Hinterland

It may be odd, ornamental and otherworldly – but it’s time we took our interwar architecture seriously

Gavin Stamp, who died at the still early age of 69 in 2017, was probably Britain’s leading architectural historian. He combined an encyclopedic knowledge with acute analysis. His opinions were laced with wit that could be pungent. All these characteristics are embodied in a new book, Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 (Profile,

£40), published posthumously and prepared by his widow, Rosemary Hill, herself a noted architectural historian.

Perhaps because the period feels recent (though it began 105 years ago) and modern (it certainly covers the advent of modernism in Britain), and there are so many buildings of the period extant (virtually every town has on its inner outskirts a 1930s housing estate), we are disposed to take the work of the 1920s and 1930s less seriously, and to scrutinise it less rigorously, than far rarer medieval, Tudor, Georgian or even Victorian survivals. But Stamp shows in his book – which is filled with superb illustrations – just what works of art many interwar buildings are.

He begins with a survey of war memorials, exploring how these reflected both a backward-looking traditionalism and a forwardlooking sense of innovation. The latter can be attributed to one of the heroes of the book, Edwin Lutyens, whose work on the Cenotaph in Whitehall (unveiled in 1920) and, a decade later, on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, at Thiepval in France, showed that the commemoration of vast numbers of dead – around 888,000 from the British Empire alone – could inspire new artistic means of expression.

Stamp also shows how the progress from the grandeur of Edwardian baroque to the Jazz

Age influence of art deco came slowly. Great stone edifices went up in the City of London, noticeably bank headquarters and the brutalisation of Soane’s Bank of England itself, which capitalised on the advance of steel-frame technology: though, as Stamp points out, there were no skyscrapers in London. The tallest pre-war building, the

Senate House for the University of London, was allowed only initially on the condition that above the eighth floor (about halfway up) the structure would remain a shell.

The influence of America had become stronger right through the 1920s. When the palace of the Devonshires in Piccadilly was sold and pulled down early in that decade, the edifice that replaced it was a steel-framed Americanstyle apartment block. In the next decade, the development of steel Crittall windows and imaginative mouldings signalled the arrival of art deco. On the large scale, this is embodied in Frances Milton Cashmore’s Shell Mex House, which overlooks the Thames from the Strand, which Stamp compares to “an art deco mantelpiece ornament blown up large”.

Early art deco announces itself with sleek lines and curves; crudely in London at the Dorchester hotel, but more beautifully and brazenly at the Midland hotel in Morecambe, which with its dazzling white elevations must have seemed as if from another planet when Oliver Hill built it in 1932-33.

But art deco could be solid as well as ethereal, and the same year, Battersea Power Station, by Giles Gilbert Scott, gave London a taste of the towering modern

London’s tallest prewar building was not allowed to be occupied above the eighth floor

gothic of the same architect’s Liverpool Cathedral. But, as Stamp points out, the mounting influences of the mid- to late1930s were from Sweden, Holland and Germany. The remarkable De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, which opened in 1935, gleaming white like the Midland hotel but even more revolutionary in its shapes and forms, was the work of Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. Mendelsohn, like Walter Gropius, was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, proof that persecution can accidentally hasten the spread of ideas.

Stamp relates how domestic architecture accounted for some of the most far-sighted buildings, such as by Ernő Goldfinger and Chermayeff, notably in north London. And there are the factories: the Hoover, still with us, the Firestone, scandalously demolished, and the underrated masterpiece by Owen Williams in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, for Boots. This book is a magnificent monument in itself to a fine architectural writer.