Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction considers the practice of architectural modernism during the period 1925–42. The focus is on the doing of architecture: the protagonists, clients and their social milieu rather than the largely unpopulated world of the illustrated architectural monograph. It sets out to challenge conventional accounts of the growth of modernism in the UK, principally the ‘importation trope’ introduced by Nikolaus Pevsner as early as the 1930s. The Pevsnerian account has modernism developed on the continent, introduced to the UK with imported copies of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture (translated in 1927 by Frederick Etchells), through the architectural press, and, from 1933, with émigré architects such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn.
Darling fundamentally challenges this orthodoxy of architectural history for being overly preoccupied with stylistic analysis and for seeing architects as the sole agents of change. Whilst we encounter home-grown modernists such as Max Fry, Wells Coates, Amyas Connell and Basil Ward (although, as Darling observes, Connell and Ward were New Zealanders and Coates was a Canadian born in Japan), more importantly, recognition is accorded to the importance of collaborative working. The latter raises fascinating questions about the nature of authorship in the design process – whether through groups such as MARS, the unit system in architectural education, the architect–housing consultant relationship as at Kensal House, or the active role of the client in design (such as the Pritchards at Coates' Lawn Road flats, completed in 1934).
A principal aim of Re-forming Britain is to explain the shift between the marginal status of modernism before the war and its dominance after 1945. (The story ends in 1942 with the Beveridge Report and the appointment of the Dudley committee, so there is little scope for considering the effect that war-time industry had on the later adoption of modernism). A starting point is Erno Goldfinger in conversation with Gavin Stamp: ‘Let's get one thing clear: the '30s and the '40s are not separate things – they dovetail’, and the book goes on to explore how this is so. Whereas others might have explored the stylistic links between pre- and post-war modernism, Darling considers changes in the underlying cultural conditions necessary for the propagation of modernism in the 1930s.
Central to this approach is a recognition of the role of the patron (here there is a parallel with Alan Power's Britain: Modern Architectures in History). Many architects successfully courted the ‘talkative intellectuals’ (to use Fry's phrase), receiving early commissions from a middle-class professional client-base made up of voluntary housing associations, public healthcare pioneers and ‘new philanthropists’. Darling is especially good on the relationship between these political, social and cultural reformers and modernist architects, which can be seen to prefigure the acceptance of modernism as the visual language of the welfare state after 1945.
Darling's emphasis on social housing (which takes up three of the book's six chapters), and particularly the hitherto-neglected voluntary housing societies corrects something of an overemphasis of the private house in the literature, traditionally regarded as the vehicle for modernist innovation. The chapter on the new architecture of healthcare at Peckham (Owen Williams) and Finsbury (Tecton) Health Centres is an equally important contribution. So it is surprising that, with the exception of Fry's nursery at Kensal House, little consideration is afforded to educational buildings, a building type that offered equally important opportunities for social reform through architecture in the inter-war period. Denis Clarke Hall's Richmond High School for Girls (1938–40), Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight's timber nursery at Hartford, Cheshire (1938) and Impington Village College (1939) by Walter Gropius and Max Fry are all examples of the convergence of a modernist architectural idiom with educational reform, and as such would have complemented the central thesis of the book.
Whilst the research is insightful, the book comes close on occasions to being too selective, reading like a collection of case studies with little in the way of overview or synthesis. There is a great amount of detail on Jack Pritchard, but only two passing references to Frank Pick, arguably hugely influential on the course of British inter-war design. The story of the Architectural Association's conversions from a beaux arts to a modernist syllabus is fascinating, but it is a shame that there is no comparison with the introduction of modernism at other key architectural schools, such as the Liverpool School of Architecture, where Gordon Stephenson lectured, or the Regent Street Polytechnic, where during the war Peter Moro taught. It is through Darling's insightful and lively treatment of the social context that the book deserves a wider readership: from the digs and watering holes of Bohemian London and Cambridge where the protagonists of British modernism first met, to Country Life's surprising championing of the new architecture under Christopher Hussey. The book is essential for those studying modernist architectural practice in context. It does for the inter-war period what Andrew Saint's Towards a Social Architecture and Nicolas Bullock's Building the Post-War World have done (and Elain Harwood's forthcoming book will do) for the post-war period.
