Malcesine

Anthony Sutcliffe's London: An Architectural History (2006) is a useful book, if rather odd in some respects. Useful for providing a reasonable discussion of a wide range of buildings, both well and less known, and comprehensively illustrated. Odd for the sudden outbursts of scorn ornamenting its general level of dispassion. For instance, Sutcliffe interrupts a review of Victorian public architecture for a rant against the 'Outright Bad Design' of R. L. Roumieu, labelling him 'the McGonagall of London design'. He sneers at Roumieu's often admired Dutch façades on De Beauvoir Square as 'crude Tudor detailing', and labels the architect's masterpiece, 33-35 Eastcheap, 'grotesque' and 'brutal'. (Incidentally, Ian Nairn does not 'condemn' the work, as Wiki claims; if you were familiar with the rhythms of that critic's thought, you would not reach that judgement of this passage—

Victorian wildness can come from half a dozen causes, from mere fashion to cantankerousness. But this is truly demoniac, an Edgar Allen Poe of a building. It is the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare. Like Poe, and unlike Horace Walpole or a modern detective novel, the horror is no game. Acutely pointed arches shrink away in front of the windows, the wall shrinks back in half a dozen varieties of terrified chamfer. Demolition is in the air; but it must be preserved—not as an oddity, but as a basic part of human temperament, and one which doesn't often get translated into architecture.)

So Sutcliffe has some character as a critic, even if he is no Nairn. But more interesting than Sutcliffe's quirks of taste is his candid reflection of his—our—age. From the introduction:

It is now difficult to go inside most London buildings. Churches have been a problem for many years, but since 11 September 2001 security and general suspicion have made matters worse. My 'Stop and Search' by a City policeman near the Monument was entirely courteous and indeed informative but it took thirty minutes, by which time the light had gone. I often shied away from encounters with security staff and other employees.

Sutcliffe's eye is therefore not the omniscient lens that one expects from an art-book; it is human and frail, clinging unabashed to chance and contingency. This was the real surprise of the book, and at moments the real pleasure. It means bizarre photographs like this one, transposing the glorious red brick of St Pancras to a wintry 1960s Moscow:


Elsewhere, a shot of the Caledonian Market clock tower is captioned: 'The threatening sky emerged mysteriously when this picture was developed.' Security paranoia, meanwhile, reaches its peak in the caption to a glorious old aerial panorama of Pentonville Prison: 'The author did not dare photograph the prison at a time of great tension.' This isn't at all ridiculous; stories abound. A notorious instance occurred two months ago, when an Austrian tourist was approached by two coppers (or possibly PCSOs, as one blogger has observed) and made to delete his photographs of double-decker buses and a modern bus-station, because taking pictures of London transport allegedly contravened some anti-terror legislation. There is indeed a seeping fume of suspicion, and it did not immediately follow 9/11, nor even the London bombings of 2005.

I myself, who take pictures every Sunday on my walks, have only encountered narrowed eyes once, and not those of the Met. I was up in Walthamstow—not far from where the Austrian tourists were shanghaied—examining the Town Hall, which I can't quite decide if I like. It does at least have a fine interior, and a full complement of chunky mid-century relief sculpture on the fronting columns:


Anyway, there I was, camera in hand, in the blazing light of day, the stone so bright my eyes were beginning to hurt, when a middle-aged Carribean woman approached me and asked 'if she could help me'. She was not, of course, asking if she could help. Her tone allowed no doubt: she meant, You do not belong here, please leave. This was officialdom shaking its suspicious stick. Nonetheless, she had, strictly speaking, asked if she could help me. I replied that I would love a cup of tea. She was not moved. What did I want here? I pointed at the building—a fine specimen, isn't it, I exclaimed with a false jollity. In retrospect, I should have taken a photograph of her, there and then. But she continued to watch me darkly until I sidled off, admittedly content with the pictures I had. I felt the thrill of having rubbed up against genuine oppression, but also a disappointment at the mildness, the tameness, of said oppression.

*

There is a historical precedent for all this. On September 13, 1786, a 37 year-old Goethe, in the course of his Italian tour, and in the face of strong winds on the road, stopped at Malcesine, near Verona in northern Italy. The next morning he went to visit the town's old castle; he sat on a step next to a locked gate, and began drawing the castle's tower. As he sat, people began to appear, until at last

one man came up to me, not of the best appearance, and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was sketching the old tower, as a memento of Malcesine. Thereupon he said that this was not allowed, and I should stop it. This he said in the common Venetian tongue, so that I really could hardly understand him, and so I answered that I could not understand him. Then he seized my paper with a true Italian Gelassenheit [best translated into Anglo-French: somewhere between sangfroid, nonchalance, and désinvolture], tore it up, and left it lying on my board.

The podestà, magistrate, is fetched, and asks Goethe why he is sketching the Festung or fortress; the young wag replies ich dieses Gemäuer nicht für eine Festung anerkenne, 'I don't credit these mere walls as a fortress'—'I prompted him and the crowd to consider the ruination of this tower and these walls, the lack of a gate, in short, the defencelessness of the entire situation, and assured him that I thought myself to be seeing and drawing nothing but a ruin.' Then comes the key passage:

Someone answered me: If it be only a ruin, what about it could then appear worthy of consideration? I replied very anfractuously, seeking time and favour, that they knew how many tourists wanted to travel to Italy purely for the ruins—that Rome, capital of the world, laid waste by the barbarians, remained full of ruins, which were sketched hundreds and hundreds of times—and that not everything from antiquity had been so well preserved as the amphitheatre at Verona, which I hoped to see soon as well.

Thus: Romanticism. The scene at Malcesine is suddenly transformed from an irrelevant squabble into a dramatised conflict between the aesthete, with his love of mediaeval ruins, and civic authority, which sees the fortress not as a beautiful work of architecture, but only as a site of political significance. It is observed to Goethe that the tower marks the boundary-line between the territories of Venice and the Emperor's Kaiserstaat, und deshalb nicht ausspioniert werden solle, and therefore ought not to be spied upon. The Italians worry that Goethe is an agent of Joseph II, a 'restless' man. Our hero replies that he is in fact from Frankfurt and in no thrall to the Emperor; a local Malcesinesco named Gregorio steps in and everything is sorted out, but not before Goethe gets a chance to practice his Italian, waxing lyrical to the throng on the desolate glamour of the scene at hand. (Goethe was not in fact arrested, as Wiki claims. Apparently that famous website is not always accurate.)

The 1786 story neatly mirrors today's clashes between photographic scurriers, their eyes out for the beautiful, the delapidated, the unexpected, the recondite, the fascinatively hideous; and local officials who can understand the urban landscape merely in terms of its civic and political function. Deviance, no matter how undeviant when seen in the context of culture or history, must be barred and debilitated.

[Update 05/07/09: I am stopped outside Crystal Palace station, during a routine Sunday stroll, by cops with sniffer dogs. Somehow, mirabile dictu, the hounds fail to detect the sizeable quantities of smack and blow stashed under both my oxters. Despite my (apparent) innocence, the officer requests my name, date of birth and address. 'Routine procedure, sir.' I ask if I am compelled by law to give my details, and he admits that I am not, but then tries to trick me. 'And what did you say your name was again, sir?' Could he not tell by my very voice that I am not one of his usual subjects, blasted and dupeable, with plenty to hide? He speaks into his walkie-talkie, in an attempt to intimidate me. I confess that I was a little intimidated. But I did not give. Still, at last—a police encounter with real menace! Another authentic London experience to cross off the To Do list. Jellied eels next week, cum liquore.]

On the Textures of West London

Sure, it's been a while. Not that I've had nothing to say: but my intellectual energies have of late been directed instead towards the munificent footnotes of my opus. I was going to return with an arcane disquisition on religion in the later Renaissance; I still have it planned, but after such a charming request for another 'of the same order' as my last post, I offer you this instead. It is about walking in London; I do hope you are not sick of the subject.

*

Today I returned to the Grand Union Canal, west of Scrubs Lane. The weather was fine, and cyclists pelted repeatedly past me on the towpath. Strolling the canal in London is unique: for one can see to the other side, but not attain it. Thus whatever the far bank has to offer must be enjoyed at a distance, almost as through a glass. One of the finest spots in the city, indeed, is the passage of the Canal through London Zoo: on the near side, a great modernist aviary filled with peacocks, and on the far, a stepped enclosure with antelopes. At seven on a weekday morning, with nobody about, one can imagine the whole world obliterated save for these stray exotics. West of Scrubs Lane, the mood is quite different. There are no zoos, no genteel back gardens opening onto the canal, no grand Nash terrace or Elgood mansion to stare one down from without, fewer houseboats; and instead, plenty of industry, old and new. Also, now and then, an uncategorisable oddity, such as this:


Strangely, the woman's head in the gold capsule (see details, right) rotated as I watched, such that I initially thought it a live person. I was unable to determine the mechanism of its movement: was it, for instance, electric? Nor could I ascertain its function. Perhaps simply to instill fear and awe in the beholder, an effect largely achieved in my case, due partly to its distance, which allowed the illusion to remain unspoilt, and partly to its physical separation across the water of the canal. I hope that Park Royal Salvage are sensible enough to light the head at night, and even to add smoke effects for the true Gothic horror experience. Still, she was strangely peaceful in the five o'clock sunshine, silent, with nary a soul about, just revolving merrily in a junkpile above the canal, on the edge of the least human area of London. Right from Scrubs Lane, the towpath is full of sounds, present, but never invasive: the chug of occasional barges, the hum of toy planes flown over the copse in Wormwood Scrubs to the south, the whish of bicycles and cackle of the geese they fright up as they pass, and a two-note alarm you can hear for quite a distance, the same two notes, I think, chosen by John Cale for his acute production of 'Facing the Wind'. The canal is also haunted by a smell, warm and half-sweet, like a bakery.

This should be one of the sights of London. Instead you have to slip on to it furtively from Acton Lane or Old Oak Lane. Cooling towers, steaming engines, chimneys, black corrugated-iron sheds: a new industrial excitement every few yards, mellowed and bound together by the water in the foreground and the grass on the banks. — Nairn, London.

This texture I recalled from my last visit here, almost a decade ago. I have pictures from that trip, in sepia, some of the few photographs I took in the pre-digital age. They are scratched and muddy, but only appropriately so. I would not reform them.



At that time, Butterfingers and I were overwhelmed by the darkness and brutality of the place. This was not the North London in which I had grown up: a crueller beast, and a thrilling one. Our urbanites are too flattered by their surroundings, allowed too easily to master their streets, pretty and neatly arranged at the human scale. We need, rather, a range of moods: the gentle, certainly, but also, as here, the harsh, alienating, monumental. As the Romantics knew, though they were able to find it only in the countryside, we need to experience subjugation at the hands of a landscape, to keep us humble, in lieu of a religion. For this reason I was relieved to find the same remorseless passages today, albeit in full March colour:



But not all of my memories were intact. Here is another: the '57' on the side of the brick building behind the silos tells us what it is, namely, a Heinz factory.


Today I reached Abbey Road at Stonebridge with a start: I had not seen the old 57. Where was she? Gone, vanished, and in her place, simply endless rows of faceless grey boxes, walls without architecture, like these. Nairn's 'industrial excitement' is diminishing year by year; I presume that it had largely dissipated even before my first trip. Our architecture is tending away from these black chimneys, towards an absence of character, and particularly of texture. Dirt, grit and variety is bending to sheen and monotony. As an example, take the outer wall of London's new über-mall, Westfield, at the southern end of Scrubs Lane:


Look closely: this is a wall upon which the sun is shining directly, as you can see from the concrete supports below, and by the polished metal strip running along the side towards the top. The supports have their shadows, and the reflected glow of the strip indicates the path of the sun's light. But the wall itself has no glow or texture: only colour. Light diffuses smoothly, immaculately, across it, and becomes invisible. And so the wall resembles a simulation. Inside, legions of immigrants labour to maintain spotlessness. I saw one girl at her post, in a free moment, take a cloth to wipe an imaginary mark from the glass above her till. The antiseptic cleanliness of the place is most impressive. And it has been very cleverly laid out: there are no dead ends, and at the conclusion of each row of merchants, another vista opens out suddenly, beckoning you forward. The lines are not straight and orthogonal, but sinuous and irregular, ergonomic. Even signs have the soft edges of a modernist sculpture, of an Arp or a Moore:


(Hatherley, in his account of Westfield, says the signs remind him of 'prehistoric rubble'.) The tiny detail is utterly revealing. At every moment the aggression of commerce is masked and quieted, and the environment becomes instead cosy, childlike. The glass ceiling allows sunlight to penetrate every nook; there is no darkness, no possibility of the secret or occult, no possibility of 'slipping onto anything furtively'. One moves not by espying and following, not of one's own accord, but as if in a dream, automatically. The sounds are not chug, whish, hum, cackle, alarm, but consumer chatter and the reassuring strains of over-produced radio pop. The smell is not warm and nostalgic, but processed and global, expensive and indeterminate.

Westfield is the future of London, of England—the latest stage in an evolution away from awe, away from brutality, monumentality, and towards cosiness. We are no longer to see the guts of our industry: the girders, pipes, valves, tanks, the bits that get dirty. Instead, smooth lines, matte surfaces, public art. The industry along the Thames, for instance at Chelsea Wharf and Nine Elms, is being swept away for shiny flats in the Westfield idiom, and one has to trudge out east of the Dome to see the desolate remains of the old, to experience the filthy sublimity of industrial scale, and of its continued operation. On the Canal, meanwhile, south side, just east of the Hythe Road Estate, where the towpath swings away from the railway lines, one discovers a puny birch grove, littered with rubbish. I took a few steps down into the grove, and espied an old gentleman by himself, in this most forgotten spot, haunting the trees.


The sun was still coming down as it had been all afternoon, but the trees beat it back and made the place obscure. The old fellow was just standing there, not moving, for as long as I watched him. I was unable to determine the reason for his presence, or his stillness. Perhaps he was busy bringing to mind the canal as it once had been. I moved on, towards the factories.

Glebe Place

Glebe Place, off the King's Road, Chelsea: home of artists since the 1880s. Fine old houses, in a variety of styles, although not quite as beautiful as those on Old Church Road and its neighbours north of the high street. Next to the Open Air Nursery School, at the street's elbow, where it curves towards Bramerton Street, and then down to Cheyne Row and Cheyne Walk—number 50, a folly, done up in a patinate Mediterranean baroque:


This picture taken not by me, but by Jamie Barras. Built, as Barras tells us, for Sir Frank Lowe, advertising magus, and completed in 1987. The sheer ridiculousness of the facade! With its plaques, statues, ivies, metalwork, pink and green. And with a date on the gutter hopper, as became popular in the twentieth century, reading. . . 1723! It would not be out of place at Portmeirion.


Nobody is about, except two georgeously posh old mums twittering a few doors up. The light is not much good, even at midday or so. In the entrance-way, just next to the large filigree-worked double doors, on the left hand side, this, most preposterously of all:


Which either is, or very much resembles, a painting of Sir Frank himself, done in a pastiche Flemish-Renaissance style. I mean, isn't it? Heavy lids, generous nose, broad brow, the rest one can put down to a couple of decades and artistic licence. Only the painter has made him crueller and more calculative.


The possibility remains that Lowe simply found an old burgher who resembled him, but I doubt it. There is a delight, after endless walking in the grit and grime of the suburbs northeast of the City, where there are yet pleasures in the efflorescences of penniless artistic statement, and in the fragments of the old ekeing amid the new and broken, in all the undone, there is a delight here, in Chelsea, in the decadent prettiness of it all, the comfort and the devil-may-care, in good money spent idiosyncratically if not well.

erstarrte Musik

When I first met my wife, at a dormitory party at the University of York—an encounter I described here—I took her for a walk around the campus at four in the morning. We climbed up the Central Hall and stood looking out over the artificial lake, shivering in the chill of a northern February. I explained why I liked the campus—its bare geometric forms, its variety of spaces, its schematism—but try as I might, I just couldn't convince her that gravel-grey modular prefab had any architectural merit. It wasn't just her—most of my fellow students thought it a hideous place, a classically ugly product of 1960s tastes, like the South Bank or the Barbican. If Baukunst really is an erstarrte Musik, as Goethe said, then the campus must be near absolute zero.

*

Hostility towards this style often derives, I suspect, from a confusion of architecture with sculpture, from a criterion of beauty based in the plastic arts. It isn't pretty, is what they're thinking—individuals who'd never dream of requiring prettiness in literature or music. The campus, indeed, is far from pretty. Concrete rarely is. The architects had originally planned to clad their designs in banded white and green—limestone-fluorspar and Cumbrian granite—so as to approximate Siena Cathedral. That would have been prettier, but it proved too expensive, so instead they left exposed the concrete gravel that they'd dredged out of the Trent River. As a result, the campus is a terribly grey place, but it is at least a grey of the earth. (How often we forget the greyness of the earth, our eyes caught up in its greens and ochres, the garish spray of its flower beds and orchards.) The concrete itself is in precast panels arranged on a light steel framework—a method called CLASP, and revolutionary when it was devised around 1960, the campus being its first major application. Some of the panels were sculpted in abstract designs; these 'were an attempt to reassure people as to the fact that prefabrication didn't mean the end of all human variety and the touch of the human hand'. It did seem that way. A reviewer for the Architects' Journal in 1965 noted:

The edges of the precast concrete wall panels show, obliquely, and include angled drainage channels. There is an immediate natural reaction that these gaps need filling—and a further reaction that if they are not to be filled by the builder they will soon be filled by spiders' webs and the like.

The prediction turned out to be correct. When I was there, spiders were everywhere, especially hanging in mazy webs from the lit panels affixed to the ceilings of the walkways that stretch throughout the campus. Those walkways might as well have been taken from the utopian proposals of Charles Fourier—'everything is linked by a series of passageways which are sheltered, elegant, and comfortable in winter thanks to the help of heaters and ventilators'—one walks with nature, protected from it, but not isolated. Frank Lloyd Wright had written of his Living City utopia that 'hard-and-fast lines between outside and inside. . . tend to disappear'—'In spite of all untoward vicarious circumstance, man is now to be less separated from nature'. (Part of me resists Wright's vision: when I typed out this sentence, my fingers put 'not' for 'now' three times, a pregnant parapraxia.) In the same way, as you wind through the older colleges, the paths become corridors, colonnades, open now on this side, now on that: you are neither wholly inside, nor wholly out.

One is supposed to wander in this little world, to dérive: Guy Debord had only just started to use that sort of language when the York development plan was being drawn up. In a 1977 lecture, preserved only on an antique reel-to-reel audiotape sitting misfiled in a dusty corner of the university library, the tape itself threaded the wrong way through the spool, Andrew Derbyshire, one of the chief brains behind the campus, remarked:

We realised pretty early on that this was going to be a difficult place to find one's way about in. . . One wants to be able to explore. I don't like situations that expose themselves immediately, reveal all their secrets.

What we have is a version of the political utopianism so characteristic of post-war architectural theory: the design of the campus rejects hierarchical structure and places man directly in contact with nature. The organisation of buildings, loose and irregular, around intersecting nodes for congregation, are entirely anti-authoritarian: Haussmann would have been appalled. Contrast, for instance, the plan of the York campus:


to a map of Arizona State University, where I spent three long years:


In Tempe, most of the residential blocks are outside the campus, as is its centre of administration. There are some 30,000 students—twice that figure if one takes into account the other campuses. Provision is made for easy access and functional clarity, not for organic flexibility: hence long, broad avenues, lined with palms and palo verdes. At York, on the other hand, residential, educational and administrative blocks were deliberately combined. It was to be a small, close community, for a few thousand students. As Stefan Muthesius put it, 'this university is arguably not an assembly of separate units, but forms a whole, a kind of complete and 'anti-diagrammatic' organism.' This was the vitalistic language of the Smithsons, or of Constantin Doxiadis, who wrote in 1966 that the ideal city 'will evolve continuously, and when it ceases to do so the death of the whole organism will occur'. We are back at Mesa vs. Hornsey.

*

You can see plenty of pictures of the campus online. But for a more authentic vision, it will be worth examining pictures from the manifestos and early journal reviews of the campus, shot in a gorgeous 1960s high-contrast monochrome, the floors and facades all shiny and modernist. In these photographs, and attendant prose, we can recover some of the initial excitement.

A courtyard in the chemistry department; the columnar object
to the left is an old water tower, since demolished.

Pyramidal rooflights, Goodricke College

Colonnade, Derwent College

Boilerhouse, "ship-shape and shining. Ex-navy boilermen take
keen and obvious pride in their jobs."

And the greatest concession to a sculptural aesthetic, the boilerhouse chimney sticking up from the campus periphery, now usually sidelined by the roving architectural eye in favour of the spaceship-like Central Hall at the heart of the campus, seen here in half-installed form (1965) from a later retrospective:


Finally, the whole campus seen from the air:


The boiler chimney is at the far right, centre; in the bottom-right corner, meanwhile, can be seen Heslington Church, whose spire delightfully resounds in the pyramidal rooflights dotted about the campus: a 'happy harmony,' according to Derbyshire, 'which we hadn't actually ever intended or thought about'. The rooflights provide relationships of form within the campus, as well as a relationship between the campus and its environs.

And the language used to describe these lights is astounding. The 1965 reviewer saw them as evidence of an 'overall romanticism'. A later reviewer concurred: 'roofs and side-elevations were embellished by romantic details in the form of pyramid-shaped rooflights and box bay windows'. Michael Brawne, also in 1965, had mused in own his review of the campus that 'certain systems exert, through their apparent technical neatness, a romantic fascination'. What are we to make of romantic rooflights? They gesture upwards, with the spire at Heslington: they mitigate the modular repetition of the CLASP blocks: and at night they haunt the wanderer in his labyrinth.

Lutus Lutetiae

Squit, squit, squit, all weekend. Ten times a day, or more. It was horrible. Must have been something I ate—bad salmon or prawns, maybe. At least I could read as I squote, a small consolation. Other consolations were denied me. Normally in this condition, one's cul is easily torché, so wet and dilute is the dung. But this time—oh! I had a rich macerate umber paint with every swab. This morning the smell of a regular session was enough to put me off my imminent pain au chocolat. My arse, in fact, was itself like a huge pain au chocolat, after a minute in the microwave. (Georges Perec taught Harry Mathews the expression, avoir le pain d'épice au bord des lèvres.) I clench; I suffer.

Dali, in his Passions, which I purchased last week at a bouquiniste opposite the Île de la Cité—a worthy addition to my burgeoning collection of Daliana—tells the story of the Caca Dauphin. 'In the presence of dignitaries and the best artists of the realm, the divine child freed his bowels. There were collected coppers, ochres, greens, browns, and the Court was clothed in the colours of the Dauphin-poop. I know nothing at once more traditional and more subversive, nothing more legitimate and more scandalous, nothing more nobly alive.' Dali, of course, loves shit, scybales, sir-reverence, ordure. And he adores the thick palette of Moreau (detail, right): 'Gustave Moreau, the most glorious of erotic and scatalogical painters, pursued only one aim, but that fanatically: to make gold appear at the end of his brush. It is with excremental colours, ochres, burnt umbers, that a good artist succeeds in suggesting the matter of gold. Gold, as with Moreau, is born of the shadows, of the abysses of dark matter, and this is why our civilization, lacking grandeur, is that of fresh, gay colours—that is to say, inhuman and indivine. See America.' Moreau's hues are, as Dali puts it, antibonbons.

I did not visit the Musée Moreau. I meant to. But I wound up beat from all the skiting. I barely got to the Louvre without passing out from the sun and the din of tourists not even trying to parlay frongsay. But I did get to the Louvre. It was a necessity. Unfortunately I was really only there to see the Italian Renaissance, and that meant wading through all the run-off from the Gioconda. It was all creaking floorboards and Ah, Botticelli! Oh, Giotto! More interested in the name-plates than the paintings. March swiftly through the Tuscan Trecento—'don't like this stuff'—Raphael, check; Titian, check. Snap snap snap at the Veronese Cana. Peer appreciatively at the speck of the Leonardo. 'It's a self-portrait, you know.' For some reason they didn't want to flow out the back of the room to see the Ingres Roger and the rest of the famous French rubbish. So I was stuck with them.

Clearly, the Trecento was the room for the Moreauiste. The Trecento is the excremental century par excellence, with its defecund gold and ochre, the superb and unromantic brutality of its figuration. Who can fail to enjoy the Master of the Rebel Angels with his tumbling nasties—


What image could be more stercorine? Let us allegorize the fall of Lucifer and his infernal host as an expulsion of congurgitated matter from the white celestial vaults of the buttocks. Likewise, we discover Christ recast as a dung-beetle, with a stylised carapace for a chest, wrapped in a torchecul, and mounted on iconic gold, a classic Catholic gilt complex:


Dali says of Catalonia: 'The passion of God, of gold, and an erotics of non-consummation go together in the mystical soul of my country.' But it is not only Catalonia, as this Tuscan crucifix testifies. No wonder all the American tourists, accustomed to their deodorised, puritanical pastels and primaries, fresh and gay, walk right past this stuff, their glazed bored eyes hiding an unconscious dread. The Trecento room also contains Quattrocento primitives, including a very fine little Sano di Pietro predella with a St. Jerome comic-strip.


We are in the same world as the St. Anthony I wrote about here: a St. Anthony tempted by gold, mysteriously vanished, or metamorphosed into the brown landscape. Here Jerome has cast off his cardinal's hat, to reveal the aureate radiance of a halo, among trees studded with gold; his excrement has been transformed into vipers and scorpions. The vermilion towns sketched in each top corner are gorgeously charming, aren't they?

*

Oh, enough of shit. I've had enough, believe me. My wife, as always so pharmaceutically astute, has just given me a couple of Imodium tablets, chewable, mint-flavoured, and literally nauseating. I don't think they have taken effect yet. I continue to suffer.

Strangely, there are some marvelous paintings in the Louvre of a wholly inexcremental nature. In the long corridor of Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento proper, it is Mantegna who really holds my interest, as he generally does. For instance, look at his astonishing treatment of marble as a decorative element in the magnificent Virgin of Victory (1496):


And contrast this, in terms of technical skill, to the treatment of marble by an earlier generation, for instance Castagno's very fine Last Supper of 1447:


In 1497-1505, Isabella d'Este commissioned a number of matching works for her first studiolo in the Castello di San Giorgio; Mantegna painted the first two, Perugino the third, and Lorenzo Costa the last two. Mantegna, again, creams the competition. In my post on Quattrocento painting, I showed a mysterious cipher-text from a 1453 manuscript attributed to Mantegna; and here, fifty years later, the old bastard is at it again. A long scroll is entwined around a dryad-like figure to the far left: the topmost involution has some Latin, but below it are two visible faces containing nonsense-scripts of a Voynich variety, the second rather resembling (but not, in fact, being, at least not entirely) square Hebrew forms.



This thrill of obscurity recurs on the Paris streets, in a very rare moment of mystery. Just south of the Seine, at the entrance to the Jussieu campus, currently under re-construction, one finds high thin twin walls of graffiti, or possibly art of a strange urban sort, utterly illegible and incomprehensible:


Greg Afinogenov, a jolly nice chap and fellow blogger whom I met over beer near the Bastille last week, thinks Paris a dead city, replete with bobos and lacking all remnants of authenticity. I am inclined to agree. The city fills me with a slight horror, and yet I can't put my finger on quite why. Perhaps it is the visual monotony, or else the surfeit of grand architectural statements begging to be photographed, just like the Gioconda. Paris hardly allows you to find out for yourself. Everywhere is known, or not worth knowing. In London, the most known is also ripe with opportunities for new knowledge. Walk down Tottenham Court Road, looking not at the electronics stores but at the rooftops. At Buckingham Palace, walk around the corner to Lugsmoor Lane and the back streets of Pall Mall. Head north off Oxford Street and stroll down pre-Regency ways still intact. But Paris is without respite: it retains the totalitarian aesthetic of Haussmann. Consequently, its only successes are in the monumental, and for me, only in the modern monumental, or in other words, the monumental not betrayed by endless ornamentation. Thus the crystal city of Les Halles:


Or the oppressive and hieratic interior of the Bibliothèque Nationale (the reason for my visit), which a friend of mine rightly compared to Karnak:


But very little of the quiet succeeds in this city. We read about, and so desire to retrouver for ourselves, the quiet and cloistral streets of Maldoror, of Eugène Sue, of the Surrealists. This is why I took, to read on the train, the Williams translation of Soupault's Last Nights of Paris. But it is no good; and even Soupault is dull in the light of day. Dali writes: 'My entire mental life is made up of the recording of visions, with a view to total orgasmic superposition. There is a stretch of the Rue de Rivoli that I find sublime, from the Hôtel Meurice to the Place Vendôme. And, well, I always make it 'come out' at the last moment.' But I ask you: is this, said stretch now, sublime?—


When I at last return home to my wife, only the second woman to whom I have ever remotely mattered, cut off from telephone or internet contact for six painful days, and two of raw squitting, the relief on both sides is palpable.

Thanum an Dhul

Roth revives! See how he rises!
Roth he rises from the dead,
Says, "Whirl your cava around like blazes"
"Thanum an Dhul, do you thunk I'm dead?"

Rumours of my death have been, well, somewhat exaggerated. I was sleeping is all. Or else off gallivanting with Epistemon amidst among the fallen. And it is has been as busy as a time as ever it will be—moving, disowning, appreciating, divagating, arguing, decorating, slicing and framing, lucubrating, rising early, failing, attending, listening, not hearing, preening, expanding, gorging, sneering, perusing, pontificating, and scribbling, but only sober words, and all without the benefit of this ambivalent sketchpad to console me.

In little Hornsey we manage, just, to replace each drunk bottle with another, gratis, by courtesy of guests, whose magnanimity we carefully gauge and record, by the splendour of the bottle they bring, its age, its size, the grandeur of its name. Now, Mr. Dodson warned me on these very pages that Freixenet would not be suitable for the celebration of my return. Thus, in turn, I admonished our guests not to bring Freixenet, under pain of sanction. For three months gladly have I welcomed visitors bearing various cuvées, a Cristal here, a Dom Pérignon there, and I had saved for some time a particularly fine Pol Roger for this very occasion, when two nights ago a brace of unwanted (though I dare to admit it, invited, albeit by Mrs. Roth) haplodytes descended upon us for dinner, demanding champagne for the birth of their two-bit nipper, and yet bearing with them, the damned cheek of it, not champagne, but only—


— Cava? We drank the Pol Roger. The wine was bitter in my mouth. Mrs. Roth abstained piously. I did not talk much at the table, only eyeing my bouteille diminuant with ever-growing pique. Their bottle, on the other hand, remained wrapped on the far counter. My friends, it is all I have left. I'm afraid, Mr. Dodson, that your only consolation is that it is not, after all, a Freixenet.

Le'chayim, then. Bastards.

*

With each slow stride, so low, the water rises slowly by my side, aswallow. And the flat sidereal rises of the moon looming, illumining, white with weight, tremulous, foaming and shiving in the weight of the vast sea. And from the sea, all ashiver with a vast cold, rising in lines of light, so slow, is the light of bells and spires, a spired city of candles and glasses, so low and so vast, and the colour of treasure, as the skin of my face rises down against the sweep of the skin of the sweep and stave of the sea, and the moon her weight and white eyes are beside me, and her bird is there in my hand to guide me.

I wrote that when I was about seventeen. It was part of a dream-sequence in my starter-novel, The Ark, the drafts of which I occasionally look over with an embarrassed amusement. It wasn't all in this style. But it was parts like these that most interested me at the time. I wanted to write prose aspiring to the condition of poetry—the most flawed of ambitions, and one I now wholly repudiate. Later I wrote a poem, Chalybea, which developed some of the imagery from The Ark, in an entirely different context, and to much better effect. (It has the further advantage of being actually a poem.) I still liked, and indeed still like, underwater cities, and along with them, underwater bells.

Bells. Echoes, from below, from the hollows
of the bowels of the earth, billowing up.

The poem's narrative was punctuated in places by the sound of a 'Flibberty-gibbety bell', wafting over the waves to the action onboard a ship. And towards the end of the story, a precious clock is tossed into the water:

In the end, they dismantled its gears
and threw it back, amid the vitreous chime
of sunlight staggering upon waves.

It is the height of bad manners to discuss one's own work as if it were that of another. I quote these passages simply to illustrate that for whatever reason, I have long associated the sea, and lower regions of the earth, with bells and clocks. Now, when writing both novel and poem, and for a long while after, I had no knowledge of the folklore of underwater bells. The Funk and Wagnall Folklore Dictionary claims that

Bells which have sunk to the bottom of ponds or lakes or have been buried underground (of which every European country traditionally has examples) also ring at solemn times, such as midnight on Christmas Eve. Such bells were generally engulfed as a punishment for some human impiety.

So, for instance, in Gervase of Tilbury's 1215 Otia Imperialia:

In Britain there is a forest, rich in many kinds of game, which looks down on the city of Carlisle. Roughly in the middle of this forest there is a valley surrounded by hills near a public highway. In this valley, I say, every day at seven in the morning a gently-sounding peal of bells [classicum campanarum dulce resonans] is heard; and so the locals have given that lonely place the name of 'Laikibrais' in the Welsh tongue.

I quote the translation of Banks and Binns (2002), though 'Welsh' [Wallico] is a rather tendentious editorial correction of 'French' [Gallico]. R. C. Cox, in his article on Laikibrais (or Laikibrait), mentions, like the Folklore Dictionary, and in very similar language, that 'The tradition of a body of water in which bells are engulfed and yet are heard to peal is a common folklore motif often associated with demonic forces or the punishment of some human impiety.' For Cox, Laikibrait is the 'lake that cries' [Old French lai ki brait], associated with the inundation of church bells at Tarn Wadling, in Inglewood Forest near Carlisle.

This, also, from Georgina Jackson's 1883 book on Shropshire Folk-Lore:

There is a Norfolk legend which brings out the connection between pools, bells, and the Under World very clearly. Tunstall Church in that county having been destroyed by a fire, which yet left the bells uninjured, the parson and churchwardens quarrelled for the possession of them, and meantime the Old Gentleman watched his opportunity and walked off with them. He was, however, found out and pursued by the parson, who began to exercise him in Latin. So in his hurry he made his way through the earth to his own abode taking his booty with him. The spot where he disappeared is now a boggy pool of water called Hell Hole, on the surface of which, in summer-time, bubbles are constantly appearing. These, the folk say, are caused by the continual sinking of the bells through the water on their endless journey to the bottomless pit.

And from Paul Sébillot's 1905 Le Folk-Lore de France, volume 2:

According to the traditions common to many standing bodies of water believed to conceal engulfed towns, the residents hear, at certain times of the year, and almost always on the occasion of great festivals, the sound of bells rising from their depths. It seems that the cities lie beneath the liquid layer, hardly overwhelmed and ruined, but almost in the state they were in at the moment they disappeared. One can even perceive them through the transparency of the waters, as those that the sea has buried; the churches remain at the bottom, and sometimes, just as our bells are singing out to announce Christian rituals, mysterious ringers set in motion the bells of the cursed cities.

and:

At Christmas two bells sound at full volume, under the Mare Rouge at Relans, to announce the midnight hour, and at the same moment can be heard the bells of Radenac (Morbihan) buried in a sort of quagmire, those of the Mare Sonnante at Balaiseaux (Haute-Saône), of the Vieux Bronze, and of the monastery of Fleres, engulfed beneath a lake as a punishment for the monks' impiety: only at this time, occupied with their pious soundings, can the damned obtain some respite from their torments.

Sébillot, like a good philosophe, is happy to provide the rationalist's explanation. He cites the Académicien, Thomas de Saint-Mars, claiming in 1780 that the bells he hears at the waterside are not those of the sunken Herbauge, but rather those of Nantes across the water:

One might add that these carillons are heard above all at two times of the year: between All Saints and Christmas, when the trees, shorn of their leaves, provide no obstacle to the propagation of the sound; and during the calm nights of the summer solstice.

We hear the same themes even in a Joanna Newsom lyric:

In the trough of the waves,
which are pawing like dogs,
pitch we, pale-faced and grave,
as I write in my log.

Then I hear a noise from the hull,
seven days out to sea. . .
and it is that damnable bell.

Newsom has claimed that she found her line about the 'damnable bell', after having penned it, in a fantasy novel (this one?) about the drowned city of Ys, and this accounts also for the title of the record from which this lyric comes: Ys. The story is that the Breton city was flooded and drowned after the king's daughter, Dahut, opened the dam-gates standing as its protection against the sea. Dahut is later transformed into a morverc'h (cf. Irish English merrow) or mermaid. The myth has some similarity, it seems to me, to the Greek legend of Nisus and Scylla. From the 1839 collection of Breton ballads known as the Barzaz Breiz:

Gwelous a ris ar morverc'h venn,
M'hle c'hlevis o kannan zoken
Klemvanus tonn ha kanaouenn.

I saw the wan mermaid,
I recall hearing her song
In the air, the anguish of lament.

The song of Dahut later becomes the peal of bells, lamenting, although the only literary treatment I can find online is a yucky bit of doggerel by the Canadian poet Bliss Carman, 'The Bells of Ys':

Still along that haunted coast men tell us
They can hear at times,
Then the tide is half asleep and musing,
The faint sound of unsubstantial chimes
Ringing through the world's tumultuous day-beat
From enchanted climes.

And they say those peals of fairy music
Are the city's bells,
Drowned long since with all their silver joyance,—
That a deathless rapture in them dwells,
Part forever of the surge of being
As it sinks and swells.

The bells do not have a sound of 'silver joyance' or 'deathless rapture', for the bells are not part of the 'surge of being': the bells of Ys, as of Laikibris, Tunstall, Fleres and Herbauge, are bells of memory and admonition. The chimes are an element left over from an age now lost, kept fast, and warning us not to forget. They remind us that our world is only one world: there is a lower, just as there is a higher. They are a mark of what cannot be assimilated, a Delphic epsilon, or as Freud would have put it, a return of the repressed.

*

Standing on Alexander Binnie's 1897 Hornsey Lane Bridge, or rather on Suicide Bridge, as it is affectionately known, overlooking the A1 in its incarnation as Archway Road, one has the sense, more than anywhere else in London, Greenwich included, of straddling two worlds. This really is one of the most remarkable locations in the city, and one entirely unknown to me until we moved to nearby Hornsey two months ago.


What happens is this: you begin in Crouch End, with Alexandra Palace just peeking up above the shop roofs, and work your way south, up a gentle slope, and with tall trees hanging overhead, past the large church. You turn right onto Hornsey Lane, with the council flats opposite, and further up the large social housing units and older interwar apartment blocks, also on a sizeable scale. The whole way you ascend almost imperceptibly, all the while nestled comfortably in roads of houses, protected: this is upmarket suburbia. Then at last you come to the bridge, you emerge, and all of a sudden, on both sides, you find this:


My American readers will not be remotely surprised by this: it is the sort of thing you see all over that dark continent. But in London it is most unusual. Ours is essentially a flat city, or at most a city of gradual rises. And so to me, this view represents a genuine shock of vertigo.

When I first trudged up this way, on the first sunday of Lent, on my own, in the blazing sunshine of a morning, I heard the chimes of bells wafting their way up to me from below. And there is a little world down there, too. On the bridge are wrought-iron lamp-posts, dolphins. They are the same as those seen on the banks of the Thames, world-renowned. The dolphin, not a fish, is king of the fish; hence his central place on the arms of the Worshipful Company of Fishermongers. He is king of the river. And the Archway Road is a river, too, the rush of its traffic warm and cold and calling as the currents of the Thames himself. So I descend like the celestial visitors at Clonmacnoise. You can make your way down by a snickleway beside the bridge, but I take another path, down a picturesque alley named Tile Kiln Lane, beside the reservoir to the west. I make my way down, and I begin to forget.

*

It is easy to forget when you have something to look at. The church at the bottom of Tile Kiln Lane and around the corner, on Archway Road underlooking the bridge, is quite striking.


It is St Augustine of Canterbury, first built in 1888 and variously rebuilt and retooled thereafter. It lies beneath the water, hardly overwhelmed and ruined, but almost in the state it was in at the moment it disappeared. The church is strangely caught out of time, like some sort of Neo-Gothic pagoda, prefigured by this ornament on the roof of the nearby Rokesly School:


As if to emphasize the timelessness of the place, a carved inscription above the entrance commemorates George Ratcliffe Woodward, who passed away, it says, 'Anno Domini MXCXXXIV'. Now Woodward was born in 1848, and did not live to a ripe old age of -724, which he would have done if he had indeed died in AD 1124, unless of course he had invented time-travel, which really would have put his various musical and apiaristical achievements to shame. What the carver really meant to grave was MCMXXXIV, 1934. But so it goes, and we ironise.


Below the Virgin and Child, between the two doors, we find a melancholy presence. It is either the graver scolding himself for a fudged date, or the very spirit of irony itself, worn out, worn down, tired, bored.

*

The world, she wants you to forget. When you forget, you are hers. And so she offers you cuvées and cigars, television, pop music, and now the internet—that ultimate engine of lotophagose oblivion. But London! London exists to make you remember! I have been trying to remember. M'hle c'hlevis o kannan zoken, klemvanus tonn ha kanaouenn. She leaves everything just lying around for you to stumble upon, like an unexplored attic, all in a mess. This is how provocative she is. This is how she shakes her hair at you, and grins wanly, out of the corner of her eye, all the while lamenting what she has lost: a considerable amount. The city and I are on the same side, against them, whoever they are. Certainly against her scheming servants, the knave and the fool, who would be her masters. Most irrelevant of the irrelevant are they! The only living stone is London herself, and we, of whom her walls are built. I will not listen to her servants, nor to the world with its hideous spectacle. In being hers I will become, I think, myself.

*

I have been trying to remember, no joke. I have been going to church. What, you thought I'd been wasting these months without you? We went to Easter Mass at St Paul's. Mrs. Roth did not come; but I cannot blame her, for it was so cold, and her back was in agony at the time. The sermon was rather lacklustre, and communion took forever, and the huge modern paintings were inauthentic, but all this was beside the point, because I felt like I was on safari. What was I doing there? I found myself mouthing the words to the hymns because I didn't know the music, and H., whose religiosity is perhaps a little more ambiguous than my own, mouthed along with me, because she didn't know the music either. I shook hands with perfect strangers and said Peace be with you. And where is the irony in that? How do the religious make sense of this beautiful ritual? The next week it was the same. A Dutch friend and I attended Sunday service at Austin Friars, the only Dutch church in the country, and the oldest Dutch-language Protestant church in the world, including Holland. And there the alienation was heightened: I could revel in it. Not only was I the only person in the room not to know the music—I was the only person there who couldn't understand a damned thing that was being said! The sermon went blaach blaach T. S. Eliot blaach blaach blaach The Waste Land blaach blaach Shackleton blaach blaach Emmaus, and although on reflection I could deduce the subject, the vast majority of it remained, well, double dutch. Which is not to say it lacked a fine strange music. Then we stood around the altar in a circle and looked conscientiously at the floor as the prayers were recited. Afterwards they were all terribly friendly and I felt like an ass; but my companion was delighted to be able to speak her own language, and that did please me a great deal.


I force myself into these uncomfortable scenarios not from any turn towards religion, nor out of scorn for those who believe, but because of an uneasy suspicion that I have forgotten something, an art older than irony. It is as if I want the city and her ways to conquer me a little. London exists more in her church services than in her church façades. This I know; but I am trying to understand it, also. In my ears are the bells. I strain myself, for I cannot hear Herbauge—only Nantes.

To Date?

Close beside the pride of modern man there stands his ironic view of himself—his awareness that he has to live in an historicizing, as it were a twilight mood, and his fear that his youthful hopes and energy will not survive into the future.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873.

London is filled with a beautiful architecture—but like all architecture, it is resistant to man. The yuppies and immigrants go about their everyday lives, eyes closed, ears full of the latest noise, never looking up. Even those who, like me, keep their eyes intent upon the built environment, are pushed back, not by its ugliness, but by its lack of meaning. Red brick, yellow brick, brown brick, grey brick—plaster, white and cream—glass, a little oak, a little stone—concrete, slate, plastic, tin, terracotta, pebble-dash, painted porch-tiles, many quite elegant—but all blank, remorseless, and quite empty of signs. I stare and stare, in an attempt to make sense of these objects: to make texts of them, texts with which to work, to communicate. Down Chichele Road there are the rudiments of signs: a plaster eagle perched atop a house (No. 15), and facing it a Neo-Gothic church made mosque with pea-green domes. Almost every terraced house has stereotyped designs, one or several, floral or abstract, carved into the brick, or moulded into the plaster, and flexwinged wyverns are common ornaments on the gabletops of the area.

But I want an architecture that can be made to ask questions—and these objects offer only the faintest and least interesting of enquiries.

One kind of architectural object, however, can be made to ask a number of highly worthwhile questions—the datestone. Until recently the datestone was not even a category in my mental lexicon; I had never considered the things. But then, well, I got thinking.

I distinguish three related objects. Firstly, the datestone proper: a stone, brick, plaster chunk, wood panel or other object containing a date, with or without initials. The datestone marks the completion date of the building to which it is attached, or originally attached. Second, the false datestone: these look much like datestones, except that the date they show is not the date of the building's completion—generally it is the founding date of the company, or else the date of an earlier building on the same site. Third, the commemorative stone, which I will abbreviate to 'comstone': a large stone (or plaque) with a longer text, commemorating a contemporary or historical event, such as the foundation of a public building, casualties of war, and the like. It is usually, but not always, clear which is which, and there are a few border-cases. Here I am most interested in the genuine datestone, although I will show the others by contrast.

*

From what I can tell, little has been written on the datestone. The British Library has two works on the subject, both ramshackle productions by local historians: A. S. and E. Day's Datestones of Bradshaw and Harwood, and John B. Taylor's Stories in Stone: Datestones in Rossendale. The latter is hand-written. Neither contains anything of theoretical interest; instead they catalogue stones (with drawn reproductions) going back to the 17th century. There is no indication that certain periods of history have left us more stones than others. The same is true of this website, which catalogues datestones in Jersey.

But when I came to look for datestones myself, I found the distribution of dates to be strongly skewed—the overwhelming majority of stones are from about 1870 to 1910. This is perhaps even more remarkable for the fact that the stones can be found on buildings of all types, public and private, plain and ornate—as Taylor puts it, 'from mansion to hen-cote'.

Data.

I cannot claim a rigorous or systematic methodology for collecting the stones. I looked for them carefully on various walks, mostly in London—Cricklewood (where I live), Willesden, West Hampstead, Belsize Park, Hammersmith, Camden Town, Great Portland Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet Street, Holborn and the Inns of Court—as well as a couple of trips to Nottingham and York. Here is a list of the 92 genuine datestones I have found so far, with images from a digital camera. Nottingham stones are marked with an N, York with a Y; the rest are from London.

1682, 1748, 1759, 1789, 1800, 1810Y, 1860, 1860N, 1865, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1876Na, 1876Nb, 1877, 1878a, 1878b, 1879, 1881, 1883a, 1883b, 1884a, 1884b, 1884c, 1885, 1887, 1888a, 1888b, 1889a, 1889b, 1890a, 1890b, 1891, 1892a, 1892b, 1892c, 1894a, 1894b, 1895, 1895Y, 1896a, 1896b, 1897a, 1897b, 1897c, 1897N, 1898, 1899a, 1899b, 1900, 1901, 1901N, 1902a, 1902b, 1903a, 1903b, 1903c, 1903Ya, 1903Yb, 1904a, 1904b, 1904c, 1904Y, 1905a, 1905b, 1905c, 1905d, 1905e, 1906, 1906Y, 1907Y, 1908Y, 1909, 1910a, 1910b, 1914, 1924, 1930, 1930Y, 1952, 1957a, 1957b, 1960, 1962, 1969, 1972, 1979, 1983, 1996, 2000

Several of these are problem cases. In bold are free-standing objects with dates—plaques, a lamp-post (1902a), a glass awning (1874—from the Criterion Restaurant; I believe this is original, and thus a genuine 'datestone', but I could be wrong). In italics is a curious subclass of datestone (1789 may not be in this group): these are all located around the Inns of Court, and all feature a date with a triangular series of initials, most with 'T' at the apex. Notably, they go back much earlier, and continue late. These stones closely resemble 'marriage stones', which function as a record of marriage, the initials being those of the husband and wife. As far as I am aware, my sole example of the latter is 1810Y. However, because of the concentration of the stones in italics around the Inns, I am confident that their initials are in fact those of heads of chambers. What the 'T' indicates I do not know, but as 1957b and 1960 (both from Gray's Inn) clearly demonstrate, the practice still continues today.

It is worth noting that a datestone is not always a reliable indicator of the age of the building to which it is attached; both Taylor and the Days mention that stones can be incorporated into later buildings:

The datestones on a few buildings seem contrary to what the architecture would suggest and may have been incorporated from an earlier structure, which may or may not have been on the same site.

If the datestone cannot reliably attest the date of a building, it is usually reliable on its own date. However, there are exceptions—false datestones, for instance this double stone, from an old Prudential office in Nottingham. Its date of 1848 is in fact the date of the company's founding, and the building itself is considerably later, an excellent example of High Victorian Gothic, designed in terracotta by Alfred Waterhouse during the 1890s. Another example is this, which unless I am radically mistaken about Georgian aesthetics, is not from 1829, but rather commemorates the founding of King's College London. Often false datestones are combined with real ones—the latter being the restoration date, or else the two stones showing an anniversary commemoration, as here.

This is a chart of the frequency distribution of our 92 genuine stones:

Datestones become increasingly common during the period 1860-1910, and then rapidly fall off; a disproportionate number of those before and after this period are in the 'Inns' subclass discussed above. Comstones, on the other hand, are found throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, although I have not counted them with the same energy and interest as the datestones.

*

The question is, then: why should the period 1870-1910 present such a strong concentration of datestones? It will be quickly observed that there simply are a lot of buildings from this period—thus the Days: 'Nineteenth-century datestones are linked with the great explosion of population in the Bolton district when expansion took place by building mainly terraced housing along the main roads of the area'. But we observe in return that the architecture of English cities is highly eclectic, and that plenty of buildings remain from all periods of the last three centuries, despite Paul Thompson's claim that the 'medieval and Georgian architecture which now survives is no more than a winning fragment'. The distribution is just too skewed, even taking into account the unsystematic collection of my data—a deeper reason must be sought.

As I walked about London, and thought about London, I noticed that the problem of datestones seemed to become in my mind a much greater problem, of history and its architecture. And a casual remark in the Days' book provides a further clue: 'Datestones add much of interest to the visual apperance of a building, and when in the original setting, place the building firmly in the historical period.' (Italics mine.) When I polled friends, most murmured something vague about the late Victorians being conscious of progress and destiny—particularly sensitive to their own place in history. I emailed an eminent scholar, who replied:

I think that generally the Victorian period was a time of pride and money, and of 'the invention of tradition' (book by Hobsbawm and Ranger) and therefore they were both more conscious of such niceties and more able to afford it. . . In modern times we are generally less interested in identifying ourselves with buildings and they are often made by developers more interested in money than pride.

Most modern developers are concerned with cost-efficiency, and would disdain the datestone as purely ornamental; the comstone, on the other hand, is an imposition from the trustees and benefactors of the building, who wish to commemorate an historic occasion. In other words, certain events are considered significant enough to memorialise, and so are certain buildings as public functions (library, school, council block)—but not architecture itself. This is what is meant, I think, by the claim that our architects have less 'pride' in their work: they are not allowed to give it an intrinsic historical significance.

Why is this? History, as we popularly conceive it, and as it is currently made, describes the State and its subsidiaries, even down to local councils and the petty officials and society-folk who lay comstones. The buildings we choose to make historical, by giving them a date, are thus the buildings that serve a purpose in the framework of the State.

The old datestones, on the other hand, are the equivalent of dates in colophons, or on paintings and picture-frames—they denote the building as a work of art, as a piece of architecture, and as such, part of a history—a history not of the State, or even of society, but of aesthetic achievement.

The craze for datestones in 1870-1910 does not represent a sense of national pride—it has nothing to do with civics, with the public sphere. If it did, we should expect to see datestones on monumental civic achievements—on the glorious and baroque façades of Regent Street, or earlier, on all the triumphal Nash buildings in the centre of the city. But there are none. In fact there seems to be no correlation between the possession of a datestone and the grandeur or civic importance of a building. Some important works have them, others do not—and those that do often use Roman numerals, such as 1800 (Royal College of Surgeons), or at least stately lettering, as in 1877 (Belsize Park Town Hall). Most datestones, on the contrary, are private statements, soft and elegant signatures, equivalent to the dateless monograms also occasionally found through London.

*

Nietzsche, in the work quoted above, finds freedom in the escape from history, or at least in the mastery of it. I, however, am more sympathetic to Gadamer, who sees liberty in history: the man who would oppress a nation cuts its people loose from their own history, unmooring man from himself, and gives them another history, or even a myth. To sign one's work in stone is to add one's name, however small, to a distinguished list, and to become part of a history. Thus too the marriage stones, with which wed couples solidify and manifest their commitment in the face of history. History is solidity.

Sketched above is a narrative that can be read into the facts of the datestones as we have them. It may be utterly fanciful, or it may yet contain some truths worth sifting. We have yet to determine (if indeed we are on some semblance of the correct track) why the period 1870-1910 should have conceived of its architecture in these historical terms. Perhaps we might invoke the rapid growth of the architectural profession, which 'increased more than tenfold between 1820 and 1870'. Certainly we will want to talk about the changing clients; John Betjeman, in his 1972 Pictorial History of English Architecture, informs us that 'The people who paid for buildings at the beginning of the age of electricity and the internal combustion engine were different from the mid-Victorians'. (And his remark that today's architects are 'brought up in a generation whose romance is to be found in a future which does not exist, rather than the past', while describing the flight from stylistic historicism, applies equally to the decline of historical consciousness, and hence of datestones.)

But at least we have begun to press those damned stones—we have at least spurred them to talk, to ask questions—and so we have not succumbed to that effacement of our history, for which our masters so devoutly wish.