Neal Shasore’s Designs on Democracy offers a valuable new study of architecture – built and imagined – in inter-war London. This period is conventionally caricatured as one of tepid, traditionalist revivalism in British architecture, against which a blazing coterie of modernists struggled to ultimately emerge victorious after World War II. Shasore’s meticulously researched monograph contributes to a reassessment of this period, shaped by Elizabeth Darling’s seminal Re-forming Britain (2006). Architectural modernism, Shasore’s book emphasizes, did not have a monopoly on modernity. Through an array of sensitively reconstructed case-studies, Shasore shows that the inter-war decades were the site of a major – but complex – wave of modernization within the British architectural profession.
Designs on Democracy shakes off the formalist optics of style to think more expansively about the political culture of architectural production in inter-war London. Thinking beyond a ‘battle of the styles’, Shasore presents a more consensual and capacious picture of Britain’s architectural culture in the inter-war period, highlighting multiple points of interconnection and coalition. This was a period which saw a sector-wide mobilization to adapt to the demands of mass democracy, refiguring a reformed relationship between the architectural profession and the public. The book is admirably nuanced in its handling of the politics of this pragmatic pivot: ‘This was not, in other words, a communitarian radicalism, for the most part, but it was often politically progressive despite its mischaracterization as crudely or unthinkingly conservative’ (p. 15).
Popular, retrospectively fashioned labels for inter-war architecture, like ‘Art Deco’ and ‘Medieval Modernism’, are tossed aside. In their place, Shasore structures his account around recurrent terminology from the period’s own vocabulary: the book is divided into six chapters on ‘Propaganda’, ‘Slump’, ‘Machine-craft’, ‘Vigilance’, ‘Manners’ and ‘The architectural mind’. Across these studies, we learn of a major groundswell of architectural concern for public relations during the inter-war decades. ‘Good manners’ were expected of both British buildings and of British subjects. These chapters are animated by illuminating portraits of unexpected protagonists, such as Lawrence Weaver, John Gloag, Arthur Trystan Edwards and Grey Wornum. Crucial institutional changes are foregrounded, such as the campaign for statutory registration, the interventions of associational politicking, the construction of the RIBA’s new headquarters at Portland Place and the establishment of the Building Centre in New Bond Street. Especially rewarding is Shasore’s broad-minded conception of architectural culture, achieved by his embrace of an extensive source base, encompassing exhibitions, conferences and paper architecture. Through this, we gain a dual understanding of inter-war London, both abstract and material – straddling its diverse architectural imaginaries and its physical built environment.
The title, Designs on Democracy, operates as a neat double entrendre. Shasore proposes that his inter-war architects conceived of democratization as both a civic objective and as a pretext for bolstering their own positions. ‘It is striking’, Shasore notes, ‘the extent to which perceived or constructed needs and wants of the “public” underpin controversies, campaigns, innovations, reform, and development throughout the period in question’ (p. 14). The same would become clear in the decades after World War II. This book will furnish scholars who work on Britain’s post-war cities with essential insights into the inter-war period and its interlinkages with the later century. The story of Arthur Trystan Edwards’ Hundred New Towns Association – which devised an unrealized programme of low-rise, high-density housing in the 1930s – is captured vibrantly, reminding post-war urban historians of the antecedents of similar feted proposals from the 1970s.
At the centre of the book is the sharp identification of a salient tension within inter-war architectural culture: ‘between cultivating and engaging an architecturally minded public, and the concern that such a public might not in fact have need for or pay much heed to architectural expertise, and might therefore need guidance’ (p. 14). The tutelage of this ‘architectural Pygmalion’ (p. 47) in mid-century Britain has supplied a rich seam of study, as vividly testified by Shundana Yusaf’s work on radio broadcasting and Jessica Kelly’s research on the architectural press. We have seen a blossoming of excellent scholarship about the architectural profession’s shifting approach to the masses in twentieth-century Britain. I would also be keen to see this focus flipped. What is the history of ‘the public’ of the title – and their experience of architecture – on their own terms? There is (in the words of William Whyte) also a ‘history of reception as well as of production’ which warrants treatment.
The take-aways of Designs on Democracy have a burning relevance for the present moment, especially in a post-Grenfell context, when questions of public accountability have been urgently reiterated. Neal Shasore has written an account which is both scholarly and humane. It should renew the way we understand British urban history in the inter-war period and also yield additional fruits for scholarship on the post-war years and beyond.
