EXTERNAL VERITIES: PART 5

Sydenham Hill, London

EXTERNAL VERITIES: PART 5
THE VALUE OF DIVERSITY

Are these myriad expressions of individual taste a good thing? Le Corbusier (1963) would not have thought so. He advocates ‘uniformity in detail and variety in the general effect (the exact opposite of what we do today: a mad variety in details, and a deadly uniformity in the setting out of our streets and towns.)’ (p.214), the latter a description that we can imagine being applied to much of south-east London. Edwards (1981) takes a similar view, opining that ‘Whatever may be the social, economic or political benefits of [right to buy], the effect on the environment of municipal suburbia has certainly been disruptive.’ (p. 207) because individual changes can spoil a carefully planned design. However, his view of speculative suburbia is so dim that he believes that here it scarcely matters because ‘the appearance of the place is so restless that such changes are scarcely noticed in the jolting irregularity of the scene.’ (p. 207)

Le Corbusier (1963) longs for a situation where the prefabrication of basic components meant that there is ‘some sort of link between the rich man’s house and the poor man’s’ (p.217) and

A house will no longer be ... an expensive luxury by which wealth can be shown; it will be a tool as the motor-car is becoming a tool ... an aesthetic of its own results from the method employed, and to use the resources of the modern industrial “yard” to advantage demands the exclusive employment of straight lines, square-set ... We must clear our minds of romantic cobwebs. (pp. 220-221)

However, this is all written from a privileged viewpoint and the functionalist rhetoric is superficial: so a rich man’s house might be made to look a bit like a poor man’s house and vice versa, but it is still a capitalist approach.

Also, Le Corbusier’s ‘machine aesthetic’ is every bit as romantic as one which advocates reconstituted stone wishing wells or animal topiary. De Botton (2007) describes his celebrated Villa Savoye as an ‘artistically minded folly.’ (p.68) Its flat roof, insisted on by Le Corbusier despite his clients’ requests for a pitched one, may have looked efficient and utilitarian but it leaked so much that the clients’ son caught a chest infection which led to pneumonia. The house was uninhabitable.

Lefebvre’s view is very different. Merrifield (2006) describes his feelings of unease in the Modernist new town of Mourenx, reminiscent of the Pessac houses prior to their transformation or a lower density version of the Aylesbury Estate upon completion: ‘Its physiognomy is left naked, robbed of meaning, ‘totally legible’ ... a stripping process has been accomplished.’ (p. 63) Lefebvre asks “Are we entering a Brave New World of joy or a world of irredeemable boredom?” (Lefebvre cited in Merrifield, 2006 p.63) Although he says he cannot give an answer, the subtext implies that he leans towards the latter. This is a place in which there is ‘no romance around any corner . What’s there is simply there.’ (Merrifield, 2006 p.63) And what’s there excludes castellated semis, stone cladding and maisonette exteriors resembling football clubs. ‘In the street disorder lives, it informs, it surprises’ (Lefebvre cited in Merrifield, 2006 p.91); ‘this disorder constructs a superior order.‘ (Merrifield, 2006 p.91) Brand (1997) believes that ‘the most interesting period for a building is between creation and demolition or preservation - when it’s changing’ (p. 10), quoting Eno: “humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.” (Eno cited in Brand, 1997 p. 11)

CONCLUSION

I have presented a subjective snapshot of the public face of a selection of ‘ordinary’ houses in south-east London, and attempted to explore some of the possible factors that may have led to them looking the way they do right now. However, when operating in the realm of taste there is simply no room for rigorous objectivity. The DIY store coach lamp by the front door might imply that the householder harbours a longing for a mythical past, conceived as a Dickensian Christmas card, or it may just mean that he needed a light by which to see his keys, and his brother-in-law had this old one lying in the garage. Some people, as we have heard, are quite clear about what they are projecting when they paint that garden gate or rip out those hybrid tea roses, whereas others claim it is irrelevant, having no bearing whatsoever on them as an individual. And even the most dedicated DIY enthusiast will never fully erase the presence of previous inhabitants; every house ever built is destined to become a palimpsest.

Ultimately, attempting to find a correct approach is futile in the post-post-modern age. Some questions evade definitive answers. What is good taste in design that goes beyond the merely utilitarian? A combination of snobbery and oneupmanship? One might replace the picture window with a more authentic leaded one, but it then plunges the interior into stygian gloom. Which is better? It is impossible to say.

So is there value in this diversity of approaches? Our built environment as it stands may well be the construct of successive phases of capitalist hegemony, but in the era of post-industrial consumer capitalism, state planning for the ‘common good’ is probably not the answer. While those of us who may like to regard ourselves as socialists deplore a perceived lack of imagination in contemporary speculative developments and bemoan the lack of decent, affordable municipal housing, we still have no desire to be told what colour we must paint our front door.

Lefebvre (cited in Merrifield, 2006 p, 62) said that ‘the anthrope (sic) should always fight against a plan of logic, of technical perfection, of formal rigour, of functions and structures.’ In south-east London’s ouevre of exteriors, that fight is evidently ongoing. So much has been made of England's innate affection for individualistic domesticity at the expense of urban interaction. Perhaps the expressive range of these terraced facades combines the best of both.

EXTERNAL VERITIES: PART 4

Sydenham Hill, London

THE CONSERVATIVE APPROACH

In recent decades, numerous books have appeared aimed at the middle classes and their ordinary ‘period’ suburban homes, including even the much maligned Tudorbethan semi. In a way this seems like a democratization, but they tend to advocate a didactic conservative or restorative approach to house exteriors; evolution is frowned upon. Houses of Britain - The Outside View, (Prizeman, 2007) with a foreword by the Duke of Gloucester, is one example. The human allusion is made again - ‘the face of the house is the face of the [person] it was built for’ (p. 8) - but, rather than suggesting that this face should adapt itself to changing times, perhaps accessorising with a new door or paint colour in the way one would add some earrings or this year’s shade of lipstick, it is claimed that ‘to destroy or change the face of a house is to lose or alter exact evidence of the past.’ (p. 8) The Duke, in a rebuke to all aspirational homeowners who would dare to add a triangular pediment or faux-leaded panes to their little houses, helpfully points out that ‘After all nobody’s fooled if you put a Rolls Royce bonnet on a mini.’ (p. 7) It is difficult to read this as anything other than a yearning for a past where the proletariat knew their place and were content with it.

Barrett and Phillips’ Suburban Style (1988) contains a kind of rogues’ gallery of good houses gone bad, with captions like ‘A basically unassuming house has been turned into an eclectic nightmare’ (p.190) underneath a photograph of a modest dwelling with a particularly elaborate Italianate balustrade. Another image shows two houses in a terrace, one with its timber casements, porch and front door all intact, the other comprehensively endowed with aluminium picture windows; it bears the legend ‘A well-restored small Edwardian house contrasts with its sadly transformed neighbour.’ (p.197) But would the approved house’s poignant beauty not be diminished if the threat of the double glazing salesman was not always hanging in the air? De Botton (2007) writes about how glimpsing a beautiful stranger in the street makes us feel sad, partly because we may not possess them but also because we know that such beauty has a finite lifespan. Is this not part of the attraction to a perfectly preserved house? And will the authors feel the same if, in the future, someone chooses to replace the plastic garage door of a ‘noughties’ estate house with a timber one?

Front gardens too can be revealing about people’s aspirations. In Bartholomew’s (1998) Mitford-aping Yew and Non-Yew, he describes the upper-class garden:

The formal lines are often marked by hedges - frequently yew for the high ones and box for the low. Within the borders, species plants or old varieties are preferred; they are considered more "natural". Their names are preferred, too. Rosa 'Comte de Chambord' is more welcome than Rosa 'Bobby Charlton' or 'Sexy Rexy' (p. 32)

Box in particular is widely used an urban expression of affluence. To the untrained eye it may resemble weedy privet, but it is slow-growing, and therefore expensive. I surveyed the front gardens in the section of _____ Street including Julia’s house whose residents (at least in terms of property values) might be considered middle to upper-middle class and found that eight out of the twelve contained box. Incidentally, an acquaintance recently mentioned telling her mother that she liked magnolia trees, and her rebuke was that magnolias are ‘suburban’. In this context, ‘suburban’ could well be substituted with subhuman.

The East Dulwich Forum, serving the formerly lower-middle class district now synonymous with ‘yummy-mummy horrors’ (Dyckhoff, 2010) and famed for its purveyors of Cath Kidston-type idealised Englishness, contains some intriguing insights into its residents’ values. bigbadwolf chastises another forum user, Woof:

I bet you're one of those attention seeking imbeciles that festoons their property with gaudy christmas decorations aren't you Woof. I bet your house looks like something you'd find in Basildon doesn't it, you new money mincer! (East Dulwich Forum, 2009)

He then goes on to suggest Woof probably had Scottish parents, but the key citation is Basildon. To certain members of the urban middle classes, garish Christmas decorations aren’t just signs of new money, but of an inferior, suburban or ‘exurban’ (and worse, Essexurban) attitude.


TASTE AND THE PROBLEMS WITH READING IT


It is important at this point to think about the notion of kitsch. The Modernist view was that kitsch was something pleasurable that was too easy, perhaps something that ‘strives for an effect at odds with its true and proper purpose.’ (Bayley, 1991, p.103) Garden gnomes, plastic butterflies, the christmas decorations bigbadwolf so objected to, fake half-timbering and Bill’s tiled front garden could all be cited as examples of it. Greenberg compares the ‘kitsch’ of Repin to the real art of Picasso. The kitsch can be enjoyed without effort but the ‘peasant’s’ circumstances ‘do not allow him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train for the enjoyment of Picasso.’ (Harrison & Wood, 1992, p 539)

It is less useful to think of taste in terms of the way things look than as a product of the ideas that brought them into existence. In attempting to understand taste, we cannot attempt to judge the form, a matter of design, objectively. The predominant contemporary stance is that no style is intrinsically better and that ‘perfect art is possible in any subject matter or style.’ (Gaut & McIver Lopes, 2008 p. 389) We must instead study the spirit that gave rise to it. An individual’s taste is ‘utterly dependent on ideas of consumption fostered in industrial and post-industrial cultures’ and we, consciously or otherwise, reveal ourselves through our consumption. ‘If good taste means anything, it is pleasing your peers; bad taste is offending them...taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.’ (Bayley, 1991 p. 61)

De Botton’s explanation for the peculiarities of taste is simple: ‘What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us with their beauty ... We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave.’ (De Botton, 2007 p.152) In a harsher past of greater social unrest, ornate, sophisticated styles were favoured by the elite. Then, having had their fill of luxury and ease, they wanted something more elemental: unadorned concrete walls, minimalism.

Nonetheless, it is dangerous to rely too heavily on this as a formula. Taste which is too ‘good’ can be read as a sign of conformity and insecurity. It is what George Bernard Shaw described as a kind of ‘moral cowardice.’ (Bayley, 1991 p.67) And of course, as Dorfles (1969 cited in Bayley, 1991 p.67) noted, the meaning of a kitsch object (for example) can be transformed in a cultivated setting. Think of that notorious icon of front garden kitsch, the gnome: Philippe Starck reappropriated it in stool form for Ian Schrager's Saint Martin's Lane Hotel, a regular in articles about so-called ‘hip hotels’. The stools are described as being ‘very special characters that are striking on account of their originality and non-conformism.’ (Exit Art, 2010) Would anyone think this if one were placed in a rockery in the crazy paved front garden of a 1930s semi?

There is a house on Bushey Hill Road, Camberwell, which has a full compliment of the usual urbane accoutrements: refurbished sashes, a front door in a shade of teal verging on grey, standard olive trees in pots. It also has an illuminated number in its fanlight, in strident blue neon of the type more associated with signs for cheap barbers and greasy spoons. In this context, it is clever, knowing, a bourgeois creative injoke; it is like an art student from Primrose Hill experimenting with Kappa sportswear.

The notion of the paradox of consequences comes into play as well - an action can often produce an outcome diametrically opposed to that which was originally intended. Imagine ‘Joe Public’ wins the lottery and so wants a house that is extremely classy, its pediment and fountain smacking of the landed gentry. He instructs architects and designers and ends up with something that to the ‘cultivated’ eye is nouveau riche, crass and trite, exposing him for what he always was.

EXTERNAL VERITIES: PART 3

Woodford Green, Essex

RIGHT TO BUY AND THE 'WORKING CLASS'


Until the housing bill of 1979 when Thatcher introduced the right to buy council houses, local authority housing estates were uniquely unchanging in appearance. Wilmott and Young (1967 p. 31) quote a 1960s resident of an estate in Woodford complaining of the strict controls – ‘you have to submit plans before you can even build a side gate.’ In a Guardian article headlined ‘30 years on, Thatcher’s revolution still divides the estates of Britain’, a resident of the Harold Hill housing estate in Essex recounts how from 1979 ‘There was a ceremony everyone seemed to have, where they would go out and change their old council wooden gate for a wrought-iron one. That was how they announced they’d bought.’ (Rowland to McVeigh, 2009)

De Botton (2007) mentions a group of houses which Le Corbusier, who went on to be regarded as the greatest Modernist architect, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design for his manual workers in 1923. De Botton describes the resulting buildings as ‘exemplars of Modernism, each a series of undecorated boxes with long rectangular windows, flat roofs and bare walls’, claiming that

Le Corbusier was especially proud of their lack of local and rural allusions. He mocked the aspirations of what he called the ‘folkloric brigade’ – made up of the sentimentalising traditionalists – and denounced French society’s intransigent resistance to modernity. In the houses he designed for the labourers, his admiration for industry and technology expressed itself in expanses of concrete, undecorated surfaces and naked light bulbs. (p.163)

A photograph of the same houses in 1995 shows them having changed almost beyond recognition, with decorative clay tiles on the roofs, painted shutters and small, multi-paned casement windows. As De Botton puts it, ‘unconcerned with spoiling the great architect’s designs they added...flowered wallpaper and picket fences in the vernacular style, and, once that was done, set about installing a variety of ornamental fountains and gnomes in their front gardens.’ (p.163)

Across Britain, working class estates have been transformed in similarly exuberant fashion. Even those who have not had the means or desire to purchase their homes have found ingenious ways of moulding exteriors to their tastes; as well as on the Excalibur, adhesive lead applied to the inside of windows in the form of cottagey diamond panes is rife in the1960s-70s brutalist Aylesbury Estate, also soon to be demolished. A block at Havil Street, Camberwell until recently hosted a maisonette whose proclaimed itself to be Celtic Park, with green and white striped window boxes.

An early 1980s photograph in The Design of Suburbia (Edwards, 1981) shows a terrace of red brick municipal houses, with twelve-paned sash windows in the neo-Georgian style. On one house, clearly ‘bought’, these have been replaced with large picture windows and decorative shutters, but the vaguely Arts and Crafts wooden canopy has been replaced with a triangular pediment and Doric pilasters, in the Georgian idiom. In the context of this, it appears almost perverse to have replaced the windows: must we assume that signalling one’s freeholder status is more important than any commitment to a style?

In ‘The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration’ Clarke suggests that the notion of ‘keeping up with (or preceding) the Joneses’ with displays of overt material wealth is too simplistic, claiming that, amongst the working classes, ‘in accordance with historical traditions there is almost no actual visiting of neighbours.’ (Miller, 2001 p.29) However, with exteriors this becomes irrelevant, as we do not need to cross the threshold to be able to covet the neighbours’ new windows.

To return to the houses at Pessac, on the assumption that they echo British council estates (many of which were designed by Le Corbusier’s disciples) in some respects, De Botton (2007) evokes the tenants’ working life spent in ‘concrete hangars ... assembling pine packing cases. At the end of a shift, to be reminded of the dynamism of modern industry was not a pressing psychological priority’ (p. 164), hence the traditional, vernacular and more elaborate details they chose to add to their exteriors: anything to affirm their individuality and rooted past. Crucially, De Botton suggests that for both the occupants and the architect, the motivation was the same: ‘just like Le Corbusier, the tenants had fallen for a style evoking the qualities with which their own lives had been insufficiently endowed’ (p.166), Le Corbusier having rejected a life of ostentatious wealth and privilege.

It is interesting to compare this idea to one expressed by Barthes (1993) in Ornamental Cookery, where he examines the complicated dishes, ‘the very dream of smartness’, presented in Elle, which in 1950s France was a magazine aimed at a working class public. Barthes describes it as ‘a cookery based on coatings and alibis, forever trying to disguise or extenuate the brutal primary nature of foodstuffs’. This

ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways – on the one hand, fleeing from nature through a kind of frenzied baroque...and on the other, trying to reconstitute nature through incongruous artifice (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a log-shaped Christmas cake or replacing the heads of crayfish in a pattern around the sophisticated béchamel which hides their bodies). (p. 78)

This description strikes a chord; I am reminded of the imitation stone cladding that sometimes covers local stock brick on small Peckham terraces and the resin squirrels attached to mock half-timbered Excalibur prefabs.

He believes that because Elle is addressing a genuinely working class public, paradoxically it goes to great pains ‘not to take for granted that cooking must be economical’ (p.78), in contrast to the middle class L’Express which gives recipes for (simple) salad Nicoise. It is the food equivalent of the working or lower-middle and middle or upper-middle classes’ respective preferences for ornamental plastic urns or plain, patinated terracotta pots, and UPVC front doors incorporating imitation stained glass or solid, unadorned wooden ones.

This dovetails with Barthes’ (1993) essay on Plastic, that material now so beloved of the masses for low-maintenance window frames, cladding, fascias and porches, sometimes in imitation woodgrain. Writing in 1957, he suggests that ‘plastic highlights an evolution in the myth of ‘imitation’ materials”, which are ‘historically bourgeois in origin.’ It is, he says,

the first magical material that consents to be prosaic ... With plastic, objects will be (made) for the sole pleasure of USING them. The hierarchy of substances is abolished, a single one replaces them all - the whole world can be plasticized. (p.97)

Conservationists would shudder at the thought.

THE URBANE AESTHETE’S APPROACH


In The Freedoms of Suburbia, Barker (2009) reveals that when he was looking to buy his first house, in Kentish Town, north London he

was determined that it would be in the flat-fronted, Georgian style: the kind that Modernists approved of ... My first step in gentrification was to root up the privet in the tiny patch of front garden and to chip the enamelled name, ‘Bowerhayes’ off the glass panel above the front door ... Now the house could take its place as truly urban, even semi-Modernist. (p. 9)

It is not clear when exactly he carried this out but as Cooke’s (2009) Observer review points out ‘He also bricked up any remaining fireplaces, which gives you an idea of how long ago this must have been.’ So much interwar suburbia was built in the ‘Tudorbethan’ vein because it was as distinct as possible from the styles used for local authority housing. Conversely, this story shows the lengths the ‘design-conscious’ would go to to avoid their house looking ‘suburban.’ Presumably Barker was buying when Modernist council blocks were still causes celebres.

Suggesting that this attitude was prevalent at least among an urbane middle class, Cooke corroborates Barker’s anecdote, citing a time when the academic parents of a boy she admired named Crispin purchased a flat-fronted house in the centre of Sheffield – ‘thus, in one fell swoop, I became an unsuspecting modernist ... years later, when a girlfriend told me how little she cared for bay windows, I managed not to say: But they allow such a lovely feeling of space and light!’

Today, a glance at Choumert Road, Peckham betrays the enduring impact of these views. These pictures are of adjacent blocks, but the striking contrast between them is not just in terms of the original style of the architecture. Though at some point in their lives they may have been considered slums, and one in an adjacent street still harks back to earlier trends in home improvement with its square interwar bay window, the flat fronted early Victorian houses - ‘semi-Modernist’ or almost Georgian, depending on your preference - are immaculately maintained, with matching paintwork and no added decorative flourishes, perhaps apart from ‘contemporary’ chrome door furniture. The later Victorian bay-fronted houses, until relatively recently written off as mean and ugly (including in a 1960s Ladybird children’s title I grew up with, The Story of Houses and Homes; (Bowood, 1963) indoctrination started early) and therefore not worth preserving, now display a wide range of frontages, with a variety of windows and examples of roughcast and ‘stone’ clad walls. The owners of this formerly bay-fronted house opposite Sophie’s obviously took the flat-fronted mantra to heart.

Of course, it is likely that in the future the entire street will become uniformly ‘gentrified’ and in areas of London considered more salubrious, this has long since happened, though certain types of house are treated with less reverence. A Guardian interiors spread featuring an Edwardian semi in north London (14 November 2009) opens with ‘Dropping round with a bottle of wine is one way of getting to know the neighbours, but painting your house black has much the same ice-breaking effect.’ (Simon, 2009) The exterior indeed shows a black-painted house adjoining a more sedate one, and an original front door whose stained glass has been replaced with frosted. The owner is quoted as saying ‘I would never have painted a brick Victorian place, but this is a kind of run-of-the-mill house, so I could afford to be more adventurous.’ (Barron to Simon, 2009) Presumably this was the mentality that informed the owners of the house on Ferndene Road when they opted to transform its appearance so radically.

EXTERNAL VERITIES: PART 2

Dulwich, London

PORTRAITS OF SELECTED FACADES

Bill*, originally from Yorkshire, lives on ____ Street, in a small Victorian bay-fronted terrace. Perched on the bay window’s roof is a large illuminated Father Christmas in a sleigh, still greeting passers-by in mid-January. The windows themselves have been replaced with UPVC casements, the bedroom ones framing a pair of satellite dishes. Bill’s e-mailed reply to my letter stipulated that his Portuguese partner, the housekeeper, had requested that I did not visit; the uninvited step into the hall. He is a former mechanic and, as such, is the only person I communicated with in Camberwell and Peckham who could claim to be ‘working class’. He is modest about the scale of his home improvements; when asked what he has changed about his exterior he cites ‘just windows, walls, and tiling’ (Bill to Stewart, 2010), but I suspect he may have been responsible for the front door with its wrought iron ‘Olde English‘ decorative hinges. The ‘front garden’ - a strip of about 1.5 metres between the facade and the pavement - has been fully tiled in pale ceramic, of the kind more usually found in kitchens and conservatories, and the boundary wall is of cerise roughcast, topped with concrete, acorn-shaped finials. It is tempting to link these decorative quirks to his wife’s roots in more clement Portugal, but Bill does not think his house reflects them as people in any way, although he does say that ‘If it looks clean outside then 9/10 [houses] are clean inside.’

The ______ Estate is further in the direction of suburbia ‘proper’. Its prefabricated bungalows were intended as temporary ‘Homes for Heroes’ after the Second World War. Twenty nine are now owner-occupied. Their exteriors have been subject to a wide variety of treatments, from those where the strapping joining the prefabricated panels has been highlighted in black to give the effect of half-timbering to one with a skin of yellow facing brick, passing itself off as a conventional bungalow. Many of the houses display St George’s flags, or plaques with sentiments ranging from ‘Home Sweet Home’ to ‘BEWARE OF THE DOG’.

Barbara, a local, was lucky to acquire hers after her builder husband’s aunt passed away. They and their two children had been renting a flat nearby but when the opportunity for some ‘peace and quiet’ (Barbara to Stewart, 2010) and their own piece of garden arose they jumped at it. Their house is painted in a soft pink and the front door incorporates a mock Georgian fanlight and shiny gold-coloured doorknocker. Barbara tells me they would probably replace the windows if it weren’t for the lingering threat of demolition. Another resident, catching me taking photographs and keen to talk about the community’s plight, informs me that owners have been offered £30,000 each for their homes, a figure which in London property terms means the houses are virtually worthless. Ironically, it is only six unloved-looking and therefore untouched prefabs on the estate which have been given a grade II listing and might therefore escape the fate of the others. (Blackender, 2009)

Christmas is a presence at Claire’s on Camberwell’s _____ Street too, in the form of paper snowflakes in the sash windows - recently installed double glazed timber replicas, she informs me, to replace ‘horrible plastic things’ (Claire to Stewart, 2010) put in by the previous owners. The decision, I’m told, was ‘purely aesthetic.’ Their surrounds (Claire thinks they might be real stone) have been partially stripped of paint and the front garden features globe artichokes grown in a collection of requisitioned containers and a rough wooden signpost reading ‘CHATEAU PARADISO’.

Claire invites me into her kitchen (unfitted, distressed paintwork and children’s drawings everywhere) where she tells me that the exterior of her house does reflect herself in that she likes everything to be homemade; she is not interested in ‘the latest kitchen or things from catalogues.’ Claire is a wigmaker who graduated in Fine Art from Camberwell College twenty years ago, and her husband is an artist. She likes the range of exterior treatments in her street - ‘difference is marvellous, key’ - and suggests that this is an urban virtue, distinguishing the area from ‘the suburbs’, where ‘people morph into the same thing over and over again.’

By the time I receive contact from Brett (artist, designer and author) two streets away it’s clear that around here it is going to be challenging to solicit feedback from people whose occupations aren’t connected with aesthetics. This ought to be less of a surprise than it is; after all, I did not select houses entirely at random. Perhaps I have chosen an area with too high ‘a minority of freaks and intellectuals.’ (Richards, 1973 p.15)

Brett’s house has a pea green front door whose fanlight displays a carefully proportioned typographic house number designed by Brett himself. Eclectic objects are arranged around the door: animal skulls, rusty pieces of metal and dried seedheads. Brett is succinct about the function of this: ‘For someone visiting your house for the first time it's (sic) appearance is like a visual handshake.’ (Brett to Stewart, 2010) He thinks his house reflects him ‘somewhat - although being a private home it's not a public statement.’

There is a property is on a section of Ferndene Road, Denmark Hill lined with Edwardian and 1920s semi-detached villas, displaying Arts and Crafts detailing. This house has been subject to a radical makeover; above the minimal front door is a plate glass floor to ceiling window in place of the original cosy casement and the garden’s boundary is no longer defined by basketweave brickwork but by Brutalist concrete. I receive no response but when posting my letter I catch a glimpse of open plan white space within.

Julia’s house on ______ Street or ‘South London’s finest Georgian street’ (Wooster Stock, 2009) in estate agents’ terms, employs the classic Georgian device of variation in window sizes to denote the hierarchy of the storeys, from the piano nobile on the first floor to the mansard dormers. The grey paint on the lintels is flaking, in contrast to the black (previously red – the change was thought ‘more in keeping’) front door with its highly polished brass lion doorknocker. Julia is yet another ‘creative’ - an interior designer - and her husband ‘works in the City’ (Julia to Stewart, 2010). Julia says the appearance of her house is important to her ‘especially in a street like this’, and ‘it’s a bit of a cliché but I do think the garden is another room. I like it to reflect the interior’; she ‘loves the formality of the box hedging and bay trees’.


(*I've changed names, removed street names and some other details)

HOUSE M8

WOODFORD, ESSEX

I reckon my dissertation was probably the part of my degree of which I was proudest, because it kinda felt like I was exploring something like unchartered territory, even if it wasn't strictly as relevant to my ~professional development~ as it was meant to be (errrrr). It certainly reads like it was partially written the morning of hand-in and it's defo light on theory, but it was fun to do. For your pleasure, I'm gonna serialize it, like how they do Princess Diana bios in the Daily Mail. This bit is THE INTRODUCTION. To preserve people's anonymity I'm going to substitute their names with mysterious abbreviations and get rid of street names and the proper accompanying photos. (My currently neglected FACADE HUNTER was part of the original inspiration for this as a subject.)

PS I'm trying caps out for size and it feels rly awkward and weird and like I'll be judged like when I wore my fave Kappa tracksuit to non-uniform day at school and it wasn't considered appropriate to my rep as an unusual nerd. I'm totally trying to be mature and businesslike and professional but you know me, I'm an anti-capitalist at heart :'( Just kill me if I ever write PayPal or eBay or Lol.




EXTERNAL VERITIES: FACADE TREATMENTS AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH-EAST LONDON

INTRODUCTION

Walking around any inner London suburb, even the most passive observer cannot fail to be struck by distinct changes in atmosphere from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and street to street. Here, a row of Georgian houses, their front doors running the gamut of the soberer end of a Farrow and Ball paint chart and framed by clipped bay sentinels; around the corner an artisans’ row which must once have been as pristine and homogenous as any new estate but whose facades and front gardens are now astonishing in their diversity, from the stone clad with plastic swan planters, to the one boasting reproduction double-glazed sash windows, its Helvetica number rendered in stainless steel and architectural agaves squeezed in next to the recycling box. What motivates their owners to spend time and money painting, pointing and planting, and what lies behind behind something we may consider to be vulgar or twee? What are these houses trying to say? Can we learn anything from these houses and is there an approach to exterior decoration which is ‘correct’? What do these converging tastes collectively add to the urban fabric?

My first childhood home was in an inner suburb of west Glasgow, a city as famous for its Victorian sandstone tenements as for its 1960s concrete tower blocks, many of which are now being replaced with individual houses with ‘their own front and back doors’. In our area everyone lived in a flat where exterior self-expression was limited to the occasional window box or, in less strictly policed buildings, replacement or painting of the window frames themselves. Essentially, the outward appearance of the entire area had changed little since it had been built a century before. Perhaps my unfamiliarity with them explains why I became fascinated by terraced houses and the myriad ways in which people adapt them. The Englishman’s home is, of course, his castle and in London I found that self-expression through the facade was a more complex and subtle art form than I could have imagined.

It was my frequent walks around south-east London, serving no purpose other than to satisfy my growing curiosity about the ways in which certain streets and houses made me feel, that sowed the seeds of this project. Of course, I was unwittingly carrying out my own psychogeographic procedure, mirroring Debord’s (1956) definition of the dérive, in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord, 1956).

The areas of Camberwell, Peckham, Denmark Hill and Catford I plan to focus on are suburbs in the sense that they are residential districts adjacent to a major centre, even if many residents would argue that they are far from being suburban in spirit. Each of the areas has architectural similarities, but the variety of facade treatments is endless. I will be concentrating on the terraced houses so integral to these areas, along with the ______ Estate ‘prefabs’, which, though detached, still form a very high density streetscape.

In as much as this dissertation has a theoretical framework, it is derived from semiology; we are on the hunt for signifiers. I will begin by outlining the unique status of the home in England, before providing some detailed portraits of particular houses based on my primary researches. This is followed by analysis of the influences at play in the customisation of dwellings, including consideration of the ‘working class’, the ‘urbane aesthete’, conservative ‘middle class’ approaches and the roles played by snobbery and kitsch. Finally I will assess the problems inherent in trying to analyse taste, and discuss the contribution that individuals’ home improvements make to the urban sphere.

It is important to understand the unique relationship the British, and the English in particular, have with their homes. In 1896, the German architect Muthesius (cited in Hunt, 2004) reported on English housebuilding, writing that ‘no nation is more committed to its development, because no nation has identified itself more with the house.’ He suggests that this commitment can be traced to the Anglo-Saxons’ ‘reverence for individualism.’ But this individualism is tempered by the ‘decidedly conservative sense of the Anglo-Saxon, who seems scarcely to recognise the charm of change .’

There is an irony in the fact that many of these peculiarly ‘English’ qualities are attributed to Germanic invaders. Kemble’s The Saxons in England, emphasises ‘the Germanic tradition of worship ... for the mistress of the house.’ (cited in Hunt, 2004) Paul Oliver argues that this tradition continues in the symbolism of more recent houses; he provides a picture of a curvaceous 1930s entrance porch accompanied by the caption ‘The front door as orifice.’ (Oliver, Davis & Bentley, 1981 p.175) An uninvited step into the hall would be a violation. Human characteristics are routinely employed to describe houses, as on ITV’s House Gift (2010) where Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen observes that a particularly anonymous semi has ‘one of the best poker faces i’ve ever seen.’

Hunt (2004) describes how the postwar DIY boom meant that home improvement became the nation’s favoured pastime: ‘the celebrated individualism of the English was now expressed not through architecture but a particular shade (of paint)’. The contemporary house obsession continues to manifest itself in property prices making front page news, and the popularity of TV shows focusing on the home. In the past decade, many of these shows have switched their emphasis from the interior, as in Changing Rooms or Home Front, to the exterior; Property Ladder and Location, Location, Location have introduced ‘kerb appeal’ as a measure of the impression one forms of a house upon encountering it from the street into popular parlance.

TBC

09 all whine

it's a new year and time to clear something up once and for all.



in may 2005, sara wrote this after we'd had a seminal msn conversation:

"phases of internet talking:
C says: so 1 is 'r u going out 2nite? u fancy her lol'

C says: 2. I really hate it when people use bad grammar. Heh. They're losers.

C says: 3. omgzz!!!!1111111one!111 STFU lolzzzzzzz

C says: 4. yeah hes a dick lol

4 is the most advanced phase of internet writing but you have to go through the other 3 first well i never did the first tbh but at least two.

whatever. I inspired this conversation colin was basically recycling what i said the night before. yeah, and it's so true. so for anyone stuck in the 'Heh, why can't you retards spell' phase GOD SO FIRST LIVEJOURNAL KILL YOURSELF NOW. haha i no. and for people needing to justify their lol and omg with extra digits after the exclamation mark..i understand...but soon you'll just have exclamation marks or none at all and not care about adding anything on to it. because you don't care lol. i think i've reached a higher spiritual level. lol"

i'd like to think things have moved on since then and it's likely i've been hanging out in morally dubious internet forums lately, but the number of "I am a grammar Nazi" (often followed by a comma splice before the nazi elaborates, incidentally) types about is still alarming. i'm not actually saying this because i'm unable to write a grammatically correct sentence (guess what i think it might be time to bring up the fact that i was 2nd in higher english at the top state school in scotland again!!!!!!! until recently i was labouring under the illusion that i was first but over christmas my friend adam brought out a copy of our 2002 school magazine which confirmed that a smug boy whose mother's apples i distinctly recall refusing to eat (such a brat) in the early 90s because they were organic held that title).

a lot of the time the internet seems to demand a more ~casual~, conversational approach to grammar and conventional rules just get in the way (lol). i'm not proposing a quirky, unique new style, although natch i did go through a brief sub-ee cummings &mpersand phase. when you're writing something spontaneous on someone's facebook wall, say, the aforementioned comma splices and even NO PUNCTUATION WHATSOEVER between independent clauses are not only acceptable but desirable - it helps the flow, and feels right. in a way it's like writing naturalistic dialogue in a story, except it becomes completely un-self-conscious.

re the lol issue - GOD. people actually say "you're not actually laughing out loud when you write lol" after the age of 16? OH REALLY OH OK THANKS BABES. imo being a ~grammar nazi~ is something you should grow out of as a precocious adolescent, along with hating pop music and thinking all tv is for retards.

one thing i do worry about for the future is whether or not there's a cut off age for typing all in lowercase. it's another thing that i think suits a lot of internet interaction, but when you reach a certain level of maturity is it the communication equivalent of an elderly man in a babygro? idk.