Margaret
Monck’s 1935 photos of workmen demolishing Adelphi Terrace –
the neoclassical block of Thames-side houses off the Strand – make for
particularly grim viewing. Designed by the Adam Brothers in the 1770s,
suddenly it was replaced by an office block.

The even older Devonshire
House on Piccadilly, made to William Kent’s Palladian design, was
knocked down to make way for flats in 1925; and the curving Quadrant section
of Regent Street by John Nash (favourite architect of George IV) was also
lost around the same time.

Part of the context for this inter-war appetite for destruction – in London,
especially – was a fast-growing population and rising land values. There was
also a long-held prejudice against state intervention in what private
individuals wished to do with their property. The notion of an Englishman’s
home being his castle ran deep.

As general editor of the Shell
guides to English counties, poet John Betjeman was among those
leading calls for conservation, though – and an “appreciation of the
disregarded, fast-disappearing Georgian landscape of Britain”. Magazines
like Building News and The Architect even ran obituaries of
the latest notable building to be demolished – such as the
London Institution in Finsbury Circus.

_{Departed: The arch at Euston Station photographed in the mid-Twenties}

To lighten the tone, one might also have liked to see exhibited the
satirical drawings of contemporary architecture by Osbert Lancaster.

From 1940, the Luftwaffe took the destruction of British buildings to a whole
new level, cutting a swathe through architecture of all periods. War artist,
John Piper, captured the ruins of Landsdown Chapel in Bath: using the
fluidity of water-colour to accentuate the crumbled impermanence of the
building.

Under the continued threat of Blitz, the National Buildings Record was set up
in 1941, a heritage body which sent photographers up and down the land –
lest the worse happen and no visual record of Britain’s finest buildings
survive. The Ministry of Works, meanwhile, set up its Salvage Scheme,
employing hundreds of architects to compile a list of the damaged buildings
in their local area most worthy of saving.

These combined inventories would form the basis, after the war, of the first
statutory list of architecturally important buildings: Listed Buildings, as
we now know them, were introduced by 1947’s Town and Country Planning Act.

The exhibition ends on this positive note, suggesting a firm concept of
national heritage was thus born. And certainly, today’s total of 500,000
Listed structures would hint as much.

Yet, this is also to overlook completely the frenzy of destruction carried out
in the Sixties by governments local and national – all in the name of
modernisation and progress. The losses included Euston Arch and the Coal
Exchange in London, plus whole Victorian city-centres in Birmingham,
Bradford, Nottingham and beyond.

I suppose one might say that all cities evolve, and each new generation
strives, in some Oedipal sense, against the one(s) before. But that would be
to provide a specious pardon to Harold MacMillan and the philistine Sixties
planners: the elephants in this exhibition’s final room.

‘Pride
and Prejudice: The Battle for Betjeman’s Britain‘ is at Quadriga
Gallery, Wellington Arch, Hyde Park Corner, to Sep 15 (Weds to Sun only)

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