“My dream is that people’s eyes will be opened instinctively to their surroundings,” says Simon Jenkins at the end of his new book. “I want people to point at buildings, laugh, cry or get angry. I want them to hate and to love what they see. I want them to speak architecture.” So he has written A Short History of British Architecture, which he hopes will help people understand what he calls the “language” of styles – such things as the difference between Doric and Corinthian columns, or between early English and perpendicular gothic.
It turns out to be two books in one. The first 200 pages are a brisk rattle through four-and-a-half millennia of the greatest hits of British building from Stonehenge onwards, talking about cathedrals, country houses and monuments rather than the places of everyday life, delivered with the measured if sometimes opinionated tone of a benign tour guide.
The last 70 pages are a partisan polemic about the ravages wreaked on British cities by modernist planners and architects. He writes these as an engaged and enraged combatant: as a young journalist he was involved in the 1970s campaign to save Covent Garden from redevelopment, and he has taken an interest in issues of heritage and planning – including as a former chairman of the National Trust – ever since.
The first part is a readable retelling of the standard histories, animated by the odd engaging tale and personal observation. He makes sweeping statements as to what architecture is. Stonehenge is; the intricate, older complex of circular houses at Skara Brae in Orkney is not. He contestably asserts that the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall – a towering and violently original assertion of power and wealth in glass and stone and tapestry – “exudes an English dignity and calm”.
He seems uncomfortable with more creative and inventive architects, such as Nicholas Hawksmoor (whose use of baroque elements is called “tentative”) or Sir John Soane. His own preference is for what he calls a “golden age” in the second half of the 18th century, a more tasteful and stylistically orderly era when “for perhaps the first and only time, a large constituency of Britons managed to speak architecture”, by which he means a mostly aristocratic clientele who shared with their architects an education in ancient Roman and Greek styles.
The second part of the book is more vivid. Here Jenkins lambasts the postwar destruction of British cities by architects, planners and politicians, intent on sweeping away the “obsolete”, handing over public spaces to cars, and fulfilling (in his telling) the demented visions of the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier, a man who hated the ordinary shop-lined streets that make up most cities.
This tale has been much told, and it’s a little wearying that Le Corbusier continues to be belaboured (as he is in Thomas Heatherwick’s recent Humanise) at least 50 years after his urban ideas went out of fashion. The collateral damage of Jenkins’s onslaught on the modern also includes much beautiful and successful architecture, but it is nonetheless hard to disagree that some true atrocities were perpetrated. And the author, who was there in those planning battles, has earned the right to talk about them. It is because of these disasters, he writes, that he wants to educate the public in architecture, so that they can’t be duped by professionals in the future. This is an aim that anyone who loves the art of building can applaud.
I’m not sure, though, that the focus on the “language” of architecture – a thing whose rules are to be learned – is rich enough to bring about a transformation in public understanding. It’s a way of looking at buildings that treats them as objects of connoisseurial contemplation rather than as three-dimensional spaces that are made, inhabited and lived, as creations of both beauty and strife. He is sometimes illuminating about the role of politics in architecture, and big on the elitist contempt that he says modernist architects had for ordinary people, but he’s light on the ways in which the brutalities of the enclosures and slavery funded the country houses of that “golden age”. Architecture, in other words, is more magnificent and more turbulent than Jenkins allows.
• A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon Jenkins is published by Viking (£26.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
