But sitting in the great nave of the church of St.Pancras - the Cathedral of the Moor to its admirers - provided a perfect demonstration of the central theme of the book I am just finishing, The Pattern of English Building, by the late Alec Clifton-Taylor (1962). The book is a magisterial survey of the history of (mainly domestic) building in England, which it approaches by way of geology. It insists upon the close connection of the character of the building to the local landscape and the materials the landscape provides. Thus the best buildings for Clifton-Taylor are those which are rooted in and at home in their environment. The massive but simple granite columns of the Widecombe church exemplify this well, cut of the same stuff as the great and very solid tors which dominate the local scene; the moorman and the tinner came to worship and be together in a building that was simply the bedrock of their lives writ large. They could readily appreciate the aptness of the Christian metaphor of the Rock; it demonstrated for them something that was not only unshakable but seemed a permanent fixture in their lives.
(In 1638 the church was was struck by ball-lightning during a service, the roof torn open and four people killed. Such a threat to stability and permanence could only have been the work of the Devil, so local legend attributes it.)
So it is through all the regions of the country. The farmer sowing his wheat in the flinty soil of Norfolk comes home to his house of flint, the ploughman of Yorkshire or Dorset all the long day turns up the very stones from which his cottage is built. Brick, being in the most part formed from local clay, takes on the hue of its setting. Even timber-frame building is a reflection of a lost England of forest and woodland. Of course, with the Industrial Revolution this began to change. Bricks could come from far away, a roof of uniform Welsh slate was a cheap option. So we have long reached the point when the sprawl of new estates are block and steel and render owing nothing to their surroundings, so that Whitby and Wigan and Worcester and the Weald every year grow more alike, with habitations that are everywhere and nowhere. The genius of place is lost.
The complaint that we have lost touch with the countryside is a commonplace; but maybe we have also lost touch with our built environment too, which equally shapes our sense of home and identity, almost unnoticed. Maybe it is this that in part accounts for the loneliness in the paintings of L.S.Lowry, which I recently blogged about.
It is a virtue of writers like Clifton-Taylor that they can make you see what may have previously passed unnoticed. The columns and walls of Widecombe church reflect the the harshness of the surrounding moor, but their starkness was borne upon the builders by the difficulty of carving hard granite. The narrow courses of Elizabethan brickwork were dictated by the builders' difficulty in firing bricks of any greater thickness. Georgian glazing-bars were a fitting counterpart to their classical surroundings, so that their loss to Victorian plate-glass seems like a jarring black eye. Does anyone but me resent the multitude of Edwardian terraced streets that could be instantly improved by replacing the plastic double-glazing and returning the iron railings cut down in the War? Instead of the houses leaning against each other like a row of bruised and exhausted drunks, simple suburbs could be refreshed and whole. Walking to the station on a workaday morning, we might all feel the better because not only have our surroundings become authentically pleasing and restored to their history but someone has cared enough to do it.