6 C O N T E X T 1 4 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 7 Repair issues associated with another fascinating historic building – St Judeon-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb by Sir Edwin Lutyens – are described in a paper by the architect Margaret Davies. Hampstead Garden Suburb was laid out to designs prepared by Sir Raymond Unwin around a formal park to be surrounded by monumental architecture. Lutyens was appointed as the consulting architect for this area, called Central Square, and the ‘houses of worship and learning’. His design included three dominant buildings on the scale of his government buildings for New Delhi rather than that of an English suburb: two major church buildings, the Free Church and St Jude-on-the-Hill, flanked by the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, which was built in a series of phases between 1908 and 1930. Davies sets out the urgency and extent of the accumulated defects, and the need for repairs stemming from successive quinquennial inspections carried out in 2007 and 2013, and in the interim inspection undertaken in 2016. At the time of the article, the building had been the subject of an initially unsuccessful application for Heritage Lottery Funding for significant works to repair, the intended subsequent improvement to the provision for visitors and the creation of a new learning hub in the Lady Chapel, focusing on the history of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Also worthy of note in these Transactions is a well-argued and wellillustrated proposition by Colin Kerr, partner and co-founder of Molyneux Kerr Architects, that design and conservation are not antithetical and may be two sides of the same coin, but by being on different sides of that coin they may be being studied by what now seem to be oppositional factions. Kerr deprecates the fact that in schools of architecture, history is now relegated to the fringe, whereas many in conservation see contemporary design as of little worth and incapable of bringing critical faculties to bear on buildings old or new. His paper is a worthwhile move to reconcile the perceived division. The Victorian Society’s Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design has reached its sixth volume (of 162 pages), revisiting the work of William Butterfield, one of the first great gothic revivalists. This reassessment is timely as the last monograph on the architect was Paul Thompson’s celebrated study of 1971, which has long been out of print. The editors, Peter Howell and Andrew Saint, share a lifelong admiration for Butterfield’s work. The 10 contributions, hugely enlivened by the use of colour illustrations throughout, include papers on the perplexing character of the architect (Rosemary Hill); Butterfield’s place in the pantheon of High Anglicanism (Geoff Brantwood); the houses by the architect (Michael Hall); the influence of Butterfield abroad, particularly in Australia (Alex Bremner); the Cathedral of the Isles (Gavin Stamp); works in Oxford (Peter Howell); the 1895 restoration of All Saint’s Margaret Street (Andrew Saint) and the restorations since 1998 (Colin Kerr); and papers on researching and writing about Butterfield (Paul Thompson), and illustrating Butterfield (Andrew Saint, Helen Jones and Chris Redgrave). Past volumes of the Studies series have covered Pevsner’s attitude to Victorian architecture; the era of the 1840s; churches 1870 to 1914; and what the 20th century thought of 19th-century architecture. Bob Kindred MBE From the address at the 12th annual meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings by William Morris (1889) People say… that men like Edington, Wickham, and the rest deal with the buildings according to the convenience and needs of the day. They restored, developed, and altered them, and why should not we? They certainly did so, and though we may sometimes regret that a Norman building was turned into a Perpendicular one, we cannot help feeling that these people had a right to do as they did. But why? Because we are perfectly conscious that when they took away something they left us a living thing in its place. It seems to me that the life of these buildings lay in the traditions of the human race handed down from generation to generation, and the architects of the later Middle Ages worked as the traditions of their own times compelled them to work. Tradition compelled them to set the mason and the carpenter to work on the buildings, according to their traditions. But as for us, the tradition of our times forbids us to pretend to do this, and to imitate them mechanically in their actions. We could not do so with a clear conscience; we should be masquerading in the past-master’s clothes. It seems to me that for us to pretend to be William of Wykeham and the like, would not be acknowledging the continuity of history, but ignoring it. In their time tradition was not only alive in the world at large, but it was alive in a very definite form, in the actual craftsmen themselves, the people who had to deal with the old buildings. In these days tradition is absolutely dead among them. Therefore we shall better carry on the continuity of history by gaining genuine knowledge of the past, by careful study of it, and by acting with conscious public spirit in the present than by imagining an unbroken mechanical connection between the present and the past, which does not exist.
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