English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  MARK GIROUARD AND THE ENGLISH TOWN

  Waking up in a strange English town is a pleasure I find hard to explain to most Englishmen. Even the smell of burnt coffee from the dining room and the hum of the Hoover in the shuttered bar quicken the anticipation. In fact, the Trust House Forte experience is a necessary prelude to stepping out into the market square and looking for the cathedral tower behind the scaffolding, the sooty mass of the old town hall (closed, except Wednesdays), the Georgian terrace dolled up in Civic Trust pastel shades, the Corn Exchange, now reserved for bingo and the amateur dramatics society. Was much corn ever exchanged there? The merchants usually preferred the pub. Even the havoc wrought by the ring road and the multistorey car park cannot put off a hardcore urbanist, a perversion not often confessed to in this nation of rural romantics. By contrast, I find a faint melancholy stealing over me on joining the queue to pay £4 for a guided tour of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s seat at Chesney Wold (Teas and Gift Shop in the Stables).

  It is a delight to recognize in Dr Girouard a fellow deviant. In this neat and beautiful volume, the author of The Victorian Country House and Life in the English Country House takes to the streets and, so to speak, comes out. He speaks with unrestrained nostalgia of driving down, when an officer cadet at Eaton Hall, off the treeless and terrifying moors into Huddersfield:

  What a city! For a mile or so we drove along a street of palaces – palaces which were admittedly as bleak and unadorned as the neighbouring Pennines, but still amazing in the height and power of their mighty stone facades, piled up storey after storey, and row after row of windows. I had never been to Florence, but this, it seemed to me, must be what Florence was like.

  It is fifty years ago that I went to Huddersfield and I still remember that same uncovenanted thrill. Newcastle, the Newcastle of Dobson and Grainger, not of T. Dan Smith, was almost as good. And as for Trowbridge – such a silly name – as a child I had imagined it a wilderness of municipal off ices reeking of Usher’s Ales and then, aged sixteen, I went there and gaped out of the bus window at the splendour of the clothiers’ mansions in the ‘southern Manchester’ – one of those fanciful nicknames one cannot imagine actually using, like calling High Wycombe ‘the Venice of Buckinghamshire’. Dr Girouard evokes a fistful of other such shared enthusiasms: for the great India Mill tower at Darwen, its dark-purple brick soaring out of the stone milltown, for the marvellous pastoral vistas still to be had from the high crescents of Bath, for the grandness of Bolton: its airy and bright Market Hall of 1851, described by the vicar as ‘a market house which Europe herself might admire and emulate’, its town hall an imperial extravaganza on a Castle Howard scale, its piazza a homelier version of the Place de la Concorde.

  Does he miss anything out? Well, if one is being fussy, there is not a great deal about the pargeting-infested little towns of Essex or about the Cinque Ports, now Mapped and Lucianized to the point of suffocation but still full of pretty buildings. Does he quite do justice to Harrogate, Yorkshire’s rolling epitome of rus in urbe? And the account of the pleasure palaces of the late nineteenth century fades away to leave no mention of the cinemas and sports stadia which are, after all, the dominant features of most poor districts. Nor does he have much to say about clubs – gentlemen’s, political or working-men’s – which took over so many of the functions of the assembly rooms and the coffee houses and taverns.

  But these are quibbles which should not divert us from considering the unusual and ultimately sad story that Dr Girouard has to tell – unusual, I mean, by the standards of many European countries, where social and political history would be largely the history of the pride and fall of great cities. England does appear to be different. We seldom seem to have cherished our towns in quite the same way. There is an accidental, almost distrait air about both their growth and their decline.

  One by one, the medieval guilds did manage to squeeze their charters out of the monarch. The resulting corporation was controlled by the freemen who often elected the town’s two MPs and were principally occupied in defending their own privileges. Until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 brought in representative democracy, the old corporations showed only fitful symptoms of a civic conscience. The Improvement Trusts of the eighteenth century which did such brilliant work in the heart of places like Taunton (now mostly ripped out again), Newcastle, Liverpool, Bath, Yarmouth and Frome had to be ratified by individual Acts of Parliament. Although they tended to spring from the initiative of public-spirited city residents, they had nothing to do with ideas of local democracy. They corresponded more, I suppose, to the present-day Urban Development Corporations.

  Until Victorian times, English urban government was haphazard, marginal and, as they say nowadays, underfunded. That is just what makes its buildings so lively, the guildhalls and assembly rooms and market crosses all so modest, light and delicate, especially when compared to the monumental edifices being deposited on the adjoining countryside by the new magnates.

  Dr Girouard points out that this restraint was not because of the smaller size of towns before the Industrial Revolution. ‘Towns no larger than the bigger 18th-century towns were to build much more grandly in the 19th century.’ As long as local government remained unrepresentative, it could levy rates only in a small way for limited purposes such as paving, lamp lighting and street sweeping. The introduction of councillors elected by ratepayers made possible the great municipal imperialism of the later nineteenth century. Alderman Foodbotham, much though he might have loathed the idea, was the child of representative democracy.

  The architects followed the money. Carr of York lived mainly off building country houses. A century later, architects like Barry would live off public buildings: town halls, banks, warehouses, museums, law courts. Waterhouse’s Eaton Hall may have cost the Duke of Westminster £600,000, but his Manchester Town Hall cost a cool million, and that was the shape of the future. Colossal sums were spent on street widening, drainage and gas and water supply by all the great towns and cities of the Midlands and the North. Despite the Chamberlains’ reputation as the pioneers of ‘gas and water socialism’, Birmingham was by no means in the lead.

  Yet the irony is that, even before these Herculean feats of civic improvement had reached their mid-Victorian peak, the city ideal had begun to fade. As royal personages processed around the country opening enormous town halls, usually amid torrential downpours, the middle classes had already begun to decamp. The triumph of the English urban spirit, such a laggard and hesitant thing to emerge, coincided with the beginnings of its decline.

  Who was the first commuter? Dr Girouard suggests the Thorntons of Clapham in the late eighteenth century, or possibly William Roscoe the banker and philanthropist who moved out of his house in central Liverpool to the pleasant suburb of Islington at about the same time. It was probably a process so gradual that even the pioneer exurbanites themselves were scarcely aware of having altered the pattern of their lives for good, perhaps regarding the letting of their town house as a purely temporary measure.

  Holman Hunt’s father used to live in his Cheapside warehouse for cotton and velvet thread before moving out to the suburbs with his family. The Ruskins started off in Brunswick Square within striking distance of John James Ruskin’s City wine business, taking summer lodgings in Hampstead or Dulwich before finally moving out to a semi-detached house in Herne Hill with a large garden and a carriage sweep. A generation later, William Rothenstein had happy childhood memories of playing with the workmen in his father’s warehouse in Bradford’s Little Germany, but already the family lived in a smarter part of town. As a child, John Betjeman used to prowl round his father’s works – ‘Fourth generation yes, this is the boy’ – in the Pentonville Road (recently the premises of the Medici Society and being gutted at the moment):

  And once I found a dusty drawing-room,

  Completely furnished, where long years ago

  My great-grandfather lived above his work

  Before he moved to sy
lvan Highbury.

  ‘A town without a prosperous, powerful, resident middle class is a town in trouble’ is the menacing burden of Dr Girouard’s epilogue, ‘and so is a town in which the middle class think the country is better.’ Rural romanticism may have produced the imitable delights of Bedford Park and Hampstead Garden Suburb and the garden cities which have between them helped to shape suburbia all over the world. But it has also had a draining, demoralizing impact on the English city, one which has not been remedied yet and which never seems to have afflicted Continental cities so badly.

  Why did the middle classes leave? Well, ‘on winter days in London, the smoke of fossil coal forms an atmosphere perceivable for many miles, like a great round cloud attached to the earth.’ That was Louis Simond, a French-born American visiting the city in 1810. By the time of the Regency, then, the smog was already as bad as it is in Istanbul or Katowice today. Coal was the prevailing fuel and had been so for a century or more. And until Count Rumford’s invention of the Rumford stove in 1796, with its narrow chimney throat and more effective draught, much of the heat disappeared up the chimney taking with it clouds of unburnt coal dust which hung over the city. Then there was the filth in the streets, and the traffic jams, and the real danger of a street sign falling on your head or of falling down an uncovered manhole. And the noise. A German visitor arriving in London at midnight in 1770 found that ‘the noise in the street was as great as in other places at midday’.

  Above all, there were the area steps, or rather the lack of them until about 1770. Cruickshank and Burton, in their admirable exposé of the practicalities of Georgian life, point out that this meant that all night soil had to be removed via the front door by the nightmen tramping through the middle of the house with their wooden tubs. Sweet dreams were hard to come by. The only alternative was to connect the cesspit to the main drain; strictly against the rules and, even if tried, liable to end in blockage and disaster. By the later Georgian period, the genteel household would certainly own a water closet or two, but the irreducible problem of solid waste disposal remained. It is charming to notice in the sketches of the early town-garden designers the ‘Conveniency’ or ‘needful edifice’ or ‘temple of Cloacina’ nestling in the corner of the plot, only half-hidden by some arbour of fig or vine.

  Neil Burton shows that the garden-design business was well under way by the mid-eighteenth century. Thomas Fairchild’s The City Gardener of 1722 lists plants that will do in London and also places where they can be seen flourishing: ‘there are now two large mulberry trees growing in a little yard about 16 ft square at Sam’s Coffee House in Ludgate.’ One might take just as much pride in a town garden as in a country one. The sparky Mrs Delany wrote to her sister in 1734 from No. 48 Upper Brook Street: ‘You think madam that I have no garden perhaps, but that’s a mistake. I have one as big as your parlour in Gloucestershire and in it groweth damask roses, stocks variegated and plain, some purple, some red, pinks, philaria, some dead and some alive, and honeysuckles that never blow.’

  There was, it seems, less to be proud of in Georgian building methods. The leasehold system encouraged speed and economy rather than sound construction. In particular, the cost of bricks being far greater than the cost of labour, it was a standing temptation to cut some of the expensive façade bricks in half so that the headers never bonded with the much cheaper place bricks behind and the wall was from the start made up of two separate skins and so liable to bulge and bow in all directions. In Spitalfields, the minister’s house in Fournier Street was built by Hawksmoor at the same time as Christ Church according to sound building methods and cost £1461 15s. Round the corner, the jerry-built No. 15 Elder Street, not all that much smaller, probably cost less than £200 to put up.

  But when it came to aesthetic matters, no trouble was spared. The correct proportions of the windows were heatedly discussed in journals and set out in pattern books. So were the right combinations and ingredients for the paint, the proportions and ornament of the bannisters, the wainscoting and the fire surrounds. Cruickshank and Burton lead us deep into a minestrone of technicalities, of astragal nosings, quirked cyma reversas, bolection mould lags and bressummers, of crotia and smalt and indico. It is easy to ridicule the classical dogmatism of Georgian architects. How could there be said to exist a single ideal relationship between the size of the windows on the different floors of a terrace house when that ideal changed so often over the course of the century? But what did not change was the obsessive belief in and pursuit of that ideal.

  In their different ways, these two enchanting books cannot help making the Georgian city sound like an attractive place to live in, even after every allowance has been made for the poverty and squalor, the banging of the night-soil buckets in the small hours, the gentlemen pissing in chamber pots in the dining room after the ladies had retired, the stifling overcrowding at the routs remarked on by so many foreign visitors like Prince Pückler-Muskau at Brighton in 1827: ‘There are now private balls every evening; and in rooms to which a respectable German citizen would not venture to invite 12 people, some hundreds are here packed like negro slaves.’

  Provincial cities too had their fairs and their race weeks which drew all classes to them. In high-minded old age, William Wilberforce sighed for the bright days of his youth in Hull: ‘It was then as gay a place as could be found out of London. The theatres, balls, great suppers and card parties were the delight of the principal families in the town. No pious parent ever laboured more to improve a beloved child with sentiments of piety than they did to give me a taste for the world and its diversions.’

  Enough of that fine city, Larkin’s ‘lonely northern daughter’, survives to give us a feeling of what must have been as evocative a waterside as any in England, Dr Girouard tells us, despite so much destruction during the war and, unforgivably, worse destruction after it. But would even its revamped and wine-barred waterside so beguile a young Wilberforce today? And whatever happened to the English passeggiata? Where are those thousands who used to walk along the Mall, or the Grand Parade in Bath, or the seafront at Sidmouth, or the Quarry at Shrewsbury? Come to that, whatever became of ‘polite society’, which was originally not an excluding but an including notion? Part of Bath’s charm in its early days was that it broke down class barriers, in the upper regions anyway, and enabled duchesses to walk the streets unattended and mingle with trade. Anyone who dressed properly and could afford the subscription could frequent the Assembly Rooms. I suppose the answer is that the whole business has moved to the Costa del Sol where the English now perform their lobster quadrille, if not in such a seemly fashion.

  Now in the evening in the market square of an English town, Dr Girouard mournfully observes, ‘when the shops have shut and the cars have gone, groups of boys and girls shriek and giggle outside McDonald’s or Wimpys. The lights glimmer through the windows of the half-deserted pubs. Otherwise there is no sign of life at all.’ Is not all this fractionally out of date? It seems to me that English towns at night, though scarcely buzzing, are not quite as dead as they were. All the same, it has to be admitted that the signs of a major return to the city are still faint and uncertain. The dream of suburban independence, despite decades of modish mockery, remains the dominant one. And if ‘inner cities’ are still deserted and forbidding places, the middle classes have nobody but themselves to blame.

  For it is not the lager louts spilling out of the pubs who have frightened them away. It is the middle classes who have abandoned the city to the yobs. And both have lost something by it. There is a certain emptiness all round, a gap which even neighbours cannot fill.

  No, we are not to use the word ‘community’ to describe what has been lost, especially since what strikes one about the English town in its heyday was its sprightly individualism, its very lack of communal solidarity. ‘Townliness’ is the best I can do, though it is not much better. But we all know what Dr Girouard is on about.

  Meanwhile, there is still Hull in store for me, and Ludlow
, and Richmond, North Yorks. Not everything has gone, and what is left is worth a dozen detours yet.