Survey of London’s fair prints of the city

I have every sympathy with the footsore compilers of the new Survey of London books on Clerkenwell. Architectural history of this quality and depth takes a lot of legwork. Twenty-five years ago, Edward Jones and I were commissioned to write a guide to London’s modern architecture. Taking the Enlightenment as our start date, we half-jokingly called it Modern Architecture in London 1780-1980, but in the end were persuaded that we might as well try to cover everything.

The result was an assemblage of about 1,000 objects — buildings, urban set pieces, engineering structures. We’re now working on a revised edition, and I’ve spent the past year working my Freedom Pass to revisit and digitally photograph every one of the original objects and a small number of new works of the past quarter century.

We were writing at a time when it was clear that what had become mainstream modern urbanism wasn’t good enough, and when several alternative models were being discussed. While we wanted to produce a useful catalogue, we too, like the original authors of the London Survey, had a campaigning aim: to criticise the indifference of most new development to London’s particular characteristics, and to draw attention to the availability of models from its extraordinarily complex history.

We could not foresee the damage that the relaxation of planning policy by Margaret Thatcher, then John Prescott and Ken Livingstone, would visit on the city. In compiling the list, our main sources were of course the then-two volumes on London and the one on Middlesex in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series from the 1950s. Pevsner had been able to draw on the partly completed Survey of London. Organised parish by parish, the survey had by the mid-1950s covered Kensington, and Brompton to the west; chunks of the West End; Spitalfields to the east; and Lambeth and Southwark to the south.

When Pevsner started writing, the earliest volumes in the survey were already 50 years old, the first having appeared in 1900. The survey was the brainchild of that arts and crafts architect par excellence, Charles Robert Ashbee, who had set up his first handicraft school in Whitechapel in 1888. He established the survey in 1894, and by identifying, describing and recording building stock, explicitly intended to further the cause of its conservation which — then as now — was not disentangled from the enthusiasm for restoration. Ashbee persuaded London County Council to publish the first volume — on the parish of Bromley-by-Bow, written and edited entirely by volunteers — in 1900. The series was to be extended to neighbouring parishes to the east and north, and the LCC and its successor, the Greater London Council, continued to publish further volumes. Since the GLC’s abolition in 1986, the work has been carried out by scholars at English Heritage.

These two books, the 46th and 47th in the series respectively, together cover the area from just above Pentonville Road in the north to Smithfield Market in the south, and between Farringdon and Goswell Road. They follow the sumptuous format of previous volumes — huge margins, thick paper, the best Singaporean printing — but are the first to integrate drawings and new photographs with the text. As I’ve learned, buildings are best photographed in winter — to avoid trees — and the many beautiful but wanly lit new colour photographs have a perhaps unfortunate elegiac quality.

The sumptuous format now integrates text, drawings and new colour photographs

The pair of substantial introductions first delineate the early medieval ecclesiastical land holdings and institutions, and conclude with the colonisation of the north by student housing and in the south, the occupation of redundant warehouses, factories, workhouses and breweries by artists and architects. On the way, we learn about 18th and 19th century house plan typologies, the watch and clock industry, Finsbury’s socialist housing programme of the 1930s and 1940s, Banksy’s graffiti and, thankfully, the re-emergence in recent developments of the street as one of the few worthwhile urban ordering devices we have.

An exhausting inventory (sic) follows, district by district, street by street, building by building, describing and illustrating every noteworthy, currently visible structure, and often supplying the history of any that previously occupied the site. The history stops very recently and includes, for example, a full report of Janet Street-Porter’s vendetta with her architect David Adjaye about alleged faults in the conversion of 35 Clerkenwell Close.

How long the series in its present physical form could or should continue is moot. Most of the content of the previous 45 books in the series is available online, at www.british-history.ac.uk/survey

oflondon. There, though, the sensuous pleasure of turning fine pages and — even on the best screen — the sharpness and contrast of photographs and drawings, are missing.

These magnificent but expensive books, with their superb scholarship are primarily essential reference works to be bought by and consulted in libraries, but any of the many architectural offices which have relocated to Clerkenwell would do well to have them on their shelves: their histories, and the density and layering of their references, can serve as a microcosm of the development of the whole of London.

Original print headline - Fair prints of the city