sommerson seemed not to believe that such a thing was possible and to say something like that in 1957 did not go down well with the profession. Sommerson declined to explain himself further and that was about his last public statement on contemporary architecture until the mansion house square affair of the mid-1980s. You might say it has been suggested that his 30s left-wing conscience turned against the way modernism was developing in the brutalist generation or to use Sir Hugh Casson's terms he was a herbivore in the age of carnivores and he would drew into history. Greatly lauded at the time a public figure on almost every major public body in the area but Sommerson remains in many ways an enigmatic figure and the most enigmatic of the three nights. He began intending to be an architect, he became an architectural journalist and writer, he became by degrees a historian and withdrew into architectural history and there was a sense that his powerful sceptical critical intelligence dissatisfied with the way modernism was turning out. Instead of being turned on what dissatisfied him in contemporary architecture was turned on subjects in architectural history instead, in other words he turned his faculties as an architectural critic onto historical subjects, something I'll be talking more about. So of our three nighty historians, Colvin, Pettinart and Sommerson embodying architects, topography, style, three different ways of understanding architectural history, three powerfully normative ways of organising the subject, referring to and reinforcing each other. However, as several historians have pointed out more recently, the apparent authority there is open to question. This approach translates into architectural history as a story about individual architects and a sequence of canonical great works. It freezes the narrative into a set form, it sidelines the Gothic, the provincial and the vernacular and it tends to leave out all the other people involved, the craftsmen who made the buildings and the people commissioned, paid for and then used them. This approach, in a word, leaves out society and so although there is a natural authority to the three nights architects places style, there are obvious grounds on which to criticise and actually for a long time other historians have been providing us with very distinguished works showing how far architecture and architectural history can be written from other points of view. I'll just run through a few to remind you of the range because I'm sure you all know these things very well and that's the point that they're well known, like David Watkins' superb biographically based study of Thomas Hope, like Mark Girowad's magnificent life in the English country house, which advanced our understanding of this vast subject and theme in a quite new and different way. I think Mark Girowad's book in particular, one of the most influential books, has been on our subjects in the Second World War and then there are books which deal with craftsmen and craft skills, which turn from the architects to the craftsmen who actually made and built things like these superb volumes, which really strike a blow for materiality and against the occasional tendency to become fixated on design. And there are other scholars who have concentrated on material categories, on the materiality of buildings in different ways, like Geoffrey Beard on plasterwork, from Bonesill on brick. And since the 1980s, the country house studies and the understanding of historic interiors have added a whole further dimension to architectural history and started to make links between architectural history and the fine arts and the decorative arts and wider culture, wider visual culture, in a way which Colvin and Pesner and Somerson generally did. So, for a long time now, other very distinguished historians have been opposing different ways of looking at this subject. And these are this new and altogether welcome focus on society and the materiality and uses of the buildings brings us to yet another and quite different way of understanding architecture, which actually goes back at least 100 years further. And this, of course, is the existing antiquarian and archaeological tradition for when the three nights started work in the 1930s. They were working in a European inspired tradition of art history, but the native tradition native to this country, you might say, was quite different in character having originated with the society of antiquaries in the 18th century and having a much more archaeological character and a focus that was overwhelmingly on the Middle Ages until relatively, until the 20th century, I think. And this antiquarian archaeological culture produced work of superb quality at a very early date. As we see, I think, in J. C. Buckler's survey of Lothra and S Tower of Canterbury Cathedral, that's from about 1823, also Harold Ratesbyer's phase plan of Winchester Cathedral here. And if you pick up any volume of the Victoria County history, you will find that it refers to Georgian country houses, for example, as a modern mansion in the classical style of no historical interest. But where the church is concerned, you'll find something like this. You'll find a phase plan with a precise antiquarian analysis of how that building developed over time. There is, of course, not a single phase plan in Somersons architecture in Britain. And this kind of antiquarian archaeological understanding, rather like those books about brick and plaster work and country house furnishings, strikes a blow for materiality, but in a rather different way. It provides an alternative way of reading architecture to the site of session with the architects, architects control through design. The idea that architecture is really all about the designs, about black lines on a white page. The antiquarian and the archaeological view starts from the surviving fabric and works backwards towards design, and it gives us very different insights. And insights into historic buildings are something which change and evolve over time. This is something which Colvin, by the nature of his subject matter, very rarely had to engage with. Pefsner often had to engage with it because of the nature of his subject matter. Somersons, I think, chose not to, but more of that later. And this alternative tradition, the archaeological or antiquarian tradition, isn't something that's confined to old volumes of the VCH. It's something that evolves and continues. Although to a puzzling degree, it seems to have evolved as a separate culture to the kind of modern architectural history, which I think most of us are probably more aware of. There's a slightly perplexing division between the archaeological side of historic buildings culture and modern architectural history. But the archaeological strand of historic buildings culture gives us remarkable insights. Like this, for example, this is an analytical elevation of the White Tower of London, confirming for the first time that it really was built in two phases. One in the reign of William the Conqueror and one in the reign of William Rufus. This is from mortar analysis, and the mortar analysis also confirmed the dates of various major campaigns of refacing. And here are two projects, which I've been involved with. This is a survey of the Great Kitchen roof at Windsor at first thought to be entirely 19th century, and then found to be medieval and then found by Denver Chronology to be a 15th century rebuilding of a 14th century roof with a major phase of 16th century repair and a decorative casing added by Geoffrey Whiteville in the 1820s. And here is another rather nice example of the building being repurposed over time at the very grandest scale. And this is a long survey for the St George's Hall range of Windsor Castle, and this shows you how a very grand building was reimagined at three stages. First, there's an 18 bay range. You see the 18 bays in the vault below. And then reworked to an 11 bay rhythm by Hugh Mayne, the 1680s, for Charles II. And you see how Mayne has carved out new openings to alter the ground floor to his new 11 bay rhythm, and then reworked to the Gothic style by Whiteville in the 1820s. And archaeological excavation, especially development excavation under PVE planning policy guidance paper 16, has enormously enhanced our understanding of the development of medieval and early modern towns through archaeological work like this. This is an excavation in the city of London, ruling the foundations of a 12th century stone house, of the kind of which there seem to be an aspiring number in the 12th century city of London. This is from that wonderful book, John Scofield's Medieval London Houses. And so, great quantities of new data and new information now were proposed in archaeological archives about the early history of towns and wonders how many modern architectural historians are really entirely aware of this. And it's a little perplexing to me that there's still such a wide gap between these different strands of historical culture, but so it is. I return now to our three night master narratives, architect, topography and style. So of course they were never the whole picture. And these three architect, topography style are manifestly not all of the piece. They are not entirely comparable to each other. The biographical and topographical themes, architect and place, have an independent reality. The architects and the places would still exist, would have historical reality outside any discussion of architecture. They have an independent reality to them. One can hardly, but one can't quite make the same place claim for style. And what about Summersone's great book? It has been so central to our subject that again and again writers since Summersone have cited his judgments, have formulated their arguments and views in relation to his. The book has arguably had to bear an unfair degree of scrutiny. And we have to consider how well this approach has weathered the concentration on architectural style. I suppose the first general criticism would be that style is now widely felt to be a problematic concept in a way that Summersone never acknowledged. The great labels Gothic, Baroc, Neoclassical, Rococo and Palladian were for the most part unknown to society at the time. They are more recent coinings. And the second general criticism of the style-led art historical approach is that it is ahistorical. It does not take account of broader themes in social, economic and cultural history and the resulting narrative exists in a kind of vacuum. So the first example of this encountered in architecture in Britain is the way that Summersone introduces English medieval architecture, English Gothic architecture in the early 16th century. And this is what he says about it. This extreme taste of the flat, the square, the shallow, which had been defining itself ever more clearly for over a century represents the final withdrawal from the Persian Gothic. It is a negative taste, an eliminating taste. It stylises the past, reduces it to compact symbols and dismisses it. It is the taste of the end of an epoch, but it is also a taste peculiarly receptive to novelty as the Gothic spirit is withdrawn, it leaves a void, extremely attractive to alien ideas. Now, I feel at the same time that this is a superbly well-written passage, but I disagree with every word. I, as a medievalist, I find this deeply objectionable and that Summersone considers this an appropriate way of introducing the subject of English art in the 16th century and the relationship between it and its medieval legacy, um, astonishes me. I mean if you think, think of all the ways in which you might introduce medieval building culture and its legacies to the early modern age. You might talk about the division of building between the 90% of buildings that were timber and the 10% which were in stone. You might talk about the shape of households and the shape of houses. You might talk about the corporate collegiate quality of late medieval culture, especially in towns which would have an obvious relevance to buildings like these. You might think about the origins of English perpendicular Gothic and its building culture about the masons in their lodges. You might think about the degree to which Gothic architecture had developed in relation to religious building and patronage, that is almost entirely. This kind of architecture, religious architecture had been almost solely entirely responsible for stylistic development ever since the English began building in stone in the 7th century. You might think about the degree to which the fine arts, sculpture, painting, stained glass, art, metalwork and textiles had all developed in relation to church buildings and church architecture and the way in which medieval society thought about the fine arts, architecture and all of these other things together. You might go on to observe what sort of effect the Reformation had on this coherent culture of patronage, the degree to which this cultural catastrophe ended religious patronage and was accompanied by waves of destruction. So there were lots of things which you could say to provide a historical grounding here, but Somerson doesn't mention any of them. He completely disregards the Reformation and its dramatic consequences for the architecture and the new arts, and as you see he elides the end of the Gothic religion, tradition and church building with the idea that the style itself was in decline heading into an aesthetic vacuum. Well, I put these buildings up just to show you exactly what kind of aesthetic vacuum it was and why I hope these will hint at why I disagree with him so proudly here. To any medievalist, this approach is not just anomalous, it is astonishing, it is completely ahistorical and the resulting judgments are downright misleading and it exemplifies further in the most regrettable way the degree to which the scholarly community remains divided between medievalists who look at this kind of thing and modern historians who really pick up about the point that Somerson starts. There was a gulf here which urgently needs bridging and Somerson has done really nothing to help. Now, I'm not going to talk about this subject because Giles did it say much better than I possibly could, so I'm really going to refer to his book. Somerson's interpretation of Palladianism as instinctive, insular kind of English classical architecture again has been questioned at several points and several people and subjected to a thorough revisionist approach by Giles Wersley in his classical architecture and written The Heroic Age. But one can make the general point that Giles here operates and comments broadly within Somerson's own terms within concepts of architectural style and leaving aside most of the other considerations client craftsman materiality which one might think about. So, while this is very much a revision of Somerson, it is a book in the Somersonian tradition. What I would like to talk about for a while now is this concept, artisan mannerism, Somerson's own coining. Somerson coined the term, as we know, to describe a strand of English architecture that he identified in 1620s and 30s, the classical architecture that wasn't correct, that wasn't by Jones and Webb, that wasn't connected with the court. And he describes it again in primarily visual stylistic terms as follows. The style, the natural successor to the Jacobian, has never been given a name. Artisan mannerism may perhaps serve for the style is essentially that of the best London craftsman, joiners, carpenters, masons and bricklayers. It is not hard to recognise in feeling it is broadened course and has none of knife intensity or exciting contrast to the preceding style nor the fine taste and exquisite balance of Jones. So, this is a visual reaction of a visually very sensitive air seat. Now, Somerson's approach has already been criticised here. Historians like Lucy Gent and Caroline Van Eck have pointed out the distortions which arise from seeing Jonesian classical architecture as correct and normative and anything which departs from it as provincial and uncouth. I strongly agree with these revisionist views and I don't feel the need to rehearse them in detail but I would like to propose an alternative approach. And I think that Somerson in identifying artisan mannerism as a style is actually conflating the symptoms of more fundamental changes in the culture of building and the way houses were conceived that were unfolding in England right to the 17th century and construing these selected symptoms into an artistic style which I don't think has any real existence of the 20th century historians' minds. And we might list these fundamental changes as follows. First, social change and change in the shape of houses. Decline in the hall as a common space. Servants breathing to be consigned to service quarters in basements and attics. An increased wish for privacy. An increase in the number of private chambers in houses and the rise of the compact double pile house as a response to social change and a change in the shape of households which might be either traditional or formal in its architectural presentation. As you hear, this is Clegg Hall in Lancashire about 1610 and Cheveny in Kent convincingly attributed to Andal Gom to Jones of about 1625. And here are two more examples. Boston Manor in London and Colesill and what these tell us obviously is that the double pile house isn't necessarily an architecturally formal thing. It comes in both in more informal vernacular styles and in more formally conceived shapes like Colesill. And then the next great theme is the decline of timber framing which had remember been absolutely ubiquitous 16th century handed has almost died out as something as an externally expressed thing by the end of the 17th century and it's replaced by brickwork. But I think there is a further point here, which is quite often missed, that most brick construction in the 15th and 16th century was mass brickwork like the Dutch house at Qang left with thick brick walls which in construction are essentially similar to stone masonry. The brick simply takes place of stone and the walls are nice and thick. And the new kind of brick construction which rises in the 17th century is a thin walled style exemptified by these famous houses in Stoke Newington and there must have been a great many more of them and this of course is historically of huge significance because it's the origin of London Terrace House. And in those houses in Stoke Newington, because they still have their gavels end onto the street, you can sense the way in which the timber frame townhouse is morthing into the later brick terrace house. And as we know a great many of these terrace houses, thin walled houses, are reliant on structural timber and in many cases it seems clear that carpenters remained in control of the process. And as we know right through the 18th century a great many of the terrace houses in London were really built by, managed by carpenters who people have called themselves carpenters rather than bricklayers. So there is a spread of brick construction, which is a particular significance not simply because of the continuation of this thick walled style which can place way back to the 14th century but almost more significant because the rise of this new thin walled style of construction which is going to provide the new vernacular for town architecture. And it must have been well developed and well understood by mid 17th century if you think about it for Wren and Hook to be able to set those conditions in the 1667 era after the great fire of London. You don't set conditions for a whole class of building that are as clear and specific and actually as effective as that if there isn't already a well understood body of practice for Wren and Hook to refer to and call on. So it's not something which is I think historically very well understood partly because very few of the early 17th century examples survive but it's clearly immensely important. And then there's the matter of window design which has a special place in English culture in the Middle Ages and right up to the late 17th century. And this comes back to fairly fundamental issues doesn't it? London has four hours of direct sunlight a day and Manchester has about three whereas Rome has six and a half. And northern light diffused through clouds is a rather different matter to bright Mediterranean sunlight and so the English whenever they could afford to wanted to let light in. And tracerid windows became one of the most important themes in English Gothic architecture and the largest tracerid windows ever created are in this country. And tracerid windows were one of the central driving factors behind all perpendicular architecture. And in the 16th century that tradition of window design became translated into window design the great Elizabethan houses. And there are all sorts of points you can make about status and display and the use of glass. But there are also but these are also wonderful design statements and statements of great sophistication and it's entirely a native tradition which doesn't really owe anything to any other country. And so it's change and disappearance in the 17th century is in some ways rather perplexing. You could say that window design experiences its phase of maximum variety in the 1620s and 30s in a house like Swakley's here which as you see has windows of new style upright and square and oval. But it also has old style mullion and transom windows and bay windows and there's also the castle where the new kind of upright windows are being interpreted with old style stone mullions and transom still. And the curious point here is that the period of maximum variety is actually also the period of Inigo Jones's surveyorship. And we know that Jones was trying to reward pochimations to enforce use of upright windows in London. So what does that tell you about the nature of Jones's influence of time? But nevertheless this culture resolves itself down by late century to just two forms. And this native tradition of elaborate and showy and inventive window design more or less disappears in a generation. Why is this? Well obviously upright windows allow us to be designed in accordance with the principles of classical architecture. But is that really the only consideration when you consider who your clients for a building like for instance building on the right here? Where would they really have been thinking about Andrea Palladio in thinking about the shape of their windows? I somehow doubt it. And this is something of a puzzle and I have never seen a scholar really grappling with this in print. Henty Low obviously has done wonderful research about sash windows but that's a later and separate subject. So I just comment on the nature of some of these issues and some of them actually look rather strange when you start looking at them by themselves. The relationship between walls and roofs is another of course in medieval and 16th century building culture. Most buildings are essentially formed of ranges one room deep between 15 and 25 feet deep covered with a roof at a pitch between 40 and 60 degrees. And more elaborate building shapes are made by putting ranges one room deep together and having short sort of return ranges and bay windows and things. And roofs like this end in gables and so Elizabethan Howard did you make the composition out of the gables and from the 1590s the gable itself. So far from going into a decline goes into a period of manic elaboration of the experiment which lasts again until the 1630s. And as with window design the period of greatest variety, greatest experiment, greatest eclecticism is also the period of Inigo Jones's dominance as severe when he is supposed to be spreading correct classical architecture. Of course we actually know that Jones is a more complex figure than that and Jones himself designed what are called Holborn gables looking a little like the ones on Swakelys for a house full civil gravel. So all of these things of course are more complicated than we really understand. And the culture of the gable after reaching its greatest elaboration then as like the elaborate window design disappears completely in one generation. So what's going on and as double pile plans take over so the gables disappear from English architecture and that whole kind of design language disappears and towards the end of the 17th century there is this very strong sense of a closing down of options, a closing down of variety as English architecture converges on fewer and simpler forms. And you can present this of course as being the rise of classism because these forms are generally more compatible with principles of classical design. But is that how people in the real world really design buildings? I rather doubt it. They design buildings in terms of fundamental issues and here's the fifth and last one. And this is the change in heating method, the rise in coal as a fuel. There's a huge submerged issue here which I think architectural historians need to think about a little more. England had a timber famine in the 17th century and that's one of the reasons why brick takes over from timber framing and it's also one of the reasons why coal takes over from wood as the main domestic fuel source especially in towns. And this makes a huge difference to architecture because coal emits toxic fumes which wood fire does not and it thus demands a much better, much more efficient stack which will be guaranteed to take all the smoke out of the house. But coal also has twice as much stored calorific value by mass as wood which means that it's more compact, that it takes up less storage space and you get more heat out of the smaller fire. And that means that as long as you can afford the coal you can have more and smaller fireplaces but the result is that they now have to share a stack and you need to build stacks out of brick in order to serve several flues at once. And the result architecturally is that flues migrate from outer walls to inner walls and from being big and generally serving just one fireplace for law, they migrate to spine walls where they will probably serve a lot more chimneys and become quite complex constructions. And so here Ham House rather nicely illustrates both generations. So Thomas Vatherser's original house of 1610 was an H plan, it was just one room deep so it embodies the medieval tradition and Tudigrish in that kind of way and as you see it had big stacks on its external walls. William Samuel filled in one side of the H for the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale, made it very fashionable indeed, had some of the first sash windows in England and as you see he turned the centre of the house into what is to all intents and purposes a double fireplace house, though I think it has an M roof with a valley gutter and he concentrated his stacks on the spine wall. And so we have a number of really fundamental changes in building culture unfolding across the course of the 17th century. At the beginning of the century James I implicitly relieved in witchcraft, his grandson Charles II believed in mathematics and astronomy and founded the Royal Society. And by the end of the century we can see incipient modernity I think in things like the double pile house, the servants pushed into the basement, the terrace house, the end of that grand tradition of window design, the sense that fewer and simpler design motifs are being used everywhere, a wider use of glass but at us in two different window styles. We see incipient modernity and there is loss here as well as gain, there is the loss of the entire native timber construction tradition, there's the loss of that great tradition of window design, there's the loss of the Christian of gable design, there's the loss of most of the medieval inheritance, the point that by the end of the century Gothic is a matter of conscious revival. But Sir John doesn't really discuss any of these underlying factors and he, as we noted a little earlier, presents sees artisan mannerism in terms of his aesthetic response to it one building at a time. He's selected a group of houses from the mid 17th century which exhibit various of these teachers and he's coined this label to understand them in his own stylistic terms and the implication is that the building's appearance was mainly determined by aesthetic decisions taken by the artisans in question that these buildings represent design or disenio in the same kind of way as a building by Enico Jones, only in his view the artisans just aren't very good at it. Whereas I would suggest that a more historically informed view would suggest that no one setting out to build a house in the 17th century or any other century does so with a primarily or solely aesthetic agenda in mind. Other economic, social and technical factors are usually uppermost in their minds and these buildings should be understanding a quite different way as if they were vernacular architecture and that their appearance is generated not by design intention on the part of the craftsman but by these fundamental questions, these issues like lighting and heating and plan form. The decorative finishes derived from paper sources which Sir John sets so much store by in identifying this as a style are literally superficial added at the end. I say that the important story here is how the vernacular language of English architecture changed radically over the course of the 17th century and by the end of the century we have a design language which has been created by craftsmen not architects. Which we can recognise as modern so I'm sorry Sir John I just don't buy artisan mannerism I think it's a construction and one that is right for deconstruction and worse I think it obstructs and obscures judgement by distracting attention from these underlying historical causes which has indeed received surprisingly little attention from scholars. The Achilles heel of a style based approach to architectural history is its tendency to mistake symptoms for causes. Now Somerson as I've suggested brought the mind of an architectural critic and a very sharp and distinguished one to architectural history and much of his writing especially architecture and Britain is marked by a tendency to summarise buildings, places or architects with an aesthetic judgement and often a negative one. Many of his judgments are very acute but there is something troubling about this whole tendency so let's look at a few examples. This is Wren's first building, Pembroke College Chapel and what Sir John says is this. The ultimate appraisal of the building must be this, must note. It is constructed with a great deal of thought and expressed in sound latin but in conception it is unimaginative. Unpoethical, perhaps more exact it implies the absence of that deft intuitive coordination of thought and the imagination which is exactly what is missing in Pembroke Chapel. Sorry Sir Christopher. Bad luck Pembroke. This is from that famous essay, the mind of Wren. I find this troubling, I don't know about you, the de Oambartone, the lack of any sense of doubt in his own judgement, the lack of any sense that this is a discussion and a suspicion that Somerson actually expected his readers just to accept his judgments as true statements. I think again a more historically based assessment of this might suggest a rather different answer. On the right is a plate from Sir Leo which Somerson suggests may have been Wren's source and I think he may well be right but look what Sir Christopher has done with it. Now bear in mind that in 1664 Wren has never built a building, he's no real experience of building, he's never left England, he may have had access to a copy of Sir Leo and Palladia where that would have been about it and this is the first building he's ever designed. And yet look what he's done with this plate from Sir Leo, look how he's turned the middle opening into an arched opening, look at the proportional relationship between the arched openings, look at the way he's made, placed that feature below the middle arch which you could read symbolically as an altar or as a pedestal and look at the beautiful, they slight recessions in the façade and the way in which Wren the astronomer has modelled his façade because he knows the shadows on it. And it will change in the course of the day, look at the way he's added medillians presumably for this reason. Now we see similar modelings of the wall surface in a rather more spectacular way by Nicholas Hawksmore in the 1710s in his wonderful churches and we all say how wonderful it is quite rightly but at that date Hawksmore had had the benefit of working for Wren for 30 years. Wren when he built this had never built a building, had no teacher, had at most had two or three architectural books maybe to work from. I don't know if he had access to Jones and Webb's drawings, I've no reason to believe he did. As models he had the handful of executed works by Jones and Webb and I would point out that none of them have quite this language, these slight recessions in the façade making shadow lines. It's something which Wren has developed for himself on the basis of that plate from Surlio. So how is that unpoesical? How does this not represent intuitive coordination of thought and imagination? Now the fact is I think Somersons saying this because he has a line to take about Wren which is that Wren is a scientist who never quite managed to make the transition to artist. Obviously Pembroke Chapel has to fail this test because Wren has to fail to become an artist because that's the line Somersons going to take and this seems to me to be all wrong and very unfair and I think if any of us designed that as our first ever building we'd feel dolly proud of it. So let's move on to something rather more obvious really and that's Somersons on the subject of William Adam who I think is an absolutely terrific architect actually I have to say but Sir John as you see is marking him down and also saying that it's all based on English examples anyway. Most of his houses reflected the mixed influence of Wren, the Palladians and Gibbs and Adam showed no desire to discriminate between them. In a general way he adopted Palladian plan arrangements etc etc. Well I don't know the objections this rather careless summary now seem rather obvious. The assumption that Adam can be judged simply as a provincial extension with English architecture rather than a figure in a distinctive Scottish line of development from William Bruce and James Smith just seems obviously wrong. Note to the assumption that the Anglais Palladian style school is something superior and normative and the corollary to rather careless dismissal of Adam's richly decorative architecture in its quaintly barbaric richness I think the quaintly is especially treacherous and Somersons assessment about Palladian plan arrangements is also quite wrong as Ian Gao has shown Adam's plans are often asymmetrical determined by function rather than ideology. And respond in a rather sophisticated way to his clients needs and it's not surprising that Scottish writers have reacted rather strongly against Sir John's rather cavalier treatment of their architectural history and this kind of dismissal has related to Irish architecture as well. This building obviously has a very special place in Irish architectural history and of it Sir John wrote the pacification sub rosa of the Burlington group in Irish architecture extends to the mansion which speaker Connelly built for himself at Castle Town etc etc etc. It sounds a story 13 window front of stupendous monotony while the planning who includes a hall manifestly based on part of Inigo Jones' Whitehall designs on the publication of which Kent will have been working on when Castle Town was designed. Now in this case Somersons was actually obliged to revise in later volumes because Irish scholars in particular Edward McPollen have shown that all this is quite wrong and that Castle Town was actually designed by an Italian architect need a paper architect no less Alessandro Galilei and a very brilliant Irishman who had studied in Italy Edward Lovett Pierce. So Somersons rather careless judgment has short circuited all the other ways in which we might read Castle Town. It isn't an English design at all. It was designed by an Italian and an Irishman contrary to Somersons assumption of Burlingtonian influence they had nothing to do with it. And it is nothing like contemporary English houses of either block or the plague in generations. It was conceived by speaker Connelly as a deliberate advertisement of Irish wealth and political self confidence like the contemporary Parliament House and there was some reason to believe that Connelly deliberately conceived it as a non English even anti English statement. And that it responds to Irish not English architectural preferences which you also see in buildings like this. So Somersons in position of an Anglo centric view and a style led view has completely short cut short circuited and undercut more sophisticated and probably more nearly correct readings of this remarkable building. And Irish historians like Eddie McParland and Christine Casey have in entirely revising all this have put Castle Town in something more like its proper place in Irish and European cultural history. And last of these cases we come to Edinburgh New Town. Now you might think you might have thought that Edinburgh New Town is really quite good. Well heritage site and all that. But Sir John Wood I'm sorry to say not have shared your view. He says this if he doesn't in fact have very much to say about it. He says the new town expanded in four distinct areas each planned in a formal manner though with due appreciation of the discoveries of the woods of Bath and of what Nash was doing at Regent's Park. The architecture is generally a dower Grecian with little imaginative enterprise. I mean even in Sir John's terms this seems wide of the mark. It doesn't really look Greek to me. I'd say this was more like a testimony to the amazing longevity of the Palladian tradition. I mean this is really a sort of recapitulation of Robert Adam at Fitzroy Square and Charlotte Square I would have said. But it gets worse. It gets worse. Royal terrace for sheer sullen gloom. This is probably the longest Georgian terrace in England. Well I mean I know length isn't everything but you know it's impressive. For sheer sullen gloom this is surpassed by St Bernard's Crescent here. Inset Greek Gothic colonnades give an extraordinary impression. The building is some sort of residential morcelium. Well I mean I suppose I've chosen the most morcelium like picture to give you a flavour of where Sir John's coming from here. But I doubt that's quite how the good people of Edinburgh see it really. And bear in mind that Edinburgh Newtown is rightly a world heritage site and that all of this is generally taken to be the architectural representation of the Scottish Enlychement and all that. So there you go. Are these really sufficient and appropriate judgments for the Pelican history of art? Well I don't know but Sir John clearly thought so. So he's been throwing judgments around and so I'm going to join in I think. Are these aesthetic judgments true? Well obviously not their expressions of personal taste. Do such statements have any historical value? How could they possibly? They take no account of the aesthetic preferences of the people who created these buildings who may be presumed to have liked them rather better than Sir John. What use are such statements and why publish them at all? Now I'm not proposing any kind of censorship here. I'm not at all a woke person. I rather dislike fact attitudes and I firmly believe in freedom of speech. But if Sir John is free to write such statements then I am also free to react accordingly. And I say that these judgments are not presented as points for discussion. That they would not inspire anyone to look again or to value these buildings. That they are more likely to close down consideration than to encourage it. And worse, they mock those who live in these places who love these buildings and feel pride in them, maintain and look after them. And in relation to other buildings, less securely placed than Edinburgh and Newtown, judgments like these can actually threaten their very future. As Summerson's comments about 6th William Street in Dublin often did. Now I know that we are taking, I've chosen particularly pejorative statements by Sir John here and it is true that there must be a role for criticism for the assigning of value in architectural history. Otherwise how would our good friend Dr Bradley do his job? And how would Historic England decide which buildings are grade 1, grade 2, grade 2 or don't quite make it at all unfortunately? And I absolutely acknowledge that there is a place for critical analysis of historic buildings. The question is where to draw a rather difficult boundary. And I'm suggesting that Sir John is falling somewhere on the wrong side of it here and it gets worse of course when Sir John arrives in the 19th century. Oh dear, oh dear, can you believe this statement remained in print in the Pelican history art for 50 years? This, and I put some pictures up to just remind you just how feeble, deficient and poor the architecture of the 1830s was. I mean there's Wharton Street, sorry I got the street wrong Andrew, I do apologise. Wharton Street, but Lloyd Baker estate. I mean who'd want to live there? And Gray Street Newcastle, ah Georgian Disneyland, I don't know. What a failure. I simply, I read those words and I do not know what he is talking about. And this seems to me the very, the extreme point of this sort of personal aesthetic response to architecture when you can slate and dismiss an entire generation and entire decade. Does this actually mean anything and does it tell us anything? What about judgments like this are not unpopular building? Well this is all very perplexing because of course I'm being very unfair to Sir John here and these extreme statements do not represent anything like the totality of his view. It is perhaps unfortunate that in 1970 Somersong published a collection of essays called Victorian architecture and in it he expressed his conviction that Victorian architecture had been a failure repeating that word over and over again as if the mere repetition somehow made it true. But this didn't represent the totality of his thoughts about Victorian architecture as we know because weird as it may sound he was also planning a different book about Victorian London as successor to Georgian London and has worked towards it he wrote a number of superb essays like these two which are wonderful analyses of their subjects and don't contain pejorative language at all. I don't quite understand it I have to admit and then there's the famous essay on William Butterfield or the glory of ugliness. Now I certainly depart from Sir John in one important respect. I've never found Butterfield's work ugly and I've always thought this one of the most beautiful buildings in England but nevertheless Somersong felt a deep sympathy with Butterfield. But this encapsulates both his fascination with the subject but his inability to rid himself of his mid 20th century modernist critical eye. What is going on here? Well we have to bear in mind Somersong's enigmatic character and his oppositional habit of mind and here is how David Watkins summed it up in the rise of architectural history. His distinguished mind ever questing and worrying now found especially sympathetic those 19th century authors and architects who had expressed doubts about the merit of the architecture of their day. Thus Somersong's Victorian architecture interprets the subject in terms of failure. And my goodness how they failed for Sir John is horribly unsuccessful. Problem of failure, no point avoiding it, no point trying to find a name as I've already suggested a failure, failure, failure, failure. I would suggest that what we are looking here is not history at all, this is rhetoric of a peculiarly interesting kind. That this represents a crime to the criticism of architectural rhetoric over historical realities. There was no consideration in this book really of the vast and complex realities of late Georgian Victorian architecture. He bases his case that Victorian architecture was a failure entirely by appeal to previous writers who have judged it to be a failure. He says because lots of informed Victorian thought it was a failure so it must be. Well ever since the Enlightenment and certainly since Logea there has been this period, periodic tradition of oppositional critical writing about architecture. Interpreting the architecture of its own age as a failure often by reference to an idealised future for Logea. Everthing since the Greeks have been rubbish. For Pugin Gothic architecture was Christian and structurally honest and contemporary architecture was dishonest and cosmetic and redful. Ruskin built on Puginian foundations and in the 20th century the generational rejection of Victorian architecture was immensely enhanced by the functionalist philosophy of the modernist generation. These generational rounds of criticism, comment and rhetoric are indeed fascinating. They are part of the stuff of our subject and this rhetorical critical culture is highly important in the development of architecture. But it is not the truth and it certainly doesn't constitute sound historical method. A few, just because a few Victorian or modernist critics said that Victorian architecture was a failure does not make this the historical truth any more than Logea's criticisms of Rococo culture or Pugin's criticism of late Georgian architectural culture are true. It seems if there is a war within Somersong between the architectural critic and the historian. The historian represented by the history of the kings works by Jordan London by those essays about Victorian culture and the purely historical work is superb but more often the critic wins. This is one of the ways in which Somersong is enigmatic. He is both historian and critic and when you approach books you can't quite know which character which persona is going to win. Somersong views are really crystallised nowhere more than in his thoughts about preservation and about the idea that historic buildings should be preserved by law. For he was involved in the first committees which first set up national buildings record and the national list and Somersong set out his views on the idea of architectural preservation in an article for listener in 1941 reprinted in 1945 and it's in that volume called heavenly mansions, the past in the future. Somersong sets out extraordinarily stringent restrictive criteria for preserving historic buildings which might be summarised in one word excellence. You look at these statements in almost every town or large village one or perhaps two houses which stand out. He doesn't believe in the concept of historic character. Do not try to preserve what you cannot preserve. Well I'm sorry Sir John but lots of us do think that's exactly what we're trying to preserve. General sentiments regarding historic association should not be allowed to be an obstruction. They are as I've said in any case fugitive. There is I think an almost sadistic refusal to allow sentiment historical association or the character of an area to be a criteria for preservation. There is an insistence on excellence as manifested as you see by this proposed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is difficult to find a single occasion indeed when Somersong made a clear invention or statement in support of the preservation of the specific building. He wrote a biography of John Nash and in almost the same years he distanced himself from efforts to save the last of Nash's Regent Street. He positively condemned Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin. He didn't intervene in the campaign to save Euston Station or St Pancras and in his last public statement in 1980s as you all know he intervened to support construction. This design by Mies van der Rohe in place of those Victorian buildings which as we know all eventually came down. So his critical his critical mindset had implications for conservation and that I think is where we. Was Somersong a great historian? Well yes of course he was. The ambiguities and complexities themselves testified to that. His reimagining of English architectural history, his confidence assigning of it to stylistic periods and categories really has shaped the subject ever since. However it can be argued that Somersong remained first and foremost an architectural critic and only secondarily a historian. Yet Somersong himself a complex and sophisticated man was aware of this and occasionally the Olympian's self confidence was dropped as in his lecture Art and Society. All my writing life I've been haunted by a sense of guilt about writing about things which don't connect, which don't have some sort of lodgement in real life, writing about buildings as if only I and the building mattered. Of failing to make the building seem an objective past a scene in which it emerged in other words in relation to society. This is a tribute to his self knowledge and intelligence that he could articulate one of the most important objections to his own approach. So clearly the style based architect dominated the view of history that Somersong helped to bequeath to us has been a powerful intellectual tradition. It embodied a vast deal of scholarship and as a mode of looking at architecture it still has value. But arguably it is exhausted and has run out of road in terms of its potential for development and fresh thought. And as we've seen there are already other ways and other strands of seeing buildings as made by society for society being developed by many distinguished scholars. But there's one other matter which to my mind is even more important than widening the scope and focus of architectural history and that is the buildings themselves. And this contrast Somersong is to recognise historic buildings as a precious finite resource whose value goes far beyond those rare qualities of artistic excellence which in Somersong's view alone justified preservation and support would at any rate not forget the efforts made by owners and planners and consultants and others to preserve them. His judgment in the case of Fitzwilliam Street shows how little he would have sought to preserve and if you applied such standards to an average English town what would be left. And this carelessness, this casualness with the very stuff of our architectural history, our very subject matter represents the worst of his legacy and one aspect of it which deserves not vision but rejection. Somersong's view showed no understanding of historic buildings as a finite and threatened resource and no understanding of the speed with which that resource would be eroded without legal protection. Here are some statistics. We have about 25 million homes of which about 374,000 may be listed. About 2% of building stock is listed. Remember that represents our whole architectural history about 2% of building stock. Over 200,000 net new houses are added to the existing stock at this rate even allowing for a lot of the new homes being apartments. The entire stock of listed houses would be replicated so to speak in two or three years and replicated again in another two or three years. So much for the claim advanced by Somersong and others ad nauseam that the preservation of historic buildings holds back development. Without extensive legal protection for historic buildings this pressure to develop and convulsive change in society and patterns of shopping, economic life would doom whole tracks of buildings to destruction. High streets, churches, municipal buildings are safe because they are listed. Our listing system with its relatively broad criteria of selection, Contra Somersong enjoys very widespread support and has become a central part of our planning system for very good reasons. Somersong's ultra selective approach conservation is a long out update and would have doomed whole historic town centres to destruction. Somersong was a critic and a historian and often a critic first and his critical legacy has helped to shape our understanding of our subject and I'm not saying for a moment that the role of architectural critic is not valuable. Its value to society and its importance in shaping architectural culture has been demonstrated again and again and looking at this kind of thing you might well think that our own age is sorely in need of more of it. And that the lack of passion and the lack of oppositional critical voices is one of the things that is most sorely wrong with contemporary architectural culture. Yes, I wonder what Somersong, the herbivore modernist, would have made of all this. A while back I read Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher and in the preface he wrote this. When I interviewed her she could never quite understand that historical inquiry is not the same as political combat. And I'm saying that historical inquiry is not the same as architectural criticism and architectural criticism is not the same as historical inquiry and the two are to an extent incompatible with each other. Deploying a critics approach to historic buildings, as Somersong so often did, is often ahistorical imposing a contemporary aesthetic viewpoint on the past. And it can be positively anti-historical in its effect, undermining real sympathy, obscuring and diverting attention from complex historical truths and sapping the reader's will to understand things better. It can lead to absurdities like Somersong's blanket condemnation of the whole of Victorian architecture as a failure. And at its worst, as in the case of Somersong's unhappy intervention in the Fitzwilliam Street saga, this style of criticism makes a mockery of local pride ignores and derides the value which communities place on their historic buildings and undermine the efforts of those who seek to preserve them. The freedom to criticize, of course, is sacrosanct, but the critics cannot themselves be immune from criticism. So in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, society needs both critics and curators in its architectural culture, but our historic buildings, if they are to survive, need curatorial values of understanding sympathy and care. Historic buildings need curators more than they need critics. Thank you very much. I hope someone is going to disagree. I find absolute unanimity rather troubling. Hi, Simon. Stephen, thank you for that. That was a marvelous presentation of the 17th century amongst other things. I feel a bit of a pang for the term artisan mannerism, and not only because peasant are adopted isn't therefore it became part of the shorthand essentially language of the buildings of England. But I wonder, I mean, if you were to show a progression of church monuments with all of their architectural language throughout the 17th century, perhaps that might stand up rather better than perhaps if one, as it were, things outwards from the frontist piece type of design, then there's still a case for dear old artisan mannerism somewhere? Oh, what a nice thought. It would be nice to resurrect it somewhere, wouldn't it? My objection is the degree to which it has diverted attention, I think, from the fundamentals, and obviously my contention was that what happens to English domestic architecture in the 17th century is fascinating, but our perception of it has been diverted by concentration on style. And it hadn't occurred to me that actually, if you translated artisan mannerism to the realm of the sculptural, that actually it still has a role to play, which is a lovely idea, because once someone, because it's one of their nice sounding words, and it would be nice to redeploy them there. Thank you, absolutely. So you talk about sort of economics and practical changes leading on the aesthetic changes of the 17th century architecture, what would you say has led to the changes that we see now in architecture? Oh, you mean that kind of thing? Well, the rule of the property developer and of certain kinds of accountants formally, and of the QS and the accountant and the project manager, and the astronomical land values, and all sorts of other rather unhelpful considerations, which mean property developers always just want to get as much square metres as they possibly can onto any given site, and it becomes a sort of game between them and the planners and the terms in which the local plan is framed, doesn't it? And the slightly humiliating way in which great cities are obliged to go slathering after billionaire investors, which I don't suppose is going to get any better any time soon, is it? Sorry, I'm not a competent commentator on contemporary architecture, and I put this in to make a cheap point, but I'm afraid that I think there are other people in the audience who'll be better able to explain to you why, despite the fact that we have a modern architectural fashion which is full of intelligent, public spirited people who really try their best. Our architecture still comes out again and again looking like this. It's all rather difficult, but the thing I find most troubling is that actually there are so few coherent, oppositional voices. I think we need to wind down the rust skin, don't we? Hello, I'm going to be a bit cheeky and ask what would architectural history after Brindle look like? Once this has sailed through numerous additions, what changes would you like to have achieved through this work, and what might be some of the barriers perhaps to that change being enacted? I'm trying to present buildings as being made by society, for society, which of course is a completely ridiculous brief to set yourself, but it means that the approach has to be thematic, so there has to be chats about towns, and there has to be one about roads, and there has to be one about landscapes. I'm trying to present architecture as a cultural narrative too, and in terms of the way in which architecture was translated from being a craft-based tradition whereby architecture was largely comprised somewhere between the heads, eyes and hands of craftsmen, and in craft skill in 1530, and by the end of our actually rather well-chosen period, had been translated entirely to paper, and had become a vast paper-based relic. It is not just about translating all the craft from the bodies of knowledge to paper, and the whole language of design to paper, but there are all sorts of sorts of books about architectural history, which sort of generate new architecture, and which allow the clients to be involved. And there are books like Thomas Hope's book, and all those books about J.C. Ludmore's Villa designs, and architecture has become part of wider consumer culture, and having been entirely translated to paper, and the craftsmen having lost all agency, shall we say, have to do what they're told, and the degree to which architecture by 1830 has actually become a subject in the kind of sense which we're discussing now, which I certainly don't think it was in 1530. Or 1630, or it was only just starting to be in 1730. So I'm interested in, I'm suggesting ways in three rather pathetically short chapters of seeing architectural culture, and evolving architectural culture as being one of the motors, one of the things which drives architecture, I think more fundamentally than architectural style. I think there would be, you'd lose that if one just concentrated on the material, and so I've introduced these separate chapters. Now I don't think I've done them at all well, because they're very short, and there's more than I can read. So what I would hope is that other people will do that kind of thing, and in particular write about architecture as a culture, as a developing culture, part of a wider culture, more intelligently when they see how badly I've done it. Alan. Thank you. You did pick out someoneson's worst moments. I did, didn't I? Yes. This was one of a polemic. Get an example of where his words do help us to see something positively. Oh yes. Go back to the picture of Coal Hill. Massive, serene and thoughtful. Coal Hill was a statement of the utmost value to English architecture. It's a beautiful line, and if I was a fundamentally nicer person, I would probably put it in with a picture of Coal Hill. Sorry Alan. Yes. And he writes beautifully. I'm not really trying to rescue someoneson here, but I'm rather hoping you were. I'm trying to rescue us. I think that's probably a better idea. And not just us in this room and what we do, but the architects out there as well. Because for a strange combination of reasons, it strikes me that the discussion of what things look like and the attempt to evaluate them in any way at all has now gone for three generations. There used to be a time when it was taken for granted. People might have done it badly, but it was what people did. And then we policed ourselves, and so did the architects, and they are not taught in any sense that one thing might be better than another. And I teach in architectural schools even the good ones don't do this. And the historians don't do it. And none of us know how to do it anymore. I think you're suggesting that in dethroning architectural criticism, I'm potentially doing architectural culture a colossal disservice. No, I mean you're coming very late in the day, because the damage has already been done for a very long time. But the remedy I don't think is to go back to Somerson, but it is in some way to rebuild a culture of criticism, which is a wire of the pitfalls. I couldn't agree more. I mean I think that those rhetorical oppositional voices in architectural culture have been no loge and pugin and ruskin are so important in shaping architectural culture and making people at the time see things differently. The reason that I find it troubling in Somerson's case, and I find it potentially troubling in architectural history, is that we now I think have to conceal ourselves as curators in relation to what we've inherited in a more active and protective way. I mean they weren't really worried if all their medieval buildings gone, which is why most English towns have very few medieval buildings left. And we have to worry about this rather more. I think what I'm suggesting there is that architectural history needs to tip to around historical buildings, but I think you should go for it with these things. Good Lord, yes. Well you mentioned people who do listing, and it has struck me for a very long time having been quite close to that process, that certainly some of the things that I can value and see in a building are not seen. Yes, and almost anything that can be objectified, scores, anything that is subjective doesn't really exist. I think I know what you mean. This applies in particular to 20th century architecture, where we are still rather feeling our way in assessing what we've got and where it's actually going rather quickly. Well, the criteria I'm aware of are being the first of something, being the influential example of something, being the good example doesn't count if it's the second or third one, and it's really much better than the first one. It still doesn't count. I say better because that's what I think I know. Oh, I see. Well, not really having engaged with the preservation of 20th century buildings. I didn't know that, Helen. It's an insight which I had not shared, so thank you. I think what you're saying is that architectural criticism actually has a job to do in shaping and assessing our inheritance before it all disappears in perhaps a rather more active way than I may be allowing, and certainly where the late 20th century end of it is concerned. Thank you. Oh, good. Not that I'm someone who's ever been a used star label, and I'm a great proponent of vernacular classicism. So there are lots of things I would say. Taking his over as a whole, he certainly was very concerned with the relationship between architecture and society, and that quote in that lecture is a typical one where he's arguing saying something against himself, which he's fully aware that he has done through his career, and we only have to look at George in London, which is posited around taste and wealth to see that. So my point back to you would be architecture is about taste and wealth. So architecture in Britain may not have so much about the wealth, but through the rest of his career, those two are circling round the whole way, and I think a lot of that comes out of the same things you're talking about that he had to compress a great deal. He's writing this history for the first time. Pefsner as well is a German idealist, and the buildings of England is full of denigration of plagued in architecture. So plagued in architecture is Pefsner's bugbear, Victorian architecture is Somersons bugbear. So I think, I mean after I manage them, you can read it back the other way and say that it's innovative in that time for him to be considering these buildings, which are not by named architects and putting them in this ground narrative. And in later editions he does actually drop the term and changes it. And of course in later editions he adds chapters like men and materials, which go some way towards what you're talking about. Of course his men and materials are a sort of 1970s view, their industrial revolution onwards, so it's late 18th century onwards, it's not materiality in the early modern period in the way we look at it now. But he, you know, it's absolutely the case that he is fully aware of the change in historiography between the 50s and the 70s and through to the 80s. And Ditto with Victorian architecture, you know, his view changes and by the end of his life, he's despite the Mansion House Square Inquiry, he is writing favourably about it and acknowledges that he was just of his time in, you know, Garthlegow Street view. So I think you've made me want to go back and look at architecture in Britain in isolation and is it the one that is the exception that proves the rule. So I'd be arguing architecture in Britain is the exception that proves the rule. The rest of his work is all about architecture and society. Can I just say one more thing on preservation? Sorry, I'm going on a bit. So one more thing on preservation. Again, you can argue it the other way. He did a lot as Deputy Director of the NBR for cataloging buildings through the war. He then manages to get at a time when everyone's thinking about new build, he manages to get listing and preservation into the process officially. That's an amazing achievement. You know, it was certainly not top of the list. Yes, he has a different view from current day. That's not surprising. He was on what we would probably now see as the wrong side of all those major ones, but he was also on the Historic Buildings Commission from the beginning. He was on the GLC Historic Buildings. If you go through Curator's Diary at the Sonars, I have 40 years of Curator's Diaries. He is going out to look at cases for a good 30 years. He's off all over the country, going to public inquiries, standing up for historic buildings. So he did a lot of under the radar preservation work. Therefore, there is a contradiction when he's above the radar. He's generally arguing the opposite. But he did an absolutely enormous amount with the Georgian group, the SPAB, all sorts of people. So a huge amount of his working life was actually taken up with case work of historic buildings. Anyway, we will continue this discussion later, but I want to put the counter-view.