Context 155 - July 2018

6 C O N T E X T 1 5 5 : J U L Y 2 0 1 8 Periodically Your reviewer has been moved to remark on more than one occasion, most recently in the March 2017 issue of Context , about the enhanced value attached to membership of some of the national amenity bodies that can be obtained through their in-depth serial publications. An example cited in the last issue was the latest ASCHB (Association for Studies in the Conservation of Historic Buildings) Transactions , but two others have very recently been published and are worth seeking out.You could, of course, join the societies concerned and get these publications free as part of your membership. Twentieth Century Architecture Over the years the Twentieth Century Society has regularly produced a series of substantial journals, including the invaluable ‘Housing: regional practice and local character’ in its series Twentieth Century Architecture (it was Volume 12). The latest (Volume 13), just published, runs to 200 pages. Entitled ‘The architecture of public service’, it has 12 in-depth, thoroughly illustrated articles. Alan Powers sets the scene, highlighting the great variety of building types for which the state, local government and autonomous public bodies have been responsible; the political and social climate in which they have operated; and the rise of public service architects (the number of RIBA members in local authorities increasing by a quarter between 1939 and 1948), particularly in county councils, and the gradual decline after 1965. Powers explains the rising tide and increasingly enthusiastic embrace of modernism in the middle decades of the century, and the decline as capital spending restrictions led to the public-sector share of building plummeting from 60 per cent to 25 per cent. He points out that the rise and decline of architects answerable to the public through local democracy and skilled by long experience to interpret the needs of national services remains a compelling tale, especially to a generation that has grown up with the welfare state being knocked away year by year. Joanna Roethe, an architectural historian with Historic England, provides a perceptive overview of interwar town and city halls. She notes the early historicist styles and their gradual replacement by modernist designs, and the continued esteem at local level for interwar municipal buildings, showing how successful their designers had been in creating a local icon. Roethe is persuasive in her discussion of civic dignity and identity, although this now faces the challenges of the emasculated functions of local administration, outsourced functions, and amalgamations and reorganisations. Some town halls preferred to be defined as civic centres, the term being coined in 1936 (rather flippantly at the time) for Southampton. NE Sharore explains its conception and construction, the image it was intended to project and its failure to resolve the physical embodiment of urban governance. The author acerbically describes the Grade II* set of buildings as ‘difficult’. David Brady makes a valiant attempt to breathe interest into London’s medical buildings of the inter-war years but concludes that ‘wrestling with the undeniable fact that the majority of buildings are not of great stylistic interest has been a recurrent phenomenon faced by architectural historians’. His article provides a useful background to their social and architectural development. Elain Harwood and Nicholas Long explain respectively the architectural development of ‘Fire services in Middlesex, 1920–1965’ (that is, up to the formation of the GLC); and the uniquely distinctive building type comprising ‘Metropolitan police stations, 1920–1974’. Many of these buildings have an uncertain future following the rationalistion of the police estate that commenced in 2000 (and particularly under Boris Johnson as mayor). A further important and often much-loved (and also threatened) building type, ‘Public libraries in the twentieth