Deco displayed

Elain Harwood, Art Deco Britain 
Published by Batsford, in conjunction with the Twentieth Century Society

Art Deco is fashionable now. For decades the jazzy and decorative design style encapsulated in many cinemas, factory fronts, apartment blocks, shops, and office buildings had been out of favour. So many Deco buildings have been knocked down that it’s sometimes hard to know where to look to find the survivors. It’s even a challenge to define exactly what Art Deco is.

Elain Harwood’s new book certainly helps a lot. It’s got an elegant picture-book format – at its heart are about 115 double-page spreads with one building each and one stunning colour photograph per building. But don’t let that fool you. The text is packed with information about the buildings, which are arranged by type, making it easier to compare wonders such as the Carreras cigarettre factory in London (all black cats and “Egyptian” lettering) and the more stripped-down but magnificent India tyre factory in Renfrewshire; or to weigh-up the virtues of the interiors of the Midland Hotel in Morecombe with the Regent Palace of Hotel in Westminster. All this provides a colourful picture of Art Deco buildings. They can vary from highly ornate structures that allude to the past, like the jaw-dropping interior of the Granada Cinema, Tooting, made over in around 1930 by émigré theatre designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, to the stripped-down architecture of buildings like the Saltdean Lido.

Can structures as different as these all be Art Deco? Well, yes, they can. One of the best bits of Harwood’s book is the Introduction, which explains how in the 1920s and 1930s architecture in Britain came under an array of influences – decorative developments in France, a leaner architecture in the Netherlands, a new appreciation of Viennese turn-of-the-century design and the closely related work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the theatre sets and costumes of the Ballets Russes, a fresh awareness of certain historical sources (notably ancient Egypt), the advances in building materials happening at that time. This rich soup of influences helped designers in Britain develop in different but parallel directions, creating a range of styles from the full-blown cinematic Art Deco to the plainer mode sometimes called jazz moderne or streamlined modern or just moderne. None of the latter was quite as plain and spartan as the purer architectural functionalism of white boxes and strip windows, though some came close.

It’s not all about classification, though. A joy of the book is the stories that some of these places throw up. Harwood entertains her readers with tales of firemen making covert use of light sockets to run wireless sets at Heston and Isleworth Fire Station; of the beehives and putting green once on the roof of Adelaide House in the City of London; of an intrepid flight across the Atlantic in a Puss Moth in 1931. And she reminds us of the not always obvious visual effects of Art Deco architecture. Some buildings, like Osterley Underground station, need to be seen lit up at night to reveal their full glory; some have details undreamed of (by me, at least), like the unaltered manager’s flat in Blackpool’s White Tower Casino.

Art Deco Britain is a cornucopia of buildings, although there could, as Harwood herself says, easily have been twice as many. I’m grateful for the hundred-odd that are here, and that the appreciation of these buildings will be extended and enhanced by this beautiful and informative book.