First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  The architecture of entertainment, of fairs, exhibitions, concert halls and theatres may be considered alongside church building. Like churches, places of entertainment are where people go for short spells only—all except for the cleaners and permanent staff who may be compared to the nuns and priests of churches, and very heartily they may laugh at the comparison. But the difference is that while churches are built to last, places of entertainment are not.

  Nothing is more empty than a deserted fairground. A walk through the White City with no one about, the baroque sculpture collapsing, the plaster façades damp-stained, the halls echoing and dusty, the railway lines for special trains which carried long-dead merry-makers, rusty and grass-grown, is macabre even in broad daylight. And empty race-courses seem emptier than that. But an empty church is full, especially one in which the Consecrated Host is reserved in tabernacle or cupboard in the wall, with a light before it. Such a building may be alarming. One may feel oneself elbowed out by angels, but the emptiness is awe-inspiring, not desolate.

  For the truth is that in England and Scotland and Wales fairs and entertainments are the cast-offs of the church. Their ancestors were hurled out of churches when the religious plays acted in naves were considered too secular. They waltzed away into the churchyard and then into a field near the church. And on the date of the patronal feast of the church, in many an English village today, a fair is held in a neighbouring field. When I look at the roundabouts and swings and hoop-la canopies gaily coloured in King’s Lynn, in the same style as barges are coloured at Stoke Bruerne, and as some old-fashioned waggons are still painted, when I see these traditional colours of red and blue and gold and green twisting round the flashing mirrors which hide the steam organ, when I catch sight of flares or electric bulbs reflected in barley sugar rods of polished brass, I think how near the church these really are. I remember they must be derived from canopies over images carried with a mixture of reverence and guffaws, centuries ago in English sunlight. And I wish that this people’s art would come back to churches: a little more vulgarity of painted wood, a little less of the church furnisher and the art-expert and a little more of the fair ground. For this colour decoration of old-fashioned fairs is the oldest and most permanent feature of the architecture of entertainment.

  English visitors are often shocked by the garishness of patronal feasts and processions in the towns and villages of Italy and Spain. There, fair and church, entertainment and worship are undivorced. We are shocked because we have still such a Puritan sense of sin about pleasure that we drive it out into the open fields of the world. From these outcast fairs, from strolling players and booths and competitions grew up the entertainment business whose structures are the subject of this article.

  Churches are built on reality, in the mystical sense of that word. Fairs, exhibitions, theatres and cinemas are built for daydreams of personal wish-fulfilment, which is a phrase for pride. No wonder then that, unlike churches, impermanence pervades them.

  Architecturally, the most impermanent, the most quickly dated of entertainment buildings are exhibitions and cinemas. The first great exhibition of 1851 was undoubtedly beautiful within its limits. I have a peep-show perspective of it. Under a bright light the eye looks down long glass avenues (whose cast-iron columns were originally painted with bright reds and blues under the direction of Mr. Owen Jones, who later designed the pleasant colours of Paddington Station which have now been obliterated by cream paint). The eye is stayed by crystal fountains, statues and hangings, flags of all nations, the great elm trees of Hyde Park which the palace enclosed, ormolu lamps tandards and hundreds of ladies walking about in coloured crinolines. All seem bathed in sunlight. One does really, in this Victorian perspective, recapture the idea current at the time that everything was getting better and better and that this exhibition of the products of Industrial Art was the beginning of a material millenium of peace on earth and good will towards men. But Ruskin, who saw through most things, was suspicious. “We used to have a fair in our neighbourhood—a very fine one we thought it,” he writes in Ethics of The Dust. “You never saw such an one; but if you look at the engraving of Turner’s ‘St. Catherine’s Hill’ you will see what it was like. There were curious booths, carried on poles; and peep-shows; and music, with plenty of drums and cymbals; and much barley sugar and ginger-bread and the like; and in the alleys of this fair the London populace would enjoy themselves, after their fashion, very thoroughly. Well, the little Pthah set to work on it one day; he made the wooden poles into iron ones, and put them across, like his own crooked legs, so that you always fall over them if you don’t look where you are going; and he turned all the canvas into panes of glass, and put it up on his iron cross-poles; and made all the little booths into one great booth;—and people said it was very fine, and a new style of architecture and Mr. Dickens said nothing was ever like it in Fairyland, which was very true.” And he then proceeds to pour scorn on the exhibits. The Crystal Palace was indeed a new style of architecture. It was the first prefab, brought in numbered pieces in carts from the factories and erected swiftly in a public park. There is something ironic in the way this impermanent architecture, so well suited to an exhibition of lifeless industrial products, should have been resurrected in this century to make buildings which of all should be most permanent—homes for families.

  The impermanent, utilitarian style of the Crystal Palace was, despite Ruskin’s strictures, just the thing if industrial exhibitions were to continue. Yet later exhibitions, Alexandra Palace (1873), Olympia (1886), Earls Court (1912), The White City (1913), Wembley (1924), to cite London alone, seem to have been inspired by an over-confidence in material success. They are permanent buildings without that flimsy semi-rurality which must have been the charm of Pleasure Gardens like Vauxhall, Cremorne and Rosherville. Not that I would condemn them. All lovers of the useless, and they must be increasing in Britain hourly, could hardly fail to delight in the Alexandra Palace before the war. What a pleasure it was to tread acres of echoing boards past disused slot machines in search of the roller-skating rink where the huge steam organ would be playing to a few swirling couples, what a pleasure to open a wrong door, as I once did, to find Gracie Fields with a full chorus behind her, singing to an empty theatre. Gas, brickwork, silent dark towers, wet and windy amusement parks, bandstands where no silver band has played for twenty years, all these are associated with deserted exhibitions—and what terrible crimes, hinted at by Denton Welch or invented by Graham Greene, may not be perpetrated in the dark, deserted refreshment rooms or cloak-rooms where water drips everlastingly into stained, cracked and no longer hygienic porcelain. All that is part of the romance of decay.

  As soon as exhibitions become permanent buildings like those I have mentioned, they quickly look out-of-date Their appeal is in being in the very latest style when they are erected. Decoration, to convey the latest style, even if it is a coating of chromium pseudo-simplicity as at the Glasgow Exhibition of the nineteen-thirties, must predominate. Hence the sad wildernesses of the White City, hence that mysterious area of minor Metroland around the Wembley Stadium where for all I know those concrete temples of Empire may still be standing among thin poplars and railway lines.

  Cinemas too have their origin in fairs. They were, in living memory, booths where people paid a few pence to see the phenomenon of moving photographs. The exaggerated language of the huckster, “the most daring, stupendous, thrilling spectacle ever staged in the history of the universe,” applies as much to the architecture of the cinema as it does to the language of the playbills, trailers and advertisements of films in the daily prints. However much the film, so far as producers and directors are concerned, may progress towards an art, the exhibition side is still in the hands of those who have the mentality of the old fairs. There is hardly a cinema in Britain, except for a highbrow exception like The Curzon, which is not architecturally on the outside a showy attempt to be up-to-date. The interiors, whether “atmospheric” and designed to lo
ok like the Garden of Allah, a Moorish mosque or Imperial Rome, are designed as an exotic day-dream. That day-dream looks particularly pitiful in daylight when the manager has not yet assumed his boiled shirt. The earliest cinemas to be erected as permanent buildings may still be seen in some suburban and provincial high roads, the words ELECTRIC PALACE done in plaster among baroque twirls reminiscent of the White City, and a little pay box in mahogany protruding out below the colossal entrance arch. They are survivals of the days when the cinema needed to attract people to go in. There is no need for a flashy entrance now, for the cinemas are the chapels of most of our people who feel it a sin not to attend each change of programme. The chief problem is to hold their increasingly sophisticated attention once they are inside. Slap up-to-date decoration may have something to do with that. There seems to me more sense in the comparatively modest façades of the Granada cinemas whose wildly fantastic interior decoration may possibly be changed as different styles come in, to suit another popular mood.

  Music-halls come half-way between the cinemas and the theatre. Their origin is older and they are more homely. They started as entertainments in public-houses and they ended as theatres with this single difference, that the bar opened straight into the auditorium as at dear old Collins’s on Islington Green.

  Theatres themselves are an older and more respectable form of architecture, Renaissance in origin—it would be absurd to connect them with the theatres of Ancient Greece and Rome since, in this country at any rate, theatres did not exist until after the Reformation. Nor do many of the older ones survive. The round and open wooden theatres of Shakespeare’s time, Wren’s Drury Lane, the magic effects created by de Loutherbourg with real waterfalls at Sadler’s Wells, not all the water in the New River has saved. They were destroyed by either fire or fashion. The most complete survival is the Theatre Royal at Bristol and even that is largely 1800 in date. Mr. John Summerson, that learned and mordantly entertaining writer on architecture, says that very little of their history is known. “The theatres of this country have never been much studied as architecture, though many books have been written on their owners, lessees and managers and the men and women whom their audiences have applauded.” And this is surprising, for when great dramatists were alive and actors like Garrick, whom all the world of intellect knew, the best architects were found to design theatres. James Wyatt and Henry Holland both built Drury Lane theatres, Nash designed the Haymarket, Smirke Covent Garden, Foulston designed Plymouth’s Theatre Royal. All these buildings have been destroyed or altered out of recognition “by successive generations of profit-eager lessees.”

  Many fine Victorian theatres survive of which the best is the Theatre Royal at Newcastle (Benjamin Green, architect), almost a Georgian building and mercifully preserved from successive generations of fashion. In London the noblest surviving building—in my opinion more impressive within and without than Covent Garden—is the Royal English Opera House (1892, Thomas Collcutt, architect), now called the Palace Theatre. This is on an irregularly shaped island site. Its main façade on Cambridge Circus is concave and the awkwardness of the corners of such a façade is overcome by graceful octagonal turrets. The dressing rooms are all along the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the building and serve as a buffer against the noise of that main thoroughfare. The building slopes inwards from the auditorium and is acoustically a great success, though it is built on the opposite principles to those generally employed in theatre design. The three tiers of galleries are cantilevered out—a revolution at the time—so that no columns obstruct the view of the audience. The decoration throughout is scholarly Flemish Renaissance. Nothing is skimped and the entrance hall and staircases are rich in those contrasting marbles Collcutt delighted to use and which he employed so effectively in the Holborn Restaurant. The Palace is the only theatre architecture of the last sixty years in London, or for that matter the provinces, which climbs into the regions of a work of art. But many have a splendid richness as those by Charles John Phipps (1835–97), notably His Majesty’s which was completed in the year of his death. Phipps designed some graceful, exuberant provincial theatres, of which The Gaiety, Dublin, is a still unspoiled example.

  Many of London’s smaller theatres preserved a charming quality of an Edwardian or late Victorian drawing room, with their whitewood or mahogany, plush seats and watered silk panels and electroliers. In the cheaper parts of these houses were the Dickensian fishtail gaslights in wire cages in long stone staircases and passages. But these little theatres of which the Criterion and the Comedy were outstanding examples, have been stippled, pickled, shaved, sprayed, chromiumed or simplified according to D.I.A. rules of good taste so as to have lost most of their character. Only the St. James’s survives as a charming period piece.

  Fire is, until the next war, better controlled than before. The enemy of old-fashioned theatres today is fashion. Fashion has about it that impermanence which suits the impermanent architecture of entertainment. But if ever a man wants to study a popular style exaggerated to its vulgarest terms, let him look at the decoration of the buildings of entertainment. Cherubs will have chubbier cheeks and bottoms, caryatids have more protuberant breasts, art nouveau water lilies be more attenuated, cubes and triangles outstrip the ugliest followers of the worst of Picasso’s cubist period, and if the word goes round “be functional” wall spaces will be plainer, chromium shinier, off-white be more off-white in or upon the theatres, cinemas, music halls, exhibition buildings, bandstands, piers and restaurants of the kingdom. Only the fairs survive.

  9

  LONDON RAILWAY STATIONS

  THE study of railway stations is something like the study of churches. It can be turned into archæological detection work. For piscina, read cast-iron lamp bracket; for arcading, read girder construction; for transepts, read waiting-rooms; for hangings, read tin advertisements. Then with very little practice anyone with an eye for detail can date the objects inspected.

  Picture a disused platform of a rather forgotten station, let us say South Hampstead, the first station after Euston (2½ miles) on the old L.M.S. electric line to Watford. It opens late and shuts early and few people seem to use it. When I was a boy we called it Loudon Road and the booking office building stood, as it still stands, looking rather like a small mid-Victorian brick Vicarage, harmonising happily with the Gothic fancies of this lilac-shaded part of St. John’s Wood. I should think from the style of architecture it was built in the late ’seventies by which time enough platforms had been constructed at Euston to make it possible for the London & North Western to run an enlarged suburban service. I have never departed from nor alighted at South Hampstead. Not being modern, my hours are too long either side of the day to take advantage of its times of opening. I prefer to imagine the station. I like to think that it contains the various fittings of a former age for which my eye is always on the watch when I use an unfamiliar station. Perhaps there are some very old tickets in the booking office—a first-class return to Chalk Farm (which would mean going down to Euston and coming back again), would probably be printed with “Loudon Road” and the letters L.N.W.R. Under the treads of the stairs to the platform there may be those tin advertisements saying IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS in blue on an orange ground, insisting, as one ascends, on the weakness of one’s heart and its need for the stamina which those pills supply. Still in imagination, I walk right down to the end of the platform to the oldest lamp standard, a graceful thing on twisted columns with, perhaps, a six-sided glass cage for the gas-burner and the name of the iron foundry where it was made at the base of its column. Against the station wall there may be tin signs for MAZAWATTEE TEA and the still-familiar black and blue splodge of STEPHEN’S INK on a white ground. And, of course, there will be those two old friends VENO’S LIGHTNING COUGH CURE and DR. J. COLLIS BROWNE’S CHLORODYNE.

  Then what waiting rooms may there not be! Gothic Revival cast-iron grates in which no fire has been lighted since the days when a mountain of glowing coal wa
rmed the early-morning pin-striped bottoms of city gentlemen who used this station as the preliminary part of a journey from Boundary Road to Euston, thence by steam train on the inner circle from Euston Square to Aldersgate. (Ah, Aldersgate! alas the Refreshment Room has been bombed, the Refreshment Room at the top of the steps surveying all four platforms from the height of the great semi-circular glass roof, that Refreshment room where, as Mr. John Hayward once pointed out to me, the words AFTERNOON TEAS A SPECIALITY were affixed in letters of white china to the plate-glass window). The walls of the waiting room will be green. The lighting gas. There will perhaps be a framed collection of photographs, “Beauty spots” of the L. & N.W.R.—Killarney; Sackville Street, Dublin; Blarney Castle (the L. & N.W. always liked to give the impression that it owned all the Irish railways); George’s Landing Stage, Liverpool; Bettws-y-coed; Warwick Castle. These will be in sepia with gilt lettering on the wooden surround. Then there will be a framed looking-glass in which it will be impossible to see all one’s face at once because painted on the surface are the words IDRIS TABLE WATERS and a long maiden in clothes rather like a water lily holding in her hand a sparkling glass of IDRIS. These are but some of the delights I imagine there may be at South Hampstead.

  The serious scholar of London railway stations will make the historical approach. I unfold the map of my Bradshaw’s Railway Companion for 1841. London shrinks to its size a hundred and nine years ago. I notice that there were fields beyond Regent’s Park and Pentonville and Islington and Hackney. Bethnal Green was in London, Stratford was not. South-east of Bermondsey and south of Walworth there were still fields between terraces and squares, fields that in two years were to be filled with either Italianate merchants’ houses amid laurel shrubbery or with rows of two-storey artisans’ dwellings. Chelsea and Brompton and Kensington still had separate personalities. No railways dared to invade the centre of London. Westminster was even more sacred than the City. There they are on the map, little pink lines, pushing tentatively towards the heart of the metropolis.