In 1944 the British architecture and design writer John Gloag declared, without much fear of contradiction, that “the modern movement does not yet speak English.” Paradoxically, the revolutionary design ethos that flourished on the European continent between the two world wars had yet to make much impact in the country where the Industrial Revolution began and the Crystal Palace affirmed modern architectural prefabrication. That odd disparity was apparent three years later in a survey titled Recent English Architecture, 1920–1940 and illustrated for the most part with moderately modernistic buildings interspersed with a few advanced schemes. Gavin Stamp, the fiercely principled British architectural historian, critic, educator, and preservation activist who died in 2017 at age sixty-nine, reconsidered many of the examples included in that book and came to a much different set of conclusions in Interwar: British Architecture, 1919–39.
Seamlessly edited by his widow, the historian Rosemary Hill (author of a brilliant biography of the ardent Victorian Gothicist A.W.N. Pugin), who worked from his unfinished manuscript and retained his distinctive voice, Interwar seals Stamp’s reputation as an eloquent exponent of humane design, which he saw as a necessary prerequisite for a civil society. Unfailingly erudite, articulate, provocative, entertaining, and above all independent-minded, he was unafraid of flouting received opinion, especially the certitude that orthodox Modernism was the defining, not to say inevitable, architectural expression of the twentieth century. Instead he insisted on examining the entirety of architectural production in any given time and place, combining a masterful command of the subject matter with moral values that transcended ideology. Among Stamp’s most admirable traits was that despite his fogeyish attire and elite schooling—at London’s Dulwich College, followed by Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received a doctorate—he proudly stressed his middle-class origins and the benefits he received from the postwar welfare state’s more equitable education policies and funding.
Staunchly nondoctrinaire, he could be quite unpredictable. For nearly forty years he wrote the Nooks and Corners architecture column in the satirical fortnightly Private Eye, which originated with John Betjeman, another passionate preservationist. Stamp signed those articles with the pseudonym Piloti, a sly choice given his disdain for Le Corbusier, who popularized the slender piloti column. Although he championed positions unpopular in some quarters, he gained a wide readership that savored his impertinent drollery, respected his flair for argument, and admired his basic decency. I never met him but sorely wish I had.
During the thirty-five years when Private Eye bestowed Stamp’s annual Sir Hugh Casson Award on the worst new British building—a spoof honor named for an establishment Modernist architect who cozied up to the royal family and was known as “Cash-in” to his detractors—he chose works by Richard Rogers’s techno-modernist firm a record four times. But Stamp was an evenhanded castigator, and he spared neither Pritzker Prize laureates nor cultish outsiders. For example, his 1991 Casson winner was one of my favorite London buildings—Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s witty, commodious, and contextual Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, which he dismissed as an “elaborate and expensive camp joke.” Two years later he selected the ultrareactionary revivalist Quinlan Terry’s thrustingly bogus Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College, Cambridge, which he derided as “a gauche and vulgar essay in misunderstood Greek Classicism.”
Stamp may not have converted many confirmed modernists to his point of view, but he was more concerned with how architecture is actually lived in than with how it looks. He also had no qualms about reversing himself when he felt his assessments had been wrong. Writing in the humor magazine The Oldie three months before his death from prostate cancer, he described the Guy’s Hospital Cancer Centre in London, where he was undergoing chemotherapy, as
a sympathetic building which, to my surprise, was designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners; that is, by the firm of Milord [Richard] Rogers of Riverside about whom I have long been very rude. But it is a building that works, and has, I think, made both staff and patients happier—as good architecture should.
Standard histories of early-twentieth-century British architecture have relied on the same small group of High Modernist touchstones. These greatest hits include Berthold Lubetkin’s London Zoo Penguin Pool of 1934, an ingenious self-supporting concrete double helix no longer used because it’s harmful to the birds’ webbed feet; his Highpoint I apartment block of 1935 in the city’s Highgate section, the finest residential tower of the era; Maxwell Fry’s Sun House of 1935 in London’s Hampstead, a dim reflection of the heroic Le Corbusier villas it mimics; and Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s De La Warr Pavilion of 1935 in Bexhill-on-Sea, a streamlined public pleasure dome. But the constant citation of these gleaming white anomalies and their ilk gives a skewed impression of the general tenor of British building activity in the twenty years before the Blitz. Although they are all in Interwar, it also contains a far broader range of designs, some of which would have been thought beneath contempt by midcentury architectural historians.
To some extent, Britain’s standing in the international architectural hierarchy can be gauged by its buildings at the world’s fairs and specialized theme expositions that proliferated during the twentieth century. Nations vied to put their best architectural foot forward with pavilions by their most talented designers. The 1939 New York World’s Fair included schemes by such important Modernists as Alvar Aalto and Aino Marsio-Aalto (Finland), Sven Markelius (Sweden), Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa (Brazil), and Henry van de Velde (Belgium). Britain’s entry was a Stripped Classical mediocrity by the firm of Stanley Hall, Easton and Robertson. Yet not even a big name could guarantee success. The pavilion created for the 1930 Antwerp exposition by Britain’s reigning master builder of the period, Edwin Lutyens, was among his rare duds: a sprawling Mannerist assemblage surmounted by a huge Mughal dome modeled after the one on his Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, then nearing completion. Colonialism never looked more out of place, nor a Lutyens composition so ill-proportioned.
For design professionals, the most consequential fair of the century was the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925 and best remembered for giving its name to the Art Deco style. At the very forefront of innovation there were Le Corbusier’s modular Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (though not an official part of the show, it was erected by its media-savvy architect just outside the exhibition’s perimeter) and Konstantin Melnikov’s USSR Pavilion, a thrillingly angular Russian Constructivist gem that one philistine English critic likened to “an aeroplane falling through a garage.”
Easton and Robertson’s bizarre British Pavilion at the 1925 Paris exposition suggests the confusion among the country’s leading architects about what new direction to follow. Stamp does his best to make sense of a mad farrago that
combined an attenuated Swedish Baroque with the plain walling of Spanish Colonial; some arches were elliptical, some were polygonal, while part of the interior of the pavilion was decorated like a Gothic church…. The French were, on the whole, astonished: “Why the motley-coloured plaster, the glass steeple with the galleon perched on it like a weathercock? Is this all old Albion can bring us? A fantasy created in an opium den by a retired colonel?”
Although Interwar features the work of many competent if unexciting practitioners I’d never heard of, I was disappointed not to find a discussion of the worthy German émigré architect Ernst Freud, who fled to London the year Hitler rose to power. Now overshadowed as the son of Sigmund and father of Lucian, he is mentioned but once in passing and is Oedipally indexed under “Freud, Sigmund.” It would have added to Stamp’s insistence that Modernism can be warm and inviting had he included, for instance, Freud’s Belvedere Court of 1937–1938 in the North London borough of Barnet. This handsome four-story redbrick apartment complex owes a large debt to the underappreciated German master Erich Mendelsohn (who took refuge in the UK before moving to British Palestine and ultimately the US).
The building’s principal elevation features three horizontal blocks between four equidistant, outwardly curved, and elongated bays, Mendelsohn’s signature motif. Horizontal strip windows set off by stone string courses impart a dynamic, streamlined quality redolent of the 1930s. (Fittingly enough, the apartment complex was developed as rental housing for Jews who had recently arrived from Nazi Germany. However, Ernst Freud’s own family lived in a Georgian terrace house he lightly remodeled in the St. John’s Wood section of the city.)
Belvedere Court, which comprises fifty-six flats, has aged quite gracefully, unlike so much other early Modernist architecture in damp northern regions where the International Style’s preferred concrete (or the stucco that imitates it) is subject to climatic damage. And although the curving portions of its long elevations are flat-roofed in approved Modernist fashion, the top story of each straight-walled segment between them has very slightly angled mansard roofing, a concession to local convention that does not seriously undermine this overlooked landmark.
The relative paucity of female architects in Interwar reflects the dearth of them during that period. However, Stamp is careful to give credit for the design of Kensal House of 1933–1936—a midrise International Style apartment block with sixty-eight flats for working-class families in London’s Ladbroke Grove—to both Maxwell Fry and the social housing expert Elizabeth Denby. And he devotes several pages to the most important commission given to a woman in Britain between the two world wars, Elisabeth Scott’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre of 1928–1932 in Stratford-upon-Avon.
This flat-roofed redbrick assemblage (which was substantially remodeled and expanded by Rab Bennetts from 2007 to 2010) is romantically sited on the tree-shaded banks of the River Avon in Shakespeare’s hometown. It exudes a mildly Art Deco air (though less so since Bennetts gutted Scott’s auditorium in favor of a quasi-Elizabethan update) but is free of the style’s jazzy ornamental effects and ranks among the better British buildings of its time. Scott won the blind competition for this prestigious job from among seventy-one other entrants when she was just twenty-nine. But as Stamp reports, incredulous sexists could not believe that a woman had done it, despite her being a relative of the Victorian master builder George Gilbert Scott and his grandson Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the Cambridge University Library of 1931–1934 as well as Britain’s famous red telephone booths. Doubters insisted that she must have been helped by her male employer at a London architectural firm, though as Stamp writes, he “disclaimed ‘any share whatever in the successful design.’”
Happily, Stamp shared my enthusiasm for an idiosyncratic building by a little-remembered Modernist, David Pleydell-Bouverie, a precocious aristocrat who as a twenty-one-year-old in 1932 established a practice with the much older Wells Coates, best known for his white-painted concrete Isokon apartment block of 1929–1934 in Hampstead (yet another staple of standard histories). Together they designed the Sunspan series of compact Streamline Moderne houses meant for mass production, but fewer than twenty were built. They split after four years, when Pleydell-Bouverie created a minor masterpiece, Ramsgate Aerodrome of 1936–1937 in Kent. This regional airport terminal was about the size of a large passenger aircraft of the period and resembled one with its symmetrical, outstretched, tapering wings with concrete roofs. These extended above transparent glass walls that seemed to vanish, and a cockpit-like control room with a curving windshield was elevated at the center. A textbook example of architecture parlante—a structure that “speaks” of its function directly—it anticipated Eero Saarinen’s birdlike TWA terminal at JFK Airport by more than two decades. Stamp reports that “this most stylish and elegant building disappeared at the end of the 1960s,” but a photograph of it taken from under the wing of a parked airliner “survives as one of the most telling and arresting images of British architecture of the time.” (Alas, it is not included in the otherwise well-illustrated volume.)
Late in his life I got to know David Bouverie (which he went by after he immigrated to the US in 1937 and reinvented himself as a Sonoma Valley landowner, conservationist, and socialite). He told me that when he won the Ramsgate commission he had no idea how to proceed, so he cold-called the Berlin office of the architect Emil Fahrenkamp, renowned for his pioneering use of concrete, to ask his advice. Fahrenkamp warned him to be careful about using metal reinforcing bars, which he worried might interfere with radio signals, a conversation that indicates just how small and cooperative the international confraternity of Modernists still was during the interwar years.
I also share Stamp’s fondness for the designs of another insufficiently esteemed twentieth-century architect, the Dutch master builder Willem Marinus Dudok, whose influence was strongly felt in interwar Britain. Along with Erich Mendelsohn, Dudok chose a congenial third way that avoided punitive reductivism on one extreme and derivative historicism on the other. Like Mendelsohn, his favorite material was red brick, which he used in a simpler manner than members of the Amsterdam School, whose early-twentieth-century schemes for social housing and public buildings in and around the Dutch metropolis had a pronounced Expressionist inflection.
During his busy quarter-century as municipal architect for the midsize city of Hilversum, about halfway between Amsterdam and Utrecht, Dudok developed a personal but aesthetically cohesive style that combined traditional massing (sometimes featuring enormous pitched roofs) with minimal decorative detailing. Most conspicuous of Dudok’s works was his Hilversum Town Hall of 1924–1931, a striking departure from the surroundings with its yellow brick cladding, flat rooflines, bold Cubist geometries, and a sleek fifteen-story-high clock tower that serves as the symbolic cynosure of an otherwise low-rise community on flat terrain, much as a church steeple would have done in the Netherlands during the age of faith.
Hilversum’s secular civic centerpiece served as inspiration for several of the new town halls erected soon thereafter in Britain, including municipal buildings for the London boroughs of Hornsey (1935) and Greenwich (1939), although they lack the volumetric complexity of the Dutch prototype. There was even commercial trickle-down, as seen in faint variations on Dudok’s tower at the Odeon Cinema on London’s Leicester Square (1937) and the Granada Cinema in the city’s Woolwich section (1937).
Another major template for British seats of local government was Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall of 1911–1923, which figured prominently in early accounts of twentieth-century architecture but is now little remembered outside Sweden. (Glimpses of it can be caught in news coverage of the Nobel Prize ceremonies held there each year.) This vast and imposing structure, which brings to mind a fairy-tale fortress, is grander than some national capitols. It was also a European rarity during and after the devastation of World War I as an ambitious showpiece scheme made possible by Sweden’s neutrality and resultant prosperity. Stamp rated Östberg’s inventive reinterpretation of medieval forms, which is enriched by countless handcrafted details, as “arguably the finest Arts and Crafts building in the world, a realization of the dreams of William Morris” in its comprehensive integration of architectural and decorative elements.
One can’t disagree with that assessment; more questionable is the high opinion held by both Stamp and the doyen of interwar British architectural historians, Nikolaus Pevsner, about one adaptation of the Stockholm Town Hall formula: C. H. James and S. Rowland Pierce’s Norwich City Hall of 1936–1938. Both redbrick buildings have a lantern-topped foursquare clock tower at one end of an elongated rectangular façade, but the anemic Neoclassicism and infelicitous proportions of the etiolated Norwich clone hardly merit Pevsner’s prediction, which Stamp seconded, that “in spite of its frankly admitted dependence on Sweden, the Norwich City Hall is likely to go down in history as the foremost English public building of between the wars.”
Interwar reminds us what a strong effect contemporary Swedish architecture had on concurrent developments in Britain, though not through the austere Functionalism that was the Scandinavian version of the International Style. What took hold instead were the pared-down Baroque and Gustavian Classical forms then popular among middle-of-the-road Swedish architects who dispensed with fussy ornamentation but retained familiar outlines thought to be more suitable and less threatening than the mechanical imagery so typical of High Modernism.
Derry Moore
Gavin Stamp, London, 1980; photograph by Derry Moore
Britain’s official acceptance of this imported style was signified by the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stripped Classical headquarters of 1932–1934 in London by G. Grey Wornum. Its Portland stone façade is centered by a three-story-high entry portal flanked by stylized figurative sculptures atop a pair of freestanding columns, a suave scheme that would have been right at home in Stockholm. It drew so clearly on recent Swedish designs—including Gunnar Asplund’s much-admired Stockholm Public Library of 1922–1928, a free reinterpretation of Neoclassicism that appeared modern in its simplicity—that one British architect likened it to “a gentleman dressed in clothes that were not bought in England” (perish the thought).
In explaining how such foreign trends were received in Britain, Stamp cites the British architectural gadfly Osbert Lancaster, whose inimitable satirical drawings were published in a series of popular midcentury books, including Pillar to Post, or The Pocket-Lamp of Architecture (1938). Stamp, who never shrank from bestowing superlatives, reckoned it “one of the most influential books on architecture ever published.” Though that’s rather an overstatement, Lancaster offered hilarious yet perceptive visual and verbal commentary on the immense changes that were transforming architecture and urbanism.
He was equally clever at coining names for the plethora of bastardized substyles that proliferated during the interwar British building boom. Among those designations was Pseudish, a Mediterranean-cum-Cape Dutch mishmash favored by nouveau riche sorts like the music hall singer Gracie Fields, whose twee 1934 house in Hampstead by C.H. Lay was a prime specimen. American tendencies were detectable in midrise office buildings like Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne’s eleven-story Adelaide House of 1925 in the City of London, which utilized emphatic vertical striping to imitate New York skyscrapers. (In 1924 the London County Council imposed an eighty-foot maximum height on buildings within its jurisdiction, a restriction that was relaxed only after World War II.) Even Hollywood movies had an influence on modes such as Bankers Georgian, which, as Lancaster wrote, “preserves something of the air of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of the School for Scandal.”
But at least some of those improbable hybrids possessed a certain vitality, unlike much of what is dutifully included in Interwar, with page after page of competent but boring Classical buildings of the kind that might catch your eye from a London black cab but then be immediately forgotten. Many of those routine regurgitations can be attributed to what Stamp calls “the continuing national cult of Sir Christopher Wren,” which enjoyed a notable resurgence between 1923, the bicentennial of his death, and 1932, the tercentenary of his birth. A contemporary British architect and critic, Harry Goodhart-Rendel, wryly noted that while the extravagantly overrated Wren was considered a great architect by “practically all Englishmen and practically no foreigners,” he occupied a high place in the hearts of his countrymen because “his buildings have that inestimable quality of lovableness which…we can recognize but not define.” However, apart from spirited riffs on the old master’s designs that the pun-prone Lutyens termed his “Wrenaissance,” this was one of the least interesting aspects of interwar British architecture.
A great irony of World War I’s aftermath was that the main beneficiaries of the new architecture were not the citizens of victorious Britain but rather those of the vanquished Central Powers, thanks to the unprecedented workers’ housing reform programs instituted by social democratic governments in Germany and Austria. Britain would not achieve anything remotely similar—and never as good architecturally—until the election of its first Labour government in 1945. Writing after a trip to Germany in 1930, the British designer Oliver P. Bernard was struck by the contrast:
Country houses for gentlemen, and more palatial premises for bankers, are still an architectural obsession in little Britain, where hundreds of thousands of families lack adequate space, light, and air to live in. Those who explore the domestic development of Berlin, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, and even Vienna, may discover that the cities of defeated Empires have triumphed by their examples of progress in living. Art, design, and craft, and their professional distinctions, are worthless until every man, woman, and child is allotted an adequate minimum of living accommodation.
The closest Britain came to satisfying the demand for new housing between the world wars was the suburbanization of the English countryside, but that was only within reach of the middle, not the working, class. Although the turn-of-the-century Garden City Movement advocated the rational development of rural land to minimize suburban sprawl, unanticipated demographic shifts caused by the Great War’s horrendous death toll affected hereditary land ownership along with so much else. Stamp explains:
The old aristocracy withdrew from many country seats partly because of the dreadful attrition of male heirs during the war but mostly because of high taxation and death duties. Many peers seem to have given up their country houses—and their grand town houses—without much regret, exchanging them for a modern flat.
The sudden plentitude of hitherto unavailable greenfield building sites on the market resulted in a rush of consumer-oriented construction. To meet the pent-up demand, contractors went into overdrive—Britain’s interwar population grew by 10 percent, but new housing units increased by 30 percent. Often devised without architects, the predominant styles of these speculative developments played to the British self-image, as Lancaster noted with Stockbrokers Tudor, typified by sham half-timbering, and By-pass Variegated, which drew on several Ye Olde Englysshe clichés for the semidetached middle-class bungalows that characterized outer London’s so-called Metroland (areas served by the Metropolitan Railway), of which Stamp was a self-proclaimed product. Yet his abiding fondness for the comforting traditionalism of those snug little dwellings was more than nostalgia for the scenes of his childhood:
It is in the ordinary suburban house, built in its millions, that the power of the Tudor architectural ideal was strongest—hence the unceasing abuse of it by the architectural profession…. The spec-built suburban house, with its neo-Tudor details, its false half-timbering, tile-hung gables, bay-windows and rough-cast walls, represented an image of home, of freedom and domesticity, for millions of families able and willing to afford a down payment and the mortgage installments.
This validation of the populist vernacular—akin to Venturi and Scott Brown’s famous dictum that “Main Street is almost all right”—paralleled similar reassessments of post–World War II American suburbanization, which have addressed mass-produced developer housing with the same seriousness once reserved for high-style architecture. In England this variance was made even sharper by the country’s deeply ingrained class consciousness, which caused some to see the suburban semis of the sort Stamp grew up in—“on the Orpington bypass” in Kent, he used to specify—as irredeemably “non-U” (not upper class, in Nancy Mitford’s snobbish parlance).
A visceral distrust of European Modernism—emblematic of British xenophobia in general—is captured in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall (1928), which revolves around the destruction of an unrestored sixteenth-century Hampshire country house called King’s Thursday, deemed “the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.” At its new owner’s behest, this fictive landmark is torn down and replaced by a soulless International Style house designed by Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus, a German Modernist architect transparently based on Walter Gropius, the chilly and officious founder of the Bauhaus. Silenus complies with the patron’s vague request for “something clean and square,” but before it is completed, he delivers a cartoonish screed that echoes Waugh’s deep-seated antipathy to the new:
“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferroconcrete and aluminium, “is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”
The opening chapter of Interwar is devoted to an all-consuming architectural preoccupation of the British public at the time: the memorialization of the recent war dead. Virtually every family had at least one member killed in the conflict, sometimes several, and although other belligerent countries also sustained appalling casualties and duly honored them, David Cannadine has pointed out that “interwar Britain was probably more obsessed with death than any other period of modern history.”
This, Stamp explains, was because for the first time in British history the brunt of battle was borne not by the career military but by hastily trained civilians:
In the Great War, parliamentary governments, as well as autocracies, committed their populations to the struggle with a ruthlessness inconceivable in earlier centuries. The British Expeditionary Force of 1914 consisted of professional soldiers, but those who went over the top at the Somme in 1916 were largely volunteers, while by 1918 Douglas Haig was commanding a huge army of conscripted soldiers. The patriotic character of the war and the unprecedented scale of casualties sustained by ordinary citizens demanded that every individual sacrifice be commemorated.
Thus an overarching theme of Interwar is how the catastrophic war exerted a deadening effect on British society and hence its architecture, a caesura that marked the true beginning of the country’s seemingly irreversible decline. Often that slippage has been attributed to economic factors—the dissolution of Britain’s colonial empire and loss of captive markets, crushing debt incurred during World War II, excessive cold war defense spending after it ceased to be a world power, and the gradual demise of its heavy industries, hastened by overreaching trade unions and then globalization. These were all undeniable factors, but Stamp also understood the psychic toll of the carnage: “During the decade after the Armistice, British architecture was often conservative and uninspired, reflecting a society which was damaged and exhausted by four years of war.”
Awareness of that national post-traumatic stress disorder suffuses Interwar from the outset. One of its first photographic images shows the architect Lionel Pearson’s controversial Royal Artillery War Memorial of 1925 on London’s Hyde Park Corner. This full-size rendering in Portland stone of a 9.2-inch howitzer is raised atop a matching plinth, on three sides of which stand larger-than-life-size bronze statues of artillerymen by the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger. On the far rear end of the monument, unseen as one first confronts the composition, comes an unexpected shock. Lying supine on a slab at visitors’ eye level is the bronze figure of a dead soldier, his head obscured by a tarpaulin from which his hands and feet disconcertingly protrude, and on which his now useless flat-brimmed Brodie helmet rests. Stamp writes:
There is no idealisation here; just truthful, brilliantly modeled realism about the brutal nature of conflict…. This feature met with opposition, but Jagger believed that a memorial should tell the public about the horror and terror of war, and he paid for this part of the work himself.
In a fiery eulogy delivered at Stamp’s church funeral (he was a devout Anglican), the writer Jonathan Meades averred that “Gavin was, among much else, a political writer—a political writer in disguise, but a supremely political writer.” This is self-evident to anyone who has read his masterwork, The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006), the definitive study of Lutyens’s gut-wrenching funerary monument of 1928–1932 in Thiepval, France. That towering redbrick-and-limestone structure commemorates the Great War’s bloodiest battle—there were more than a million killed and wounded on both sides—and fully justifies Stamp’s estimation of it as
the greatest British work of architecture of the interwar years, arguably of the whole century: an intellectually distinguished creation by an architect of rare genius that represents its time powerfully, and painfully.*
His Somme book stands among the great antiwar texts of our time, so ringing is its denunciation of the infamous battle’s officially sanctioned slaughter. With mounting indignation that reaches an outraged crescendo, he presents an irrefutable indictment of mechanized martial barbarism. After all, the “Missing” in the memorial’s title does not refer to soldiers who somehow wandered away on the battlefield and could never be located. Rather, it euphemizes the 73,357 (among the more than 400,000 British dead) whose remains were unidentifiable before the advent of DNA testing.
As Stamp approached death, this inveterate campaigner directed that he be buried wearing a “BUGGER BREXIT” lapel pin. This characteristic parting gesture signified his conviction that Britain could no more cut itself off from Europe politically than its architecture could reject foreign influences, which began with the Norman (if not the Roman) conquest, accelerated during the age of Palladio, recurred when William and Mary brought Dutch styles with them from Holland, and ranged ever wider as the British Empire expanded. Although Gavin Stamp was a quintessential old-school Englishman, he harbored no illusions about Britain’s diminishing place in world affairs and its concomitant need to remain part of the European Union, which made those last words of protest consistent with his embracing but cautionary vision of the building art.
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