7 Books Like Time's Witness

The diary of a young officer of the Royal Engineers in WW1 could have been a dry read but the writing here is exceptional and the detail is fascinating. Glubb loved the army and went on to do great things and write many more books and it is sobering to think that his life could have been cut short on the battlefields of the Great War.

A clever romance set in 18th century Europe by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge a British novelist and poet, who also wrote essays and reviews. Coleridge published five novels, the best known of those being The King with Two Faces in 1897. This was her most successful novel, which ran through six or more editions in one year. Her novels were noted for dramatic episodes, rather than plot or character development but I found the period detail was brilliantly done.

This was the first book about architecture I read and it remains one of my favourites. Clark wrote it in 1928, long before ‘Civilisation’ made him a television star and it has the freshness of a young man trying out ideas and working to understand something he doesn’t like. He was writing about Gothic architecture at a time when it was completely out of fashion. Clark’s subtitle ‘an essay in the history of taste’ is tongue in cheek because Gothic for his generation meant bad taste. Tracing its roots back into the eighteenth century Clark shows how it developed to embody the ideals of the Victorian age. 

This is my most personal choice. The architectural historian and critic Gavin Stamp, who died in 2017, was my husband. This was one of his best and most deeply felt books. It tells the story of the memorial arch at Thiepval in Belgium designed by Edwin Lutyens, which bears the names of 73,000 men whose bodies were never found after the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in July 1916. It shows how architecture can bestow dignity on loss, how it can both embody grief and to some extent relieve it. Gavin’s book looks beyond the monument itself to meditate on the greater tragedy of the First World War. 

Architectural history can be fun -or at least it can be funny. Lancaster, who invented the term ‘Stockbroker Tudor’ tells the story of the imaginary town of Drayneflete as it supposedly evolved from the days when ‘sabre-toothed tigers prowled though the tropical undergrowth where now stands Marks and Spencers’. This typical British town has its grand family, the Earls of Littlehampton, its notables the Parsley-ffidgets and a proud if not always very accurate sense of its history. Writing in 1949 Lancaster’s brilliantly witty drawings show the same spot over the centuries from Romans in togas dodging chariots outside the senate to women with pushchairs dodging cars outside the cinema.  

The 1960s saw Britain destroy more of its own built environment than all the bombing of the second world war. The car was king, the high rise and the shopping precinct transformed city centres. In many cases this is now seen as a disaster. Otto Saumarez Smith, one of the brightest of the rising generation of architectural writers, tells us how and why it happened, why it stopped and why he has come to love some of it. 

Platt calls this ‘a biography of the A40’ and it is about the road that most people coming and going between London and Oxfordshire drive along without looking. The suburban houses that line it, many scheduled for demolition, some empty and some squatted, intrigued Platt and he began visiting them, talking to the inhabitants and finding out how they became stranded in this hinterland. Their accounts are funny, poignant and sometimes astonishing.  The A40 tells a story about the history of London and the visions and failures of urban planning in the 20th century.