Volume 25, Number 2 · February 23, 1978
The View from the Inglenook
By Noel Annan
Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement 1860-1900
by Mark Girouard
Oxford University Press, 250, 223 illustrations pp., $29.95
A mist of disenchantment with modern architecture now shrouds England. In the early 1960s it was different. Then visitors from the Continent streamed across the Channel to declare that in school building the British led the world. A new generation of architects had broken the stranglehold of Sir Albert Richardson and the old gang who for so long had stifled their initiatives, and had seized the fabulous opportunities which the swelling budgets of government departments and the local authorities provided. Oxford and Cambridge entered an age of building unsurpassed even by the mid-Victorian age: practically every architect of note in the new movement has a building to his name there. The creation of the new universities presented even more glittering prizes for the profession. So did the vast building programs for new towns or for rehousing those who lived in slums. The property boom financed hundreds of new office blocks and the architectural profession exuded self-confidence.
Review, 3394 words
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