Arundel overcomes its great disappointment
In what has become a celebrated judgment, Ian Nairn declared in 1965: “There is no getting away from the fact that Arundel castle is a great disappointment.” He blamed the 19th century.
Nairn called himself “a person who drinks a lot and can’t bear either pretensions or possessiveness”. He died melancholy and alcoholic in 1983, aged 52. Gavin Stamp, the historian of architecture, summed him up thus: “During his short, furious, productive career, Ian Nairn had a more beneficial effect on the face of Britain than any other architectural writer of his generation.”
Nairn wrote half the volume on Sussex (the western part) for Nikolaus Pevsner’s series The Buildings of England, but proved unwilling to supply the condensed, detailed descriptions required for the eastern part, which Pevsner wrote himself.
That remark on the castle does not appear in the revised volume, Sussex: West, learnedly and energetically revised by Elizabeth Williamson and others. The book was launched this week with drinks in the castle’s improbable Barons’ Hall (1893-98), which the editors contradict Nairn by finding light and colourful, not “dead”.
At its deepest, Nairn presented his criticism as a question of morality. He calls the Catholic cathedral in Arundel a “moral puzzle”, because he cannot resolve how to weigh up a 19th-century replica of 13th-century Gothic church architecture. “Certainly, it cannot be dismissed as valueless,” he concludes. “To do this would be to perjure one’s eyes, because the spaces are impressive however one may deplore the attitude of mind that created them.”
Does one deplore it? The new volume omits the condemnation but Tim Hudson (reviser of the entry for Arundel) retains Nairn’s observation that the cathedral (as it became in 1965), “even more than the castle, gives Arundel its exciting un-english skyline… The distant effect is that of a building like Beauvais or even Mont St Michel, with the little town
huddling around it.” That is true and helpful. But a problem emerges, too, with an even more soaring Gothic landmark on the Downs, Lancing school chapel.
Elizabeth Williamson quotes Nairn’s opinion that it belongs to the same family as Arundel cathedral, but disagrees with his finding that, inside, “doubts creep in”. Nairn argued that “all the details come unnatural”, since the architects here had not (as JL Pearson would have done) made Gothic a language they spoke.
His reviser thinks the architects of Lancing chapel “achieved a far from runof-the mill 19th-century medievalism”, while Nairn saw, as “the whole 19thcentury tragedy, that good intentions and architectural talent are useless unless they are tuned in to the right wavelength”.
Nikolaus Pevsner’s own judgments on architecture are expressed much less explicitly than Nairn’s.
It is perhaps a tribute to Pevsner’s generosity that they worked together at all on the volumes for Surrey and Sussex. The revised edition of Sussex: West now out is essential for anyone who, like many Telegraph readers, enjoys looking at old churches and finding out about English towns, country houses and industrial design. There’s twice as much in it and it draws on recent research.
I tried it out by pottering around Shoreham, with its two remarkable medieval churches. Its value was inestimable. If you want the strong arguments of Nairn, you’ll simply have to buy a second-hand copy of the old volume for Sussex as well as the new 800-page Sussex: West volume with its 121 colour photographs.