Prince Charming?

Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by Peter Davey

For good or ill, because of the Prince's involvement, all comment on Dorchester's architecture is inevitably linked by the news media to the Duchy development, and perhaps rightly so since the same local authorities are involved in both. Hence the hollowness of the planners' response to one seemed to expose the hollowness in the execution of the other. Pastiche-adulation has taken such a hold that local planners now denigrate genuine historic buildings as eyesores and advocate their replacement with woeful, ersatz versions as 'practical' alternatives. Genuine historic Dorchester seems in danger of becoming theme park Casterbridge.

It seemed to me that the Prince's 'monstrous carbuncle' speech had reflected exactly what was happening in Dorchester and had pointed the way to a change of thinking as to how urban building styles ought to relate to the inherited townscape. Extending this theory into a wider context that included marrying buildings to landscape and its application to humbler structures marked a further advance. Together with the precepts advocated in A Vision of Britain these seemed to me to predicate a return to what might be described as vernacular craftsman's values.

Non-industrialised communities were compelled to use the resources available in the immediate environment because no others could be procured at less than unacceptable cost (and also perhaps because their importation resulted in no perceptible benefit). Hence expertise in handling local materials to meet local needs was built up over many generations, perhaps even millennia, and resulted in regional variations still observable today. This deep-rooted tradition of craftsmanlike, straightforward and honest use of materials coupled with an intimate knowledge of their various natures and properties resulted in manufactures which Bernard Leach aptly described as having been 'born not made'. All this was achieved without the necessity of having recourse to a professional designer who was, until our own day, a phenomenon associated with the moneyed and leisured classes since only they could afford artefacts the appearances of which were dictated not by pragmatism, but by fashion. Many people today regard the Unconscious beauty, obtained by the everyday objects produced by vernacular craftsmen, a beauty born of necessity, as being of a higher order than ever that attained by the contrivances of modern machinofacture.

Not until our own generation were the last vestiges of these age-old traditional crafts finally swamped by and drowned in the sea of mass market goods and hence the unbroken cord linking us to our most remote ancestors finally severed. Long before this final rupture some, such as William Morris, were inveighing against the seemingly all-pervasive industrial products and advocating the preservation of the spirit of the folk tradition. Attempting to effect the reconnection of the cut and frayed ends of the cord that linked us to this tradition has been the worthy aim of many others into our own day. By doing so they would wish to put back the humanity lost from so much of that with which we crowd our daily lives. It is important to realise that such people, now for the most part individual craftsmen and artists, work outside the mainstream of community life, quite unlike the traditional craftsman who had unwittingly the strength of an inbuilt inherited knowledge of 'the correct way' to do the job in hand to support him in his unremitting daily toil. His nearest contemporary equivalent is perhaps the baker of good bread who works unselfconsciously in a determined process which yet results in a product subtly different from those of his peers. Neither he nor the craftsman of old, while expecting due recognition of their mastery of their craft and perhaps enjoying a local reputation, would expect to be celebrated as someone of remarkable ability but as justly deserving the approbation of their fellows for their honest toil.

As a consequence of our being inheritors of a craft tradition broken by industrialisation, attaining a valid late twentieth-century vernacular style is a task of immense complexity and the route to such attainment is set by pitfalls and blind alleys: the exact opposite of conditions under which the craftsman of the past operated. Accepting the standards which were second nature to our forebears, that is the use of materials in straightforward ways appropriate to their innate qualities without egotistical striving for effect, is simple compared with the problem of deciding what form an object produced to such specifications should take to be a genuine expression of them for our own times.

The most common manifestations of an inability to cope with these difficulties are evident in attempts to copy the artefacts of previous generations. Failure to assimilate the basic tenets of folk craft practices results in tasteless pastiche of the external appearance of objects and buildings or hideous travesties in tortured materials as exemplified in much handmade furniture and ceramics or so-called traditional buildings to which 'period' detail is tacked as an afterthought. These are the inevitable results when appearance is put before substance.