Ellis Woodman touches on something very important in his review of Peter Barber’s extension to ET Hall’s Poor Law Guardians’ Office (Buildings September 20), when he talks about its “sense of civic decorum”.
As a student I was taught to deride late Victorian urban architecture for its failure to create a language of its own time (excepting a few Arts and Crafts houses considered to be harbingers of modernism). But this is to miss the excellent way in which the schools, libraries, police stations and town halls of this era manage to convey their exact level, and type, of civic importance.
In the history of British architecture Philip Webb became the guru while the spatially brilliant, proto-Loosian work of Richard Norman Shaw was forgotten — a complete injustice as it is the latter who was the main influence in creating a mode of urban expression that was legible in a way that the shiny new language of modernism could never be.
Students and architects of our time would do well to study Norman Shaw and his generation carefully — it would make our
cities richer.
Simon Gill
London SW6
Postscript
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