“In contrast tot the widely held impression that country house building in Britain ceased in 1939, John Martin Robinson proves that the tradition is not only alive but has continued to flourish since the Second World War. He shows that in the last thirty years at least two hundred houses have been built which conform tot he country house style of architecture and way of life.”
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John Martin Robinson
John Martin Robinson FSA (born 1948) is a British
architectural historian and officer of arms.
He was born in Preston, Lancashire, and educated at Fort
Augustus Abbey, a Benedictine school in Scotland, the University of St Andrews
(graduating MA and awarded D.LITT in 2002) and then in 1970 arrived at Oriel
College, Oxford, to prepare for a DPhil. He worked for the Greater London
Council's Historic Buildings Division from 1974. to 1986, where he worked inter
alia as architectural editor of the Survey of London, and Historic Buildings
Inspector for Westminster, and also revised the Statutory Lists of Historic
Buildings for 2 east London boroughs. As an independent consultant since 1988
he has advised on the restoration of numerous country houses churches and other
listed buildings. His contribution to the Conservation Plan for 7 Dials and
Covent Garden in London won the 1998 Camden Environmental Award. He also wrote
the Conservation Plan for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in association with
Rick Mather Architects.
He has been an Architectural Writer for Country Life for
over 40 years contributing nearly 400 articles and reviews. As chairman of the
Art and Architecture Committee of Westminster Cathedral he has overseen the
completion of the mosaics in St George's and St Joseph's chapels, the Vaughan
Chantrey and several individual panels
Robinson was Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary at the
College of Arms from 1982 and is now Maltravers Herald Extraordinary. In 1978
he was appointed Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk Earl Marshal.
Robinson is also a Knight of Magistral Grace of the
Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He lives at Beckside House, Cumbria, and is
an active member of the Georgian Group of which he was a trustee and
vice-chairman for 20 years, acquiring their HQ Adam townhouse in Fitzroy
Square, setting up the Casework committee, and instituting the Young Georgians,
and founding and presiding over the Annual conservation Awards for 10 years
from 2003-2013. He served on the North West Regional Committee of the National
Trust for 10 Years and is Heraldic Adviser to the National Trust. He was a
trustee of the Lakeland Arts Trust for 25 years, and served on the Council of
the Society of Antiquaries, the council of the National Records Association,
and is a trustee of Arundel Castle , Burghley House and Wilton House. He was a
founder member of the Friends of Christ Church Spitalfields and helped
establish the music Festival there. His scholarly book on James Wyatt is the
definitive treatment of the subject. His witty New Georgian Handbook,
co-authored with Alexandra Artley of Harpers Magazine , was the architectural
face of the "Young Fogey Movement" in the 1980s and remains a cult
book with young enthusiasts.
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| See the "post" below : "The Return of the Young Fogey " |
Tales of Hoffman Square
A classical conversion enriches a former almshouse. Keith
Miller reports
College look: built around a courtyard, Hoffman Square has
the air of an Oxford college. The refurbishment has filled it with apartments
that developers Copthorn Homes called 'lofts'
By Keith Miller12:00AM BST 08 May 2002
SHORTLY after the corkscrew-haired savant Peter York hit
paydirt with The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in the early 1980s, some of
his chums at Harpers & Queen published a slightly more obscure piece of
popular social anthropology. This time the tribe under discussion was labelled
"The New Georgians": middle-class urbanites moving into dilapidated
terraces and doing them up in an archaeologically correct manner. Anachronistic
features - rhododendrons, radiators and so on - were out, while obelisks,
candlelight, baths with feet and oil-based paints that rubbed off on your
jacket were deliciously in.
By and large, the New Georgians have been consigned to the
dustbin of history, best remembered as an eccentric rump of the postwar
Reconquista which saw the middle classes renounce the suburbs to which their
parents had moved and install themselves back in less cosy, more stimulating
inner-city areas. Certainly the more passionate and scholarly aspects of 1980s
conservationism have given way to something more twee and theatrical. NG
commando Dan Cruikshank is now a sort of panto entertainer in the BBC2 heritage
slot - and you wouldn't catch Laurence Llewelyn Bowen skimping on the gch. But
it was a moment during which strong feelings about architecture were wedded to
a passionate, if inevitably rather paternalistic, belief in social engagement:
you appreciated the diversity outside your doorstep, and saw yourself as
contributing to it.
One of the more ambitious claims made in The New Georgian
Handbook was that the fledgling soap EastEnders showed how "the People
have survived the modernist experiment". Or, in other words: you knew it
was a "real" community because nobody lived in a tower block (it is
still the case in the soap that modernist housing is a place where bad and
unpredictable things happen, as in the Mel/Dan hostage imbroglio or Steve's
Oedipal encounter with his dying mother).
Fast forward 10 years to the mid-1990s, and similarly
crunchy neighbourhoods began increasingly to bristle with the latest big idea
in urban housing, loft conversions and loft-style developments. These started
life as a thrifty option for artists needing a lot of space with no frills -
light industrial buildings with exposed steel joists and unplastered internal
walls, good for parties and enormous furniture, not so good for fostering
traditional domestic feelings of enclosure and protection.
Developers soon realised that such spaces not only enabled
them to cut down on their overheads - no need for that early Victorian dado
rail - they also held a flattering mirror up to the new breed of young
professional. Conspicuous consumption - domestic properties were often priced
by the square foot rather than the number of bedrooms - could go hand-in-hand
with a sense of modernity and informality, as well as a blurred line between
work and play, crucial since the freelance revolution which came in the wake of
the early 1990s recession. The market's appetite for loft developments,
especially since the onset of the latest price boom, inevitably led to a law of
diminishing returns, as the word "loft" began to seem like a means of
adding value in itself: one man's loft is another man's bedsit.
Which brings us, finally, to the Hoffman building in Hoxton,
joint winner of the Britannia National HomeBuilder Design Award for Best
Restoration and Conversion. Built as almshouses by the Worshipful Company of
Haberdashers in 1825-27, and designed in a proud Greek Revival style by D R
Roper, the building has undergone several enlargements and modifications since.
For a century or so it functioned as a furniture design college, a role for
which it was ideally situated; the furniture manufacturers in nearby Shoreditch
needed a trained workforce, and the notorious slums of Hoxton, Bethnal Green
and the Jago were full of youngsters thirsty for education, education and
education.
Indeed, with the establishment of Ashbee's Guild and School
of Handicraft just around the corner in 1888, the area was a crucible for the
aesthetic and political ideas of the Arts & Crafts movement. Its members
tended to see craft skills as the way to improve the lot of the deserving poor,
much as boxing, football or winning a reality TV show are perceived to be
today.
A spicy funk of historical associations hangs over the area.
There is some terrific architecture nearby: a church up the road by a pupil of Sir
John Soane, a pleasantly ruinous music-hall, several buildings by followers of
Norman Shaw, a Passmore Edwards library (now used by ENO) and, just across
Kingsland Road, a school by Erno Goldfinger and the Geffrye Museum, once an
almshouse itself, now graced by Nigel Coates's nifty brick annexe. A Regency
terrace on Buttesland Street to the north was used as a location for the TV
movie of the Brinks-Mat robbery, gangland being another rich seam in the
district's folklore (although the purist may prefer to buy into the Krays' alma
mater, Repton Boys' Club, similarly converted in Bethnal Green a mile or so to
the east).
Into this dense architectural and social matrix comes
Hoffman Square, a gated bourgeois enclave named after a distinguished
Haberdasher of the 19th century, but conveniently also evocative of Josef
Hoffman, a founder of the Vienna Secession and a big fan of British designers
such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh (and so, maybe, Ashbee). Developers Copthorn
Homes and their architects Hunter & Partners have done a beautiful job,
restoring the building's classical facade and some of the Arts & Crafts
details on the later additions, sensitively incorporating new materials here
and there, making any big interventions such as ramps and garages consistent
with the existing fabric.
Interiors are clear and lucid, with lots of double-height
rooms and galleries, and low partition walls letting plenty of light in from
above. Detailing is spare and neutral, with only the ghost of a chimney-breast
giving a "period" feel to some of the rooms. Space is used thriftily
but not meanly: one virtue made of necessity is a crafty hinged bathroom portal
which must make residents think they're scrubbing up on a submarine, but which
stops ensuite bathrooms from gobbling up space.
The word Copthorn used when selling these apartments
was, needless to say, "lofts". It worked: they've all gone. But that
isn't really what they are, even if lots of the spaces are high or open-plan,
and the odd girder can be seen inside. The structure reeks of history: a noble
facade in a modest neighbourhood, something to do with monasticism (many
almshouses were directly modelled on Carthusian monasteries), something to do
with a vanished social contract. Solemn and introspective, built round courtyards,
it is rather like a tiny Oxbridge college. Certainly it has an ambivalent
relationship with its distinctly ungentrified surroundings. One hopes that at
least the residents will get on with each other. It might even make a good
location for a
soap opera.
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