A Short History of British Architecture - from Stonehenge to the Shard
Simon Jenkins, Penguin Viking, £26.99

SIMON JENKINS is one of our last remaining journalists of the old school – he writes with passion as well as compassion, perceptively and rationally, in a style that combines articulateness, erudition and accessibility. 

Jenkins has been deputy chair of English Heritage and today is chair of the National Trust. Although he is a conservative with a small “c” and despises many of those with a capital “C”, his commentaries are always provocative and apposite. This, his latest book, will enlighten and entertain, as it will undoubtedly annoy some of our more extremist architectural iconoclasts. 

His book is a celebration of our architectural heritage, a lament for our failures, and a call for more public involvement in architectural decision-making. Although often labelled as an architectural conservative, he argues rightly that we are all consumers of architecture, and it therefore makes sense for everyone to learn its language. “My intention above all,” he writes, “is to inform what should be a public debate on the future appearance of Britain’s built environment. I believe people will only join this debate if they can understand its history and language.” 

Jenkins rightly bemoans the fact that architecture is not taught in schools alongside, art, drama and literature. When you think about how central architecture is to our lives – the homes we live in, the offices, hospitals and factories we work in, and the buildings we shop in – it’s striking that we are rarely if ever involved in any sort of democratic process to determine what buildings are planned and where they are built in our communities. He does overlook, however, the lack of dialogue between architects and those who will have to live and work in their buildings, and that under capitalism architects are beholden to the financiers rather than local communities.

Nevertheless, his book does offer a fascinating story of why Britain looks the way it does, from pre-historic Stonehenge to the tower-blighted cityscapes of today.

He argues that the post-war infatuation with Le Corbusier and associated utopian concepts did untold damage to many cities, despite the progressive goals of their advocates. While their aim of ridding our cities of slum housing and creating new more “democratic” concepts of social housing was laudable, the results were often alienating brutalist housing estates rather than new living and thriving communities as a replacement for the old industrial ones of cramped tenements. 

In this context, Jenkins, the conservative, can’t help taking a sideswipe at communism. “Such utopianism,” he writes, “was happening around the world, especially under communist regimes. I saw with my own eyes the bulldozers demolishing the beautiful centre of Bucharest in Romania.” No mention of the meticulous restoration after the devastation of war of St Petersburg, Warsaw or Dresden by “communist regimes.”

In his polemic against the plethora of high-rise towers today, he is unforgiving. About London, he writes acerbically: “They rose wherever a planning committee had been bullied or bribed into approving one. What I was seeing was the collapse of any strategy for the visual appearance of the capital over the past half-century.” Tower blocks have sprouted willy-nilly with no integrated planning and no reflection on their impact on the overall architectural ambience of our cities.

The building of tower blocks and prestige high-rises, he writes, “became detached from normal planning. While most European cities guarded historic enclaves as legacies of the past and were rigidly protected from the tower mania,” in Britain developers were given carte blanche.

Jenkins does not, however, underline the role of big, often transnational, money in the promotion and financing of such prestige buildings, and the impact of “soft touch” regulation introduced by the Tories and continued under Labour.

He is no advocate of socialism and unjustly tars Ken Livingstone with the same brush as he does Boris Johnson as a crazed tower-building freak, and accuses him of having “a fixation that his metropolis should be made to ‘look more like Manhattan.’” 

However, in an article in the Independent in 2001 Livingstone expressly addressed the tower block issue and made it clear that: “London isn’t Manhattan. What I envisage,” he wrote, “is a small number of tall buildings on locations suitable for their development, to meet an identified economic need and to contribute to London’s overall vitality as a world city. I would like to reach agreement with English Heritage about where clusters [of tower blocks] would be acceptable... We may have to disagree ultimately, but at this stage I hope that economic interests and heritage concerns can be reconciled.”

Despite the caveats, Jenkins’s book is a very useful and informative guide through our architectural history.