One began her life and career in the north of England, before travelling to London to find success in the West End.
The other began her life in south Asia before travelling to England to reach the heights in London theatre.
One would be found in front of an adoring public on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre; the other spent 56 years blowing her trumpet to the heavens from the dome of the theatre – only occasionally spotted through the grimy London air.
This musical comedy production, ‘Our Miss Gibbs’, was a huge hit for the Gaiety Theatre and the star of the show was our first leading lady, Gertie Millar, who played the eponymous Miss Gibbs – a shop girl in a large London department store, Garrods.From a working-class background herself, (father a millworker and mother a dressmaker) Gertie’s career began in the 1880s with performances as a child in pantomimes in Manchester and London.She moved to singing and dancing in northern music halls, then found more fame and higher pay in London variety shows.
Postcard of Gertie (and dog), in the role of Mary Gibbs
The zenith of Gertie’s career was achieved through her successful partnership with George Edwardes, the manager of the original Gaiety Theatre in the first two decades of the 20th century.In 1903 the new, rebuilt Theatre opened, Gertie played the lead in the long-running opening production, ‘The Orchid’, watched from the royal box by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
Musical comedy was a hugely popular form of British theatre in the early 20th century, and Gertie was one of the top performers, not only in the London theatres but also on Broadway – taking New York by storm in her performances in ‘The Girls from Gottenburg’ in 1908.She was also one of the most photographed women of the age, appearing on numerous postcards.‘Our Miss Gibbs’ was a typical Gertie Millar success story – running for 636 performances before transferring to Broadway in 1910.
Our second leading lady is The Spirit of Gaiety, designed by Hibbert C. Binny, constructed at his workshop in Essex and positioned on top of the dome of the newly rebuilt Gaiety Theatre in 1903.She is made from blocks of carved teak, gilded, weighs more than a ton and is 20 feet high – quite a show stopper.
In 1939, the theatre was scheduled for demolition to accommodate a road widening scheme.The Spirit of Gaiety oversaw the last performance (‘Running Riot’) on 25th February 1939.However, the road widening scheme was discarded, partly due to WW2, and the theatre stood abandoned and increasingly derelict.Astonishingly, despite bomb damage in The Blitz, the statue remained standing – resilient and proud.
After the war, the famous comic actor Lupino Lane bought the building, hoping to restore it to its former glory.Unfortunately, despite spending huge amounts on restoration works, Lane realised he had in fact bought a money pit, which he did not have the resources to fill.In 1950 he had to sell the property.The theatre was demolished and the English Electric Company building was constructed on the site.Although she lacked a theatre, The Spirit of Gaiety still remained on the site, if somewhat lower in status and height.She was preserved and stood in the well of the Citibank premises until 1984 when she was presented to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden where she began her 3rdlife –on display in the main entrance until 1992, as concerns about her condition caused her to be taken off display and moved into storage.She came to rest at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Gertie’s private life was also entwined with the theatre: in 1902 she married Lionel Monckton, 20 years her senior, the man who had first spotted her performing and recommended she come to London.A theatrical composer, he wrote several of her best known songs, including ‘Moonstruck’ for ‘Our Miss Gibbs’.He was, however, a jealous man who disliked seeing his beautiful wife enjoying attentions from many of the ‘stage door johnnies’.The couple separated, but Monckton refused to give his wife a divorce even though she desperately wanted to marry the Duke of Westminster, with whom she was having an affair.Eventually King George V and Queen Mary were compelled to step in to prevent the scandal that would have erupted had the Duke had to divorce his wife to marry Gertie.
Meanwhile, theatrical tastes began to shift – in WW1 audiences began to prefer new entertainment in the form of films as well as music hall.George Edwards died in 1915, and Lionel Monckton’sstyle of song was increasingly dated.She achieved a few successes after 1912, but never again had the consistent acclaim of her early career, so in 1918 she retired from the stage. Her final performance was fittingly in the theatre of her home town – the Bradford Alhambra.
Gertie had by then embarked on a liaison with the 2nd Earl of Dudley.His wife died in 1920, and Lionel Monckton succumbed to illness in March 1924, so in April 1924,at last Gertie became the Countess of Dudley.She and her new husband spent most of their short married life in Le Touquet, not far from their neighbour, friend and fellow theatrical writer – P.G. Wodehouse.The Earl of Dudley died in 1936, while Gertie, still a countess, lived on in Surrey, until 1952, on her death leaving a substantial estate.
The Spirit of Gaiety on the other hand, has outlived the era of the Gaiety Girl, epitomised by Gertie Millar, and resides at the end of the Paintings galleries on the first floor of the V&A.Years of exposure to rainwater had left her internal framework heavily corroded and woodwork weakened.Urgent work was required, before an extensive treatment programme could progress, strengthening the rotten woodwork and reinstating her gilded surface – carried out by lead conservator Zoe Allen, who calls the statue one of her favourite objects.She was given this level of care as she is something of a rarity – wooden architectural sculpture doesn’t often survive.Size, weight, exposure to the elements mean few are preserved intact when the buildings they grace are demolished.The Spirit of Gaiety is therefore considered by the V&A to be unique within UK museum collections.She now has a new name – the V & A staff affectionately call her the Angel.Restored and renewed, she is once again visible to many visitors as well as staff who can all appreciate the joy and gaiety she represents.
This is the text to a presentation that was part of the Conway Storytellers in the Being Human Festival in 2021.
Having started work on the Kersting Photographic Archive as a Digitisation Volunteer in August this year, I decided to try to find out more about his life. As part of this I used an online genealogy service and amongst various records that I discovered was a passenger list for a ship called “Venus” showing an entry for Anthony F Kersting, Photographer, aged 36, of 37 Frewin Road SW18. This sailed from Southampton to Madeira in March 1953 and when I checked in his ledger there were entries for photographs he had taken there at this time.
Looking through the relevant boxes I was surprised to find in one that there were photographs he had taken of the ship itself and some of its passengers. One particular photograph intrigued me. It was of a young girl who looked to be about ten years old, standing at the ship’s wheel, with an excited expression, pretending to steer. This prompted me to go back to the passenger list to see if I could identify her.
It helped that the passengers were put into age categories, one of which was ‘Children between 1 and 12’, and under the column for females there were two possible candidates, both called Mary. They each appeared to be travelling with their parents:
Mary M Gilmour (Schoolgirl, aged 11) with Walter Gilmour (Produce Merchant, aged 54) and Dorothy M Gilmour (Housewife, aged 49)
Mary F Musgrave (Schoolgirl, aged 10) with James P Musgrave (Carpet Manufacturer, aged 53) and Margaret Musgrave (Housewife, aged 53)
The Gilmour’s address was shown as being in Bridge of Weir, which is in Renfrewshire, Scotland and the Musgrave’s in Halifax, Yorkshire.
Armed with this information I started to search further to try to find which Mary it was in the photograph and whether she might still be alive. If so, my idea was to make contact and arrange to invite her to come and see her photograph at The Courtauld.
Unfortunately, I have so far been unable to follow the trail much further with enough certainty, but am continuing the search…
For Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in 1957, the rebuilding of John Soane’s Bank of England, undertaken between 1923 and 1942, represented the worst individual loss suffered by London’s architecture in the twentieth century. [1] Constructed to a design by Herbert Baker (1862-1946), the resulting Neo-Georgian pile loomed over the heart of the City, attracting negative comments from the outset. Many, like Pevsner, considered it to be an act of arch-vandalism. Others have since perceived in the ensuing furore a principal reason for its architect’s fall from grace.
A conspicuous portion of the criticism levelled against Baker’s work at the Bank targeted the building’s external sculpture. This was overseen in its entirety by Charles Wheeler (1892-1974), a young protégé of the architect who would go on to become the first sculptor serving as President of the Royal Academy (1956-66). However, in 1922, when Baker gained the commission for the rebuilding, Wheeler was then a relatively unknown figure in the world of British sculpture. This all changed after the Bank. With his and Baker’s working relationship begun through war memorials at Harrow School and Winchester College, it was his Madonna and Child (1922-4) at the latter that earned Wheeler the opportunity of working on this most attractive of projects: “a commission which any of the established sculptors of the day would have gladly accepted”, he later wrote; it was “the young artist’s dream”. [2]
Wheeler’s work was executed in a bold, angular style whose gestures towards Swedish Art Deco sculpture and Byzantine planarity produced muscular forms with a grave, elemental presence. At the Bank, this is clearest on the Threadneedle Street facade, the building’s principal front and most common target of criticism. In addition to three enormous cast-bronze doors, Wheeler ornamented this front with six giant figures (two female caryatids and four male telamons) and, in the pediment, The Lady of the Bank (1929-30). The monumentality of these schemes presaged a career creating public sculptures, often of the gargantuan kind. This culminated in Water (Fig. 1) and Earth (1950-3) at E. Vincent Harris’s Ministry of Defence (1938-1959), which, weighing in at forty tonnes each, are among the largest architectural sculptures in Britain. [3]
Fig. 1. Wheeler working on the sculpture of “Water” for the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall. c. 1950-3. CON_B07584_F001_045. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
The massing and ornament of the Threadneedle Street front were, for Pevsner, the most effective parts of Baker’s scheme, whilst sections like Garden Court, behind an intervening vestibule, were deemed less successful. However, Wheeler’s work was to be found here too, and even in the most humble of pieces he managed to convey something of the deeply symbolic vision he shared with Baker for the Bank. Upon entering Garden Court and facing west, a line of sculpted keystones can be seen in the rusticated storey of an arcaded loggia, with five ornate blocks atop windows in blind arches and four in recessed spaces above. These keystones, photographs of which are kept in The Courtauld’s Conway Library, were carved by Wheeler to carry likenesses of important figures involved in the rebuild, including himself.
First among the Garden Court keystones was that depicting Baker (Fig. 2). The architect’s stern mien, craggy brow and cropped hair suggest the gravity and Graeco-Roman dimensions of his character. These harmonise with the surrounding neo-Greek décor – acanthus leaves and meandering Greek keys abound – chosen to align with the supposed origins of banking in ancient Greece. An Ionic capital, mark of the scholar, is placed below Baker’s face, itself surrounded by olive branches and singing birds, chosen to denote “the music of his country recreations”. [4] Wheeler shared with Baker an understanding of Architecture and Sculpture as being “sister arts” in pursuit of the “higher spheres of creative and spiritual art”. [5] This lent itself to the melding of personality, artifice and nature shown in the keystones, which broadcast a profound respect for and dedication to good architectural craftsmanship and its executors.
Fig. 2. Keystone for Herbert Baker with Ionic capital, olive branches and two singing birds, “denoting the music of his country recreations”. c. 1932-8. CON_B07585_F001_006. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
Baker’s assistant, Alexander Thomson Scott (1887-1962), was depicted in no less of a striking manner (Fig. 3). Balancing his high-cheekboned, pince-nez’d face with a compass, set square and protractor, Scott is bounded by tall thistles – a clear indication of his origins north of the border. Working with Baker from 1914, he became his chief assistant in 1922 and entered into a partnership from 1929 until 1946. This saw the two collaborate on all of Baker’s commissions in Britain after his distinguished career in the wider Empire-Commonwealth, although portions of work at New Delhi were also carried out with Scott’s assistance. A similar transcontinental situation characterised Wheeler’s professional connections with Baker. Like Scott, he was during his time at the Bank just beginning to learn the mastery of his craft. His keystone (Fig. 4) shows the young sculptor, steely-eyed beneath boyish locks (which he kept to the end of his life), clutching a hammer amidst “foliage symbolical of the parallel process of the growth of forms in nature and the artist himself”.
Fig. 3. Keystone for Alexander Thomson Scott, Baker’s assistant, wearing glasses, and with drawing instruments, plus thistles representing his Scottish background. c. 1932-8. CON_B07585_F001_007. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.Fig. 4. Keystone for Charles Wheeler, with “tools of his craft; foliage symbolical of the parallel process of the growth of forms in nature and in the artist himself”, signed and dated 1932. CON_B07585_F001_008. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
Whereas keystones depicting Wheeler and the Bank’s architects conformed to established precedents of artistic recognition, others represented a striking break from tradition, attributing authorial status to figures occupying more identifiably “modern” roles in the architectural enterprise. George Macaulay Booth (1877-1971), Chairman of the Building Committee and later Director of the Bank, for example, was afforded just such an honour (Fig. 5). An enthusiastic patron of Wheeler and Baker, Booth was, in the latter’s words, “our revered leader […] He had unique gifts, a combination of quick insight and the understanding of complicated plans and practical problems, as well as sympathy for the artist and a genuine flair for the beautiful in art”. [6] The visual puns continued in Booth’s ornamentation by Wheeler with a “staff of power” and a lyre – “a double reference to “calling the tune”: to the designers and his musical recreations”.
Fig. 5. Keystone for George Macaulay Booth, Chairman of the Building Committee, with lyre, “a double reference to “calling the tune”: to the designers and his musical recreations; and the staff of authority”. c. 1932-8. CON_B07585_F001_010. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
To Booth’s managerial functions were added engineering responsibilities in the domain of Oscar Faber (1886-1956), depicted by Wheeler below a square arch of steel girders and above the “winged wheel of mechanical forces” (Fig. 6). Faber was another of Baker’s frequent collaborators in the Interwar period who, alongside Wheeler and Scott, made a name for himself through working at the Bank. A pioneer in the use and advocacy of reinforced concrete, he wrote widely on engineering matters, garnering extensive praise: earning an OBE during the First World War, a CBE for work on the House of Commons (1951), and rising to the presidencies of the Institute of Structural Engineers (1935-6) and the Institute of Heating and Ventilating Engineers (1944-5). A firm believer in the importance of the architect-engineer partnership, Faber worked well with Baker, and extensively, on projects like India House (1928-30) and South Africa House (1931-3), both in London. [7] Indeed, the depth of their involvement indicated the growing participation of engineers in the architectural profession which Baker – in many ways a late survivor of an earlier period – foresaw as inevitable.
Fig. 6. Keystone for Oscar Faber, the engineer for the rebuilding, with “girders and the winged wheel of mechanical forces”. c. 1932-8. CON_B07585_F01_011. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
As well as Baker, Scott, Wheeler, Booth and Faber, less prominent but no less crucial figures involved in constructing the Bank found their likenesses carved into its surface too. A row of keystones, set above portals in the spandrels of Garden Court’s west arcade, depict four individuals whose reputations have since waned or been lost to posterity. If recognition of Booth’s managerial contribution and Faber’s engineering prowess was a conspicuously modern means of displaying architectural authorship, the installation of these four keystones (Figs 7-10) spoke to the growing importance of the collective and the lessening pre-eminence of the architect in large-scale projects of this kind. The craftsman Joseph Armitage (1880-1945) – whose best-known work is the oak leaf sign for the National Trust (1935) – worked largely in reproducing sculptures after Wheeler’s original carving. His keystone (Fig. 7), showing “tools and a decorative wreath”, is simple yet evokes the foliate designs he was known for making throughout his tenure with Baker, as at India House and the Indian Memorial for the Missing at Neuve Chapelle, near Lille (1918-27). [8] H. W. G. Tanner, clerk of works (Fig. 8) and R. H. Pillar (Fig. 9) have all but faded from recognition. However, Henry Thomas Holloway (1876–1951), the Chief Builder, has remained comparatively well-known due to his role as head of Holloway Brothers, a thriving construction firm responsible for large-scale and civil engineering projects across the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Wheeler’s keystone he is shown with two cranes (Fig. 10).
Figs 7-10. Keystones, clockwise from top left, for: Joseph Armitage, craftsman, with tools and decorative wreath; H. W. G. Tanner, clerk of works, with ‘Instruments of measurement’; R. H. Pillar, Works Manager with visual pun, “Pillars of support”; Henry Thomas Holloway, Chief Builder, with crane. c. 1932-8. CON_B07585_F001_019-022. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
Wheeler’s Garden Court keystones represent in stone the contribution of those who, beyond the architect and chief sculptor, helped build the new Bank of England. In doing so, they encapsulate the collision of a fading Arts & Crafts tradition, to which Baker (and, to a lesser extent, Wheeler) could claim inheritance, with the modern realities of large-scale, complicated construction work. They are also, perhaps just as importantly, a bit of fun, as Baker himself acknowledged. In both ways, the keystones lend traces of humanity to the building they are fixed to. As marks of recognition, they capture the likenesses of men who carried out the real, often toilsome, work required to complete the project. They remind us that architecture is more than taste and style – it is budgets and schedules; measurements and repetition; people working together rather than abstract genius; it is weight, pressure, stone and steel.
Jake Bransgrove
Courtauld Connects Digitisation Volunteer Tutor in Architectural History and History of Art at the University of Edinburgh
References
[1] Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London I: The City of London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 276.
[2] Charles Wheeler, High Relief: The Autobiography of Sir Charles Wheeler Sculptor (London: Country Life, 1968), p. 55.
[3] Sarah Crellin, The Sculpture of Charles Wheeler (Farnham: Lund Humphries, in association with the Henry Moore Foundation, 2012), p. 169.
[4] Descriptions of the keystones in quotes come from Herbert Baker, The Decoration of the New Bank of England and its Significance (London: private printing for the Bank of England, 1939).
[5] Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London: Country Life, 1944), p. 3.
[6] Ibid., p. 129; Wheeler, High Relief, p. 55.
[7] John Faber, Oscar Faber: His Work, His Firm, and Afterwards (London: Quiller Press, 1989), p. 2.
[8] Edward Armitage, ‘Joseph Armitage, Craftsman. 1880-1945’, Journal of the Thirties Society, no. 3 (1983), pp. 25-30.
“There are three that give witness”. These are the words inscribed on the entrance of Rushton Triangular Lodge. They are a quotation from the first epistle of John 5:7 and refer to the Holy Trinity. As a Roman Catholic in Protestant England, the Trinity was a deeply personal and symbolic icon for the building’s designer, Thomas Tresham (1543–1605). Tresham was part of the Catholic elite of his time: he was brought up and married into the Throckmorton household (a wealthy Catholic family), had connections to the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion, and argued that the state should not have jurisdiction over conscience. His eldest son, Francis Tresham, was even involved in the Essex Rebellion, and in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot. All in all, Tresham was a prominent Catholic “recusant” – he refused to conform to the Elizabethan Protestant Church. As a result of this, Tresham was subject to the increasing number of penal laws being passed against Catholics. He was heavily fined and imprisoned on several occasions. It was upon his release from prison in 1593 that Tresham is said to have designed the Triangular Lodge, completed in 1597.[1]
Image of Rushton Triangular Lodge in Northamptonshire. CON_B06344_F017_077, Conway Library, The Courtauld.
The number three runs through every vein of this folly-like building. As well as its striking triangularity, the building exhibits three triangular gables on each façade, a triangular chimney and windows, and trefoil shaped windows (the emblem of the Tresham family). Each of the three walls is 33.33 feet high.[2] The Lodge has three floors – the main room of each one being hexagonal, thus leaving three corner spaces triangular (see image of the ground plan). On the exterior of the building, there are three biblical texts in Latin, each 33 letters in length.[3] One wall is inscribed “15” (3 x 5) another “93” (3 x 31) and the last “TT” (presumably Tresham’s initials). The text of 1 John 5:7 is written in Latin, Tres testimonium dant, which might be a pun on his family name: his wife Merial Throckmorton is known to have referred to Thomas as “Good Tres” in her letters.[4] Above the Latin are the numbers “3333”. Evidently, Tresham liked the triadic holy number.
Image of the entrance to Rushton Triangular Lodge with Latin inscription above doorway. CON_B06344_F017_081, Conway Library, The Courtauld.
But Tresham’s building of Rushton Lodge was subversive as well as spiritual. The dissidence of such a novel building should not be downplayed. The peculiarity and obsessivity of this project invites the imagination to run wild. One wonders whether the space ever housed contraband catholic images, candlelit discussions with Jesuit missionaries, or perhaps even a clandestine meeting between Francis Tresham and his fellow plotters. Despite its intriguing design, the Triangular Lodge is thought to have fulfilled a rather more practical purpose – the accommodation of Tresham’s head warrener. A warrener was someone in charge of breeding and managing rabbits for the constant supply of food and skins.[5] The earthwork and buried remains of a rabbit warren can be found adjacent to the Lodge.[6] Indeed, the building is often referred to as “The Warryner’s Lodge” in documents from the Rushton estate.[7] For such a rebellious and ornate building, the Lodge appears to have had a rather quotidian function.
Image of ground plan of the Lodge which shows the hexagonal shape of the rooms and three triangular corners. CON_B06344_F017_076, Conway Library, The Courtauld.
Considering this, the Lodge’s existence seems somewhat contradictory – a highly decorative and puzzling façade which housed plain whitewashed walls and simple accommodation. Further, the secrecy that surrounded Catholic worship at this time appears completely at odds with this small building. For many Catholics, Elizabethan England was a place of illicit masses, of “Nicodemite papists” who secretly refused to internalise Protestant doctrine, of priest holes and the hiding of underground missionary networks. The era was thus characterised by outward secrecy and inward defiance. But the Triangular Lodge flies in the face of this trend: it conceals nothing, its design is testimonial and bold, yet, peculiarly, there is nothing religiously rebellious in its mundane function. Perhaps, therefore, the Lodge is most subversive in its decorative non-necessity – the performative nature of the Lodge’s nonconformity stands out. Its rebelliousness is explicit and unapologetic – a statement of Tresham’s Catholic faith.
Mary Whittingdale
Courtauld Connects Digitisation Oxford Micro-Internship Participant
Bibliography:
[1] Britain’s Premier Independent Heritage Website, “Rushton Triangular Lodge, Northamptonshire”. Available at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110904021016/http://www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/misc/rushton_lodge.htm (last access: 16 September 2021).
[2] Historic England, “The Triangular Lodge (1052038)”, National Heritage List for England. Available at:
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1052038 (last access: 16 September 2021).
[4] English Heritage, “Rushton Triangular Lodge”. Available at:
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/rushton-triangular-lodge/ (last access: 16 September 2021).
[5] Britain Express, “Rushton Triangular Lodge”. Available at: https://www.britainexpress.com/attractions.htm?attraction=3532 (last access: 16 September 2021).
[6] Historic England, “Rushton Triangular Lodge: an Elizabethan warrener’s lodge and rabbit warren (1013826)”, National Heritage List for England. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1013826 (last access: 16 September 2021).
[7] Britain’s Premier Independent Heritage Website, op cit.
When Swiss architect Le Corbusier responded to popular agitation against his design of Chandigarh city, India, with the wry anecdote “I am like a lightning conductor… I attract storms”, it was clear that he had created two cities, but heeded one.
The project of Chandigarh was commissioned by Jawarharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, in 1950. Nehru imagined a city that would serve as a clear symbol of India’s break with the past, in the aftermath of its independence. It was born of a deeply paternalistic vision that, providing its architects could innovate the right formula, the shapes of its urban space would exert a transformative and “civilising” influence on its inhabitants. This remarkable confidence in spatial determinism might, in one sense, make Chandigarh the closest we come to observing a postcolonial vision. Throughout the city, Le Corbusier distils Nehru’s vision of India’s modernity into a “city of rectangles and pure volumes”; the “symbols of perfection”, as he described them. This modernist construction was one arm of a wider comprehensive plan for India, through which Nehru envisioned an enlightened state which would propel its citizens into modernity through a programme of rapid industrialisation and economic planning – all guided by the principles of rationalism, secularism and social justice.
Photography is a forgiving medium through which to record a claim to human mastery. A photograph is necessarily reductive in some sense, and it is in this way – as a series of reductions – that we are most able to envisage Chandigarh as Le Corbusier intended; as the product of a victorious “battle of space, fought within the mind”.
The photos in the Conway Library, taken principally during the construction of the Capitol and the city’s early years, capture the instant when Nehru’s ideal loomed most plausible in the eyes of those who encountered it. Pausing at each photograph in the digitised archive some seventy years later, it is almost possible to be persuaded by them: the clean elegance of the Secretariat building, poised dramatically against an empty landscape. Le Corbusier sat soberly in front of an anthropomorphic map, on which the Capitol government complex sits elevated like the head on a human body. The “rippling, beautiful rhythm” of the Assembly Chamber, designed to give space for the circulation of high ideas – strikingly different from the classical vocabulary of the British Raj. These photos of Chandigarh at its most persuasive have gained a complex novelty, as their optimism is increasingly set apart from a growing body of works documenting their natural decay in the passage of time. Against the plethora of anxieties about the future that attend life in the twenty-first century, there is an undeniable charm to the vision of confidence offered by the photos.
Yet this evocation of rupture from the past does not bear scrutiny.
Artwork by Hailey Sockalingam. CON_B04391_F002_031, Conway Library, The Courtauld.
In taking a closer look at the ideas that undergird Chandigarh as a symbol of modernity, it becomes clear why the city falls so easily into dialogue with the architecture of the British Raj. Whilst Nehru opposed the British imperialist claim that India required western tutelage, he embraced the basic framework of human “development” upon which this was premised. This development, a historicist discourse in which human societies around the globe could be placed on a temporal scale from barbarity to civilisation, was a principal means through which Britain legitimised its imperial venture across the world from the eighteenth century. In The Discovery of India, Nehru sought to rework this framework, by drawing instead on the historic achievements of India’s Indus Valley Civilisation to posit a theory of modernity as cycles of development and decay. In this way, Nehru’s thought stops short of a complete reconstitution of imperial modes of thought, and it can be difficult to tease apart Orientalist tropes of India’s decline from his own invocations for modernisation.
The spirituality of India was one of the key targets of Nehru’s conception of backwardness. He dismissed the religiosity of people in India as “absurd”, and attributed it not to their own world experiences, but to the “exploitation of the[ir] emotions” by elites. The imperial resonances in Nehru’s vision for India can be usefully set against Gandhi’s alternative projection of Indianness, and its embracing of Orientalist depictions of village India. Taken together, they provide a powerful insight into the postcolonial dilemma; the apparent impossibility of asserting an identity that is oppositional to, but not restricted by, the terms set out by the imperial power.
If Le Corbusier understood his role as architect as commensurate with puppet-master then he, like Nehru, underestimated the agency of the city’s people in staking the terms of their lives. Even the photos in The Courtauld’s collection, taken in the city’s early years, hint at numerous sites of contestation and the quiet persistence of traditional Indian mores with Le Corbusier’s metropolis. Le Corbusier designed the city around a series of single purpose zones, neatly separating the residential, industrial, leisure and government elements of city life. He appears to have operated under the assumption that, if placed in the spatial context of a middle-class commuter lifestyle, incoming peasant masses would be transformed into a socio-economic position to fill that role.
The photos in the Conway Library hint at the way the city’s people defied Le Corbusier’s rigid prescriptions; buffalo and goats are crammed into tiny spaces outside the geometrical houses, shacks are set up next to the highway. In the residential area, dubbed the “container of family life” by the architect, residents opened small shops in the ground floor of their houses, and maintained the local principles of caste, kinship and religion in areas purportedly organised by administrative rank. We might think of Le Corbusier’s design as laying the groundwork for two cities; the perfect geometry of the Capitol, set against the rhythmic irregularities of its inhabitants’ lives.
In this light, Le Corbusier’s response to popular agitation to his stringent demands is telling. His aggrandised sense of his own monumentality as a catalyst for modernity precluded him from heeding the unshakeable influence of the city’s people in determining the quality of their own lives.
Today I uploaded the last batch of images that make up the Architecture section of the Conway Library to our World Architecture Unlocked project on Zooniverse. This is an incredible milestone for our digitisation project and not one we set ourselves from the start.
As I mentioned in our earlier post on launching World Architecture Unlocked, being able to capture item-level metadata for the Conway Library came as a surprise: we knew we would only have time and resources to capture box and folder level metadata on the premises, and although Zooniverse had been on our radar for a long time, crowdsourcing was something we thought we wouldn’t be able to look into until after we’d delivered the digitised collection online and closed the project.
An item from the 20th Century section of the Conway Library as seen on World Architecture Unlocked, Zooniverse.
Yet, the national lockdown meant that we could focus on remote activities and although I had no studio to take new photographs, I had a lot of time and access to thousands of images volunteers had already taken.
Since the launch of World Architecture Unlocked, the response of the public has been quite unimaginable. To this day, almost 8,000 volunteers have participated in the transcription, completing the task 343,239 times. The forum where the project is discussed is lively and participants post their questions, flag items that need to be rotated or appear to be in the wrong box, and chat about their favourite images. Some of our in-person volunteers have become forum moderators and advise new participants on how to best complete the task or refer them to a member of staff.
This project might have unlocked the world of architecture for people in lockdown, allowing them to volunteer and see the world through our images, but it has certainly done the same for us at the Courtauld, by opening our horizons to the enormous potential of crowdsourcing and the wonderful feeling of having put together a global community.
And so it is with amazement and thrill that today I upload the images for the last box in the Architecture section, simply labelled “CON_B04435: Great Britain (Architecture, 21st Century)”, and finish releasing the first section of the Conway Library to the World Architecture Unlocked users.
An item from the 21st Century section of the Conway Library as seen on World Architecture Unlocked, Zooniverse.
This last release is a large one, and it will take the volunteers some time to complete. In the meantime, back of house, we are testing new workflows for some of the next sections, so keep your eyes peeled for new updates.
An image from the Sculpture section of the Conway Library.
Did you know?
The first section of the Conway Library is dedicated to Architecture and is made of 4435 boxes
The first box in the collection is CON_B00001 and is labelled “Afghanistan: A-Z (Architecture, pre-1800)”
The two sections immediately after Architecture are Architectural Drawings and Architectural Publications
Sculpture is the second largest section of the Conway Library, it is made of 2654 boxes
The third-largest section is Manuscripts, with 1477 boxes
The remaining sections are: Photographic and Video Art, Applied Arts, Mosaics, Panel Paintings and Painted Screens, Wall Paintings, and Stained Glass.
It takes three different transcriptions on Zooniverse for an item to be retired, this allows us to capture data more reliably, but it also means that we triplicate the effort!
Introducing the material turn to the study of photography, visual and historical anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards (2004) encourages us to acknowledge the photograph as a three-dimensional object existing materially in the world – that is, spatially and temporally in the social and cultural experience. From Edward’s perspective, photographs are material entities because they are chemically deposited onto paper, mounted on different sized, shaped, and coloured cards, subject to changes on their surfaces, and informed by the way that they are presented.
Attention to these aspects of photographs, Edwards argues, can help us engage with the processes of intention, making, distributing, consuming, using, preserving, displaying, discarding, and recycling that are significant to the way we understand photographs as images. This approach to photography I found, also echoed in the ongoing digitisation projects at The Courtauld.
When on placement at The Courtauld, I was particularly drawn to its approach towards digitisation, and its emphasis on retaining the physicality of visual objects in their digital renditions. From the images that were provided to me and my fellow interns, I was able to engage with the signs of wear and tear on archival boxes, with the multiplicity of intentions decipherable from the text – varied in font, colour, and handwriting – on the cards onto which images in the Conway Library were mounted, and with the variety of size, colour, and type of image, as well as with the materials onto which the image was printed and then mounted onto the card.
This emphasis on digitally translating physicality was especially impressive to me because I was trying to engage with these images from my laptop screen at home in Oxford, instead of interacting with them in a more multi-sensory, embodied manner in one of the rooms at The Courtauld. Indeed, as former intern Peyton Cherry (2019) predicted, I was brought into The Courtauld, without venturing into its halls to peruse and handle prints, and into the lived experience of working within collections. Despite interacting with the collections intangibly, I was still able to engage with the physicality of the image – the image as object – and even in their digital renditions, The Courtauld had managed to make the materiality of these images matter. This was quite significant to me, for The Courtauld had successfully avoided flattening tangible, three-dimensional objects, simply by choosing cameras over flatbed scanners in the digitisation process. Intrigued by this, I spent the duration of my placement reflecting upon why, for The Courtauld, materiality matters, and why indeed it should.
The Courtauld’s emphasis on the materiality of images is based on a succinct and personal manifesto presented by Bilson (2019)
Honour physical form and integrity.
Photograph, don’t scan.
Use lighting to reveal texture, structure, and composition.
Never crop to neaten.
Never retouch.
Describe where your metadata has come from.
If possible, show the source of the transcription.
Photograph backs and blank pages.
Weigh and show scale.
Record folders, boxes, and shelves.
Don’t let basis cataloguing hold back publication.
Although in digitising an archive the size of the Conway Library the project has, for practical reasons of time and the costs of storing data, omitted the manifesto’s requirement to photograph backs and blank pages and also weigh the items, Bilson, like Edwards, encourages us to honour the physical form and integrity of images by using simple photographic techniques to, for instance, reveal “the slight line of shadow” (Bilson, 2020) showing the way in which a print was stuck by human hands onto card or the fingerprints of the library visitors who might have handled the object; or to accentuate the multiplicity of textures, materials, colours, and inscriptions that compose each object.
The importance of doing so, as Bilson writes, is to encourage the global online user to appreciate the fact that “every image presented online has a physical counterpart that still sits in a library box” (2020) within the Institute. In addition, it re-directs the online user’s attention to the “set of visual cues pointing to the personalities and voices enmeshed within [the] collections” (2020) and thus demonstrates that the appearances of these images online are not their “year zero” (2020), but another milestone in their malleable history.
In essence, therefore, for The Courtauld, materiality matters because an emphasis on it indicates to its increasingly global and online audiences, that the images it is making digitally available are entangled with the tangibly embodied histories and socio-cultural experiences of all those who have interacted with them. As my fellow intern Sydney Stewart Rose notes, The Courtauld’s emphasis on materiality presents the ultimate digitised image as an “endurance” (2021) that refers to its own history of interaction with its producers, publishers, collectors, archivists, librarians, volunteers, and interns – each of whom have inscribed their intentions onto the surface of the image.
Recognising this urged me to further explore the implications of taking these intentions – and especially their material evidence on the surface of the image – into consideration when interpreting the image. I did this, specifically in relation to two sets of images of the Crystal Palace, archived in a box containing images of exhibitions in London between 1830 and 1900, in the Conway Library of The Courtauld’s collections.
The Building Itself
Figure 1. The Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London. Image via the Art and Architecture website.
The Crystal Palace was a remarkable cast iron and glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, it was initially intended as a temporary building. However, a very general desire on the part of the public to preserve the Crystal Palace led Paxton to propose alterations and extensions to the original building, with the intention of converting it into a winter garden and adapting it to other scientific purposes.
The building was then taken down from its original site in Hyde Park and relocated to a site named Penge Place (now known as Crystal Palace) at the top of Sydenham Hill, between 1852 and 1854. The site at Sydenham attracted 2 million visitors a year and successfully hosted exhibitions, festivals, music concerts, football and cricket matches, and over one hundred thousand soldiers during the First World War.
Despite this initial success, however, from around the 1860s, the Palace fell into financial ruin. Due to its sheer size, the Palace was impossible to maintain financially and thus declared bankrupt in 1911. In addition to this, the Palace continuously experienced severe damage shortly after its relocation – first due to strong winds in 1861, then due to a fire that broke out in the North End of the building in 1866, and finally in 1936 when a more severe fire damaged it beyond repair.
Figure 2. The Crystal Palace fire, Sydenham, London. Image courtesy of the Science Museum Group collection.
Conway’s Documentary Intent
Martin Conway, an avid collector of photographs of architecture as a record of buildings that might suffer damage, was quite naturally drawn to the Crystal Palace – both because of its significance in the public imagination and its undeniable architectural magnificence. Conway’s intent to document the Crystal Palace and the trajectory of its life materially manifests in his collection in at least two ways.
First, this is evident from the sheer diversity – in type, size, and source – of the images of both buildings. For example, the image of the Crystal Palace in Figure 3 shows “The Progress of the Building” and is presumably a lithographic print on newsprint sourced from the Illustrated London News. Comparatively, the image of the building in Figure 4 is a watercolour and pencil drawing, signed and dated by the specialist in architectural views, Edmund Walker (1814–1882).
Figure 3. “The Progress of the Building” from Illustrated London News. CON_B04109_F001_008, CC-BY, The Courtauld. Figure 4. Watercolour and pencil drawing, signed and dated by Edmund Walker. CON_B04109_F001_005, CC-BY, The Courtauld.
Second, Conway’s documentary intent is evident from the “set of visual cues” (Bilson, 2020) that point to his specific process of archiving by gathering diverse visual material on the same subject, from a plethora of sources, and then mounting it onto card. For example, the crease of the paper and its shadow in Figure 5, clearly show that an image cut out from The Weekly Times has been stuck over another image. Similarly, Figure 7 shows that Conway seems to have used a larger version of the print in Figure 6 to provide a detailed perspective on the same event.
Figure 5. The crease of the paper and its shadow showing that the print from The Weekly Times has been stuck over another. CON_B04109_F001_006, CC-BY, The Courtauld.Figure 6: The Peace Fête at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. CON_B04109_F002_019, CC-BY, the Courtauld. Figure 7: A detailed view of The Peace Fête at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. CON_B04109_F002_020, CC-BY, the Courtauld.
This material evidence of intent thus signifies the extent to which the Crystal Palace had impressed itself upon Conway’s and the wider public’s imagination. They demonstrate that Conway clearly recognised the Palace’s significance – both to the history of architecture and Britain – and therefore, dexterously included in his archive, images of the conception, construction, utilisation, renovation, relocation, and the destruction of the building. In doing so, and specifically by following his unique processes for archiving, Conway created a “synthetic object” (Edwards and Hart, 2004) – that is, a new intellectual and physical entity resulting from his attempt to impose sense, order, and his intentions upon a set of separate objects from separate sources leading separate lives.
This new “synthetic object” therefore leads its constituent parts into an institutional framework of policies, strategies, and practices different to that from which they have been sourced. For example, a watercolour drawing (Figure 4) that originally would have been handled, framed, preserved, displayed, and interpreted in a manner more typical to art history, in the context of Conway’s archive, is engaged as an important resource contributing to the documentation of a historical moment that in turn was intended to inform art history.
By creating such “synthetic objects” therefore, Conway reinforced the view that the Crystal Palace was indeed an important moment in the history of architecture and Britain, and actively constructed this building as a canon worthy of preservation for posterity. When considered accordingly, the images of the Palace in Conway’s archive thus emerge as more than simply what they depict. Rather than visual representations of the building and the events that occurred therein, these images emerge as constituents of a larger photographic object and project inscribed with the intentions of its maker.
Concluding Remarks
In my reflection on the implications of considering the materiality of images for their interpretation, it emerged that the material aspects of an image – its physicality and presentation for instance – are of great importance as they provide clues to how the value of particular images changes over time due to interactions with them.
In the example I considered, we noted that images from newspapers and artists were recontextualised as archival resources under the documentary intentions of the archivist who interacted with them. These insights could not have been as easily drawn, if indeed attention to the very material and physical evidence of the archivist’s intentions had not been paid.
Further research could examine how each layer of textual inscription (for e.g., stamps and handwriting) on more generally the cards in Conway’s archive, inform the meaning of that which the images on the cards depict. To whom do these inscriptions belong? What were their intentions when marking the “synthetic objects” that Conway initially produced? How do these material traces of their intentions inform the meaning of the images constituting those objects, and the objects themselves? Further studies could also examine how the physicality of the cards onto which Conway mounted images (for example, colour and material) interacts with the meanings of said images. Knowledge of each of these aspects can significantly contribute to our understanding of images and more importantly of how they function as visual and material objects, deeply embedded in the social and cultural experience.
Aayushi Gupta
Courtauld Connects Digitisation Oxford Micro-Internship Participant
MPhil Candidate in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology, University of Oxford
References
Bilson T (2019) The Future of the Library – Architectural Information in a Post-Digital Era. Presentation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, November 21, 2019.
Bilson T (2020) The Courtauld’s Witt and Conway Photographic Libraries: Two approaches to digitisation. Art Libraries Journal, 45 (1): 35–42. Available at: 10.1017/alj.2019.38 (accessed: 13 July 2021).
Has not that ruin, say he, a good effect? A Dialogue on Stowe, 1746
The Conway Library
War-time ruins have always exerted an inexplicable fascination on the observer – a puzzling and not infrequently morbid sentiment that has been targeted as a serious object of academic enquiry since at least the aftermath of World War II. Besides provoking an undeniable and undeniably problematic aesthetic pleasure – one should only think of Albert Speer’s theory of Ruin Value (Ruinenwerttheorie), by which he persuaded Hitler that they should only employ materials that would make “good ruins” in the event of collapse during their architectural plans for the Third Reich – ruined monuments and buildings have also been exploited as a political tool. They have been constantly overwritten, either literally or figuratively, by the activities of bulldozers and cranes, bricklayers and architects, as well as journalists and photographers commissioned to record the revival of a city.
The purpose of the following article is, broadly speaking, to explore concepts of ruination and transformation, drawing from the war damage collection in the Courtauld Institute of Art. Known informally as the Ministry of Works bequest, it comprises several hundred photographs taken by soldiers, historians and architects across Europe towards the end of World War II. The collection is part of the Conway Library, which takes its name from writer, traveller and mountaineer Martin Conway. The first Director General of the Imperial Museum of London and Professor of Art at Liverpool and Cambridge, one of Conway’s chief interests was photography as a record of buildings that might suffer war damage. The Ministry of Works images continue precisely that tradition: taken by allied troops chiefly from the US, Britain and Poland, they record in often shocking detail the destruction of cityscapes as collateral or deliberate acts of annihilation.
What these pictures capture, as we shall clearly see, is the pars destruens. They crystallize a single moment, and that moment is desolation, devastation, destruction. But this is not the whole narrative. As much as the images speak for themselves, they also leave much unsaid. There is a hidden story behind these photographs, a story of human efforts and contributions to the process of preservation, rebuilding and revival, which successive generations have perpetrated in written documents and oral narratives. At a time when cultural heritage is still dangerously under threat in many corners of the globe, it is all the more imperative to continue to fill in the gaps. This article encourages us to do just that. We desperately need a pars construens; that part will be equally explored here, by taking advantage of the invaluable potential of ruined infrastructures to present themselves as a challenge to be either replaced or restored – as they were, in fact. The unfinished nature of ruins, by definition, creates a sense of superseding that invites the observer to inscribe them into a narrative of progress. For every part we see in the Ministry of Works photographs, there is a part that we do not see, which acts as a catalyst of imagination, an engine of speculation. A ruin bears the trace of unscripted possibilities. In so doing, it generates questions on the process of reconstruction and its dilemmas: whether to reconstruct or to preserve; how much to reconstruct; whether to construct anew rather than to rebuild.
The Pleasure of Ruins, and Beyond
In 1953, English writer Rose Macaulay, a civil servant in the War Office, published a ground-breaking and controversial study on ruination, the first of its kind, entitled Pleasure of Ruins. Her approach, as her introduction and the title of the book itself point out, is that of a pleasurist (some would rather say of a voyeur…). Often criticized for being excessively self-indulgent, Macaulay offers complacent incursions into “that eternal ruin-appetite which consumes the febrile and fantastic human mind”. She argues that “The human race is, and always has been, ruin-minded. The literature of all ages has found beauty in the dark and violent forces, physical and spiritual, of which ruin is one symbol”. Starting with the ancient world, her account ends with a two-page coda, “On the new ruins”, foregrounding the conjecture that the devastation evident across post-war London and other parts of Britain will one day be looked on with admiration, just like we now admire the ruins of antiquity.
On a very superficial level, Macaulay must be right. There is an undeniable aesthetic component to decaying buildings and crumbling monuments: they provide a treasure trove of encounters with the eerie and the unexpected. As we first approach the Ministry of Works photographs without context, we might gaze in awe, for a moment, at the oddly unique shapes that missing bricks and huge cracks conferred onto the architecture captured in a snapshot (figs. 1 and 2).
Fig. 1. The Conway LibraryFig. 2. The Conway Library
There is an element of honesty to these photographs, which equates them to the apocalyptic stories and dystopian novels that many of us also adore. Even if they represent the worst possible scenario, such narratives still feel real to us as we know too well that human beings are capable of committing the worst crimes. The devastation of WWII, so harshly and honestly depicted in the images, is probably the closest to apocalypse we have ever drawn (figs. 3 and 4).
Fig. 3. The Conway LibraryFig. 4. The Conway Library
In addition to that, stories predicting the future speak to an innate desire to have control over our fate; we seem to appreciate ruins because, in a similar way, they trigger our imagination. They encourage us to think of elsewhere, a phenomenon that works in two directions. One the one hand, to perceive a ruin is to recognize that it has once been otherwise, and thus to travel back in time; on the other hand, the ruins captured in the photographs increase awareness of the present and future condition of our society. As photographer Yves Marchand, co-author of Ruins of Detroit, puts it, “To us, the ruin allows you to see the past, as well as your present condition, and what you’re going to be – you can see all those three at the same time”.
The main limit of Macaulay’s approach is that it is unidirectional. She makes the example of traveller Mr Thomas Coryat, who arrived on the Trojan shore opposite Tenedos in 1612. After seeing extensive ruins, the remains of a goodly fortress, marble pillars and sepulchres, he spent his afternoon guessing: one of the sepulchres must have belonged to King Priam; the fragments of the great buttressed wall on his left were first built by Ilium when he enlarged the city, and then rebuilt by Priam. I suggest we need to go further than that. We cannot simply self-indulge in the pleasure of fantasizing about what was once there, driven by mere antiquarian frenzy; when looking at these photographs, we must think of what is now there, just like the soldiers and civilians in situ must have imagined what was going to be there once restoration was completed. “Exploring abandoned buildings isn’t about revelling in their collapse at all,” argues Dylan Thuras, author of the foreword to Dan Barasch’s Ruin and Redemption in Architecture. Upon recalling an adolescence spent in the thrall of deserted flour mills in Minneapolis, now partially restored structures, he evaluates such imperfect architecture as occupying “a shadowy liminal space between self-destruction and the possibility of rebirth”.
We can infer from the visual examples below how this whole process of imagination, moving in limbo between destruction and rebirth, might have worked for the observers of the time, looking grimly at the ruined buildings around them, and works equally well for us today as we examine such buildings in the photographs. In images 5 and 6, René Levavasseur – the architect charged by the French government with the preservation of historical monuments in the Department of La Manche – is caught scrutinizing the damage of two churches in Normandy.
In fig. 5, he lists damage to the beautifully sculpted bell of the Church of St Jacques of Montebourg, before making plans for repair of the tower – an unfortunate victim of the fighting for the beachheads nearby. Confronted by ruins without being intimidated by them, his serious and attentive gaze makes us think that he was already anticipating in his head the steps and strategies through which the reconstruction of the tower might be carried out, leading us to wonder in turn whether and how this actually took place at all. Here, imagination gives way to historical documentation: archives of Le Monuments Historiques inform us that reconstruction works were undertaken in 1949, after a deeper and more resistant foundation for the church had been secured. The square floor of the bell tower was completed in February 1950, followed by the stone spire in August of the same year. Finally, in October 1952, the building was returned to worship. In fig. 6, similarly, Levavasseur is shown holding a gargoyle “knocked loose from the tower of the cathedral at Carentan before American forces drove the Nazis from the area”. There is both intimacy and remoteness in this picture. The architect holds the gargoyle firmly with both hands, as if a father with his child, but also keeps it at a distance, in order to better scrutinize it. Again, his expression suggests he has full awareness of the exact spot the piece will occupy after reconstruction. This photograph gives out very strong ritual vibes. Levavasseur almost looks like a priest holding a newborn during some religious service, laden with symbolic meanings. A new life is brought into the community and exhibited triumphantly before the eyes of its participants. A new life, by the same metaphorical token, is also given to the cathedral: the gargoyle will be inset back into the tower.
Fig. 5. The Conway LibraryFig. 6. The Conway Library
Ruins and Bodies
I found it a funny coincidence that so many of the buildings hit by the blow of war were cathedrals, churches, places of worship. In these images, the desolation of conflict blends with a vacuous, sinister spirituality, almost verging on mysticism. Ruins shelter the spectres of the past while standing for an uncontrolled present. And such is a present in which very little faith remains. “There is Auschwitz, therefore there can be no God”, Primo Levi famously asserted. Just as God has abandoned men, men seem to have abandoned God. In the images below, the crucifix, the only element left intact among ruins in a deserted land, becomes an almost surreal symbol of such a legacy. In fig. 7, a crucifix still hangs from the rafters of a severely ruined church in Erkelenz, Germany, damaged by artillery fire in February 1945; in fig. 8, a battered cross survives, bending, in a battle-scarred roadside shrine in Dahnen, where no trace of human presence can be found. The Church, no longer the living and breathing body of those assembled in worship, is reduced to a speechless mound of matter. Yet at the same time the very integrity of the cross, a leftover functioning as an ironic symbol of defiance in the midst of so much destruction, must have represented a glimmer of hope for many a passerby. Perhaps it is true, as Professor Charles Lock has written, that one of the secrets of ruins is that “inasmuch as they retain a trace of spirit, of motion, they speak to us of something other than perdition”.
Fig. 7. The Conway LibraryFig. 8. The Conway Library
That must be as true for monuments as it is for bodies. In fact, the architecture and people in the photographs seem to share similar histories. Buildings are as maimed as the invisible corpses of soldiers and civilians who fought around and for them. Indeed, a fallen stone or one still standing might be analogous to the human body, Lock has suggested: “the upright stone reminds us of a person standing, liturgically; that which is cast down was once, like a corpse, a spirit’s dwelling”. The collection offers some glaring testimony of the tense, uneasy co-existence of ruins and civilians, whose complex relationship would only be fully healed with the passage of time, by means of concrete urban intervention and re-planning. Fig. 9 shows a man cycling undisturbed through the streets of Palermo, in spite of the bleak view of crumbing Palazzo Trabucco marked in the background by cracks resembling the bites of giant jaws. Life goes on amidst wreckage: not giving up your daily business was as powerful a form of resistance as concrete military manoeuvres, sometimes. The same sort of disquieting blending is manifest in fig. 10, depicting the interior of the Cathedral in Messina – which underwent a controversial and not fully transparent plan of reconstruction from June 1943 to August 1947. The photograph captures a man standing still, as if striking a pose amidst debris of wood. In so doing, he almost becomes part of the triptych behind him, the Altar of the Pietà.
Fig. 9. The Conway LibraryFig. 10. The Conway Library
On the other hand, several pictures from the collection keep for themselves some crucial hidden truths, and it is down to us to uncover these through historical research. It is not so widely known, for example, that the urgency of starting reconstruction works at Montecassino – where the famous Abbey had been reduced to little more than a sandcastle by the bombing of May 1944 – was dictated by a humanitarian motive other than a merely moral, or for that matter artistic, one (fig. 11). The bodies of dozens of civilian victims who had not been able to leave the monastery before the bombing lay buried under the debris. Their discovery and burial would only have been possible with the removal of the rubble. When people can finally stand up and pull themselves back together, then it is also the right time for monuments to rise again from the ashes. Succisa virescit are the words that can be read on the coat of arms of the Abbey – literally meaning “cut, it grows back”. And indeed for the fifth time in its history, despite the difficulties caused by the post-war period and its widespread destruction, the Abbey of Montecassino was brought back to the light. The restoration aimed to reproduce the original structure and was carried out from 1948 to 1956, under the direction of engineer Giuseppe Breccia Fratadocchi. Two hundred and fifty workers took part in the project, working side by side with the monks embodying the mantra of their master Benedict buried there: ora et labora. The statues of the benefactors – popes, kings and princes – which had originally occupied the Chiostro dei Benefattori (Cloister of the Benefactors) were placed under a canopy. In a rather curious turn of events, the statues now looked at these other humble benefactors working with zeal, having no treasures or privileges to bestow but their hands. All the church coverings, marbles, mosaics and sculptures were also restored.
Fig. 11. The Conway Library
We can contrast this extraordinary story of successful cooperation and resilience with a less fortunate one, again from Italy, which can nevertheless function as a memento to the importance of implementing strategies for the preservation of cultural heritage in times of conflict. The Church of Santa Maria in Passione on the hill of Castello, Genova, was severely damaged by two aerial bombardments; the first, on 22 October 1942, caused the roof to catch fire, but the most destructive was a second attack on 4 September 1944, which almost razed the top of the hill of Castello to the ground. The bombardments almost completely destroyed the frescoes and caused serious damage to the outer walls, some of which had to be demolished (fig. 12). The monastic complex remained in ruins for decades. Then, in the 1970s, a project devised by the Municipality of Genoa and supervised by architect Ignazio Gardella gave the go-ahead for the restoration of the area with the construction of the new headquarters of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Genoa on the site of the former convent of San Silvestro, the Niccolò Paganini Foundation and the headquarters of the Permanent Urban Observatory, created to promote initiatives for the rehabilitation and enhancement of the historic centre. Starting in the 1990s, another project (“Progetto Civis Sistema”) envisaged more conservation and restoration work. However, this was interrupted in 1997 and the site was completely abandoned. Everything was enclosed with barbed wire. It was only in 2012 that a group of students decided to break the fences and clean up the area. Since then, Santa Maria in Passione lives almost exclusively thanks to the support of citizens through donations and voluntary work.
Fig. 12. The Conway Library
Concluding Remarks
So, to reprise the question from which this article started: do ruins have a good effect after all? The answer is yes, I would say. But it should be remembered that for every good effect there is always a price to pay. In tracing a history of destruction and reconstruction through painstaking human efforts, I have tried to raise awareness of how essential the preservation of cultural heritage is for the wealth of communities. Several collaborative strategies have been implemented for this purpose both before and during World War II, as we have seen. Examples feature the Service des Monuments Historiques in France, of which the abovementioned Levavasseur was a member, founded in 1830 and charged with several “passive defense” and reconstruction measures as early as 1935; or the Roberts Commission in the US, leading to the establishment of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the allied armies (the “Monuments Men”) with the aim of both protecting works of art and buildings from deliberate destruction and of returning them, so far as possible, to their owners or the appropriate local authorities. Similarly, after the conflict, international organizations acknowledged the urgency to create conventions to protect sites and artifacts in conflict zones. UNESCO, among others, was established in 1945. However, as several speakers at the Courtauld talk Post-conflict: Art History and Cultural Heritage in Dialogue on 15 June 2021 illustrated, UNESCO and world heritage have been criticized for many failures in recent years, including that of deterring the destruction of heritage during times of war. There is need for greater cooperation between different groups – professionals in the field and governmental authorities in primis, but also scholars, local organizations, and no less the general public. As the example of Santa Maria in Passione demonstrates, ordinary citizens are often in a unique position to help when the threat of destruction, deterioration or looting looms over them. The very significance of the Ministry of Works collection, which has never before seen in its entirety as a consequence of being spread across hundreds of boxes, is now being understood thanks to a major digitisation project at the Courtauld, part-funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported entirely by volunteers. If ruins, as it has often been suggested, are essentially “democratic” – their appeal is for everyone, from children visiting a site for the first time to experienced archaeologists – then their protection and revival becomes, by the same token, a universal responsibility.
Caterina Domeneghini
Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities, Oxford
Courtauld Connects Digitisation – Oxford Micro-Internship Participant
The Hop Exchange is one of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the South Bank/ Southwark area. In fact, Southwark was for centuries associated with hops, breweries and coaching inns with the local area being the centre of London’s brewing industry. All road traffic from Kent, Surrey and Sussex came through Southwark with Borough High Street and Old London Bridge the only land route from the south into the city until as late as 1750. Eventually traffic began to by-pass the Borough as hops were transported by railway to London Bridge Station, or by boat up the River Thames.
‘London, Hop Exchange’, detail of design by RH Moore. CON_B04088_F001_008. The Courtauld, CC-BY-NC.
The Conway library image CON_B04088_F001_008 draws your attention to the portico and the tympanum, with the hops and malt crop depicted either side of the ‘hop picking’ central scene, indicating the importance of this industry to London. This building was designed by R. H. Moore and built in 1866-67, and although it is neoclassical in design this was not just an idealised vision of ancient agriculture: in reality the same hop picking scene was visible in the fields of Kent until the late 1950s.
Traditionally, the impoverished local population and Londoners would descend on the Kent hop farms. This ritual saw mainly women and children (with male overseers) hop-picking for a few weeks every year to supplement their meagre income.
The tympanum (the decorated area) clearly shows the long hop bine hanging from above, being pulled or cut down for the women to pick the hop flowers. (Hops have ‘bines’ rather than ‘vines’, with ‘hairs’ rather than tendrils to help them climb).
This Pathé newsreel gives an excellent and accurate account of the process of hop-picking and an insight into the so-called ‘holiday spirit’ of the families who travelled to the hop fields to bring the harvest home.
Close up of CON_B04088_F001_008. The carvings show hop harvesting figures and plants.
The photograph in the Conway library of the Hop Exchange portico is not ‘picture perfect’ in many ways: it is oddly cropped and at something of an uncomfortable angle. However, I chose it as a starting point for this blog for several reasons. Born and bred in Kent, I have fond memories of hop-picking with my grand-mother, with the smell and the beauty of the hops and making mud pies with other children. Almost sadly, within a few years, mechanisation was to spell the end of this labour-intensive tradition. On reflection, it is also an indication of the vast improvement in the lives of ordinary people in Post-war Britain, with food rationing coming to an end, an increase in the social housing building programme and a society who wanted better for the next generation.
It is ironic that this beautiful grade 2 listed building actually had a very short life as a trading floor for the hops and the brewing industry. Some hop firms did rent the offices within the Hop Exchange but it was built too late to be effective or profitable and fell into disuse in the early 1900s. To understand why, we need to understand the industry. The building had eleven storage areas and was intended to be used as a single market centre for dealers (like the Stock Exchange) where trade was conducted on the trading floor. The dried and packed hops travelled to London and were originally intended to be viewed under the gallery roof which provided the natural light needed, even if the hop picking season started in September and inspections took place in February and March. Unfortunately, for the Hop Exchange, the buyers acting on behalf of the growers – called hop factors – now owned their own showrooms and acted very successfully as middlemen. Just a little further south from the Hop Exchange there is still the façade of an original hop factor showroom owned by W.H & H. LeMay (No. 67 Borough High Street). Its frieze also shows a scene of hop picking. Within such showrooms hop merchants would buy on behalf of the brewers.
WH & H LeMay Hop Factors, 67 Borough High Street, Southwark, photograph by Lorraine Stoker.
Selecting CON_B04088_F001_008 was also an excuse to showcase the beauty of the interior of the Hop Exchange. Southwark’s hops came from Kent and the symbol of their origin can be seen in this beautiful interior of the Hop Exchange. The main hall is a vast open atrium with three levels of ornate balustrades with hop plant ironwork decoration. The green of the ironwork contrasts beautifully with the red of Kent’s county arms – Invicta – a white horse on a red background, and the muted cream tones of the paintwork. The interior draws us in, almost envelops us – not merely to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and long-lost memories of childhood, but also inviting us to stand in awe of the Victorian design.
Inside the Hop Exchange, by Lorraine Stoker.
The Hop Exchange building exudes a confidence both with its name and design but what started as a ‘speculative building’ became too great a risk and the venture failed miserably. Originally the Exchange was two stories higher with a glass barrel-vaulted transept for natural light, but a fire in 1920 saw the removal of these damaged levels and the building was then used for offices. Acquired by a private company specialising in property investment, development and management in 1983, this company then restored and transformed the interior, changing the dirt and tarmac flooring (highly suitable for its previous trade) to a Victorian style replica. The building remains a general-purpose office and event venue, and successfully conveys a very functional, business-like environment.
There were many similar floor exchanges across London (originally eleven in total), including the Coal, Metal and Stock exchanges. However, wartime bombing, redevelopment and modernisation have left the Hop Exchange as the last remaining Exchange building in London. It remains a grand Victorian commercial building, gently following the curve of the then newly constructed Southwark Street, which had been laid out by Joseph Bazalgette in 1860 and opened in 1864. Although Grade 2 listed, its future can never be assured given the tide of demolition and facadism within the Borough of Southwark.
