We should cherish the places that are a feast for the eyes and feed the soul
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Version 0 of 1. In Historic England’s latest list of protected buildings we can all find jewels that amaze Imagine, for a moment, that you’re in St Annes-on-Sea in Lancashire: perhaps you live there or maybe you’re only visiting. Either way, it’s another grey, rainy day. Tired of being indoors, you head out for a walk, striding south along the seafront. You go past Graham Ibbeson’s statue of Les Dawson and past, too, the town’s pier, whose entrance pavilion has half-timbering and an oriel window. Finally, you enter Promenade Gardens. At this time of year, its flowerbeds are not quite so richly planted as in the height of summer, but this hardly matters. Ahead of you is an exotic bloom of a wholly different order, in the form of an elaborate fountain – and here you pause for a moment. Made of cast iron around 1900 by Walter MacFarlane and Co of Glasgow, it is bright green, turquoise and coral and decorated with a relief featuring a pelican, a dragonfly and a squirrel. It is topped by a putto (a cherubic child). He wears a flower as a hat and sails a little boat made from a leaf. Noticing this makes you smile and suddenly the day seems a lot less dreary. Writing in 1969, Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian whose Buildings of England series constitutes one of the great demotic achievements of 20th-century scholarship, wasn’t very kind about St Annes (he favoured nearby Lytham, seemingly because “one might well forget that it also has a seafront”). In his guide to north Lancashire, he says of it in the section headed “perambulation” that “none is needed”. But to love Pevsner is to argue with him. While he was right about lots of things – it must, indeed, have taken some courage to construct the Fairhaven United Reform Church, which looks for all the world as if it has been transported brick by brick from the Mount of Olives – he got plenty wrong, too. He neglects not only to include Promenade Gardens and its fountain but also the town’s bandstands and seaside shelters, more than one of which are listed now, not to mention the monument dedicated to the crew of the lifeboat Laura Janet, lost in a rescue attempt in 1886. Perhaps the gravest of his omissions, however, is Burlington’s Bar. Thanks to its Victorian tiled interior, Burlington’s rivals the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in Liverpool when it comes to truly beautiful places in which to get quietly pissed. Last week, Historic England revealed details of the more than 500 buildings and other constructions to which it awarded new or enhanced status in 2019. In addition to St Annes’s Technicolor fountain, the roll call includes a Victorian chemist’s shop in Lowestoft, its wooden cabinets and gilt labels (“poisons”, “surgical appliances”) still intact; a pressurised vertical tunnel in Bedfordshire, built between 1948 and 1955 as a device to enable pilots to test how they might overcome potentially fatal spins; a nursemaids’ passage in Regent’s Park, London, built in 1821 to enable children and their nannies safely to cross Marylebone Road; and a K1 telephone kiosk near Keighley in West Yorkshire (the K1 was Britain’s first national phone box), which stands sentry by a rural beck, and ever since I clapped eyes on a photograph of it, I’ve fantasised about doing a walk that takes it in. I find that I look forward to Historic England’s listings more intensely with each year that passes. They grow not only ever more surprising – our sense of what constitutes our built heritage is expanding incrementally – but more joy-sparking, too. What loveliness, and what fascination. Look at the buildings that have made the grade and not only does the sweep of history wash over you in an invigorating wave; you picture, too, all those individuals, communities and experts who campaigned long and hard for their cherished lido or lychgate to be protected and somehow it gives you hope. People who notice: isn’t this what society needs? And isn’t noticing a kind of baton, one that may be passed on, as cheering as sunshine, as revitalising as a breeze? We cannot be reminded often enough to look more closely at the world as we move through it. The more we look, the more we see; the more we see, the happier we feel. Gaze only at the pavement and it will do your soul no good at all. Pevsner, a German by birth, thought that art history in Britain was too class-ridden; at its worst, it was “an activity a bit like stamp collecting”. But he also believed that of all the arts, architecture was the most important; being the stuff that surrounds us, it is the form most closely connected to life. For a while we have been told that the arts may improve our mental health. Last week, however, it was reported that their beneficial effects may extend to our physical health: according to research carried out at University College London, and published in the BMJ, those who visit museums, galleries and the theatre may have less risk of dying early. If this is true, one can only imagine the benefits that could come with knowing something about the built environment – or even from merely being open to experiencing it. What I’m talking about is a world away from the bland fixations of glossy design magazines. It’s about the old as well as the new. It’s about murals and stained glass windows, cabmen’s shelters and municipal libraries: all the stuff, in other words, that’s already there. Not so long ago, I was invited to a party at a place hitherto unknown to me: the Fitzrovia Chapel in London’s Marylebone, which is all that remains of what was once the Middlesex Hospital. Built in 1891, its style is Italian Gothic. But on the night in question, all I knew – all I needed to know – was that its opulent mosaics of blue and gold were doing more for my mood than the wine I was drinking. In the moments before I entered the fray, I raised my eyes (and not my phone) to its shimmering vaults. My heart leapt; it danced, like a kite. |