January 2009

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‘All the architecture in this book is completely imaginary, and no reference is intended to any actual building living or dead’. So Osbert Lancaster noted at the beginning of Pillar to Post, which first appeared exactly 70 years ago but has scarcely dated. Augmented with further caricatures of domestic interiors first published as Homes Sweet Homes and with a few American examples, it was later reissued as A Cartoon History of Architecture, one of the most influential books on architecture ever published – and certainly the funniest, because of its illustrations.

Osbert Lancaster – cartoonist, designer, writer on architecture and travel, stage-designer, wit and dandy – was born in 1908. His centenary is being celebrated with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, curated by James Knox, accompanied by a splendid book, Cartoons & Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, which includes a wealth of his drawings, cartoons and stage-designs as well as an admirable biographical introduction by Knox. The story of Lancaster’s life has been told before, not least in his own, captivating, two volumes of autobiography. Knox, however, not only presents new material but emphasises that although Lancaster belonged to a seemingly blessed and gilded generation – his friends included John Betjeman and John Piper (with whom he collaborated on the Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Park for the Festival of Britain in 1951) – he was prodigiously productive and had a unique talent – no, genius – as a draughtsman and caricaturist.

But this column is about architecture, and to concentrate on that is not to present a partial view, as buildings fascinated and entertained Lancaster from an early age. After Oxford and art school, this interest was encouraged by working on the Architectural Review in its prime in the 1930s, when Betjeman was assistant editor. It was out of the enthusiasms of that time, expressed in the witty and elegant pages of the ‘Archie Rev’, that Lancaster’s first books emerged.

The brilliance of Pillar to Post was that not only were types, and styles, of buildings caricatured and made familiar, but also that they were placed in context. Lancaster’s architecture is used and lived in – made human, as architecture should be. Not only is the essence of a style conveyed, but the building is depicted with contemporary people in appropriate attitudes, drawn with his deceptively simple and naïve line. So a monk with a mop and bucket stands under a decorated gothic arch, and a sun-worshipping, pipe-smoking progressive intellectual lies on the roof terrace of his ‘Twentieth-Century Functional’ house. Lancaster’s figures – as in the celebrated ‘Pocket Cartoons’ that he contributed to the Daily Express for 40 years – are both funny and acutely observed. A natty dresser himself, Lancaster had a sharp eye for clothes and caught the precise fashion of the time.

In this book and its sequels, Lancaster not only illustrated architectural styles but also dissected and labelled them – often defining sub-styles that nobody had cared to notice before. In fact, he contributed more to the vocabulary of architectural history than any writer before or since – more, even, than Thomas Rickman, who taught us to distinguish medieval gothic work as ‘E.E.’, ‘Dec.’ or ‘Perp.’ It was Lancaster who christened that fancy red-brick, gabled manner derived from Norman Shaw as ‘Pont Street Dutch’. But it is with 20th-century architecture that he came into his own. Lancaster identified ‘Bankers Georgian’, ‘Curzon Street Baroque’ and ‘Pseudish’ – a particularly clever name for that white-walled sub-Spanish Colonial manner with bright green or turquoise pantiles on the roof. And it was Lancaster who indispensably classified the sub-divisions of what is still the essential English domestic manner – half-timbered neo-Tudor: ‘Wimbledon Transitional’, ‘Stockbrokers Tudor’, ‘Aldwych Farcical’ and ‘By-Pass Variegated’.

The satire is in both the drawings and in his accompanying irreverent texts. And sometimes the message was a powerful one. Famously, he drew two almost identical stripped-Classical colonnades, one ‘Third Empire’, the other ‘Marxist Non-Aryan’, making the point that the totalitarian states of Hitler and Stalin had much in common. He also satirised town-planning, or its absence – being unsure which had the more destructive effect on towns and cities. Progress at Pelvis Bay, published in 1936, was his first book and depicted in words and pictures the rise and subsequent architectural degradation of a seaside resort. ‘By means of the numerous carefully chosen illustrations the reader is enabled to follow the various architectural changes that have taken place and to realise with what diligence the authorities have striven to avail themselves of all that was Best in contemporary Art.’ In reviewing what pretended to
be a municipal brochure, Betjeman wrote that ‘My only fear for this wonderful book is that some town councils may get hold of it and take it literally’.

The idea was developed in Drayneflete Revealed, a would-be town history and guide, published in 1949. In addition to the caricatures of local antiquities, monuments and paintings in Drayneflete Castle, the seat of the Earls of Littlehampton (whose current Countess, Maudie Littlehampton, would become the star of the ‘Pocket Cartoons’), the genius of this book is a series of drawings, made from the same vantage point, depicting the changes to the imaginary town over time, all observed in minute and telling detail. The last drawing, of ‘The Drayneflete of Tomorrow’ shows a ‘Cultural Monument scheduled under National Trust’ surviving on a roundabout in a rebuilt modernist town. It was an all-too-accurate evocation of what contemporary planners were proposing for Coventry, Plymouth, Bradford and elsewhere.

Increasingly, Lancaster became a force on the side of preservation, campaigning against ‘speculative builders, borough surveyors, government departments and other notorious predators’. One memorable battle was in 1972 over the proposed new Home Office building overlooking St James’s Park. After its knighted architect had claimed that it would be largely hidden by trees, Lancaster wrote to The Times wondering whether ‘any architect in recorded history from Vitruvious [sic] to Colonel Seifert [sic], engaged on an important public building on a prominent site, has ever before put forward the claim (one hopes justified) made by Sir Basil Spence… that his master- piece will, when finished, be to all intents and purposes, invisible?’

Perhaps Lancaster’s happiest contribution to the preservation cause, because both visual and funny, were the drawings exhibited at the ‘Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1974. He drew ‘Great Houses of Fiction Revisited’ to illustrate the way such buildings were now treated. Blandings Castle was now used by the Ministry of Agriculture; Disraeli’s Brentham in Lothair was crumbling behind barbed wire in the care of the War Office; while Mansfield Park had become a girls’ school. And here Lancaster had another swipe at his famous near-contemporary, for ‘After the war a new dormitory wing, the work of Sir Basil Spence, was added… While the proportions of Wyatt’s façade were carefully respected, no attempt was made to achieve any unconvincing pastiche and the result was immediately recognised as a forthright and welcome expression of twentieth-century ideals in a contemporary idiom’. Just what such typical clichéd drivel meant in practice was, again, mercilessly lampooned by this inspired architectural cartoonist.

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