So Twice Five Miles of Fertile Ground....

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 11

So Twice Five Miles of Fertile Ground....

STATION 3YM’s current BBC feature English Architects is, there is no getting away from the fact, dull. The producer has gratified the BBC love of historical anecdote, flavoured with a faint period pomposity, without giving us (as many earlier biographical series have done) the story, unified and possessing p@int, of a man’s life. There is a sorrowful lack of point and the dialogue is singularly unconvincing. And the opportunities which are offered and missed should cause every several listener to grind his every several tooth. To treat of Wren, Nash, Vanbrugh, the brothers ‘Adam, surely demands of the producer that he should show something of the architect’s relation to the society of his time; who were his patrons and clients, what the ideas and culture of the building classes were, and how all this affected his work. Vanbruzh, for instance; all we are told is that he wrote a Restoration comedy (we are not invited to read it, and very properly so), and built houses, and was expensive, and had a feud with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. What is important about him is nothing of all this; the point is that he lived in an age when the Whig aristocracy, freed from the Stuarts and their standing army as from all ideas that the landlord had a responsibility and a function in the community, were able with their vast wealth to build themselves residences that were neither castles nor manors. So ‘arose gigantic erections like Blenheim and Knole-really private palaces, like those of late-classical Rome or mediaeval Florence, emblems of a class become almost too powerful for the community. Hence also someone’s "Epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh, architect": Lie heavy on him, earth, for ‘he — Laid many a heavy load on thee. _ Would it not be better to hear such things than two mildly bleating voices, the Duke and his architect, and one angrily clucking one, the Duchess, disputing the building of. Blenheim in the intervals of totally irrelevant music?