Toward the end of 1955, the architectural historian and critic Nikolaus
Pevsner gave the annual Reith Lectures on BBC radio. “The Englishness
of English Art” argued that there was a characteristically English approach
to architecture, one that placed a premium on rationality and reasonableness rather
than on mere decorative show. It was this approach that made him so optimistic
about the future of English architecture, for it suggested, Pevsner concluded, that
“England seems predestined to play a leading part in modern architecture.”1
Pevsner’s lectures were just the latest in a long debate about Englishness and its
relationship to the modern movement in architecture, perhaps even the last gasp of
an argument that went back three decades.2 The arrival of modernism in England
had been firmly resisted by those who saw it as a foreign invasion. By contrast, those
like Pevsner, who advocated the adoption of the modern movement, made a concerted
attempt to establish its English identity. They sought to show that modernism
and Englishness were entirely compatible. More than this, they came to argue that
modernism was in fact indigenous to England. In Charles Jencks’s terms, they created
a myth of English modernism: one that was to prove highly persuasive and hugely important. It was this myth that not only helped enable the acceptance of modernism
in England but also shaped architecture itself. It was this myth, too, that reshaped
architectural historiography and helped to inspire the preservation movement. Perhaps
most important, it was this myth that allowed many to reimagine Englishness
itself and, in the years between 1927 and 1957, come to articulate a modern and
modernist version of England.
