Context 160 - July 2019

8 C O N T E X T 1 6 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 9 by James Campbell of the work of Cecil Hewitt (1926–1998) and his place in construction history under the apt title ‘The Art of the Carpenter’. The article reproduces some of Hewitt’s on-site sketches, many of which ended up in Essex Record Office. While Hewitt’s work showed painstaking research and draughtsmanship, Campbell makes two telling points. First, there is the question of Hewitt’s reliability as a recorder of historic structures and his importance in the history of building construction.While Hewett is a hugely important figure in the history of building construction and his beautiful books have been inspirational for a generation of heritage professionals, they are undoubtedly unreliable and have to come with some sort of health warning that they can not be used as accurate representations of the forms of the roofs they purport to depict. ‘Never take a Hewett drawing on trust,’ Campbell warns. Second, there is the irony that, having done so much work on the development of historic carpentry, he was an impediment to further research.Why bother to investigate cathedral roof structures if Hewett has already done it? If Hewett’s surveys can not be relied on, in the light of the modern survey techniques available, these structures need completely reassessing. Campbell concludes by posing the question: who among the next generation of construction historians will take up the challenge? Three other articles of interest in this issue include one on the rebuilding of post-war Bristol city centre, based on a rediscovered archive of almost 1,000 images, originally lovingly curated by Bristol Corporation’s town planning department in the early 1950s in two albums, showing progress on the reconstruction; a second on discussion of the 19th century debate about the relative merits of WCs versus dry closets for housing for the working classes; and a third on the reconstruction of London Bridge from 1967 to 1973. Bob Kindred MBE From ‘Outrage’ by Ian Nairn, Architectural Review , June 1955 Places are different: Subtopia is the annihilation of the difference by attempting to make one type of scenery standard for town, suburb, countryside and wild. So what has to be done is to maintain and intensify the difference between places. This is the basic principle of visual planning. It is also the end to which all the other branches of planning – sociology, traffic circulation, industry, housing hygiene – are means. They all attempt to make life more rewarding, more healthy, less pointlessly arduous. But if they at the same time destroy our environment, they are denying us the end to which they were designed to be the means. We get the by-products, lose the end-product. This happens because everyone is a specialist whose aim is not primarily to achieve the end-product. The planning department which tries to co-ordinate them is using rules which apply nominally to the end-product but these, because they have been divorced from the visual imagination which conceived them, have become ciphers. What is lacking is someone who stands outside all the specialisation and does the visual thinking, someone with sufficient powers to carry out his visual integration: responsible nationally, not locally, and responsible for topographical entities, not administrative ones... Three things have got to be accepted about Britain – it is industrial, overcrowded and small. These all suggest one conclusion, that all our development must be high-density and small-area. High-density industrial belts, with buffers of true country in between. High-density towns, with their population neither spreading outwards nor decanted evenly, but put back into the centre. Consequently, there will be high- density countryside, ie, really rural or wild, not eroded by splinter towns or industry. And this conclusion, which is sociological common sense, is part of the visual solution too. If towns are towns and country is country, they have gone a long way towards being allowed to be themselves... How about historic buildings? Are they allowed to look old, or are they given a ‘quaint’ face-lift under the excuse of preservation? And are the best 18th-century buildings preserved? Or only those which reflect a travel-poster Merrie England of beams and tracery?