I went to school in a place called Sevenoaks, the very exemplar of those strange little Home Counties towns built to store rich people within an amenable commuting distance of London. As a child who had grown up on a farm, I found the city of London intoxicating - it meant the Natural History Museum, dinosaurs, hustle and bustle, ships, skyscrapers and adventure. I also loved the Sussex countryside, its brooks and copses, the smell of cut grass and the distant sound of a propeller plane. But in between the two was a place that thoroughly disquieted me: suburbia. And in that town of Sevenoaks I had the most excellent education possible in quite where that disquiet came from, spending much time as I did wandering those streets on the way to a friends' house.
The threat of suburbia to me was not so much the watching from behind curtains familiar to English stereotype, though that scared me, nor was it the creepy nighttime hum of the streetlight in such a determinedly quiet place, though that scared me too. It was a slightly more existential fear, looking back on it, that got to me. I had been told by Harry Potter and other examples of the cheerfully anarchic strain of English children's literature that every house in the suburbs looked the same. Yet in Sevenoaks they all looked different, every one. So consciously different, in fact, that they entered the uncanny valley of domestic architecture: too different to be recognisably suburban, too deliberate in their difference to be individual. The fabulously wealthy bankers and lawyers had bought their little slice of identity, and it looked the same as everyone else's.
Oh, sure, there was a conservatory here, mock Tudor there, skylights and big modernist extensions and a couple of Doric columns there, but it was all papering over the fact that every plot was the same size and not one architect had thought of anything interesting to do. Nor would the owners have wanted them to. The point is to have individuality, because rich people can afford individuality, but not to actually be interesting with it, just make a point of it. These people were satisfied with their plot and their regular lives, their black labradors and four-by-fours and private tutors for their kids. With the grandness of their individual home they had tapped into the aristocracy's stately home tradition, and were happy to think no more of it. And walking down those streets, I felt both an immense pity and the occasional fleeting wish for a bulldozer.
I mention all this because a similarly Sevenoaks-educated friend who has subsequently joined the fine enfants terribles et riches tradition of George Orwell, Tony Benn and Charlie Gilmour of becoming a socialist (upon leaving that school I quipped that if you weren't a diehard Marxist after seven years of private education you hadn't been paying attention, a glib line that I nevertheless still suspect might be correct) just posted an interesting piece on stately architecture. I don't mean to combat its admirably balanced points too stridently here - though I can't help thinking that were he a young Chinese man surrounded by the noise of the Cultural Revolution the side of his mind that favours the bulldozer might outbalance the one that likes the cathedral.
Its relatively straightforward Marxism aside, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the desire to demolish the houses of the wealthy, if only because they are not only so incredibly dull, but dull in a quite terrifying way - no one can even think of a new style for gargantuan wealth, so just relives old Tudor cliches. I remember visiting an American mansion in Washington DC and being horrified to discover that each room had a different "Old Europe" theme - Renaissance Italy, Belle Epoque France, Georgian Enlgand - as if the owner had decided that wealth just looked Old, so wanted as many kinds of Old as money could buy. It's like going to the opera and realising that so many corporate freebies there are bored stiff but are happy to be there because opera is what rich people do. If all wealth can buy you is an extra slice of your own mediocrity, then it is not just futile, but hatefully futile.
All of which raises an interesting question. 99% of human architecture that has survived a century or more is the preserve of very wealthy people. The built environment of England, the country I feel so patriotic towards and so at home in, is dominated by the remains of people I hate - clergy, aristocrats, slavers, bankers. Yet I love country houses and love country churches. I gain a great sense of peace from an English landscape garden. And indeed the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and just about every artist who ever gained the money to work in any civilisation, were for and in deference to a horrid aristocracy. How can you possibly divorce architecture from the people whose stories it tells? You can't, which is why being an English patriot is a business so tricky most people give up the nuance for a bad job and embrace the flag and the monarch and Downton Abbey despite knowing how stupid it all is. And I must admit, I am mystified as to how a vicious hatred of the class system and monarchy especially can coexist in my imagination with a genuine stirring feeling at the sight of King Theoden leading his knights against orc armies on the big screen.
Tragic liberalism, which means taking seriously the degradations of the past while accepting that horror is the lot of humanity, might be a cure for this. My friend gives a series of principles for the good Marxist when viewing our heritage:
Keep anything that you can reuse.
Preserve any objects of purely aesthetic value as purely aesthetic objects.
Do not let the built environment of the past constrict your conception of what the future might be.
Bulldoze anything that does so.
I wince any time the bulldozer is invoked as a positive good. I know where that instinct comes from, and I distrust it. Like it or not we live with the sins of the past, however much the Marxist might believe we can transcend them. People will be cruel to each other in utopia, too. I would suggest that these rules betray a lack of imagination: to believe that the conceptions of the future are weak enough to be subverted by the built environment, to the point that its destruction is required, is to betray a lack of faith in them. The populace is not a slave to what they see around them. Or on some level we all are, indeed, but this is not something to be willed away by wrecking balls. It is something to be stared at in the face. I keep my faith in human imagination.
I am put in mind of George Orwell (again):
The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
When I go into those National Trust properties now, those same properties my friend believes have been turned into a theme parks rather than the empirical academic antique of aristocracy they should be, I do indeed see children playing in them. That seems quite a radical subversion to me. Not quite children's holiday camps, perhaps, but getting there, and god knows what they are imagining as they slide and play tag through the gardens built on the blood and lucre of England's corpulent war booty. I like to think their imaginations might be freer than mine or my schoolfriends of English public-school suburbia could ever have been.
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