IIIKING COAL (1810-1910)
THE “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part of England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers out of their homes into factories. About the same time came the construction of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of population, and the slow improvement of the roads. But none of these important changes greatly affected the outward appearance of our villages until about forty years later, when, as the title of this chapter indicates, the steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the factories, and when coal began to make its influence felt all over the country. Simultaneously there grew up a system of macadamised roads and stage-coaches, which gave place in thirty or forty years to railways. For acentury coal was the dominant factor in English life, but since 1910 petrol has played the main part in altering the aspect of the countryside.
Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation. The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual grouping of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields continued all through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite of violent agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the arguments in favour of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life was to squeeze the small man out of existence and to perpetuate the big farm employing workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher.
And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-supporting village community, changes in the meansof transport brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another type, the flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been conceived, but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness to the cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very little cottage-building was done, for though the population was increasing very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to be near the new factories.
The network of canals that spread overEngland between 1760 and 1830 or so did not greatly influence the appearance of the countryside, though their numerous lockhouses and bridges have the merit of severe simplicity. But the system of new roads introduced by Telford and Macadam early in the nineteenth century had an immediate and far-reaching effect. With them we enter on the brief but glorious coaching-period, which holds such a grip on the English imagination that it still dictates the design of our Christmas cards. The “old-fashioned Christmas” that has been such a godsend to artists implies unlimited snow, holly, mistletoe, and plum-pudding, with the steaming horses standing in the inn yard and the red-nosed driver ogling the barmaid. Dickens made the most of it in literature, Hugh Thomson and Cecil Aldin in art. For the stage-coach immediately enlivened every village and town lying on the great highways. The roadside inn came into its own, but after some forty crowded years of glorious life declined again until the motor-car provided it with a new lease of prosperity, or at any rate until the cult of the bicycle gave it a fillip.
The influence of railways on the appearance of the countryside has been mainly indirect, in the sense of having destroyed the isolation of villages and hamlets and with it the local characteristics that they possessed. For example, the use of purple Welsh slates was almost unknown outside Wales up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they came into common use, for though their colour and texture is unpleasing, they are relatively cheap and can be fixed on lightly constructed roofs. So first canals and then railways combined with factories to spread machine-made goods all over the country. Otherwise the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape as a whole, for there are still large tracts of country where one can be out of sight and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the modern motor-car. Many village railway-stations and cottages are inoffensively designed, and in the “stone” districts of England are usually built of local materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule from the dead hand of central and standardised control. The habit of erecting enormous hoardings inthe fields bordering a railway must go far back into the nineteenth century. Presumably these eyesores have some object in view beyond merely annoying the traveller and defacing the landscape, but certainly they must come up for consideration in the last chapter of this essay.
Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous and prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring counties. Agriculture, sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the main source of wealth: and the only notable exception was the iron industry of the Weald, where a sufficiency of wood fuel was available for smelting. Between 1750 and 1850 the great northward trek took place, and King Coal became supreme. He ruined an appreciable part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared his ugly fingers over mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere, created the “Black Country” in his own image, and last of all produced the terrible blot that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole landscape looks like a bad dream.
The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries, blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country. From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a private garden. At the present moment half the total population of England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts: “Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black Country” and Tyneside.
Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills. They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the earlier method,and a tall chimney was one immediate result. Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs, and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere. Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in Charlotte Bronte’sShirley, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight against progress.
But even if an occasional example of these old factories has some vestige of architectural merit, nearly all of them were unsuited to their purpose. It does not seem to have occurred to their builders that a “mill”existed for any object beyond the grinding of the last penny out of the sweated men and women and children whom it housed. Light, warmth, decent sanitary conditions—all were utterly ignored. It is hardly to be expected that the slave-drivers of early Victorian days would produce buildings of any interest, and in fact the great gaunt prison-like boxes that desecrate so many Yorkshire and Lancashire hillsides are a very fair expression of that greedy scramble for money that has caused such a backwash in our own day. For it must not be forgotten that some of the most beautiful places in England were violated in this way. Many people have never visited our northern counties, which they regard as a foreign land, yet which contain scenery at least comparable with anything south of the Trent.
But if one takes, for purposes of comparison, the two valleys in which the ruined abbeys of Fountains and Kirkstall now stand, one obtains a very fair illustration of the effects of industrialism. They are only some twenty miles apart, they were founded by monks of the same Order at about thesame time, and in their original state they must both have been attractively situated. The modern visitor to Fountains, as he rounds the bend that has hitherto concealed the Abbey, invariably gasps at the beauty that bursts upon him, for here a nobleman’s park protects the site and no coal or iron lies near. But Kirkstall is blackened and overcast by the huge ironworks that sprawl over the adjoining hillside, a sooty mass of tumbledown sheet-iron sheds, bristling with tall chimneys belching out smoke; and the river that formerly fed the monks with trout is now covered with an evil-smelling and iridescent film of factory waste.
Yet, many and various as were the insults heaped upon rural England by “captains of industry” in the good old days when England was making money hand-over-fist, they sink into insignificance compared with the early Victorian achievement in housing. The golden age of self-help, philanthropy, missionary enterprise, evangelical zeal, individualism, and all the rest of it, produced the “back-to-back” house. The meanest streets of the East End, the worst slums of ourNorthern and Midland cities, were built while the Romantic Revival was in full swing and while Ruskin was lecturing on theSeven Lampsthat he had discovered hanging in Venice. The wind sown in those prosperous days is quite clearly producing a whirlwind for us to reap in more difficult times, and one recalls another text about the sins of the fathers. This is not a faddist or an extreme view. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in his newHistory of England(p. 683), writes of “the ever-advancing bounds of the realm of ugliness and uniformity, in its constant destruction of the beauty and variety of the old pre-industrial world. Indeed the more prosperous and progressive the country was, the more rapidly did that increasing work go forward.” And he quotes the grave words of another critic: “The Nineteenth Century did not attack beauty. It simply trampled it under foot.”
Proceeding with our examination of the various symptoms for which we shall eventually have to prescribe, let us now consider what are the shortcomings of the houses built for the people in the early and mid-nineteenthcentury, and more particularly how they have affected the appearance of our countryside. In themselves they were, as a rule, either entirely sordid, or both sordid and pretentious. The former were erected by manufacturers and colliery-owners in long rows to provide shelter for their “hands” at the minimum price, the latter were more often the work of that public benefactor known as the “jerry-builder,” and were erected as a speculation. In the former case the tenants had no option but to accept what was offered, so paid the rent required and occupied the house without demur. The jerry-builder’s houses, on the other hand, had to attract tenants, hence the pretentious element was introduced in order to ensnare the tenant’s wife. In those days, nearly all small property was held on weekly rentals and architects were hardly ever employed to design cottages or small houses.
But the houses had to be designed somehow, so the builder had recourse to sundry manuals or copybooks of designs for “Villas and Terrace Houses” in the worst style ofthe day. The idea of using such books originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when numerous little calf-bound volumes appeared, but they contained little more than details of the Roman “Orders,” and such features as chimneypieces, doorways, etc. The result was that the speculative builder, who made his first appearance about that time, continued to build in the traditional manner, but added a classical porch and interior panelling and similar trimmings, which, even if they were often rather pedantic and un-English, were always in excellent taste.
The nineteenth century copybooks sprang from a very different source. “Gothick” architecture, for two centuries a byword and a reproach among all cultivated people, had been rediscovered. From Queen Victoria’s coronation to her jubilee, architects romped over Europe and brought home sketches of Gothic detail from France and Flanders and Venice. Ruskin, who was not greatly enamoured of English Gothic, but loved it in its French and Venetian forms, spread the glad tidings among the middle-class;and the famous architect, Street, ransacked Italy and Spain in his quest. All this mass of drawings was broadcast over the country at its period of greatest industrial prosperity. Once I worked in a provincial office facing a replica of a Venetian palace, and witnessed the erection of a factory-chimney copied from Giotto’s campanile at Florence.
Naturally the smaller fry in the building world aped their betters. Second-rate architects and hack draughtsmen set to work to adapt and caricature these fashionable forms for use by the builder on shops and villas. Terra-cotta manufacturers gladly joined in the game, so that soon scraps of Venetian carving and ornament came to be turned out by the mile and capitals copied from French churches were moulded in artificial stone in tens of thousands. To this movement may be ascribed a very large share in the deterioration of English towns and even villages, for the “Gothic” craze naturally spread from the centres of fashion to the smaller places. A travelled and studious architect, set down in a street of suburban villas to-day, should be capable of tracing the ultimate source ofthe pretentious porches, the tile cresting on the roofs, all the mechanical ornament reproduced down the row; and in nearly every case he could derive it from a Gothic church in France or Italy.
The sad thing is that these revived ornamental forms were only a travesty of the old. Gothic architecture was, perhaps, the highest form of natural and legitimate building that the world has ever seen: as adapted by the speculative builder, it had no structural meaning whatsoever, and consisted in mere chunks of crudely caricatured ornament, generally misapplied. Ruskin preached truth and honesty in architecture; but his pigmy disciples missed the whole spirit of Gothic. The barns and cottages of old England represent that spirit as well as the French cathedrals and Venetian palaces on which he concentrated with such disastrous effect, yet the English village has suffered terribly from the Gothic revival.
For the movement spread to village shops and banks, and, of course, all new churches erected after 1830, or even earlier, followed the new fashion. Because every old villagealready possessed a parish church, now becoming too large for its needs, there was little for the Church of England to do outside the towns, though there are many cases such as that at M—— in Middlesex, where an amateur effort in church-design by the saintly William Wilberforce, just a century ago, has ruined a beautiful old village highway. But the Nonconformist bodies, now flourishing and sometimes even wealthy, were not to be outdone in the race: so they abandoned the stark galleried chapels, that had hitherto followed the Protestant type invented by Wren for his City churches, for an ambitious and often flamboyant variety of “Gothic” that has created a discord in many a village street. There seems to have been a prevalent idea that every place of worship must be decorated with a spire, with tracery, and with a quantity of ornamental features, quite regardless as to whether funds permitted of a single one of those features being worthily executed, whether any of them symbolised the entirely English and healthy movement that produced Nonconformity, or whether they harmonised with surroundingbuildings. Our final conclusion must be that the Gothic Revival, which, in the hands of a man like William Morris, who loved England passionately, might have done so much to save her countryside, was in fact largely responsible for its defacement.
Another characteristic of this singular movement was its utter disregard of what we now call “town-planning.” When Ruskin advised his audience to treat railway-stations as “the miserable things that they are,”[2]because he disliked railways, he seems to have been voicing the spirit of his day, which was quite content to speculate on the symbolism of a piece of carving in a remote foreign city while men continued to build the most appalling slums. No town was “planned” in those days: it “just growed.” Occasionally a manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily bad business.
At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person. English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be done to save the English countryside from complete uglification. Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth.
Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. Tripe-dressing, sausage-skin making, and one or two other “noxious” trades might be prohibited in a few favoured localities; the obscure and often absurd law of “Ancient Lights” occasionally restrained his ardour. Otherwise, so long as his building was strong enough to remain standing, and providedwith adequate means of drainage, he was as free as air. Building was essentially a commercial business; the rights or needs of the community did not enter into the question. Each man built for his day and generation: the future was left to take care of itself. Yet even from a financial point of view this was a short-sighted policy. When Wren’s plan for rebuilding London was upset by vested interests, a chance was lost of making wide streets that are now urgently necessary but cannot be formed except by payments of incredible sums for compensation. A more modern instance is to be seen in the Euston Road, which was a residential thoroughfare looking over fields when my grandfather knew it a century ago. Then shops came to be built over the front gardens as the old residents fled from the invading streets: and now these shops have to be swept away with heavy payments for compensation to allow the road to be converted into the great artery that any intelligent person could have foreseen when it was first built. This phenomenon is not peculiar to towns: it applies with equal force to thecountry districts that are continually being absorbed by towns. Half the squalor of modern suburbs is due to indiscriminate development. Trees are cut down and houses are run up along a main road. Traffic increases, and the tenants move away. The houses are clumsily converted into inefficient shops, extending over the front garden, or into seedy inefficient tenements. Empty plots are covered with hideous hoardings. Without undue interference with the liberty of the subject, much of this feckless muddling could be avoided by the exercise of a little rational foresight.
For this is a question deeply affecting the whole community, not a petty professional grievance. The mad race from towns to the fringe of the country is destroying the country for miles round: and the pathology of destruction is now clearly understood. A brilliantly realistic description of the growth of “Bromstead,” a typical London suburb, is to be found in Mr. H. G. Wells’The New Machiavelli. All who have witnessed the slow spread of this malignant disease will agree that he does not overstate the case.