Tuesday, June 23, 2009

MPs: An Aesthetic Crisis

The first thing Speaker Bercow should do is move the Commons out of its present dreadful, pub-like room and into Westminster Hall, the only surviving part of the original Palace of Westminster.
Years ago I was a local hack in Wimbledon and I toured the Palace with our MP, Sir Michael Havers, and a group of his constituents. The voters were pathetically impressed in a Europhobic, Battle of Britain, 'this is what we are fighting for' kind of way. I was bemused.
During the build-up to the election of the Speaker, I heard a TV reporter refer to the 'famous chair' on which he/she sits. Famous? Where? Among whom?
Then I heard ex-Speaker Betty Boothroyd on the radio talking about how much she loved 'the house'. Her pomposity was like the Great Wall of China, visible from space.
Everybody seems to think that the Houses of Parliament are a sublime and loveable architectural embodiment of British tradition. In fact, the present Palace is a ridiculous building that is about as much to do with British tradition as my iPod. Its design was a grotesque Victorian compromise between those who favoured Gothic and those who preferred classical. Charles Barry, a classicist by temperament, did the plan and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, something of a prat, did the Gothic skin and interior detailing. The plan is good and the river frontage is explicitly classical. The rest is basically a bad three-dimensional Pre-Raphaelite painting, a Disneyesque evocation of Britain as a land of knights and churches which has come, in use, to resemble two giant pubs stuck in the middle of a truly nasty and extremely pompous club for fat philistines with occasional romantic longings and an inflated sense of their own importance. Neo-gothic, unlike neo-classical, seldom works.
Westminster Hall, in contrast, is one of Europe's and possibly the world's great interior spaces. It struck me dumb the first time I saw it. The hammerbeam roof is a glory of medieval carpentry. The stone structure is almost 1000 years old and its tone is utterly different from anything else on the site. Real, muscular grandeur contrasts with Pugin's fussy mincing. The MPs, having moved into this great room, should be made to stand at all times, anything to stop them lolling like drunks on those green pub benches. Also standing, ideally on one leg, focuses the mind and would shorten debates. On entry into the hall they should be made to kneel and kiss these old stones. I am serious. Very.
My point is that many of the delusions and denials we now see in our political classes are influenced by these architectural surroundings. They live in a fake that feels like a pub and they behave like fakes in a pub. They do not derive inspiration, solemnity or a sense of history from Pugin, merely an ersatz fantasy of the past. This is reflected in the glutinous sentimentality with which they cling to their 'love of this house' or the famous Speaker's chair or some lazy identification of this feeble style with the spirit of the Blitz. They think this is tradition, but the greatest British tradition is pragmatic re-invention, not fake medievalism.
Finally, Speaker Bercow should arrange for the destruction of the Victorian Palace. Only the Hall and Big Ben - as a sop to tourists - should remain. There should then be an international architectural competition to fill the resulting gap. I am, I repeat, quite serious. The present crisis of Parliament is aesthetic before it is anything else.

20 comments:

  1. No not a good idea as soon at the rate we are going we will be burning the place down and there will be more chance of the hall surviving without the "members" under it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Truly magnificent. You make an entirely convincing case and I can find no flaw.

    But what's your plan for the Lords? How about actually putting them in Lord's (ie. the MCC)? It would be a good use for it in the winter and the distance from the Commons would do everyone a service. The woolsack could be placed in the spaceship mediacentre, to remind them that tradition is only half the story. The incumbent MCC members would warn the Lords of the dangers of excessive crustiness, and you could give them the summer off to retain perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  3. International architectural competition? You mean one of Richard 'Tribune of the People' Rogers, Norman 'Byelaws Insist I Get at Least One Headline Commision A Year' Foster, Frank 'So Arrogant Everyone Should Bow Before Me' Gehry or Zaha 'Considered Brilliant Even Though None Of My Designs Work Or Even Get Built' Hadid will be designing the replacement.

    Oh God, help us in this our hour of need.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Have you thought on the Tynwald Hill system. Open air, once a year and while on the Isle of Man held on the fifth of July, if the system was adopted for Westminster could well be held in August. When the people who care about these things are annoying people in France. Win, win.
    Then, there is January, if one was thinking cull.

    On the Hall, is there not some sort of protocol. Whigs, Torys and a King on a scaffold.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Your previous post posed some truly difficult questions, the biggest of which was where to start, given it's all so rotten. My gut level response was it really needs to be blown up. I'm glad you've thought things through a bit and given this view a respectable presentation.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Take away "Fake Medievalism" and you take away the 19th century. In other words, you take away a large and significant chunk of the British history you think you are defending. And Pugin, that prat, was arguably the wellspring of almost everything good and important in British design in the 19th century. The line from Pugin to William Morris is a pretty straight one. Or, maybe, since neo-Gothic doesn't work, we ought simply to tear down St. Pancras Station and the Law Courts as well. As I say, let's just tear down the 19th century and flush the Victorians down the memory hole.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I understand your point Francis, but I think Bryan is onto something with this. Westminster Hall hosted the trials of the Gunpowder plotters and Charles I - it is redolent of Parliament's ancient and (in my opinion) rather proud traditions. I watched the events last night with Bercow smirking while being being 'dragged' from his chair and the ludicrous nonsense with Black Watch - less a pub than a weird masonic ritual.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You are right absolutely right Bryan: the whole place sucks. I suggest a gathering of right minded folks to follow though where a certain Mr GF failed...

    How about next week?

    ReplyDelete
  9. I like the standing idea - perhaps the mps could be herded in groups into small pens or veal crates?

    Naturally they would have to be tagged, and any overeager members could be put in the crush and tasered until they submit

    ReplyDelete
  10. Magnificent rhetoric, Bryan, you playing at the top of your game, but, au fond, demented designer twaddle. You sound like "Lord" Richard Rogers railing against the saintly P.O.W.. Pugin was a genius (all right, yes, maybe a bit "fussy"); the House of Commons a jewel beside the Thames. The pub atmosphere is created only by the bunch of self-serving 21st Century dipsos who frequent its hallowed halls - and as for Bercow as Speaker, God save us all. Ceci un pipe.

    ReplyDelete
  11. You a hack Brian? Oh surely not!

    ReplyDelete
  12. I've always thought Westminster looks like it was designed by a gay Victorian serial killer - Oscar Wilde meets Jack the Ripper, and they both gang up on HG Wells.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Bryan, that line about the MP's pomposity being like the Great Wall of China, "visible from space," made me laugh out loud. Boy can you write. You're not a hack, unless Shakespeare and Milton are also hacks.

    Michael Smith, your comment is likewise great. I think they made a movie of that, with Malcolm MacDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack.

    ReplyDelete
  14. and then . . . . move it all to Birmingham.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I'be always thought the clock tower looks particularly silly.

    Soane did some rather wonderful designs for a new Palace of Westminster. Time they were dusted off.

    ReplyDelete
  16. And end up with something like Bilbao-on-the-Thames or the Scottish Parliament Building? Be careful what you ask for ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  17. Careful with the compliments Susan, you'll make him go all gooey. You don't want to be covered with Bryan's goo - the last thing you need at your age is a nipper ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  18. Beyond the tongue-in-cheekiness, there has been a tradition since the 1960s of using bad architecture to excuse and explain declining standards of behaviour. Think of the way in which the residential tower-blocks were blamed for the rising levels of crime in Western inner-cities. Similar, or even worse architecture in other cultures haven't provoked such rising crime levels, but this fact seems to be neglected.

    In politics, as in society, it is the underlying culture which is culpable, not the architecture. Sorry to be literal and non-aesthetic.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I think it important to note why it was necessary to rebuild the PoW. The original was burnt down stuffing all the old tally sticks (registering tax receipts) into the furnace in the cellar. Very symbolic. Guy Fawkes couldn't do it, but the taxman could.

    ReplyDelete
  20. It would be a good use for it in the winter.. But... What about in summers?

    ReplyDelete