In the conclusion of his important and insightful Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London, Neal Shasore reminds the reader that while the focus of his discussion has been the 1920s and the 1930s (a final chapter ends with the 1951 Festival of Britain), these decades, “so easily reified as ‘the interwar period’” and too often “marooned on an inconsequential island” (405) are, in fact, central to understanding twentieth-century British architecture as a whole. They formed a pivotal point in the emergence of the modern architectural profession and saw it define its preoccupations and purview in the context of a mass democracy. Moreover, through his focus on a swath of practitioners, institutions, and organizations, hitherto either little considered, or not at all, by historians, Shasore argues that he is able to “unpack the emergence of Modernism and to problematize notions of its hegemony” (405). In so doing he offers a rebalancing of long-held narratives of how and why British architecture took the forms it did, and resituates modernism within (rather than purely against) a wider architectural culture.
Derived from his doctoral thesis, Designs on Democracy is a substantial and significant work of scholarship. Its range is wide. Framed by an introductory chapter (“Reconstructing the Profession for a Democratic Age”), in which Shasore assertively establishes architects and architecture within an ongoing national conversation about British modernity, and a concluding chapter in which he ties together the book's themes through a focus on planning in the immediate postwar years (“The Architectural Mind: Topographical Projects on the Public Realm”), Shasore titles each chapter with keywords of the period (“Propaganda,” “Slump,” “Machine-Craft,” “Vigilance,” “Manners”) and links these to specific architectural moments. Sometimes these are buildings, such as Waterloo Bridge (completed 1942) or the new headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects at 66 Portland Place, completed in 1934, and about which he gives a quite brilliant exposition around the theme of machine-craft. Equally, and more often, the book focuses on sites and activities where architecture as an idea and practice was explored, challenged, or evolved. Thus, the reader sees how architecture played an integral role in the projection of a shifting imperial consciousness through the British Empire Exhibition, opened at Wembley, as Shasore notes, on Saint George's Day 1924; a discussion complemented in the analysis of 66 Portland Place, where reference to British colonies and the white dominions were imbricated through the fabric of the building in the use of empire timbers and decorative motifs. Shasore explores new organizations such as the Building Centre, and campaigns such as those for the preservation of the Regent Street Quadrant, Carlton House Terrace, and the working-class enclave of Portland Town in Marylebone (threatened by demolition for blocks of flats for the middle classes, it did not survive). He also considers significant architecture/design theorists such as John Gloag and Arthur Trystan-Edwards. These two men, familiar to many who work on the period but largely unstudied, Shasore shows as significant figures in shaping the interwar discourse of how architecture might modernize. Throughout the discussion is articulated and complemented by carefully chosen images.
Shasore's book is part of an ongoing shift in the historiography of pre-1945 British architecture, especially that of the period of the late 1910s through to the early 1940s (bookended by my own Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction [2007] and Jessica Kelly's No More Giants: J. M. Richards, Modernism and the “Architectural Review” [2022]). As does Shasore in Designs on Democracy, the new historiographers refuse the familiar ahistorical tales of interwar architecture: the Pevsnerian cliché of a culture moribund until rescued by émigré architects. Instead, they look at the interwar period on its own terms (Shasore gives the example of the range of buildings considered “modern” in a 1938 issue of the Architectural Review [12]) and shows the particularities of architectural culture in Britain in a post–World War I modernity—one that was grappling, as Shasore's title signals, with an emerging mass democracy and a shifting world order. This new approach began with a critique of a historiography that overemphasized modernism and replaced it with both a broader understanding of that modernism (modernisms as opposed to one monolithic International Style) and showed that it was only one among several attempts to resolve how architectural culture could adapt to contemporary modernity. Moreover, by its insistence on architecture as a set of discursive practices, rather than buildings alone, the new historiography of architecture shows the complexity of how and by whom architectural culture is produced and reproduced.
Shasore is, at times, prone to oversimplifying how he characterizes this new historiography, but he does so mainly, I suspect, as a rhetorical technique. The value of Designs on Democracy is that it provides, at last, a scholarly account of the missing half of interwar architecture. He shows the activities of modernist architects such as Max Fry and Wells Coates in context, and shows how what they did was often shaped by architects like Trystan Edwards who were more concerned with longer traditions of architectural culture. Equally, Shasore does groundbreaking work in weaving the imperial subconsciousness throughout his book and very pleasingly adds to the picture some of the many women who were central to contemporary debates and practice in architecture. He offers very useful accounts of the work of Miriam Wornum (at 66 Portland Place) and Dorothy Warren Trotter and her preservationist campaigning. More could, perhaps, have been made of how a reconfiguring profession was structured around the figure of a white male protagonist. This model increasingly constructed out the polymathic practices that many women involved in the built environment tended to pursue at this time—such as Wornum, interior designer; Trotter, gallerist and campaigner; and Elizabeth Denby, who makes several appearances throughout the book. This was at a time when increasing numbers of women were entering the profession, with the consequence that they were trained into that white male professional persona. At times Shasore's wide scope can be hard to digest and militates against sustaining the arc of his thesis. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book that should quickly become standard reading for all those interested in understanding historically how architecture was construed and practiced in the metropolitan London of the 1920s and 1930s and the way that this shaped the built environment long after.
