“Simon Jenkins on architecture is typically a treat,” said Laura Freeman in The Times. Over the past 25 years, the newspaper columnist has produced a series of bestselling books – “England’s Thousand Best Churches”, “Britain’s 100 Best Railway Stations”, and so on – which are invaluable when you’re on a weekend away, and deciding what to see in the area.
Now, he has written a short history of British architecture, aimed at the “intelligent layman”. As Jenkins takes us through the various styles (Palladianism, the gothic revival, etc.), it sometimes feels a little bit dutiful: the writing is more “assured” than inspired. But in its final 70 pages, the book “comes flamingly to life”, as a “blistering polemic” against the postwar planners and architects who flattened neighbourhoods, built motorways through towns and forced people into brutalist tower blocks. For the Labour Government, planning to build 1.5 million homes, this brilliant section should be “required reading”.
It’s undeniable that many “atrocities were perpetrated” in the decades after the War, said Rowan Moore in The Observer. And having been involved in some key planning battles as a young journalist – notably the campaign to save Covent Garden from redevelopment – Jenkins has “earned the right to talk about them”. It’s a little wearying, however, to find the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier once again being lambasted, “more than 50 years after his urban ideas went out of fashion”. Jenkins is on surer ground when rattling through “four-and-a-half millennia of the greatest hits of British building”, an account he enlivens with “sweeping statements”, such as that the megalithic structure at Stonehenge counts as architecture, whereas the older complex of circular houses at Skara Brae in Orkney does not.
Jenkins believes that if more people could “speak architecture”, they’d be more confident in voicing their opinions about it – and British building would be in a less “dodgy state”, said Will Wiles in Literary Review. “The book is his contribution to improving public understanding.” It’s full of interesting details – such as the fact that a window in Gloucester Cathedral contains the first image of someone playing golf – and though some sections are a trifle repetitive, for the most part it “gallops along”.
The book is at its best when Jenkins himself appears – describing clambering around the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral as a boy, for instance. “I was left wishing the book as a whole was more personal”, and less informed by a “need to catalogue”.