Not long after the second world war, ex-sergeant Eric Hobsbawm moved into a flat in an 18th-century house on the north side of Clapham common. "Outside," he writes in his recent autobiography, "I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past." The Leipzig-born Pevsner, with his newly acquired British citizenship, was working on a classic early volume in his planned Buildings of England series: London Except the City of London and Westminster. It was always known to Pevsner fans simply as London Except.
This book symbolised his love affair with his adopted country. Many people had written architectural, topographical or antiquarian guides to London. With a few picturesque exceptions, such as Hampstead, Richmond or Greenwich, these books had always focused on the usual sights of Westminster and the City. Eventually published in 1952, London Except made the full circuit of all the other boroughs within the old London County Council area: from St Pancras and Islington in the north to Lambeth and Lewisham in the south; from Hammersmith and Wandsworth in the west to Poplar and Woolwich in the east. It was in these places that most Londoners lived. These urban tracts had been built up by the Victorians. Within them lay—then largely unregarded—baroque wonders like Hawksmoor's great east end churches, or the Georgian terraces of Barnsbury (which was known as Pentonville before the estate agents waded in).
Pevsner's task extended to the whole of England, of course, not just London (volumes on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland came later, from other hands). His 46 volumes followed the traditional county boundaries, partly because that was how he had begun, but also because he rightly believed that these older divisions had strong historical and cultural meaning. (Some of the newcomer counties that the series ignores, such as Avon or Humberside, have themselves vanished from the map.) As in the new London volumes, the once slender handbooks are now bulky glove-compartment books.
"The young always write too much," Pevsner muttered, as he plunged on at his astonishing rate of two succinct but authoritative volumes a year. This delivery schedule was what he had promised to the Penguin founder Allen Lane, and Penguin continued to publish the series until Yale took it on in 2002. Helped latterly by various assistants who seldom survived the pace, Pevsner completed the 46 volumes in 1974, with Staffordshire. That grubby county, even more than Victorian London, had been a blank on the map for less adventurous architectural historians.
Before Hobsbawm moved south of the river, he lived in a flat in Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town. A few years later, a literary enclave came together in this street, including Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin. The cartoonist Mark Boxer based a chic comic-strip, The Stringalongs, on life here. It had evolved into a smart high-bohemian address. But to 28-year-old Hobsbawm in 1946, it was "the western outpost of the vast zone of London's bombed and as yet totally ungentrified east end." It was cheap, and handy for buses to the British Museum.
No one would now call Gloucester Crescent the "east end." And the tide of gentrification has since swept ever eastwards. Islington was undeniably east-end-ish until at least the 1960s. Writing Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), George Orwell, who had lived in Canonbury, placed Winston Smith's excursions into prole-land in "the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been St Pancras station" (that is, the streets Tony and Cherie Blair moved from to take up residence in Downing Street). Now even parts of Hackney and Bethnal Green have moved psychologically, if not geographically, into the west end. London has become increasingly professional class. The Georgian houses, or even pleasant Victorian ones, which such families would like to inhabit, are a "positional good," as the economists say. No one is manufacturing any more. To find a suitable home, you must throw your net ever further out. You may even have to reappreciate the charms of the much despised inter-war semi.
Pevsner threw his net out first. Looking back at Pevsner's achievement, Colin MacInnes, novelist and social chronicler, wrote that London Except was "an essay about buildings… but even more about the Londoners who live, work, worship, shop, bathe, study, get arrested or die inside them." It was social history as well as architectural history. Not enough people, especially planners, architects and borough officials, read the lesson of that history. Leafing through London 5, you see that since London Except an entire wave of disastrous urban decisions has come and gone. I was a witness to this, and London Except was my guide.
In 1952, Pevsner noted that 19th-century Bethnal Green "was London's slum area par excellence." A survey showed that 89 per cent of houses still had no bathroom; some older tenements had only taps and lavatories on the stairs. But he warned against oversimplified do-goodery: "The most characteristic feature of domestic Bethnal Green is the endless streets of two-storeyed cottages of c1840-60. They certainly do not look as desperate as they did when overcrowded and neglected. In fact there is no question but that the early Improved Dwellings or Model Dwellings [built by Victorian reformers such as the Peabody Trust] look infinitely worse. Yet everybody, including Lord Shaftesbury and Dickens, agreed then that they were a spectacular improvement. Dickens wrote in 1852 to… the Baroness Burdett-Coutts: 'I have no doubt whatsoever that the large houses are best. You can never, for the same money, offer anything like the same advantages in small houses.'"
The real trouble with the old two-storey cottages was too many people in them and not enough internal plumbing. The message was missed. New do-gooders came along, for whom big was once again best. A new Pevsner guide to Liverpool, published last year, states unequivocally: "Wartime bomb damage was less destructive than the subsequent efforts of architects and planners." The same was even more true of London's east end, of which 1,321 acres were marked down for "comprehensive redevelopment"—the largest such designation anywhere in the capital. I lived in Stepney while this megalomaniac plan was unfolding.
What did it mean? At one level, I think of a wainscoted 18th-century house in Spitalfields which Pevsner thought Bolingbroke had lived in (though London 5 reckons he lived across the way). It was pulled down in the mid-1960s to provide more "hard standing" for the fruit and vegetable market. In the 1980s the house was rebuilt in replica by the local conservation trust.
At another level, I think of three 17-storey skyscrapers which rose up at Stepney Green from 1958-64: "the most dramatic postwar composition in the area," according to London 5, and the tallest then in the east end. A Henry Moore sculpture lounged on a grassy knoll between the blocks, to bring culture to the masses. The skyscrapers replaced low terraces, built by the Mercers' Company in the early 19th century, which had lasted satisfactorily for about 130 years. All three skyscrapers were demolished in 1999-2000, after a mere 40 years; they were declared dangerous because of falling glass. They were replaced by "uneventful low housing"—that is, a 21st-century version of what was there before. The Henry Moore went to the Yorkshire sculpture park.
My family and I also lived in a Mercers' house, just along from the skyscrapers. Our outside brickwork bore the company's emblem of a virgin's head. Today, it is one of the few old local houses still standing. This may be because it has become an undertaker's: a "community resource." When we wanted more elbow room, we looked around for a house to buy, but almost everywhere was under threat of demolition. We tried to buy the "Bolingbroke" house, but the planning department told us how little future it had.
By then I had already accumulated a debt of gratitude to Pevsner. After reading MacInnes's appreciative essay, I had gone out and bought the paperback edition of London Except, which still sits, tattered, on my shelves. Our first son had just been born. I did all the book's east end "perambulations" within walking distance, with an actual perambulator: from John Soane's Bethnal Green church to the dock-master mansions at Wapping Pierhead. I had long been interested in architecture in a general way. But I first began to understand it on these compare and contrast expeditions.
Pevsner was an incomparable educator. Wherever I went across England, I started picking up the local volumes, until I had them all. He opened eyes everywhere. I grew up near Halifax, in the Yorkshire Pennines. In the town's old heart there is a large, galleried 18th-century Piece Hall. It now features on all tourism posters. Itinerant merchants came here to sell lengths of cloth they had bought from hilltop handloom weavers (these weavers' story is central to EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, largely researched when Thompson lived in Halifax as a university extramural lecturer). When Pevsner published his West Riding volume in 1959, few knew that the Piece Hall existed. Surrounded by slum streets, it was where the council kept its lorries. "Nature has done much for Halifax, architecture little," Pevsner wrote. "The mills have ruined natural beauties. They have replaced them by what may be visually exciting and inspire awe. But with architectural beauty they have nothing to do." The Piece Hall, built in 1775, was "the most noteworthy architectural monument of Halifax." Half a century later, almost all the mills have gone—though Dean Clough, once Europe's biggest carpet factory, is a successful arts centre—whereas the Piece Hall survives. Thanks to Pevsner.
When Pevsner began his London perambulations, the terrain was still strewn with bombsites, all of them bright pink in springtime with willow-herb blossom (see the descriptions in Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net). But demolitions, going far beyond the bomb damage, had already begun.
In Bethnal Green, for example, Baroness Burdett-Coutts's grandest charitable experiment was Columbia Market: "one of the great follies of the Victorian Age," Pevsner wrote. Meant to protect the poor from dishonest traders, it had lofty aisles, elaborate tracery and a high central hall: "a structure as proud as any Flemish Guildhall of the prosperous middle ages." But people preferred the familiar shops and street markets. By the mid-20th century, it was derelict. For all his gentle mockery, Pevsner—who became one of the founders of the conservationist Victorian Society—added: "Needless to say, the building should be preserved at all cost and made some reasonable use of."
By the time of my own perambulations, only a few stumps and a bare space showed where it had stood. London 5 reports that one nursery school still has Gothic railings and gate-piers, "the sole remnants." The main site "is occupied by lamentable slabs of flats," built by the London County Council. All this is right next to the present-day Columbia Road flower market. The stalls are busy every Sunday with gentrifier shoppers from Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
Pevsner has his detractors. The county guides—of which London Except was second, after Cornwall—were written at amazing speed. Assistants prepared notes. Pevsner descended with his driver (at first this was his wife Lola) and did the rounds. The top score was 19 parishes in a day. Pevsner wrote up the notes that evening, "with iron determination; otherwise all would go dim and dead." Apart from tidying up, only the introduction remained to be added when he got back to his family home in an unglamorous terrace in Hampstead Garden Suburb. For one volume, the summertime driving was especially hot; he dedicated it "To the inventor of the iced lolly." The astonishing thing is that there were not more errors. "Don't be deceived, gentle reader," he wrote, "the first editions are only ballons d'essai; it is the second editions which count."
He probably never foresaw how long the revision process would take. Nor, in east London, could he foresee the enormous changes. Waiting for some pause in the onrush is no doubt one reason why London 5 has taken so long to arrive. Crucially, as London 5 points out: "The hoped-for utopia did not anticipate the later 20th century closure of the docks."
No longer would the smell of imported spice or coffee, which I vividly remember, waft over the high dock walls. In the urban landscape, the docks were like prisons, carving out huge, secretive chunks of territory. No one apart from those who worked there ever went inside. The walls were designed, not always successfully, to protect bonded goods from theft. In the east end, the industrial revolution had mainly meant big breweries. These also closed. No more smells of beer brewing on hot summer nights, either. Charrington's brewery was demolished. Truman's, on Brick Lane, became (of course) an arts, media and office centre. The new face of the east end is Canary Wharf. This sprang from an eccentric idea by the wonderfully named American developer, G Ware Travelstead, hence its "transatlantic scale."
Like all the London revision volumes, London 5 takes its coverage right out to the suburbs, far away from the tourist trade: the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Newham, Redbridge, Waltham Forest. These are a litany of the places eastenders increasingly fled to. Sometimes, as in the LCC's vast Becontree estate—so handy for the Ford works at Dagenham—this took place under local authority sponsorship. More often, people moved out under their own steam. Many of the Jews of the east end escaped to Golders Green. Others, like my shopkeeper landlord in Stepney, escaped to Ilford (now in Redbridge).
The old east end—the borough of Tower Hamlets—is still the core of the new volume, at more than 300 pages. Some of Pevsner's personal foibles have been removed. In his other bestselling books, such as Pioneers of Modern Design and An Outline of European Architecture, he was a devoted advocate of early-period modernism—meaning, roughly, the kind of architecture Mies van der Rohe built. In 1977, a former student of Pevsner's, David Watkin, published a brilliant polemic, Morality and Architecture. He showed how, from August Pugin to Pevsner, some favoured style was recurrently perceived as the social and cultural acme to which all should strive. For Pugin it was Gothic; for Pevsner, the modernism of the Bauhaus.
But as new buildings were erected after the second world war, Pevsner often found that they did not meet his strict standards. The new brutalists, led by James Stirling, preferred fun and games to a purist simplicity. Pevsner dismissed them as "fantasts and freaks." He once said that, with modernism, he felt "the coming of the millennium." In the Lambeth pages of London Except he wrote a paean of praise for the Royal Festival Hall, hoping that this was the calm, rational harbinger of his millennium. His fiercest contempt was always reserved for the style we now call art deco, which many east end factories adopted. This, he fumed, was "the 20th century at its worst… 'borax' as the Americans say, that is, bogus streamlined, with the long bands of windows and other elements of modern design used purely as 'motifs.'" He detested the implication that modernism was a style like any other. Strangely, for a man whose Jewish mother committed suicide in Germany in 1942 rather than be hauled off to a death camp, Pevsner wondered: "Was that flashiness a special Jewish favourite?" In London 5, the rag-trade factories designed by H Victor Kerr, one of the art deco architects Pevsner abominated, are blandly recorded as "much in evidence."
Most of the new Docklands is as humdrum and utilitarian as those old Bethnal Green streets of cottages. But London's great design achievements have always been domestic and unbreathtaking. Only in London would a fine neoclassical building like the British Museum be stuck in a side street. Nicholas Taylor's fine polemic, The Village in the City, was a pioneering defence of the friendly, petit-bourgeois Victorian streets which were still being destroyed in swathes in the early 1970s. Taylor had studied and worked with Pevsner. He remembered Pevsner telling him "how a young Italian architect, whom he had been taking on a tour of those few isolated examples in London of monumental architecture that began to match up to the best in Europe (Greenwich… Greenwich… Greenwich…) had kept insisting on stopping the car in perfectly ordinary spec builders' avenues and crescents of the 1920s, exclaiming at their so exquisite design." As London 5 shows, these are the kind of houses that suburban Redbridge or Waltham Forest offer by the acre.
Many architecture writers had a misplaced faith in the intended utopia of early modernism, a movement whose origins were mostly German. Some of Pevsner's traditionalist critics have tried to make more of this than they should, with unpleasant accusations about his "outsider" status in English culture. His family were Russian Jewish. Though Pevsner converted to Lutheranism, this would not have saved him, or his wife, in Nazi Germany. In 1933 he fled to England after being expelled from his university lectureship.
In fact, any outsider quality was an advantage. He was better placed than many to compare and contrast. He became a star in the galaxy of German scholarly talent that took refuge in Britain. As an alien, he was briefly interned under wartime Regulation 18B. As a Jew by birth, he was listed in the Nazis' Black Book of those scheduled for "protective custody" if an invasion succeeded. After that war, he wanted to show in his guides that, on its own terms, English architecture could match anything in Europe. And he succeeded.
Sometimes John Betjeman is wheeled on to show how an English critic could do it better. But Betjeman, for all his merits, was no scholar. Pevsner himself realised that, in focusing on architecture rather than on the wider context, he could sometimes miss out what made a street or a village attractive. For example, the revised edition of his Cornwall guide borrowed, with permission, a description of Polperro from Betjeman's Shell Guide to the same county. Polperro had been "left out of the first edition entirely because it has no individual building of special merit, but, as a whole, it is certainly worth visiting." Later editions have taken the point.
But nobody can be right all the time. In Coming Home, an anthology of Betjeman's prose published by his daughter in 1997, we find the future poet laureate in Sheffield, enthusing over the now notorious Park Hill flats: "thoughtful and ingenious and people do not much miss the gardens they never had." He also remarks how "successful aesthetically are the square tower blocks arising in the city and its outskirts." They are "well proportioned and even noble." Contrariwise, writing about Manchester in 1969, Pevsner looked with mounting doubt at the blocks going up all round the city centre. He asked "whether flats on the tenth or twentieth floor are what people want, or indeed what it is socially justifiable to give them." He thought the new housing would be looked back on in 2060 "with as much scandalised curiosity as we feel when looking back at the low-cost housing of the 1860s." He was only wrong about the timescale. The blocks were slums within 20 years.
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield, which Betjeman admired, were built according to the prescriptions of a husband and wife team of architects, Peter and Alison Smithson. They built little themselves, but their writing and teaching was hugely, and usually disastrously, influential. In Tower Hamlets, looking out towards Canary Wharf, there is a London example of how they thought things should be: gaunt, windswept and desolate. You can glimpse the Smithsons' Robin Hood Gardens above you on the right as you plunge into the southbound Blackwall tunnel. London 5 acknowledges that the estate is seen by Smithson fans as an "apotheosis" of public housing, an "icon" of perfection. But Bridget Cherry and her associate on the revise, Charles O'Brien, are having none of this. Making the worst of this "horrible site," Robin Hood Gardens is, they record, "ill-planned to the point of being inhumane." The estate is worth a visit if you want to see what public housing should never be like. It is a soulless, ominous ghetto in which migrants and refugees have been dumped. No old-style working-class friendliness. No prospect of gentrification. The only question is: when will the cranes with demolition balls come?
Pevsner died in 1983, aged 81. I met him once, as an ignorant young journalist. I was writing up the art nouveau revival and he was willing enough for me to look in on him, at very short notice, in his room at Birkbeck College. In some ways, despite the glint in his eye, he was the epitome of the German professor, with his steel-rimmed glasses. But he was friendly, helpful and even amusing. For him, public education was a lifelong cause. Not only gentrifiers gained.
With London 5, Pevsner's devotion to putting the word around is carried forward long after his death. Take, for example, the deeply obscure borough of Redbridge. On the south side of Ilford High Road, you read, Barclays Bank (1913) presents a "highly distinguished temple front… calm and dignified." But "harder to love" are the 13-storey council offices (1960s): "reinforced concrete with floor bands faced in rough, dark aggregate." More cheerfully, in and around Glebelands Avenue, Woodford, you find "exemplars of different phases of suburban development," including "a particularly sumptuous array of half-timbered and turreted" 1890s villas. Meanwhile, back in Tower Hamlets, the old churchyard of St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel, has been renamed Altab Ali Park, in memory of a young local Bangladeshi who was murdered there. A Victorian drinking fountain is set into the wall, with the inscription, "Erected by one who is known yet unknown."
Who else would tell you all this? Social change is recorded here in bricks, mortar and concrete. Strata of old and new London are laid on one top of another. A great metropolis teeters between memory and innovation. East London is where most of the experiments have been carried out. For better or worse.
