Posts Tagged Life and style
‘Secret garden’ Wrest Park reopens after restoration
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
The 90-acre park in Bedfordshire contains '300 years of garden history' and boasts Versailles-style views
Wrest Park restoration – in pictures
One of the UK's finest and least known gardens will on Tuesday be unveiled in newly restored glory after decades hidden away from the general public's gaze.
The 90 acres of Wrest Park in Bedfordshire are unarguably magnificent, probably Britain's largest "secret garden", with surprises around every wooded corner. Although it is a nationally important garden its existence has remained virtually unknown.
John Watkins, head of gardens and landscape at English Heritage, said Wrest Park was unusual because it retained designs from the 17th century to the 20th century.
"You can literally walk through 300 years of garden history," he said. "It's this palimpsest of garden history that is so special, but also it is stunningly beautiful – so you can come here whether you want to delve into the history of the place or just look at it."
Wrest Park was owned by the De Grey family for nearly 700 years and there are three key stages in the landscape's history – the formal woodland garden created by Henry, Duke of Kent, in 1706; changes made under the direction of Jemima, Marchioness Grey, in the 18th century's latter half; and then the work of her grandson Thomas, Earl de Grey, from 1833.
Wrest Park opens to the public on Thursday, revealing the first fruits of an ambitious 20-year restoration plan. As visitors step out from the French-inspired mansion, designed by Thomas in the 1830s to replace the old, dark and dingy house he demolished, they are met by a long, Versailles-like view of the central gardens.
Within the grounds there are examples of work by some of the most famous names in English gardening and architecture history, including Thomas Archer, who designed a magnificent baroque pavilion in 1709-11.
Then there is the hand of the most famous of them all, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, who was hired by Jemima in 1758 to make the boundary canals less formal and more natural.
A great gardening pioneer he may have been, but it is clear that while at Wrest, Brown was the "hired help". The rusticated column that was erected for Brown is inscribed with the words: "These gardens originally layed out by Henry Duke of Kent were altered by Henry Duke of Hardwicke and Jemima Marchioness Grey with the professional assistance of Lancelot Brown, 1758, 1759 and 1760."
Closer examination of the column reveals cracks from where a big beech tree fell down in the 1990s, crushing the monument. "This was before we took over the site, and it highlighted to us the importance of getting Wrest Park into protection," said Watkins.
Other surprises in the gardens include a tucked-away bath house, built in 1770 to resemble a semi-ruined classical building. Inside, family and friends would have walked across the pebble and deer vertebrae floor, to step, probably quite slowly, into the cold water plunge pool.
Then there is a small dog graveyard with headstones for family pets down the years, and a good source of inspiration for anyone stuck for a name: Douba, perhaps? Or Freuah, Una, Little Dick, Dingey, Busy, Fury, Dorroch, Phedra, , Nissy, Kelpie, Tottie, Petsy or Pet.
Jemima was in charge of the gardens for a long time and comes across as an enlightened but slightly dotty matriarch. There is, for example, the Mithraic altar she devised with her husband, which has seemingly Persian and Greek text, but is no more than an intellectual joke.
After Thomas, the gardens were looked after well with the house remaining remained in the family until Auberon Herbert in 1905, who leased Wrest Park to the US ambassador. During the first world war it was used as a military hospital.
When Herbert, a liberal politician and captain in the Royal Flying Corps, died in action, the estate was sold to northern industrialist JG Murray who felled quite a lot of trees when things got financially tricky.
He sold it to Sun Alliance Insurance in 1939 and after the second world war it became a centre for modern agricultural engineering research.
English Heritage took over in 2006 and devised a restoration plan stretching over 20 years. It was helped by a £1.14m grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The first phase being seen this week includes the restored Italian and rose gardens, a new exhibition on its history and access to the miles of pathways and vistas set over the 90 acres.
Simon Thurley, English Heritage's chief executive, said: "Wrest Park tells the story of England's love affair with landscape. It is a unique place capturing 300 years of gardening history. So now with the successful completion of this first phase of restoration, Wrest Park can rightfully reclaim its place as one of the great gardens of England."
Wrest Park restoration – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
Wrest Park in Bedfordshire opens to the public on Thursday after the first phase of a 20-year restoration plan
Workplace of the future
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 24, 2011
The year is 2018. What might your office environment look like? Here is the award-winning vision of London-based architects tp bennett
Grand Designs: The home truths of Kevin McCloud
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 8, 2011
Kevin McCloud won't talk price. For him a dream property is all about enriching your life, not your wallet
It wasn't the best morning to interview Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand Designs and the nation's architectural critic-in-chief. "The not so Grand Design," screamed that day's Daily Mail, featuring a Thames barge given an £80,000 makeover lying washed up and unfinished on a drab Essex beach. "A Grand Design for Failure," said the Guardian.
McCloud is not familiar with failure. Grand Designs is in its tenth series, and its presenter is regarded as one of Channel 4's most bankable assets. The TV programme has spawned a number of spin-offs, including a popular magazine and a home improvement show, Grand Designs Live.
He had a bad feeling about the Thames barge programme. "The project was compromised from the beginning. They were not prepared properly from the beginning and were relying on happenstance. I didn't want to do that one from the start." In that programme's summing-up, he dubbed it a "floating scrapheap challenge" rather than a true Grand Design.
But disapproval is rare in McCloud's bountiful vocabulary. The homilies delivered at the end of each programme aim to inspire rather than moralise, and in person, McCloud is no different. "There are plenty of others who delight in schadenfreude," he says. "I'm not keen on shows that do that. What we do is set out to celebrate architecture and find projects that move the architectural canon on a bit."
The idea for the interview is that McCloud will talk about what the average homeowner can do to their property to maximise its value. But despite fronting a home improvement show that counts Velux, Dulux and Miele among its chief sponsors, McCloud is almost evasive when it comes to talking about kitchen makeovers or loft extensions. The thinking man's answer to Linda Barker, his passion for architectural innovation and style keeps him from telling you how to improve a mundane three-bed semi with a slap of paint and a bit of decluttering.
McCloud won't talk price, but he will talk value, a rare enough commodity in the TV property shows. "I don't look at what people do with their homes in terms of money, but the social and personal value of what they're trying to do and achieve," he says. "I never use the 'P' word. I'm not interested in just doing something up and selling on."
His personal favourite Grand Design cost just £28,000. It was built by Sussex woodsman Ben Law from the trees in the woods in which it stands. Recycled newspaper insulates the floor and thick straw bales line the walls, covered in lime plaster. All the electricity comes from solar panels and wind turbines, while water is taken from a nearby spring. "He built the most delightful home and he built it all on budget. It's the extraordinary personal values of people like Ben Law that matter. It's not about half a million or three-quarters of a million pounds. It's the brutality of those sorts of figures that stops people in their projects."
Beautiful crafting, innovative design and highly personal touches are what makes a home improvement work, not piles of money, says McCloud. He points to Monty Ravenscroft's home built on a sliver of land in Peckham on a small budget as one of the enduring stars of Grand Designs.
The plot was 80ft-long but in places just 13ft-wide, yet Ravenscroft squeezed a four-bed family home on to the site, at a cost of £170,000, plus £40,000 for the land. That compares with typical prices of £350,000-plus for family homes in the area. There are no external windows, but light floods in through a retractable glass roof. A double bed slides back to reveal a double bath underneath, while a toilet doubles up as a wet room. "He was on a very restricted budget but what his project showed was an extraordinary example of personal craft. It's very easy, isn't it, to slit open a fish and sell the eggs as caviar. What Monty did was miraculous."
Forget what all the other property programmes tell you about improving your property to maximise its sale value. Do it for yourself, not for the market. "Ask yourself how long you are going to live there. My father died at the age of 73. Hell, that doesn't give me an awful lot longer [he's 52]. How am I going to spend the next two decades? How am I going to be happy?
"Your home should be about enriching the daily experience. I don't want to be too philosophical, but next week you might be under a bus. Figure out what you have, do you like it, do you really want it? Don't try building a fantasy of how you should be."
Behind the scenes, McCloud admits guiding some self-builders rather more than the programme always shows. "Look, I'm not the architect, but off camera I say, ring this person up for help and advice, or I really counsel someone not to put in, say, a swimming pool, at the expense of insulating the home. If I really like the people, I do tend to get involved."
Twelve years after he started work on Grand Designs, McCloud says he remains as excited as the day he began. "Every series is different, every project is different. But the series is evolving – not least the issues around where people get the money from to do projects."
He also has his own £18m grand project: a development of 109 new-build homes in Oxford. It will perhaps be a bigger challenge than most Grand Designs. McCloud's company, Hab, is aiming to create low-cost, affordable and sustainable homes that embrace an eco-vision that includes car clubs, cycleways and food collectives.
McCloud calls it an "intelligent approach to regeneration". But at the end of the project it will be – for once – the public who decide, not him.
McCloud's do's and don'ts of home renovation
• Grand Designs don't happen without what McCloud believes to be the essential component of any home improvement project: an architect. "Expert help needn't be impossibly expensive. Everyone deserves and needs to work with talented individuals. If you go to a good architect, your fees will pay for themselves."
• Don't design things as you go along. "We did a programme on a house in Spain, but sadly they didn't invest in the design process. And then there was a conversion of a church in Tipton [in the West Midlands]. There was no architect, no design input, and it was pedestrian and clunky."
• Don't just add rooms but use the process to re-evaluate the layout of your home. "Rejig your rooms to how we live today rather than a hundred years ago."
• Hire a project manager. "A big project will drain you night and day, but the ride need only be as hard or as easy as you make it … People have got to get over the fear of not being able to trust others. I come across people who are very successful in their own sphere, and really believe they can do it all themselves, but they can't."
• You can find cheap solutions. "Vision and ideas are free. But there are reasons why not everyone opts for glass balustrades. I'm a big fan of intelligent cheap solutions. There's no reason for your imagination to be fettered by money."
• Expect cost overruns. "If you are disciplined, add 20% to your budget. If you are not disciplined, then add 59%."
• Don't expect the bank to keep bailing you out. "We used to see people go back to the bank for bigger loans. Now that has stopped and projects have been mothballed."
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Peter Zumthor unveils secret garden for Serpentine pavilion
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 5, 2011
Swiss master architect will create contemplative garden courtyard enclosed by lightweight black-clad structure
Peter Zumthor, Swiss master of meditative, one-off, and highly crafted buildings, has released images of his design for this year's Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens. The pavilion, which opens in July and closes in September, will take the form of a contemplative garden courtyard created by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, enclosed by a low-key and lightweight timber structure Zumthor plans to wrap and coat with scrim and black paste mixed with sand. Visitors will enter the low-lying pavilion through a number of doors and follow several different paths between outer and inner walls into Zumthor and Oudolf's secret garden.
The idea underpinning the design is that of a garden of quiet pleasure and ruminative calm set just a couple of minutes from the 24-hour motorised roar of Kensington Gore. "The concept", says Zumthor, "is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time."
In practice, it will be interesting to see how the Serpentine Gallery attempts to maintain an aura of floral calm in what, for the past decade and more, has been one of the most popular of the art world's summer events. With Zumthor offering a marriage of the Serpentine pavilion and the Chelsea flower show, crowds flocking to this nominally tranquil and self-effacing black-clad building may well be larger, and noisier, than usual. Zumthor, however, says his design "aims to help its audience take the time to relax, to observe and then, perhaps, start to talk again."
As with architects of the previous 10 Serpentine pavilions, Zumthor's is the architect's first completed building in England. The series began with Zaha Hadid in 2000 and has included such giants as Oscar Niemeyer, Alvaro Siza, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry. What makes Zumthor stand out from such famous company is the fact that he tends to design just one carefully considered building at a time. Recently, he turned down an opportunity to consider a new library for Magdalen College, Oxford that most architects would have welcomed like manna from heaven. Like the most beautiful gardens, Zumthor's architecture is not to be hurried.
Zumthor, born in Basel in 1943, trained as a cabinet-maker before training as an architect. He came to international attention with the exquisite thermal baths he designed in Vals, a village in Switzerland's Graubünden canton. At once ancient and modern, the atmospheric baths, completed in 1996, form a gently haunting part of the natural landscape. Crafted from layers of local quartzite, they are truly beautiful and sited well away from the summer crowds of Swiss cities.
Since then, Zumthor's Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, Kolumba Art Museum, Cologne and Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, on a farm near Wachendorf, Germany have added greatly to his reputation. He won the Pritzker prize for architecture in 2009.
Zumthor's Serpentine pavilion, designed in cooperation with the engineers, Arup, will operate as a public space and as a venue for Park Nights, the gallery's high-profile programme of public talks and events.
Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery, said: "It is an honour and a great joy to be working with Peter Zumthor on the 11th Serpentine Gallery pavilion. The commission allows us to connect with the best architects in the world and each year is an exciting and completely new experience. Zumthor's plans will realise an exquisite space for the public to enjoy throughout the summer."
Interiors: Thank you, Marlene Dietrich | Berlin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 19, 2011
If it weren't for the German actress, this iconic Berlin apartment may never have existed. Today, it's a designer pad in one of the city's best spots
Some big names were involved in making Peter Schlesselmann's one-bedroom flat in Tiergarten, Berlin's most famous park. Walter Gropius, the granddaddy of Bauhaus, designed it. And five years ago, Gisbert Pöppler, one of Germany's most talented young architects, reconfigured it.
But if it weren't for Marlene Dietrich, it might never have been built at all. For more than a decade after the second world war, Berlin was in ruins and an ambitious plan was hatched: to rebuild the formerly grand Hansaviertel district, where the communist freedom fighter Rosa Luxemburg once lived, in über-modern style, and show off the results at the 1957 Interbau exhibition.
Around 50 top architects, Gropuis and Le Corbusier among them, agreed to work on the Hansaviertel. The only problem was money. Then a bright spark on the Berlin senate suggested giving the city's most famous daughter a call. Dietrich, though long exiled in the US, had never lost her love for Berlin and, tickled by the idea of an avant-garde enclave slap bang in the middle of her home town, agreed to help. In just two days she had hustled a seven-figure sum out of her admirers on Wall Street and the project was a goer.
Originally the flats were owned by the state and rented very cheaply to young families. But by the time Schlesselmann, a writer and film producer, bought his in 2006, they were almost exclusively owner-occupied – a relative rarity in Germany, where renting is far more common than buying. By British standards, it is not expensive. Schlesselmann does not want to reveal the price he paid, but a slightly larger flat in the Le Corbusier towerblock nearby is on the market for €160,000 (£136k).
Once he had exchanged contracts, he called in Pöppler, a Berlin-based architect with a reputation for designing modern, luxury living spaces using bright colours. Although he couldn't alter the listed exterior, he was free to do as he liked with the interior, a series of low-ceilinged rooms with a great set of windows facing north, east and south. "Peter gave me free rein," Pöppler says. "And when we started work, he didn't turn up once to see how it was going. Usually clients want to pop in every day, but he left me to it. It was enormous fun."
Schlesselmann had already agreed to Pöppler's bold plans, which included painting the main rooms in strident colours: a red kitchen, green study and turquoise-and-yellow bedroom, echoing the colours of the Pierre Vago towerblock opposite. The floor is blood-red linoleum.
Pöppler was determined not to design a pastiche of 1950s/60s style. "We didn't want just to put in a load of Arne Jacobsen furniture," he says. He wasn't daunted by the idea of tinkering around with a Gropius original? "Not one bit. It's actually a pretty banal building. It was supposed to be. And you shouldn't give the past too much merit." The Hansaviertel architects, in particular Gropius, believed in function over form, and had been given such limited budgets that anything fancy was out of the question.
The only structural change to the flat was knocking out an interior wall, which opened up the kitchen into the living room to let in more light. Pöppler describes the project as "absolutely low budget. Apart from the bespoke kitchen, which was not cheap, we mostly used basic materials. The tiles in the bathroom came from a builder's merchant." The whole lot came in at "under €40,000 (£34k)", he says – but that figure does not include some pretty classy furniture.
In the living room is a decadent purple chaise from Neue Wiener Werkstätte , an Austrian design firm. A blue floor lamp is by UK design duo Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby. The dining table is by Eero Saarinen, and above it hangs a wonderful porcelain "Blossom" lamp by New Zealand designer, Jeremy Cole, which has such delicate china leaves that Schlesselman was terrified of breaking it. "I am never moving house with that again," he says. Pöppler himself made the tall porcelain cupboard in the living room (pictured, above on right).
What really makes the flat unusual, though, apart from its heritage, is its location. Berlin is not blessed with many green spaces, so to live in its largest park is a treat indeed. It might even have suited Marlene herself.
Zaha Hadid | Architect
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 8, 2011
Iraqi architect who has designed buildings all over the world and last year won the Stirling prize
Born and raised in Iraq, Hadid, 60, has lived in Britain since 1971, but her adopted country has been slow to embrace her talent – that is now changing, with her waved Olympic aquatic centre due to open, joining her school in Brixton and a cancer centre in Kirkcaldy. Last year she won the Stirling prize for her Maxxi museum in Rome.
Interiors: The new bling
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 29, 2011
In a world far removed from cuts or recession, the super rich are spending like never before – investing their millions in mansions and art
'I don't think there is a higher end," says John Lees of his work as architect to the super rich. A distinction must be made, he says, between the merely vulgarly rich (ie, footballers of the Cheshire belt or the mere-millionaires of The Bishops Avenue) and the world of obscene wealth that Lees inhabits. He creates homes for the Russian oligarchs and Chinese business moguls who run the global economy and who continue to inhabit a land untouched by cuts and recession. In fact, their extreme wealth is buoying the fine-art market: Andy Warhol's Coke Bottle sold for a record $35m in New York in November, the same month a Chinese vase sold in London for an unprecedented £48m to a Chinese businessman. Sources in the art and property markets say these billionaires are currently spending "without restraint".
In response, developers in London are creating a new crop of luxury homes, dripping with original Picassos and swimming pools, to cater for this profligate class, including a vast development in Cornwall Terrace being sold for £29m upwards.
Likewise for Lees, business is booming. "Our big-scale jobs are £40m-£125m," he says. "I work for private individuals and I'll be doing their country house, their London house, one in Hong Kong and another in, say, the south of France. We recently did a dacha outside Moscow for £174m, for someone who entertains Putin."
Which makes it all the stranger that Lees is sitting in the scruffy offices of Lees Associates, near Borough Market in south London. The stairs are rough concrete, the shelves dusty, but the computer screens rotate with virtual tours of excessive luxury. "On our current job, the accessories budget is £2m," he says. "That's teaspoons, glasses, plates. Towels and linen is a separate budget. Each bed costs £20,000. We are a very specialised market at the very highest end."
So what does an oligarch require in his home? Not the classic markers, such as banks of TVs ("We put some televisions in, but we hide them"), gold-plated taps or swimming pools shaped like a shell. Wealth at the hard-to-imagine end of the spectrum is "subtle". Creating a truly, deeply wealthy home becomes more about rarity and materials: imported stone, works of art, grand pianos and libraries.
At Cornwall Terrace, Lansdowne's development of eight mansions, two show homes have just reached the market, luring the super rich with original Francis Bacons, Murano glassware and furniture from Portofino. Everything is bespoke: the paints specially mixed; the hardback books handpicked.
Lees is similarly aware of the hunger for provenance. "At that level, your bathrooms will be made of heated, solid stone carved in Brac, an island off the coast of Split in Croatia, which produces a particularly white limestone."
A spokesman for Knight Frank, an agent operating at the top end of the market, says the super rich "have moved their money away from bank deposits and stock markets into alternative investments such as luxury property and art. It is increasingly normal for Christie's to deliver a painting to a potential buyer's house so the owner can see it on the walls."
These gliding swans of houses, occupying only the best London addresses, have layer upon layer of service floors from the basement down. The traditional family kitchen might be above ground, for coffee or a snack, but below ground there are catering kitchens with a dozen chefs ready to entertain a party of 100. Lees says these subterranean floors "contain all sorts of service departments, catering kitchens, gymnasiums, collections of cars. We've made swimming pools where the floors come up to become ballrooms. There's no noise in the pools and no smell of chlorine. We have projected dolphins on to gymnasium walls – hologram images behind glass. We put a bowling alley in one house." Bathrooms have become the most expensive rooms, he says, with their requisite body jet showers, warmed toilet seats and timed bathwater heaters that maintain supply at a specific temperature.
But wealth and power create problems of their own. A house full of staff means no privacy. Owning homes all over the world means a fragmented family life. Lees is asked to, if not solve these problems, then at least mitigate them. "The family kitchen is incredibly important, because they all live dissociated lives. You want to find a home, don't you? The fundamental thing is the family."
Children have suites, dressing rooms and all the latest toys. And Lees adds "secrets" for the children to discover: a doll's house full of make-up or stepping stones in the garden that set off a fountain. "There is a sense of loneliness these children have, and that's a great shame."
Does he ever feel contaminated by these monuments to consumption? Or envious? Isn't it odd to return to life as a working London architect?
"Happiness isn't driven by anything you've got. It's inward. I'm not sure I want all those things myself. It's the sheer hard work in having them. They need these tools in order to play the public persona. I find it's bad enough having just one house."
Super rich must-haves
• Direct access from road to underground parking complex, with lift directly into the residence.
• James Bond-level security including CCTV, infrared scanners, panic room, bomb-proof garage doors, bomb-resistant lift and bulletproof windows.
• A home office complete with a communications system that would please a Royal Navy destroyer.
• A master suite the size of a one-bed flat with his-and-hers ensuites, walk-in dressing rooms, day rooms, exercise area and TV lounge.
• A subterranean basement containing bar, nightclub, hairdressing salon, gymnasium, sauna, spa, swimming pool and private 3D cinema (with seats that move with the movie).
• Staff quarters, separate from the main residence.
• A show kitchen above ground and a basement industrial kitchen that can cater for up to 300.
Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 award nominations – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 18, 2011
From energy-harvesting paving slabs to quick-assembly emergency shelters, see the projects at the cutting edge of design in 2010
At this time of year, let’s thank God for churches | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 23, 2011
Believer or not, Christmas is a reminder of what these places of worship do so well – maintaining and expressing community
God has blessings, even for atheists. Chief among them is the British Christmas. Cleared of its commercial and religious clutter it has become the nation's collective version of a Buddhist sabbatical, an increasingly extended retreat into family and self almost devoid of externalities. It is a time when Britons behave quite unlike they do for the rest of the year. In other words, they behave quite well.
The preliminary clutter is ever more dire. Compared with any other city in Europe, London's decoration is tatty and hideous. The archbishop of Canterbury contributes a platitudinous musing on riots and St Paul's protesters, with no hint of meaningful conclusion. The prime minister declares desperately that "the United Kingdom is a Christian country" and that "we should not be afraid to say so", as if we were. His seasonal intervention recalls HL Mencken's maxim that "people say we need religion when what they mean is we need police".
Even Christmas shopping, once deplored as an irreligious commercialisation, has morphed into a public service duty, a dig for victory. "Hopes of Christmas boost for economy," cry the headlines. Analysts examine the returns from M&S and John Lewis like priests round sacred geese. Will Christmas save us from double-dip recession? The din of collective misery is insufferable.
Suddenly all goes quiet. Britain now stretches what in the US is one day off into 10. There seems nothing else to do. The volume of public life is silenced. Family is acknowledged before colleagues and friends. Duty is paid to household gods in an annual census of filial piety. Family quarrels are supposedly suppressed, while children and old people acquire a brief moment in the spotlight. We know of the strains and stresses of Christmas, but I wonder how many families have been repaired and rescued through its ritual kindnesses. What if there were no such moment?
Throughout history, church charity boards record the gifts to be made to the poor at Christmas time. They record the communal services to be performed, the visits to be made and donations acknowledged. Christmas is more than just a much-needed rest, it is a ceremony of domestic and communal pleasantry.
The festival may have replaced Easter in pre-eminence largely thanks to the Victorians, but it is none the worse for that. Charles Dickens' demolition of Scrooge's cynicism – A Christmas Carol is a harder-edged novel than any of its dramatised versions – captured popular imagination the world over. Like the Muslim obligation to hospitality, the Christian obligation to generosity at Christmas is near universal. It is not enforced or even formalised, but it is, and deep in Britain's cultural gene.
Millions of Britons do at Christmas what they never do at other times in the year. They become "pray-for-a-day" worshippers. They see in their church a repository of good neighbourliness without which the community would be poorer. The Anglican church has a genuine talent for sustaining this communal centrality through thick and mostly thin. This role in the local "establishment" is far more plausible than the state version.
Going to church at Christmas keeps alive a sense of what the Germans call heimat, an attachment to home and place of birth, a refreshment of roots, an acknowledgement of continuity and tradition. This Christmas is deeply conservative. As Roger Scruton argues in his forthcoming book Green Philosophy, it reflects a "desire to live among things that endure" that should, in his case, be harnessed to the challenge of climate change.
I constantly find myself in churches. I find them aesthetically appealing, a constant source of pleasure (or sometimes pain). They were designed for a liturgy of contemplation and repose. They are good places to sit and think, in a landscape where such places are in short supply. As Philip Larkin wrote, they are temples where our "compulsions are recognised and robed as destinies/ And that much never can be obsolete". This may have nothing to do with religion, but it is undeniably a religious legacy and I do not mind thanking someone's god for it. The world is full of unintended consequences.
As government continues to enervate and disempower communal life in Britain, churches retain their physical and emotional centrality. In most settlements, rural and urban, churches are hopelessly oversized for their congregations. Yet the great medieval buildings remain a dominant presence in the community, the architectural expression not just of its ageless faith, but of its ceremony, its history, its family life, its arts and crafts, its tithes and taxes. They are increasingly reborn as theatre and concert halls. Where else would one want to hear The Messiah?
The parish church is thus the one building in any neighbourhood that is worth saving, together with God's acre, the churchyard. Since there will for sure arise a movement within the church to abandon such monuments – under the cry "we are a church, not a museum" – there will be a corresponding need to champion their survival. I have no trouble with the German system of taxing parishes for the upkeep of the church (with a voluntary opt-out). The Germans, like the French and Scandinavians, enjoy a civic tradition that permits them to keep their mayors and town halls. In Britain an increasingly faithless land finds itself ironically turning to faith institutions as symbols of local cohesion. Long may such places survive. At Christmas we salute them.
Anglicanism, Architecture, Art and design, Christianity, Christmas, Comment, Comment is free, Life and style, Religion, The Guardian, UK news, World news
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