Before the Blitz: the dynamism of British architecture

Gavin Stamp was a prolific and unusually level-headed architectural writer and historian. Less emotional than Ian Nairn, pithier and more immediate than Nikolaus Pevsner (he knew both men), Stamp wrote definitive books on grand and humble subjects. These ranged from his hero Edwin Lutyens, to brutalism, to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s scarlet telephone boxes of 1935. The last he first defended in a piece for The Spectator 50 years later, which led to a campaign that saved a clutch of them.

For Stamp, journalism and campaigning bled into one another. He co-founded the Thirties Society in 1979 – now the influential Twentieth Century Society – to save the era’s buildings. He understood that future generations may value the structures of our recent past in different ways, perhaps unforeseeable to us. Without his efforts, Scott’s Battersea Power Station would likely have been turned to rubble decades ago. Writing as Piloti for Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ column, he exposed planning fraud and architectural vandalism.

Stamp was at work on an investigation into a definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz when he died in 2017 at 69. Now, his final book has been completed by his widow, the historian and writer Rosemary Hill. The result is both vital and clear, a book steeped in technical detail, full of meticulous attention, yet accessible and without prejudice – never dry and certainly not florid.

That architectural era has been oddly underexplored. Perhaps part of the reason lies in the effort required to make sense of its dynamism. There were all those overlapping, seemingly competing styles: beaux arts; neoclassicism and ‘the grand manner’; lingering arts and crafts; functionalism and art deco. There were countless subtrends, too: jazz modern, seaside moderne, Egyptian revivalism, mock-Mayan and Tudor-bethan.