A house built by Jane Austen’s descendants in Horsmonden, Kent, was listed by English Heritage last week, joining around 100,000 protected buildings of its era. But it has been singled out not for its quaint Victoriana, but for what sits on top of it.
Floating above the gothic scene, like a spaceship hovering into view in Pride and Prejudice, hangs a long low roof, suspended above a bronze-tinted glass box. From inside this diminutive pavilion, the woodland scenery wraps around in a 360-degree panorama, framed only by a tawny timber ceiling and ceramic floor tiles, which extend outside to a pool beyond. It is as if a slice of 1960s California has been cut and pasted into the Kentish Weald.
“I thought everyone had forgotten about it,” says the architect of Capel Manor House, Michael Manser, who at 84 now has three listed buildings under his belt, and whose name adorns the annual prize for the best private house in the UK, the coveted Manser Medal. “Even I almost had.”
Capel Manor House. Photograph: Henryk Hetflaisz/English Heritage/PA
Manser, whose practice continues (now headed by his son), was a prolific pioneer of steel-framed houses in the 1950s and 60s, bringing the industrial clarity of Mies van der Rohe‘s glass boxes to rural south-east England. A scale model of Capel Manor is now on display in London as part of an exhibition of post-war listed buildings organised by English Heritage.
Brutal and Beautiful celebrates the period when houses were bright and open-plan, schools were designed around fresh air and light, and the state built shopping centres as models of open public space. It was also the period of concrete, a material which in the English climate can stain and spall, acting as a symbolic sponge for all the faults of the era – a reputation it still hasn’t shaken off.
The exhibition is full of familiar brutalist monoliths that have courted love and hate in equal measure – from the Barbican to Coventry Cathedral, the National theatre to Trellick Tower. The surprising thing to learn is how many of their makers are still alive – branded by English Heritage as the “living listed” architects, an elite group of around 40 pensioner-practitioners.
Turn End, Haddenham. Architect: Peter Aldington. Photograph: Alamy
“Being told you are now part of ‘heritage’ makes you feel very elderly indeed,” laughs Peter Aldington, 84. He is sitting in Turn End, the home he designed and built with his wife in the 1960s in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, one of three single-storey houses that frame a series of walled gardens – which were all grade II listed in 1998. Aldington is the leader of the pack, with seven buildings now listed, a remarkably high proportion of his small practice’s output of mostly private houses.
“He’s a master of what’s called ‘romantic pragmatism’,” says the exhibition’s curator, Elain Harwood. “His houses incorporated modern and old materials to create a new kind of vernacular, which became very influential in the 70s and 80s.”
His Anderton House – acquired by the Landmark Trust as its first modernist holiday home in 2003 – is a modern interpretation of a traditional Devon long-house, with simple breezeblock walls and glazed gables. It was the result of a year of client interviews by Aldington’s business partner, John Craig, who deduced that there was a “major conflict” between Mr and Mrs Anderton.
“He wanted an office at home that was open to the rest of the house, but she was obsessively tidy and didn’t want to see his papers everywhere,” recalls Aldington. “So we made him a sort of dog-house.”
Standing in the middle of the open-plan building, like a raised dock in a lawcourt, the timber study carrel is an ingenious solution, meaning Mr Anderton could feel part of the family action but have his mess safely contained. His clients were initially wary, saying they would use it to store the washing machine (a move which saw the architect threaten to leave the project), but which turned out to be the most successful part of the house.
You might think being a piece of walking heritage gives an architect carte blanche, but it hasn’t made life easier for Aldington. When he was refused permission for a vicarage on a site near Haddenham, he took the project to appeal and invited the planning officer to visit Turn End. “He turned up, took one look at the place, and told me he would never give permission to build this house now – because it’s not in keeping with the buildings in the local area! Utter nonsense.”
He describes his seven listings as “vindication against a sick system,” and he’s still stung by a life of battling to get work past rural planning committees. “There would have been a lot more,” he says, “if it wasn’t for our dreadful planning system, which gives the butcher, baker and candlestick-maker control over your aesthetic judgment.”
Anderton House, Goodleigh, Devon. Photograph: Alamy
Aldington is not alone in having bittersweet feelings about being declared a piece of heritage. “I prefer the term living national treasure,” says Christopher Woodward, 74, referring to the Japanese name for aged craftspeople deemed to be Preservers of Important Intangible Cultural Properties. Woodward has certainly earned the title, having worked with arch-brutalists Alison and Peter Smithson on the listed Economist Plaza and the Garden Building at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, before being part of the team responsible for Milton Keynes’ shopping centre.
“But listing is a bit of a sideshow,” he says. “The clue is in the name – like the 100 things to see before you die. It’s an art historical game.”
A 650-metre long white steel and mirror-glass temple to shopping, the Milton Keynes mall is one of the most recently listed projects in the show, receiving grade II status in 2010 – a move described as “utter madness” by the British Property Federation. Its owners were furious at the decision, saying the listing would “prevent evolution and growth” of a building they described as “nondescript and characterless”. But in the eyes of English Heritage, the project represented a rare example of “rigour, consistency, luminosity and user-friendliness”.
Milton Keynes, thecentre:MK. Photograph: Alamy
Woodward has mixed feelings: “Architects are rarely thanked or honoured in this country, so it’s nice for one of the last state-sponsored projects to be recognised,” he says. “But I would be embarrassed about freezing the building in time. It was designed to be easy to unpick, so you could whip it down and recycle it easily. We always said if it becomes obsolete, just demolish it.”
The complex has suffered a number of unfortunate extensions since it was completed in 1979, lengthened with a meaner, low-ceilinged version of itself in 1993, and joined by a wavy-roofed monster next door – everything the clear-headed original is not.
“There has been a general drift towards fussiness and bling, whereas we were just trying to make it clear and open,” says Woodward, who hasn’t been back to the building since 1982. “I don’t want to be upset. When people tell me what’s happened I have to put my hands over my ears and go ‘la la la’.”