Mind your planguage

Jones the Planner (Adrian Jones & Chris Matthews), Towns in Britain
Published by Five Leaves Publications

Jones the Planner is one of the best blogs about building, planning, and the state of towns in Britain. I’ve been enjoying its thoughtful and well informed perambulations of towns for some years now, and admiring the way it gets the essence of a place. I remember, having followed the blog around Nottingham and Northampton, and read what it had to say about the great cities of Scotland and South Wales, that I began to hope they’d tackle some of my favourites. It was not too long before Adrian Jones and Chris Matthews visited Lincoln, to the sound of cheering from this quarter at least. Other favourites such as Bristol and Exeter followed. Now Adrian Jones and Chris Matthews have turned their extended perambulations into a book, making this reader at least, very pleased indeed.

The portraits of cities in this book are lively, sometimes witty, and the fruit of actual visits. They are informed by an experienced planner’s eye, but don’t degenerate into jargon: most of the time, they watch their planguage. The result is first of all a collection of very readable portraits. Coventry, for example, is seen as underrated, and Jones helps us to understand the virtues of its postwar planning (albeit compromised by later changes), as well as pointing out the striking buildings (the circular market building and Godiva Restaurant), the outstanding murals, and the greatness of the cathedral. I think the book is spot on about the way in which Spence’s design complements the ruins of the medieval cathedral. The virtues of Leicester (Clarendon Park, ‘Jacobean deco’ factories: hoorah!) are highlighted without denying the ‘silly show-off attention-seeking shininess’ of much of the city’s recent architecture. Glasgow is a fine city – one of our very greatest: true – its ‘American’ planning and scale, its staggering early iron-framed buildings, and its brooding tenements are magnificent. But Jones does not lose sight of the city’s problems, from the poor traffic planning to the lacklustre new transport museum; nor does he fight shy of suggesting solutions – he is Jones the Planner after all.

The urban parade continues via Cardiff (some terrific aspects but Cardiff Bay is poor and there is some depressing gated development by the Taff); Bristol (a great city that could do even better); and Southampton (some impressive assets like the old walls and the water, but the city needs to capitalise on them, not just give in to development). The smaller cities are given their due too: Exeter has a lot going for it, Lincoln has done much that is right.

There are several chapters on London. The approach to the capital is via various routes – the importance, and depletion, of the public realm, the vitality of traditional vibrant streetscapes, housing (flats in the Elephant advertised in the Gulf States while hardly any social housing is being built to replace what has been taken away from the area), contrasts of scale (city squares v the Shard), and so on.

Any book on towns has to work on both macro and micro scales, adumbrating the overall effect and specific details, and embracing both planning and architecture. Towns in Britain manages this, time and again. The book lays out clearly the phases of the development of a major city such as Birmingham while also zooming in on specific buildings. And although it’s often at pains to show the reasons why 1960s architecture is the way it is, to justify the ways of Brutalists to man as it were (Jones has time for John Madin’s threatened Central Library), it’s also open to more recent building when it works (Jones also respects the brand new library by Mecanoo).

This book is made up of pithy, arresting accounts of major towns, well illustrated with helpful photographs that are briefly and pointedly captioned. It avoids pat judgements about ‘crap towns’ or ‘concrete monstrosities’, drawing attention to how places actually work. It points to the virtues of planning, and the dangers of laissez-faire development (while also acknowledging that freedom to develop was one of the things that made Victorian cities great). The essays are appreciative of the good aspects (especially of underrated places), sharply critical of the bad, and, above all, alert to the specific character of each place. And this is the point: city authorities need to be sensitive to local character and build on it, and to resist the temptation to bow to the fat cheques and shiny facades of rampant capitalism on the one hand, or to the regurgitated nostrums and generalized principles of big-shot master planners on the other. Jones the Planner, in revealing so much about our towns’ positive qualities and their importance, makes it clear why this is vital.

Pevsner in Oxford: Part One

This is the first of two guest posts by Susie Harries, author of the recently published Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, that I’m honoured to publish. Pevsner’s work is indispensable to students of English art, architecture, and design. His An Outline of European Architecture has introduced countless students and amateurs to the subject; books such as Pioneers of the Modern Movement and A History of Building Types still engage specialists; above all, his monumental survey of The Buildings of England (over 40 volumes, county by county) is the guide and one of the most important art-historical projects ever. And yet Pevsner was an outsider to England, a German who showed the English what to look for in their architecture and helped shaped the culture he described. Susie Harries’s fascinating biography explores this remarkable character and his work. It’s one of the best biographies I’ve read in the last few years.

In this post, Susie Harries looks at Pevsner’s reaction to Oxford.

Nikolaus Pevsner was never at home in Oxford as he was in Cambridge, a more austere and Protestant place, although he learned to come to terms with what, on his first encounter, he called Oxford’s ‘ghastly miasma of humanism’. As a congenital outsider, in his own mind at least, he always had a deep-seated desire to belong, and Oxford is notoriously a hard place to infiltrate. ‘Every sentence, every lecture, every book, every conversation here means something quite different from what it would mean at home,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘The words mean something different, the brain itself is wound differently.’

On his first visit to England in 1930, three years before he was obliged to leave Germany for good, Pevsner had been a guest of the 2nd Viscount Harcourt at Nuneham House, a Palladian mansion in grounds landscaped by Capability Brown with views over the water meadows to the towers and spires of Oxford. Its park was the setting for several scenes in Through the Looking Glass, and Pevsner –who was spending the rest of his English stay in low-grade B&Bs – found himself frequently as bemused as Alice by the customs and conversation of the natives. ‘One Oxford college has a motto – Manners Makyth Man’, he told his wife, implying that this was a rule of life in the locality. Not only was his own appearance at lunch at Nuneham ceremoniously announced by the butler, so was the arrival of every course, and dessert was interrupted by a liveried servant to enquire whether the hostess would care to send a wreath for Lord Birkenhead, who had passed away. ‘Just like the films,’ Pevsner told his wife, ‘and I’m in the midst of it. I have to be very careful not to make any faux pas.’

Forty-four years later, when his Oxfordshire was published in 1974, he was, it seems, still afraid of the faux pas. ‘To an Oxford man no doubt gaffes of nomenclature and gaffes in the little snobbery concerns which one disregards at one’s peril have been left in my text, apart from more serious mistakes.’ His social unease may perhaps have jaundiced his overview of the city in his introduction, where he is very bracing indeed about the image of the ‘dreaming spires’: ‘Nonsense in every respect. Surely, in spite of St Mary, All Saints, and the cathedral, and now Nuffield, Oxford is remembered less for them than for Tom Tower, the Camera, and Magdalen tower. It is the variety of the shapes which makes the skyline. And as for “dreaming”? Stupor say the enemies, inertia say even some of the friends, serious search for truth among the undergraduates, search for knowledge among the dons, less serious search for publicity – single out what you will, dreaming is not a figurative Oxford quality, by criteria either of the mind or the eye.’

Pevsner’s opprobrium was, of course, directed more against the people than the place. Oxfordshire does contain some of his most scathing epithets – ‘elephantine’ (Sir Thomas Jackson at the Examination Schools), ‘retardataire’ (Sir Edward Maufe with his Dolphin Quadrangle at St John’s), ‘totally unrousing’ (G.G. Scott in his additions to Magdalen) but equally it is full of loving descriptions of buildings – not least, his favourite of all contemporary university buildings, Arne Jacobsen’s St Catherine’s College. ‘Self-discipline is its message, expressed in terms of a geometry pervading the whole and its parts and felt wherever one moves or stops... It has a clarity of structure and at the same time a serenity such as no other new college building has.’

What appealed perhaps most to Pevsner about Oxford, however, was less the individual college buildings, ‘incomparably beautiful’ as they were, than their relationship to one another. Again and again he would take Oxford as a prime example of the Picturesque planning he so much admired – a place that had evolved organically, but not without design.


The university as it had developed over the centuries now possessed all the key qualities of the Picturesque – surprise, variety, intricacy, irregularity, with formal quadrangles set next to narrow, twisting lanes, Baroque college buildings next to workmen’s cottages and Victorian chapels. Set pieces like the Sheldonian Theatre and the Radcliffe Camera were not designed to dominate, as they might have done in a more rigid, classicising layout, but were placed as accents in an informal composition. The High (above) achieved its effect not as a single triumphal statement but as a series of small disclosures, making it ‘one of the world’s great streets. It has everything. It is on a slight curve so the vistas always change.’