‘Wrecking balls swung from the ceiling, pillars were shown toppling, cornices crumbled… it was sensational’: The groundbreaking museum exhibition that helped save the country house

After years of neglect and countless demolitions, 1974 witnessed a revolution in attitudes towards country houses. It proved a turning point in Britain’s treatment of its old buildings generally and the saviour of places such as Covent Garden, as Simon Jenkins explains.

November 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of what was a new dawn in the history of the English house. It was a claim championed by Country Life for more than a century, that the great houses of England belong to the nation, as well as their owners. In the decades since the Second World War, these houses had disappeared at roughly two a week. War, neglect, dilapidation and lack of family resources had been their ruin. Then, in 1974, taxes were to be introduced by a Labour government that would have made inheritance prohibitive and ongoing family ownership all but impossible.

One event was to signal that dawn. A London museum went shamelessly political. The V&A Museum’s new director, the young Roy Strong, collaborated with two enthusiasts, John Harris and Marcus Binney, in a display called ‘The Destruction of the Country House’. It was followed by a fierce television documentary, Gone, Going, Going, which collectively put the crisis in the public domain.

The exhibition was sensational. Wrecking balls swung from the ceiling, pillars were shown toppling, cornices crumbled, fireplaces and exquisite ceilings were shattered. Over it all was Harris’s gloomy voice listing the 1,600 houses that had already succumbed. Visitors were visibly in tears.

No exhibition has ever had such immediate effect. The government changed the proposed rules of inheritance. Historic houses could be frozen in trusts. Costs could be deductible. The requirement was that houses be opened to the public and properly maintained. The heritage estate was effectively transferred into a semi-public sector, with National Trust ownership a last resort. Grants would be available through English Heritage.

The effect was immediate. Historic-buildings listing was galvanised and consent to demolish was persistently refused. From 1974 onwards, the rate of demolitions plummeted to a handful a year.

The 1974 revolution was not confined to country houses. It proved a turning point in Britain’s treatment of all its old buildings. Modernist urban-renewal plans, introduced during and after the war, were still operational across Britain. They involved the comprehensive redevelopment of swathes of city centres, of Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham and London, among others. These had proceeded slowly for lack of resources, but they were still the official plans, blighting huge areas of urban Britain.

Most drastic was Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944. By the 1970s, this proposed the flattening of Whitehall from Downing Street to the Houses of Parliament, including the Foreign Office and the Treasury building. Much if not most of the West End was to go, including Carlton House Terrace, Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Soho and Fitzrovia. Five ringways and 10 radials would sweep around the inner suburbs, demolishing more houses than were lost in the Blitz.

Abercrombie’s transport ally Colin Buchanan took up Le Corbusier’s motto: ‘We must kill the street.’ The ground was for vehicles and pedestrians were to be elevated onto decks, it would seem everywhere. Throughout this period, public and political reaction to such proposals was minimal, largely because little progress was made and there was no attempt to consult the public. Buchanan was properly implemented only at the Barbican in the City of London. Its podium is perpetually deserted.

As the V&A show was being prepared, reaction to Abercrombie’s plan for Covent Garden erupted. The neighbourhood was one of those he had dismissed as ‘obsolete’. The proposal was to demolish most of the area in favour of a Barbican-style redevelopment. In the first popular uprising against Modernist renewal, the inhabitants of a London community took to the streets. They were threatened with eviction from a place they called home and without good reason, beyond an architect’s dreams.

Covent Garden at the time was mutating from an old market district to a classic urban micro-economy. No fewer than 17,000 small businesses were estimated to be flourishing in a maze of back streets and alleys. The opposition became increasingly political. Soon, the relevant Greater London Council committee chairman, Lady Dartmouth, resigned. Then, a government minister, Geoffrey Rippon, listed 250 Covent Garden buildings as ‘historic’, in effect sabotaging the plan. The new Labour government got the message. Abercrombie was quietly ditched. Covent Garden was saved, as were Whitehall and Piccadilly. The ringways and radials within the M25 were dropped.

These events coincided in Britain with the 1970s energy crisis and widespread industrial disruption. The city seemed in decline and in need of a new sense of purpose. Mass demolitions seemed unnecessary and expensive. Many of Modernism’s high-profile creations — Glasgow’s Red Road flats, Manchester’s Hulme Crescents — were already becoming uninhabitable and were to be demolished. East London’s brutalist Thamesmead was a design disaster, the eventual cost of making it lettable as social housing being put at £1 billion.

Even as Modernist urban renewal was being shown the door, a systematic appreciation of historic townscape was gaining ground. In 1967, the MP Duncan Sandys had introduced his Civic Amenities Act. It was to prove the most innovative concept in British town planning since the Second World War. Its concept of a conservation area stipulated that mostly Georgian and Victorian neighbourhoods should be seen as integrated townscapes, to be conserved intact. Buildings should be seen in context. Local people should be consulted on where those areas should be.

The conservation-area concept was galvanised by the events of 1974. Covent Garden became one of the first. Amenity societies and civic trusts sprang up everywhere. Groups such as the Georgian Group, the Victorian Society and SAVE Britain’s Heritage, the latter founded in 1975, came to life. The spirit of the age was indicated when 1975 was declared European Architectural Heritage Year.

The saving of Covent Garden was instantly vindicated. Within a decade, its warehouses and workshops were galleries and theatres, with Long Acre becoming a miniature Bond Street as the old market buildings heaved with life. It showed that conservation made old districts attractive and busy. They made money. Covent Garden’s commercial rents now rank with those of the West End. In contrast, the Barbican, on some of the richest land in Europe, is all but devoid of economic activity.

If 1974 transformed British planning, less clear was what it meant to British architecture. The 1970s and 1980s marked a low point in the esteem of the profession. Its veteran sage, Lord Esher, wrote that, for the first time, British people were actually noticing their buildings, ‘and for the most part they do not like what they see… buildings bland, unhuman and impossible to love’. When critic Nathan Silver staged a public seminar on ‘Why is British architecture so lousy?’, the validity of the question was not challenged.

By the 1980s, the then Prince of Wales was ready to join the debate. In an extraordinary speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984, he blasted ‘god-forsaken cities of huge, blank, impersonal buildings… carbuncles, nuclear facilities’. British architects, he said, had been ‘trained to tear down and rebuild for the approval of fellow architects, not of tenants’. The speech attracted more publicity than architecture had ever known. Architects furiously suggested the Prince was constitutionally out of order. Buckingham Palace was inundated with thousands of messages in support. Prince Charles continued to repeat his criticism in speeches and even a television documentary in later years.

The next step the Prince made was to put his money where his mouth was. His Pound-bury estate on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorset was emphatically Palladian Revival in style. Directed by the Luxembourgish Léon Krier, Poundbury was built around squares, streets and alleys, in defiance of the Corbusian diktat against such spaces. The enterprise was loathed by Modernist architects. When I drove two of them around it, they closed their eyes and pleaded to leave instantly. To them, it was all they had been trained to detest. Poundbury, one-third of it composed of social housing, was soon enjoying premium house prices over neighbouring Dorchester.

Not to be outdone by the V&A, the Royal Academy (RA) took the debate forward in 1986, with an exhibition of work by the three ‘greats’ of contemporary architecture: Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Sir James Stirling. The exhibition director, Deyan Sudjic, introduced it on a downbeat note. Modernist buildings, he admitted, had become the source ‘of a public outcry’. Their ‘promised utopias have been manifest failures… Feeble attempts to copy the movement’s pioneers have produced monotonous and dispiriting environments from which city life has been driven out’. It was significant that the three works chiefly featured were all abroad — Lord Foster in Hong Kong, Rogers in Paris and Sir James in Stuttgart. The RA was out to tell Britain it should learn to love its architects. The concept of the starchitect was born.

Trying to assess the legacy of 1974 is not easy. British planning grew more democratic and the subject of public debate. It remained susceptible to greed and local corruption, especially in the spaces between conserved areas. British cities never adopted the firm zoning rules that guide development in most cities abroad. Every tower block, even in historic areas such as Norwich or Bristol, became a battle royal between developers and residents. Conservation areas were blatantly disregarded in the City of London’s Fleet Street and around Paddington Station. On those empty sites where modern architecture could show off — Manchester’s Salford Quays or London’s Olympic site — it reverted to a frigid Modernism. The spaces remained empty. Modernism seemed incapable of generating congregation.

What did emerge was the concept of town planning as a conversation — if often a heated one — between the surviving fragments of the past and a putative future. It may be sad for a Londoner to visit modern Paris, Amsterdam or Rome and note how other nations could fuse new architecture with the glories of the old. Few British cities can achieve that. Yet they do offer a visual mix, a variety of old and new buildings that diverts the eye and stimulates argument. Few could be called dull. For that, at least, we can say thank you to 1974.

‘A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to The Shard’ by Simon Jenkins is out now, published by Viking/Penguin (£26.99)

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