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The Journal of Architecture

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20

Townscape: scope, scale and extent

Mathew Aitchison
a a

ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History), School of Architecture, University of Queensland, Australia Version of record first published: 12 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Mathew Aitchison (2012): Townscape: scope, scale and extent, The Journal of Architecture, 17:5, 621-642 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.724847

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Mathew Aitchison

ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History), School of Architecture, University of Queensland, Australia 1920s. With Hastings ensconced in the APs suburban Villa, it was left to Richards to nd a replacement editor for the AR in London. He nominated the emigre architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who had been in the country for less than ten years but had already published a number of articles in the AR and was about to publish a second major book.4 Pevsners early years in England had not been easy; with the onset of war, things had only become worse.5 He had been briey interned in 1940, but was soon released, and narrowly avoided being shipped to Australia with other enemy aliens.6 Pevsner had swept rubble from the streets and re-watched from the roofs of Londons historic buildings: an editorial position at a magazine of the British Establishment was a major advancement.7 Hastings had proved himself an insightful editor throughout his term, with a good eye for attracting the best people for his paper, but it was mainly Richards who ran the magazine. Pevsners editorial experience, on the other hand, was limited: now he was charged with managing an internationally renowned magazine for an indenite period under the most extreme of conditions. Pevsner was a good choice, not only for his scholarly credentials and reliability, but as an enemy alien he was not liable to be enlisted for war duty like many of the ARs contributors. Besides Pevsners duties of bringing out the monthly editions of the AR, Hastings soon put him
1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.724847

Background
Despite the looming catastrophe of war in the late 1930s, The Architectural Reviews (AR) war policy was one of silence. This policy was more stubborn hope than conviction, born of the chance the war might still disappear and life could return to normal. But any such hope was dashed in December, 1940, when a German bomb scored a direct hit on the ARs printers in London.1 The result: the January, 1941, edition was the only number of the AR not to appear during the entire war and soon after the magazines policy was refocused to include it.2 Under the persistent threat of the Blitz and with Britains economy consumed by war, the ARs editors had more pressing concerns than developing new campaigns in architecture and town planning. The ofces of the ARs parent company, the inuential publishing house The Architectural Press (AP), had already been evacuated from the prestigious Queen Annes Gate to a suburban address in Cheam. After the evacuation, the ARs longstanding editor J.M. Richards had continued to run the magazine in London out of a small suitcase.3 But in the spring of 1942, Richards withdrew from the AR and applied for a war job. He left for Cairo one year later and would not return until February, 1946. Hubert de Cronin Hastings was the enigmatic proprietor of the AP at the time; he was also the ARs chief editor: a position he had held since the late
# 2012 The Journal of Architecture

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Figure 1. View of the destruction around St Pauls Cathedral, AR (June, 1945).

to work on other special projects and themes that the AR had explored in the previous decade, which included the promotion of Modernism in Britain. Throughout the 1930s, under Hastingss editorship, the magazine had gained a reputation as a modern architectural paper, but Hastingss support for Modernism was conditional. Parallel to this interest largely pursued by RichardsHastings employed numerous contributors to investigate the deleter-

ious effects of Britains ongoing modernisation and to develop themes that were aimed at its reform. These were a diverse group, including the poet John Betjeman, the painters Paul Nash and John Piper, the planner Thomas Sharp, and scholars such as John Summerson and Pevsner. By the mid1940s these interests had converged around the theme of the picturesque, useful not only for its familiar practical lessons in improving landscapes

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but also as an aesthetic and theoretical handle for many of the issues raised by the clash of modern and traditional settings: problems further exacerbated by the continuing effects of wartime destruction and the still-distant prospect of a reconstruction effort. Pevsner became the mainstay of the ARs picturesque revival. Sporadically assisted by H.F. Clark and others, he went on to publish numerous articles on the subject.8 As Richards would later recall in his memoirs, the adaptation of the English Picturesque tradition to urban instead of garden landscapes, [was] a principle The Architectural Review had been advocating since Hastings and Pevsner had campaigned about it during my war-time absence between 1942 and 1946.9 Pevsner drew a straight line from eighteenth-century landscape gardeners such as Uvedale Price and Humphry Repton to the mid-twentieth century work of British architects such as Hugh Casson, William Holford and Frederick Gibberd. In doing so, Pevsner was following Hastingss lead and looking for ways to make picturesque theory operative. Hastings commissioned Pevsner to work on a book intended to be the theoretical and historical backbone of this new approach, which Pevsner referred to as Visual Planning. Pevsners involvement in this picturesque revival brought qualities to its analysis that took it beyond Hastingss gentlemanly connoisseurship. Hastingss writing, though tfully brilliant, was loaded with eccentricities and anecdotes; by contrast, Pevsners approach was as sober as one might expect from his rigorous art-historical training in Germany. For the purposes of the picturesque revival, the pairing

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Figure 2. Nikolaus Pevsner (anonymously), Frenchay Common or Workaday Sharawaggi, AR (July, 1945).

of the somewhat erratic and eccentric Hastings with Pevsners scholarship was perfectly complementary. In 1974, towards the end of his career, Pevsner recalled the moment:

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Some time after the beginning of the Second World War the Architectural Review lost its principal editor J. M. Richards (now Sir James Richards) to the Ministry of Information. He suggested me as histemporarysuccessor and moved to Cairo. I did what I could, and this would have been entirely in matters of contemporary building, if it had not been for the co-owner of the Review, H. de Cronin Hastings. He is a brilliant man who likes to stay in the background. He had read Christopher Husseys The Picturesque, the great classic of the movement. [. . .] I also had of course read the bookeven several years before I settled down in England, but purely as a piece of English art history. It was de Cronin Hastings who dropped a remark in his studiedly casual way indicating that surely Husseys Picturesque and our day-to-day work for the Review were really one and the same thing. This is what set me off. With de Cronins blessing I started on a book whose subject was just this aside of the great pathnder. [. . .] As my thought in these years developed, I realized that the missing link between the Picturesque and twentieth-century architecture was the picturesque theory chiey of Uvedale Price, but also of Payne Knight and Repton, and even Reynolds.10 The few accounts that describe Hastingss work and life are quick to point to his eccentric character and abundance of ideas. In honouring his patron, Pevsner explained The brilliant ideas creating what was called Architectural Review policy were mostly H. de C.s, [. . .] But the brilliant ideas had to be developed, had to be made viable [. . .].11 The contributors who took up the mantel of making Has-

tingss ideas viable were many and varied: Richards remained the stalwart executor of operations at the AR; in the 1930s, Paul Nash wrote of Seaside Surrealism in the coastal town of Swanage;12 in a lengthy pictorial article, John Piper documented every visible object on the road from London to Bath;13 Thomas Sharp carried out a solid four-part historical study of The English Tradition and the Town;14 John Betjeman wrote humorous accounts of the clash of English patrimony with the effects of modernisation in The Passing of the Village, and promoted a sentimental and un-dogmatic approach to architectural style in his The Seeing Eye, or How to Like Everything.15 Read against the backdrop of war, the fanciful themes from this period paled in signicance. For more than a decade, the AR had explored an alternative direction for architecture and planning, but had not produced anything of duration or substance: nothing that reached above individual efforts and a handful of intriguing articles. By 1943, it was unclear if the ARs latest interest in picturesque theory and technique was just another fancy from Hastingss imagination, or, for that matter, if Pevsner was simply the last of a long chain of contributors to bow at Hastingss door before turning his back and returning to university life. By 1944, the situation had changed dramatically. The bombs kept falling on London, but the AR began a baby Blitz of its own. In January, 1944, Hastings launched an anonymous decree of AR policy with his Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape.16 The February edition saw Pevsners exegesis in print, entitled Price on Picturesque Planning.17 In the following

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Figure 3. John Piper, London to Bath. A Topographical and Critical Survey of the Bath Road, AR (May, 1939).

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Figure 4. The Cover of the AR (January, 1944).

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years, not a number of AR appeared without some mention of this new editorial line. With the end of the war within reach and the prospect of reconstruction looming ever larger, the ARs editors saw the promise of a new beginning. Within the ranks of the AR this promise lled the sails of the new campaign, known variously as Visual Planning, Exterior Furnishing and Picturesque Planning, but eventually launched ve years later under the banner Townscape.

Townscape
Townscape eventually became one of the ARs longest publishing campaigns, remaining a xture until the mid-1970s. Retrospectively, the articles from the 1930s and early 1940s represent Townscapes pre-history, where its ideas and applications were still in testing. Viewed as one campaign, Townscape spanned ve decades, mirroring Hastingss editorship and the ARs rise to international renown. Over its duration, Townscape involved around 200 authors, who together contributed around 1,400 publications related to the campaign.18 These ranged in scope and scale from some well-known monographs (mostly published by the Architectural Press), to special editions and features in the AR, down to brief editorial statements, captions and monthly columns. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Townscape became a commonplace in Britain. From the 1960s onwards it began to assert its inuence on a wider international audience. Despite its longevity and inuence, Townscapes reception in historical accounts of twentieth-century architecture and planning has, until recently, been very limited.

By the twenty-rst century, over three decades past its decline, Townscapes meaning is anything but clear. Partly, this confusion can be traced to a version of Townscape that has persisted to the present day. In recent decades, the term and concept townscape is regularly cited in connection with neo-traditional urban design, and architecture concerned with preservationist and historicist agendas. The so-called New Urbanism or Prince Charless faux traditional village of Poundbury are examples of this continuing strain of Townscape, but so too are the municipal schemes aimed at urban beautication and character control by the exclusion of anything new.19 Townscapes recommendations rarely extended to imitation, revivalism or the exclusion of novelty, and the widespread perception that Townscape was anti-modern reveals how much has been forgotten about the campaign since its inception in the 1940s. Coinciding with the emergence of postmodernism, interest in Townscape has seen a steady decline. This is a strange turn of events, considering that Townscapes message bears strong commonalities with many issues that resurfaced in the period.20 These include an interest in place, specicity and context; the distain for large-scale master planning; the pursuit of historical continuity in architecture and urbanism; a reform and humanisation of modern architecture and planning; an interest in tradition and vernacular building; and the re-emergence of a distinctly visual or aesthetic approach to design. The eclipse of Townscape in late-twentiethcentury discourses is a curious story involving many well-known personalities of the period, from Colin Rowe to Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi to

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Figure 5. Peter Reyner Banham, H.F. Clark, Robert Venturi, Miscellany, AR (May, 1953).

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Kevin Lynch, who passed over Townscape, often without acknowledgement.21 Townscape was intended to be highly popular; arguably the AR was so successful in this objective that its discourse eventually achieved saturation among architects and other design professionals. But this proliferation can also be seen as a dilution: caught between the to and fro of the late-twentieth-century avant garde, Townscapes message of compromise, syn thesis, moderation and reform soon became passe. Today, if anything is known of Townscape it usually involves Gordon Cullen and his books: Townscape (1961), and its abridgement, The Concise Townscape (1971).22 The latter remains in print, but excluded the modernist schemes from the 1940s and 1950s contained in the rst edition; another likely cause for Townscapes perception as anti-modern. Cullens urban studies, designs and highly seductive illustrations became the face of Townscape, and gave the campaign a visual character absent from Hastingss polemic and Pevsners historical treatments. However, the longer history and wider view of Townscapes campaign show that many of its key ideas not only pre-dated Cullens involvement, they also succeeded it. If todays neo-traditionalist successors do not do justice to the campaigns original message, and Cullens work can no longer be taken as its touchstone, what, then, denes Townscape? My research has focussed on the body of work that emerged in the AR from the 1930s to the 1970s. In particular, I have sought to draw attention to Townscapes developmental phase and the authors who were active at this time.23 There is also an argument for seeing Townscape as merely one of many parallel

and competing campaigns operating within the AR throughout this period; the AR was, after all, an international monthly magazine constantly searching for novelty. Pevsners picturesque revival has already been noted as one such sub-campaign. Through the 1950s, Ian Nairn rose to fame with his special editions of Outrage and Counter Attack; J.M. Richards wrote extensively about a phenomenon he termed The Functional Tradition; Eric de Mare campaigned for the reuse of canals; and from the 1950s onwards, Kenneth Browne and Silvia Crowe wrote about the uses and abuses of landscape and issues of dereliction, encroachment and exploitation. Viewed at its narrowest extent, Townscapes activity could be restricted to its high period: from 1947 to 1961, involving authors such as Cullen, Nairn and Browne. But there is a stronger argument for seeing Townscape as both an episodic campaign and an umbrella term for a range of problems, interests and concepts that had been developing before and after this period. My research argues that Townscapes contributions should be viewed within this wider context. This shows that Townscape achieved and sustained a level of coherence throughout its duration, which demonstrates that it had a direction and self-reection that took it beyond its role as an episodic editorial device. Part of the confusion surrounding Townscapes denition as a concept and campaign stems from its name: there is still uncertainty surrounding who rst coined the term, with both Hastings and Thomas Sharp laying claim to its invention.24 As mentioned, the heading Townscape arrived much later than its message, and was underpinned by

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the series of related alternatives: Visual Planning Urban Landscape, Sharawaggi, Exterior Furnishing, The New Empiricism, The Functional Tradition and Picturesque Planning. Additionally, campaigns such as Outrage, Counter-Attack, Man-Plan and Civilia followed the advent of Townscape. The ideas within these various campaigns are strongly related and helpful in explaining different facets of Townscapes mission. In this context it is important to note that as an editorial campaign Townscapes message evolved over time. Beginning with the series of articles from the 1930s and the critique of sprawling modernisation, the magazine pitched earlier versions of Townscape as moderate alternatives to a still unpopular international modernism and the wave of stylistic revivalisms that had emerged between the wars. The early years of post-war reconstruction witnessed the rise of scepticism regarding planning, a feeling that where the bombs had failed the planners might yet succeed. To these sentiments, the Townscape circle added the creeping effects of modern infrastructure, signage, advertising and other urban paraphernalia, which were having a serious though undetected impact on urban environments.25 Seeking to counteract these effects, Pevsner and Hastings thought that a reformed modernism could be married to informal picturesque planning to provide what they termed a more humanized townscape.26 This proposed a more synthetic, compromised and scenographic conception of architecture and urban design. At its simplest level, Townscape was a collage of moderate modernist architecture set within the framework of an irregular picturesque planning.

By the early 1950s, the range of themes championed by the AR and its editors had coalesced into the central polemic of Townscape, creating a comprehensive and highly visual approach to urban design. This new approach was given a full dress rehearsal at the Festival of Britain in 1951, carried out with the help of many of the ARs inner circle.27 But where Townscape initially drew its mandate from war-time destruction and post-war reconstruction, as the campaign progressed it began to address other related concerns, including urban sprawl and visual blight. Townscape became an early advocate of environmentalism, highlighting issues of land exploitation, degradation and dereliction, and developing working and artful solutions. As such, Townscape pre-empted much of the interest in these problems within postmodernist urban design and the architectural urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite these commonalities, it appears that Townscapes criticism of an unchecked modernist planning and rampant modernisation in urban and rural areas also provided the basis for Townscapes perceived conservatism and historicism: a ginger-bread-style urban design, beginning with pedestrianisation and ending with lamppost design. The Townscape campaign expanded the scope of design concerns to include many aspects of the built environment previously outside the remit of building and planning, including mundane artefacts such as street furniture. Townscape promoted a unied approach to designing the urban scene, which Hastings and others thought had been abstractly divided by the historical development of the professions. For Hastings, the problem of town planning was a

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Figure 6. Ian Nairn, ed., Outrage, AR (June, 1955).

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Figure 7. Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Collage City, AR (August, 1975).

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schema where architects designed buildings, planners laid out streets, engineers designed infrastructure, and so forth. What was left out of such a division of competencies, the AR termed the submerged thirdmeaning the third of the built environment that had escaped attention by design professionals.28 In contrast to the ginger bread version of Townscape, this SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning, as it was humorously dubbed in 1973)29 was not intended to be polite or respectable, but rather to invoke the messy vitality of the urban condition. By paying close attention to aspects such as electricity pylons, telephone wires, roadways, advertising, paving and oor surfaces (later termed oorscape), Townscapes advocates attempted to harness the potential of the miscellany thrown up by modernisation by including it in their designs. For Hastings and Pevsner, this method had its historical corollary in the practice of landscape improvers who appropriated the various raw materials of eighteenth century rural existence into their designs for country estates and pleasure grounds.30 A persistent feature of the ARs Townscape campaign was its mixture of critical and creative endeavours. Some of the most spectacular outcomes of this policy are Nairns Outrage and Counter Attack campaigns from the 1950s. In 1971, when support for Townscape at the AR was in steep decline, Hastings and his daughter Priscilla together with Browne, launched another attempt to reclaim the high ground with a special edition entitled: Civilia. The End of Sub Urban Man.31 Civilia was intended to be both a critique and an improvement to the idea of the New Towns, where late modernist

and brutalist architecture were collaged onto the side of a disused quarry and proposed as a high-density solution to the ailing dormitory New Town model. The results were striking in appearance and remarkable for their persistence in realising ideas that Hastings and his collaborators had begun as far back as the 1940s. Civilia and other earlier schemes are often seen as ironic commentaries on the architectural and planning discourses of the day: Bob Maxwell termed Civilia a kind of Welfare State Monte Carlo.32 They were also intended as serious alternatives. This oscillation between the real and unreal, and the disregard for disciplinary boundaries, provided further grounds for the campaigns limited reception: Townscape, it could be argued, was too urban for architectural history and too architectural for planning history.33 Fictitious projects like Civilia and other studies set in London and elsewhere from the 1940s to the 1970s, show that Townscape not only proposed an expanded scope for design, but a rethinking of architecture. This new architecture highlighted the combination of old and new, the clash of the modern and traditional, and emphasised working with the existing conditions recommended by the genius loci rather than some imagined ideal. It promoted the idea of the moving spectator, the design of buildings and quarters from actual terrestrial vantage points rather than abstracted aerial views. Townscapes urban and architectural designs privileged bold asymmetry over symmetry and the incongruous over the pleasant. Developing from the study of the picturesque, the Townscape circle advocated a version of modernism which disparaged uniform-

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Figure 8. The Editor, The Submerged Third, AR (August, 1948).

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ity and pleaded instead for informality, irregularity and clash of texture, age and colour when possible. Throughout these various sub-campaigns, Townscapes editorial line and its objects of study oscillated between the trivial and profound. Townscape approached fundamental issues, such as the relationships between buildings as objects, and the relationship more generally between society and the built environment. But the campaign also spent much time extolling the virtues of bollards, cobblestones and cast-iron drain covers.34 As such, Townscape should be remembered as a campaign that promoted designs for park benches as well as entire city quarters.

The Architectural Review

Townscape was also remarkable for its humour. The campaigns eccentricities and contrariness are frequently understood as pure whimsy (which they often were), but Hastings and others at the AR actively fostered an amateurishness and dilettantism among its contributors, which framed the magazine as a running (and often humorous) commentary on the signicant developments of the day. Townscape was an important campaign for the AR, not only because it promised a frontal approach to the major issues of the time, but also as a light-hearted and fun campaign: the ARs contributors could express their views openly in Townscape articles.35 Projects such as Outrage, Man-Plan or Civilia show that Townscape often became an aside to the ARs role as a magazine of record, or, to the expectation to attend to the day-to-day of publishing. In Townscape, reporting and publicising merged with activism and advocacy, creativity with criticism.

Although there were many authors involved in Townscape, it remained Hastingss chief polemic throughout his long term at the AR. In this regard, Townscape is a mirror, or perhaps a kaleidoscope, of Hastingss philosophy and his complex, mercurial temperament. To understand Townscape is to understand this philosophy and its three-fold manifestation within the magazine and its output: rst at the level of Townscapes authors and the ARs editorial constellation; then in the ARs graphic format, illustrative style and peculiar mixture of content; and, nally, in the synthetic approach to architecture and urban design that the campaign sought to effect. Hastings was convinced that architectural publishing needed to develop a new voice if it wished to keep up with developments in society, not least the monumental challenges faced by architects and planners in post-war reconstruction, modernisation and expansion. In 1947, in a rare account of editorial policy, Hastings described the future role he saw for the AR: One of the aspects of the English cultural tradition most worth preserving is the practice of dilettante journalism by experts who are also amateurs [. . .] But the urbane habit of literary dilettantism, of scholars table talk conducted in public, is not one that can be indulged without a medium.36 Many of the publications that resulted from this period of dilettante journalism were intended for Townscape. Hastingss team continued to expand from the 1940s onwards, where academics and journalists worked beside photographers and illustrators; poets and cartoonists, beside architects and town planners.

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The second manifestation of Hastingss philosophy came in the visual style of the magazine. As far back as the 1930s, Hastings and his team had sought to renovate the ARs graphic and visual presentation. It was an eclectic framework: Betjemans witty texts were juxtaposed with the neo-romantic illustrations by Piper and Pevsners historical explorations were illustrated by starkly modernist designs by Casson and Cullen. The AR became famous for its graphic design and layout, where oral Victorian typefaces were juxtaposed with sans-serif scripts; lime-green highlights contrasted with a smooth cream of thick paper; and richly textured prints from original paintings were contrasted with superb professional architectural photography. If Townscapes nal iteration proposed a humanised modernist architecture set within an outspokenly picturesque mode of planning, ARs visual style provided a clear example of how this might appear in graphic terms. As noted above, the question of Townscapes authorship has provided a continuing barrier to scholarship. Until 2004, there was little literature available on the ARs editors and the magazines editorial structure.37 Erdem Ertens doctoral study was the rst to highlight the centrality of the ARs editorial structure.38 Subsequently, my research on this editorial structure has illustrated a consistent pattern running parallel to Townscapes development. This is best visualised as a relatively tight core of advising editors surrounding Hastings in varying formations: Hastings and Richards from 1935 to early 1942; Hastings and Pevsner from early 1942 to early 1946. Beginning with his announcement of a new editorial board in 1947

and continuing with minor variations until the early 1970s, Hastings was joined by Richards, Pevsner, Osbert Lancaster and Casson, with Ian McCallum as executive editor until 1959. By 1971, Richards, Pevsner and Casson had left the editorial board, and Hastings nally retired in 1973.39 My doctoral dissertation from 2009 also attempted to provide a systematic catalogue of Townscapes contributing authors and an explanation of their respective roles within the campaign.40 Perhaps the most signicant problem in understanding the multi-layered authorship of Townscape was the ARs practice of publishing articles pseudonymously and anonymously. Hastings, Pevsner, Richards and Summerson all used pseudonyms: Ivor de Wolfe, Peter F.R. Donner, James MacQuedy and John Coolmore respectively.41 With his earlier pen-name Hermann George Scheffauer, Hastings had made his intentions for anonymity clear.42 Around one third of the total number of Townscape-related publications from the 1930s to the 1980s are anonymously published.43 Richards stated that he used his pseudonym when he wanted to appear in an individual, rather than an editorial, role.44 Nevertheless, this practice resulted in a particularly playful mode of writing and one that was certainly less guarded in its opinions than would have been normally the case for most journalism, and instilled the Townscape campaign with a more informal tone and outspoken critical voice. Townscapes position as an editorial campaign provides another barrier to understanding the campaigns authorship. Relying, as Townscape did, on a broad base of contributing authors meant that

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Figure 9. Michael Rothenstein, Colour and Modern Architecture, or the Photographic Eye, AR (June, 1946).

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many of Townscapes important articles were commissioned. Therefore, establishing authorship and origins for particular publications or ideas is difcult, particularly when combined with the ARs practice of anonymity. This raises other problems recurrent in Townscapes history: namely, the role of individuals within the broader editorial campaign, and the hierarchy within the vast circle of Townscapes contributing authors. Townscapes inner circle clearly includes the ARs editorsforemost Hastings, Richards, Casson and Pevsnerjoined both by the various authors who pre-empted Townscape from as far back as the 1930s, and by those who went on to develop and rene the campaigns ideas and application into the late 1950s.45 But there is also an outer circle of Townscapes contributors, constituting around two-thirds of the campaigns authors. This group (approximately 136) consists of the hired hands and passersby, who were only obliquely involved in the campaign or had arrived after its direction was set.46 Some authors contributed articles to the AR in the 1930s and never again. Themes from the 1930s disappear in the 1940s and re-emerge in the 1950s. Several architects and critics who published early articles on Townscape went on to achieve great notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s. Within this context of discontinuity, Townscapes message was easily lost. By the time it disappeared from the pages of the AR, its message had been exhaustively promoted and it went on to have an afterlife quite distinct from that of its host. Until recently, historians have tended to struggle with the questions arising from Townscapes authorship, origins and chronology, or the campaigns

scope, scale and extent; a measure of this difculty can be found in the scarcity of historical accounts which are not plagued by misinformation or anachronism. It is hoped that the work collected in this edition provides a solid foundation for the ongoing study of Townscape in the post-war period, despite the continued absence of a monograph dedicated to Townscape or a comprehensive history of the campaign. That a major history of Townscape has yet to be written reveals more about existing twentiethcentury histories than it does about Townscape. Townscapes legacy as a broad, popular, enduring and interdisciplinary movement challenges the outcomes of histories that privilege the grand narrative and outstanding authorial gures. Although the AR clearly possessed the means, it never published a tightly elucidated manifesto, nor did it promote a leading authority. Pevsners book, commissioned by Hastings in the 1940s, was never nished and has only recently been published.47 Cullens work is often invoked in this connection, but his role as Townscapes gurehead is problematic. Townscape, it could be argued, was a poor attempt at a movement, especially when viewed in the context of post-war avant gardism where the cult of personality and the manifesto had become the trade secrets of architecture and urban design, or at least its historiography. Many scholars are returning to the architecture and planning of the post-war period in an attempt to recover and revise its histories as part of a larger examination of post-modernism in twentiethcentury architectural and urban culture.48 Within this wider project, Townscape is of great interest,

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essentially standing at the junction of two major streams of post-war development: the transition from modernism to post-modernism, and the rise of urbanism and its perception as the supreme question of architecture in the period.

Notes and references

1. This incident and many others from the period are relayed in J.M. Richards, Memoirs of an Unjust Fella (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 144. 2. The Editor, The Architectural Review and the War, AR, 89 (June, 1941), p. 117. 3. J. M. Richards, op. cit., p. 141. 4. The rst was Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London, Faber & Faber, 1936); the second, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1942). 5. For more on Pevsners early years in Britain, see Susie Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life (London, Chatto and Windus, 2011) and Stephen Games, Pevsner: The Early Life: Germany and Art (London, Continuum, 2010). 6. J. M. Richards, op. cit., pp. 141 42. 7. Using pseudonyms, Pevsner wrote several humorous accounts of his work in this period: see, Ramaduri, Meine Kollegen, Die Schuttschipper, Die Zeitung, 1 (September, 1941). 8. These articles are too numerous to mention here: see the bibliography contained in: Nikolaus Pevsner, Mathew Aitchison (ed.), Visual Planning and the Picturesque (Santa Monica, CA., Getty Publications, 2010), pp. 211 13. 9. J. M. Richards, op. cit., p. 241. 10. Nikolaus Pevsner, ed., The Picturesque Garden and Its Inuence Outside the British Isles (Washington D.C., Dumbarton Oaks, 1974), pp. 119 20.

11. Nikolaus Pevsner, Elusive JMR, RIBA Journal, 78 (May, 1971), p. 181. 12. Paul Nash, Swanage or Seaside Surrealism, AR, 79 (January-June, 1936), pp. 150 54. 13. John Piper, London to Bath. A Topographical and Critical Survey of the Bath Road, AR, 85 (January-June, 1939), pp. 229 46. For an analysis and comparison of Pipers and Pevsners roles at the AR, see: John Macarthur and Mathew Aitchison, Oxford Versus the Bath Road: Empiricism and Romanticism in the Architectural Reviews Picturesque Revival, The Journal of Architecture, 17, no. 1 (February, 2012), pp. 51 68. 14. This series began with Thomas Sharp, The English Tradition and the Town. I. The Street and the Town, AR, 78 (July-December, 1935), pp. 179 87. 15. John Betjeman, The Passing of the Village, AR, 72 (September, 1932), pp. 89 93; and, The Seeing Eye or How to Like Everything [Illustrations by John Piper], AR, 86 (July-December, 1939), pp. 201 4. 16. The Editor [Hastings], Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape, AR, 95, no. 565 (January, 1944), pp. 3 8. 17. Nikolaus Pevsner, Price on Picturesque Planning, AR, 95, no. 566 (February, 1944), pp. 47 50. 18. For the most comprehensive discussion of this material see my doctoral dissertation: Mathew Aitchison, Visual Planning and Exterior Furnishing: A Critical History of the Early Townscape Movement, 1930 to 1949, (PhD Dissertation, University of Queensland, 2009). 19. Ibid.: see pp. 247 51, for a discussion of the interrelationships between Townscape and its neo-traditionalist successors. 20. For a broader discussion of Townscapes inuence on twentieth-century discourse and practice the reader is referred to the contributions in the fourth part of

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21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

this collection, in particular: the articles by Nick Beech, Steve Parnell, Jasper Cepl and Erik Ghenoiu. See Gillian Darely and Erik Ghenoius articles in this collection. See also, Mathew Aitchison, Whos Afraid of Ivor De Wolfe, AA Files, 62 (2011), pp. 34 39. Gordon Cullen, Townscape (London, The Architectural Press, 1961) and The Concise Townscape (London, The Architectural Press, 1971). Appendix One of my dissertation lists the 200 authors involved in the Townscape campaign at the AR. Appendix Two lists all the relevant publications from the AR, related books published by the AP, along with other Townscape-related materials. See, M. Aitchison, Visual Planning, op. cit., pp. 305 91. See Thomas Sharp, Oxford Replanned (London, The Architectural Press, 1948), p. 36. See also Ivor de Wolfe [Hastings], Townscape. A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price, AR, 106, no. 636 (December, 1949), p. 362. Such concerns were not new: Thomas Sharps work in the 1930s shows that these were already major issues in planning; Clough Williams-Elliss books, England and the Octopus (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1928) and the edited volume, Britain and the Beast (London, John Dent, 1937) are notable examples of such interests before Townscape. For references to this humanized townscape see: The Editor, The First Half Century, AR, 101, no. 601 (January, 1947), p. 36 and The Editor and Gordon Cullen, Hazards, or the Art of Introducing Obstacles into the Urban Landscape without Inhibiting the Eye, AR, 103, no. 615 (March, 1948), p. 99. See Nick Beechs contribution to this Issue. Hugh Casson, as the chief coordinator of the Festival of Britain, underscores the view of the Festival being an early outcome of Townscapes campaign: Hugh

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

Casson, The Elusive H De C, RIBA Journal, 78 (February, 1971), p. 59. The Editor, The Submerged Third, AR, 104, no. 620 (August, 1948), p. 50. The acronym appeared in a special edition, edited by Ivor de Woe [Hastings], Sociable Housing, AR, 154, no. 920 (October, 1973). John Macarthur discusses such techniques in eighteenth-century landscape gardening under the heading appropriation: John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London, Routledge, 2007), pp. 176 232. Ivor de Wolfe [Hastings], Civilia. The End of Sub Urban Man, AR, 149, no. 892 (June, 1971), pp. 326408. Robert Maxwell, An Eye for an I: The Failure of the Townscape Tradition, Architectural Design, 46, no. 9 (September, 1976), p. 535. For an extensive discussion of Townscapes reception, see M. Aitchison, Visual Planning, op. cit., pp. 52 71. Reyner Banham once reported that the Architects Journal, the ARs sister journal where Townscape was also promoted, had received the satirical gift of a cobble stone and drain cover: Reyner Banham, Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945 1965, in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, John Summerson, ed. (London, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1968), p. 266. For a longer discussion of Townscapes journalistic context and its contributions to architectural writing more widely, see Mathew Aitchison, Dilettantes, Amateurs and Eccentrics: The Architectural Reviews Townscape Campaign, in Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation and Criticism in Architecture, Naomi Stead, ed. (Melbourne, Uro Media, 2012), pp. 105 15.

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36. The Editor, The Second Half Century, AR, 101, no. 601 (January, 1947), p. 22. 37. The ARs editorial makeup is listed on its contents page. For other accounts of the history of the AR, see Peter Davey, The First 100 Years, AR, 199, no. 1191 (May, 1996), pp. 3 106 and Michael Spens, ed., AR 100. The Recovery of the Modern. Architectural Review 1980 1995: Key Texts and Critique (Oxford, Butterworth Architecture, 1996). 38. Erdem Erten, Shaping The Second Half Century: The Architectural Review 1947 1971, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doctoral Dissertation, 2004). 39. Appendix Three of my dissertation gives a comprehensive account of the ARs editorial makeup from its inception to the mid-1970s: M. Aitchison, Visual Planning, pp. 393 98. 40. See Note 23 above. 41. For de Wolfes identity, see R. Banham, Revenge of the Picturesque, op. cit., p. 267. For F.R. Donner, see John Barr Select Bibliography of the Publications of Nikolaus Pevsner, Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, John Summerson, ed. (London, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1968), p. 278. For James MacQuedy, see J. M. Richards, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 138. For John Coolmore, see John Betjeman, A Preservationists Progress, in The Future in the Past: Attitudes to Conservation, 1174 1974, Jane Fawcett, ed. (London, Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 57. Another name appears to be a conjunction of both Richardss and Hastingss pseudonyms, in Ivor J. Richards of the 1960s. There were undoubtedly several more in use in the period, although these have not been positively identied. Outside the AR, Pevsner used two other known pseudonyms, Ramaduri, and Peter Naumberg, under these names publishing a total of 22 articles. The scrapbook containing these articles is

42.

43.

44. 45.

held within The Nikolaus Pevsner Collection, GRI, box 137. A series of research notes now held at the RIBA library (referred to here as the AR Papers) lists a series of articles in the AR from Hermann George Scheffauer [aka Hastings], from December, 1922 to January, 1928. See AR Papers, cards 41 56. This number includes all articles published anonymously, or ambiguously under the label of The Editor or The Editors. For present purposes, all such articles have been uniformly attributed to The Editor. J. M. Richards, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 138. Included in this inner-circle are authors such as Kenneth Browne, Hugh Casson, Sylvia Crowe, (Thomas) Gordon Cullen, Frederick Gibberd, Eric Samuel de Mare, Ian Douglas Nairn and Raymond Spurrier. Alongside this group, a further 54 authors have been identied who were active before Townscape was launched: these include: John Betjeman, Lionel Brett, N.G. Brett-James, Stefan Buzas, H.F. Clark, Peter Dickinson, W.A. Eden, L.D. Ettlinger, Stephen Gardiner, Erno Goldnger, Maurice Gorham, Geoffrey Grigson, W.G. Hiscock, Sir William Holford, R.G. Holloway, Marjorie Honeybourne, Carl Hubacher, Christopher Hussey, Julian Huxley, G.A. Jellicoe, Barbara Jones, G.M. Kallmann, Sir Osbert Lancaster, Susan Lang, Leonard Manasseh, Ian McCallum, Harding McGregor Dunnett, Ruari McLean, Raymond Mortimer, Lewis Mumford, Paul Nash, Ozenfant, Roland Penrose, Frank Pick, John Egerton Christmas Piper, Peter Quennell, Sir James Maude Richards, R.P. Ross Williamson, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rown tree, Thomas Wilfred Sharp, Osvald Siren, Marian Speyer, John Steegman, Dorothy Stroud, John Summerson, Aileen Tatton Brown, William Tatton Brown, William Townsend, Julian Trevelyan, Christopher Tunnard, Rex Wailes, J.D.U. Ward and Clough Williams-Ellis.

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46. My research has identied 136 authors in this outercircle: these include: Alexandra Artley, Matthew Baigell, (Peter) Reyner Banham, C.H.R. Bailey, Gerald Barry, Derek Barton, Geoffrey W. Beard, Elisabeth Beazley, Manfredo Bellati, Terence Bendixson, Peter Beresford, Michael Blee, Lewis Braithwaite, Peter Bush, W.S. Butler, Sherban Cantacuzino, William Carr, Rodney Carran, Brian Carter, Miles Coslany, David Crawford, Elizabeth Denby, Donald Dewar Mills, Michael Dower, A. du Gard Palsey, D.R. Dudley, Melville Dunbar, Alexei Ferster Marmot, John Fleming, Charles Forehoe, R. Furneaux Jordan, Keith Garbet, K.B. Gardner, Roy Gazzard, Usam Ghaidan, Leslie Ginsburg, John Gloag, Andor Gomme, David Gosling, Christopher Gotch, L.F. Gregory, Richard Guyatt, Thos Halcro, Edward T. Hall, Andrew Hammer, Eileen Harris, Jon Harris, E.M. Hatt, F.H.K. Henrion, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, John Hope, R.G. Hopkinson, Richard Hughes, M. Hugo-Brunt, James Hunter, M. Iljin, J. Jahr, Peter Jay, Charles Jencks, Roger Johnson, Percy Johnson-Marshall, Edwin Johnston, Geoffrey S. Kelly, John Kelsey, Edgar Knobloch, Art Kutcher, Laurie Lee, Maurice Lee, Kenneth Lindley, David W. Lloyd, James Macaulay, Saadja Mandl, Walter Manthorpe, Charles Marriott, Georgina Masson, Anthony Matthews, Collin McWilliam, Michael Middleton, G. Moncur, Robert Moore, Lucien Myers, G.J. Nason, Geoffrey Newman, J.R. Nichols, Max Nicholson, Christian Norberg-Schulz,

Bev Nutt, G.G. Pace, R. Pearson, Simon Pepper, Alan Plater, Hugh Popham, G. Popplestone, Jonathan Raban, Roger Radford, Herbert Read, Richard Reid, Paul Ritter, Helen Rosenau, Diana Rowntree, Gordon Russell, Michel Santiago, Sylvia Sayer, Edwin Schoon, Vincent Scully, Hida Selem, Derek Senior, Graeme Shankland, Peter Shepheard, Gerald Smart, I. SmithRaeburn, Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, W.J. Sparrow, George Speaight, Betty Spence, Freya Stark, Betty Swanwick, Margaret Tallet, Nicholas Taylor, Nigel Temple, Margaret Tims, Rex Touchstone, Noel Tweddell, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Peter Varnon, Robert Venturi, Claude Vincent, Harland Walshaw, David Watkin, Julian Wells, Bryan Westwood, Marcus Whiffen, Graham Winteringham, H. Myles Wright and Lance Wright. 47. See Note 8 above. 48. See, for example: Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2008); Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architectures Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Reinhold Martin, Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010); K. Michael Hays, Architectures Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2010).

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