Conservative History Journal

Tory Historian has made a momentous decision to concentrate in future blogs on books and what one can gleam from them. It will be a kind of a reading diary of books that might be considered to be relevant to the blog.

First off, a book picked up in a strange little bookshop near South Kensington station and next to Daquise restaurant (which is still operating, TH is glad to say, and serving excellent Polish food). The books is entitled Inheritance with a subtitle that explains all: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles, by Robert Sackville-West, the 7th Earl Sackville, a publisher and chairman of Knole Estates, and, with his family, the inhabitant of one part of Knole, most of which is open to the public.

The story starts with that formidable and somewhat piratical Elizabethan, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, who survived many things, including the enmity of the Earl of Leicester and who built Knole as the great Renaissance palace in the middle of Kent.

Because the various documents to do with the building and decorating have been kept and have survived through the centuries, the names of the many workmen are actually known, something that is rarely true. On pages 14 and 15 of the paperback version there are names of ironmongers, stonemasons, locksmyths, brasiers, plommers, plaisterers and so on.

The Earl supervised the building whenever he managed to get time in his busy life (he died of what must have been a stroke or a sudden heart attack in the middle of a Council meeting) and ideas were taken from books published on the Continent about architecture and decorating. There were, at the time, no architects as such and ideas were handed on from father to son, from employer to apprentice. This is what Sackville-West says after describing some of the paintings and decorations in the Great Chamber and on the Great Staircase:

These matches, and copies, show how the design scheme for Knole was assembled. They are also and example, more generally, of the Renaissance in action in England: of how ideas, or least motifs, spread. Thomas Sackville had been on grand tours of France and Italy in the 1560s, where he must have seen many of the new Renaissance buildings. He and his master craftsmen would also have been familiar with the pattern books, newly printed in France, Italy or the Netherlands, which circulated amongst a small group of builders, like source books or design magazines today, providing inspiration and templates. Patrons swapped ideas, and recommended - and poached craftsmen - to and from each other. Designs were adapted and spread across England, site by site, gradually creating a distinctive national style. This did not mean that the English builders necessarily understood the philosophy and intellectual principles that underlay the Renaissance approach to architecture: merely that they liked some of the devices, which they could then graft, in a pick-and-mix way, on to a more homegrown tradition. 

Following the publication of the highly praised biography of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner by Susie Harries, the Victorian Society will be holding a one-day seminar on October 29 about Pevsner and Victorian architecture. All details, including fees, place and time to be found through the link above. (Susie Harries's blog about Pevsner is here and very interesting it looks, too.)

Today (just in time) is the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of those men, without whom this country would definitely look completely different. Sir George Gilbert Scott is the architect who created our vision of Victorianism, whether his designs were of public buildings, domestic buildings or poorhouses. One wonders what he would make of this "elegant brasserie and bar" in the new St Pancras Hotel.

It is always a pleasure to see a gorgeous building that could have been demolished but for the wise intervention of the great Sir John Betjeman renovated and re-opened. The former Midlands Hotel, now St Pancras Renaissance Hotel is a joy to behold. Tory Historian has spent a great deal of time watching its gradual emergence from what was more little more than rubble within a fine frame and will be visiting it very soon. In the meantime, here is Mark Easton's glowing account.

The ghost of Sir John Betjeman will be grinning from ear to ear tonight as it hovers among the guests at the grand opening of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in North London.

Not only does the event mark the climax of a project to rescue and resurrect a building the poet personally sought to protect from the bulldozer barbarians of the sixties, it also glorifies an extraordinary monument to the skills of the ordinary English working man.

Well, at least, not to the sword as would have happened in centuries past. It is always pleasant to receive any kind of response to postings, even if they arrive more than a year later. A recent e-mail about last March's blog on Sir Edwin Lutyens did make Tory Historian feel reasonably happy that there were readers around who took the trouble to write but also bitterly ashamed about two unspeakably bad mistakes.

In the first place, there must have been gremlins in the system on the day and Sir Edwin's name appeared as Sir Edward in the title and in the text. Ashes and sackcloth, methinks.

Secondly, different gremlins intervened in the paragraph about Sir Edwin's family life:

There is something ineffably English about Sir Edward’s family life – the five children, born despite a less than happy marriage; the dottiness of his wife, Lady Emily Lutyens (later Lady Lutyens), who had actually proposed to him and insisted on the marriage and who later became fascinated by theosophy, Eastern religions (only some of them, one presumes) and Juddu Krishnamurti; the children, some of whom turned out to be completely conventional, some less so.

As mentioned before, Tory Historian is reading Roger Scruton’s fascinating little book, called “Beauty”. It is taking longer than expected because there is rather a lot to digest and several passages need to be read over and over. (And also because time in Prague was taken up with meetings.)

In his chapter on “Natural Beauty” he contrasts our understanding of nature and its beauties with that of art, where there is a deliberation in what is seen and presented. Then he adds:

Although true so far as it goes, that observation ignores two vital features of our encounter with the natural world. The first is the role of nature as raw material for visual art. The great landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century, such as William Kent and Capability Brown, were responding to the taste of their patrons. They lived at a time when cultivated people made discrimination between landscapes, argued over what was or was not in good taste, and set out to build, dig, plant and adjust with intentions comparable to that of the painter whom they would later commission to record the outcome.

Indeed, the cult of the ‘picturesque’ arose because our responses to landscape and our responses to painting feed into each other. The eighteenth-century habit of decorating the landscape with ruins began from a love of the Roman Campagna not as it is, but as Poussin and Claude had painted it. Tourists in the eighteenth century would often travel with a ‘Claude Glass’: a small tinted convex mirror, which helped them to appreciate the landscape by compressing and composing it in a manner reminiscent of Claude. And the landscape architects of the day regarded architectural ruins and follies, as well as classical bridges and temples, as continuous with the trees, lakes and artificial mounds of earth which were the raw material of their art.

It is difficult to believe that our attitude to natural beauty is founded completely differently from our attitude to art, when the two are so intimately connected.

Tory Historian went to the Barbican today (on the Circle Line from Westminster and it did not take all that long – what is the world coming to) but found that the Le Corbusier exhibition, much discussed in the media, does not actually open till tomorrow. Bad planning and an unusual misreading of the programme. Never rely on media write-ups, is a good motto and Tory Historian should have remembered it.

So it was off for a cup of tea to the remarkably unpleasant and unattractive old-fashioned canteen-like Waterside Café. The little booklet on the Le Corbusier exhibition and attendant programme says:

The last truly utopian planning project in London and greatly inspired by his [Le Corbusier’s] aesthetic, the Barbican presents the perfect backdrop to discover the man and his legacy.