Betjeman on churches attached to old places
John Betjeman posed a question in 1982, two years before his death: “Why is it that when you’ve read what Pevsner has to say about a building, you never want to look at that building ever again?”
For decades he had exercised an antipathy to Nikolaus Pevsner, the German who fell in love with England and devoted his life to cataloguing its churches and other notable pieces of architecture, county by county.
The remark about Pevsner’s offputting effect is quoted by the Venerable David Meara, the former Archdeacon of London, in his engaging new short book, A Passion for Places: England Through the Eyes of John Betjeman, full of apposite colour illustrations.
Betjeman’s intuitive appreciation of churches in their human setting made him an admirer of the artist John Piper, whom Meara quotes saying that “Pevsner is good at telling you everything about a place except what it’s like”.
The rival perspectives of Pevsner and Betjeman came to a head in disapproval or appreciation of the Church of England architect Ninian Comper. Meara devotes some space to this, and I think he is right.
Betjeman admired Comper’s St Cyprian, Clarence Gate, evocative of the 15th century, which Pevsner hated as an anachronistic pastiche. What Pevsner saw as mixed pastiche, Comper called “unity by inclusion”.
Moreover, Betjeman agreed with Comper that the purpose of a church was to bring people to their knees and refresh their souls, not to express the individuality of its designer.
Comper’s intentions were excellently explicated by Fr Anthony Symondson in his book on the architect and his work published in 2006. He pointed out that by using Comper to tease Pevsner, Betjeman “in the end caused a reaction which has severely damaged Comper’s reputation”.
County by county, in his Buildings of England series, Pevsner denigrated, belittled and dismissed him. “There is no reason,’’ he wrote in 1952, of St Cyprian’s, the church Betjeman lauded, “for the excesses of praise lavished on Comper’s work by those who confound aesthetic with religious emotions.’’
It was a pity, particularly as there was something of the architectural Modernist in Betjeman as well as in Pevsner. In 1939, Betjeman paired Lubetkin’s concrete penguin pool at London Zoo and Comper’s church of St Philip, Cosham, as notable modern buildings. Comper was mystified, since he regarded Modernism as “malignant”.
I don’t know that Betjeman meant to be disloyal to Comper, as Symondson suggests, by sometimes making fun of him, calling him “Sir Niminy Piminy” in a letter to the historian A L Rowse or imitating on television his way of pronouncing church as charch. Betjeman made fun of all the things he loved – more evidence to Pevsner that he was not “serious”.
Meara quotes the architectural historian Sir John Summerson’s observation that “Betjeman’s way of talking about architecture was a sort of deliberate amateurism”. He worked by evocation where Pevsner’s approach was like “installing a system of floodlights in a twilight landscape”.
The coherence of Betjeman’s vision is well served by Meara’s focus on “place”. Betjeman’s friend John Sparrow, the eccentric Warden of All Souls, wrote that “the landscape that most appeals to him is the inhabited landscape: he cannot see a place without seeing also the life that is lived in it”. Auden called him a “topophil” to whom wild, unhumanised landscapes held no charms because they lacked history.