Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly. He subscribes to a version of the Great Man school of history, which casts the great man as an exigent client who believes himself the maker or author. But, sadly, the grim-faced Bess of Hardwick did not install the glazing herself. And another promoter ever anxious for an attribution, God Almighty, did not personally carve his supplicants’ chantries. It might be his house, but he delegated the design.
Such an exclusive approach to the buildings passed down to us is self-evidently devoted to the history of the atypical, of the exceptional, of archetypes which sowed ‘influence’ and were blithely ripped off, leaving a swathe of approximate ectypes in their wake. But approximation ought not to be considered a deprecation: the bogus, the sham, the factitious are no less ‘real’ for all their copyism. They are indeed the norm. There are, for instance, many more Edwardian baroque buildings than there are of their stylistic precursors created almost two centuries previously. Inauthenticity is not to be equated with mediocrity.
Jenkins’s approach is to treat flamboyant one-offs and magnificent set pieces as though they were the quotidian. Hence this book’s tendency to almost capsize beneath the weight of gaudy swank – the fruit of entitlement, slavery, guano and patent medicines. The common people have been eliminated, save when patronisingly provided with estates of tied dwellings by chocolate manufacturers or dealers in shoddy and mungo and – at long last – local authorities.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in