Harry Mount on British Buildings

Tell me about Summoned by Bells, the Betjeman.

Well, this is his verse autobiography and I’ll tell you why I think it’s fantastic. Most people write about buildings in a very, very dry way – ‘There’s a buttress from 1490’ – but he does it in a much more human way, like he’ll talk in the same way about them as he does about the girls he loves or his great friends, in a beautiful, wonderful, moving way and he doesn’t use the jargon, even though he knows the jargon inside out. He just communicates the beauty of buildings much better than a dry, stiff, architectural historian does. Also, in that particular book he talks about growing up and the way he first sees buildings as a child, and he drops things in all the time. He was brought up at the foot of the hill down towards Kentish Town from Highgate and he talks about the church where he was christened, a big Victorian church. And he wrote some fantastic poems in Summoned by Bells and elsewhere about Kentish Town which I love. It’s where I live, but not many people do write poems about Kentish Town. He gets it exactly right and he’s not being patronising about rundown parts of London. He gets the beauty and the feel of places and who goes there and what it looks like from the top of a bus and just observing. So, I think he’s an absolute genius when it comes to talking about buildings in human terms.

Does he single any out?

Well, he talks about going to Marlborough [School] which he absolutely hated and he talks about going to Oxford which he was chucked out of for failing his exams, and he loved the buildings, particularly Magdalen, where he was, and he imagines himself as an old don in New Buildings occasionally taking a book of poetry down from his shelves. But he was plucked away from this Elysium by failing his exams. So, it’s always like that – he’ll describe a beautiful building but it will be related to his life as well.

OK, tell me about the Osbert Lancaster.

He does a sort of equivalent thing but in pictures. He’s got a brilliant thing in that he knows inside out your buttresses from your perpendicular churches but the drawings he does are very simple and beautiful and funny. It’s very hard to be funny about architecture, but he’s good at doing funny drawings of whatever it might be – a Norman church or a Roman temple with a slightly hungover legionary in front of it. He mostly does British stuff but he spent a lot of time travelling. He’ll do a picture of an English Renaissance church and outside it a crane about to knock it down and 30 workmen. Or he’ll do a picture of an Oxford college and have two stuffy dons walking by. He’ll always make it human and not dry and the actual building will be done in a cartoony way but with all the details done perfectly. So it’s easy to look at but you can’t fault him. When I teach, I show the details from this book because he’s fantastic at illustrating the individual details of the buildings he draws.

And who is he?

He died in 1986 and he was a friend of Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh and all that lot and was most famous as the pocket cartoonist at the Daily Express, and he was very funny as a cartoonist, but his other love was buildings.

The Pattern of English Building, Alec Clifton-Taylor.

Now that one is a bit drier, but it’s fantastic for anyone interested in buildings. You realise that, until about 100 years ago, every single building was built out of the stuff that was in the ground beneath it. And he’s brilliant at saying what all the bits of stone are that are under the ground across Britain. So, for example, there’s a big, big broad sash of limestone that comes all the way down from Yorkshire and through the Midlands and down into Dorset and all along there you get that fantastic creamy building stone, so you’re able to build huge stone buildings, much taller church spires and as soon as you go off that stone sash you’ve got to turn to brick or mud or whatever else there is beneath the ground. He brilliantly describes every part of England and the different building stone there and the different brick you get from the earth. If you’ve got lots of iron in your earth you’re going to get much, much redder bricks and once you take this in you start to see that England is built out of what’s underneath and in bits of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire you can see where this band of stone runs out. You see dry stone walls and then it suddenly runs out and you get hedges. It’s a brilliant view of England from underneath. The best picture in it – and who’d have thought geology was so interesting? – is a picture of England but with all the geological bits underneath and then what the buildings on top look like. Once you think of it like that you can never think of it in any other way.

Now, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830.

That is quite a...