The title of this book makes the spirits sink, and they sink even lower when, in the Introduction, we are told that Voysey ‘is universally regarded as … one of the pioneers of the international Modern movement of architecture and design’. He is not so regarded: he himself said that the Modern Movement was ‘pitifully full of such faults as proportions’ that are ‘vulgarly agressive [sic], mountebank eccentricities in detail, and windows built lying down on their sides. Like rude children’ we have ‘broken away and turned our backs on tradition’. To him, this was ‘false originality, the true originality having been for all time the spiritual something given to the development of traditional forms by the individual artist’.Footnote ¹ Obviously Voysey did not see any connection between his long ranges of windows, the lights separated by plain stone mullions, and the ‘windows lying on their sides’ so favoured by those Modernists who lifted images from pre-1914 ocean-going liners of the Titanic vintage. Nor should anyone else hold such perceptions, save those who look with their ears.

Voysey objected strongly to having his name included among the originators of a non-architecture he heartily hated: indeed, he was very ‘cross’Footnote ² with Nikolaus Pevsner for so labelling him in his highly selective, pernicious and unhappily influential polemic, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius,Footnote ³ in which Pevsner viewed him through Gropius-tinted spectacles. Pevsner considered the Voyseyan use of ‘bare walls and long horizontal bands of windows’ as coming near ‘the idiom of the Modern Movement’,Footnote ⁴ and the stone mullioned-and-transomed bows of Voysey’s ‘Broadleys’, Bowness-on-Windermere, Westmorland (1898–9), were hailed by Pevsner as coming ‘amazingly close to the twentieth-century concrete and glass grid’.Footnote ⁵ These utterances are as absurd pieces of contorted wishful thinking and false projections as could be desired by any apparatchik of Modernism’s apologists. When J M Richards approached Voysey to discuss his inclusion as a ‘pioneer’ in Richards’s own book on Modern architecture, the veteran Arts and Crafts architect objected to being lumped in with the originators of a style he heartily disliked, but, of course, despite his protestations, Richards included him anyway.Footnote ⁶ ‘Few now accept the view of … Pevsner … of Arts and Crafts as an antecedent’Footnote ⁷ of Modernism, but such intelligence has clearly not reached David Cole, despite his ‘long-term interest in the architecture of the English Arts and Crafts movement’.

The real value of this sumptuous publication lies in the wonderful illustrations, most of them superb reproductions of Voysey’s own coloured drawings (including some stunning perspectives) from the Royal Institute of British Architects ‘British Architectural Library Drawings Collection’, with some fine colour photographs by Cole himself. Looking carefully, page by page, at the graded slate or stone roofs; the white roughcast rendered walls; the stone dressings, mullions, transoms and other details; the leaded lights; electric-light pendants; wrought-iron brackets supporting iron gutters; carved beam-ends; Art-Nouveau-inspired hinges, latches, weathervanes and finials; balustrades; steep gables; decorative hopper-heads and carefully designed rainwater goods; fireplaces, often glowing with brilliantly coloured ceramic tiles; arched openings constructed of red clay tiles (incorrectly described in the book as ‘terracotta brick-on-edge’); and gaily painted water-butts, the clear-headed observer sees a marvellous array of inventive Arts and Crafts designs, often with touches of Art-Nouveau detailing, but nothing whatsoever suggesting anything to herald the International Modern Movement or the hellish dystopia it has created. How much better would this book have been if Cole had only concentrated on Voysey’s work, Voysey’s views and Voysey’s vehement rejection of the nonsense spouted by Betjeman, Pevsner, Richards et al, who were determined to give Modernism a respectable ancestry it never, in truth, possessed.