How to fix the UK economy

 

Photo by Alexander Grey on unsplash.com

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

First, the government must lead as a “public investor … so that it supports private investment”. That is easier said than done. Successive governments have tried public-private partnerships, usually with disastrous results. The present government is showing itself unwilling to take responsibility, for example, with the water industry, leaving it in private hands.

“Economic dynamism is linked … to socially cohesive societies”(these are Hutton’s words, although he is paraphrasing Torsten Bell).

 It doesn’t look like that in the US, with huge variations in income but vast wealth creation for some.

We need a regional policy to redistribute wealth. Easier said than done; I was in Boston, Lincolnshire, and I’m not sure what expenditure could change things.

“Destructive privatization has run riot” – “we need to change the fiscal rules so the government can borrow for investment”. Agreed, but the current government is not placing big enough investment in place.

Raising taxes, including council tax reform, increased capital gains tax, taxing electric vehicles. Unfortunately, the new government has already demonstrated that relatively small changes are greeted with screams of woe from the wealthy.

British companies must invest more, and they must invest in longer-term projects, not just for results in the short term. Great idea, but impossible to regulate by government.

Share ownership in UK companies should include a critical mass of influential owners, who can sustain the long-term strategy of companies. My reading of any investment is that sensible investors are in the minority. The majority are looking for a quick win, without any relationship to actually building the economy.  

Pension funds should be consolidated, so they can make some more risky investments safely. I’m not sure I am convinced by this argument. Pensions are not risky investments, for the most part, even without being consolidated.

More generally, he write about “contributive justice”, the idea that citizens contribute to a common purpose. Now, at the level of a residents’ association, there is plenty of scope to provide this kind of beneficial activity. But how can I contribute to the success of the town where I live? It looks to me as though this has already been established by central government bypassing local authorities, by setting up bodes that are not directly accountable to the electorate, but which benefit from central allocation of funds – the local example is the Greater Cambridge Partnership.

Does it fall within contributive justice to invest in UK stocks? Should I express my patriotism by restricting myself to a lower pension? This hardly seems a sensible option, either for an individual, or for a pension provider.

All in all, the views of the analysts and critics don’t appear to be stress-tested against the real world, where if you make the slightest increase in fuel duty, you are confronted by mass demonstrations that bring the country to a halt. There is no justice in this, but there is mob rule that you cannot ignore. So my fear is that nothing much will happen with all the above, and in the meantime, the rich continue to find out way of staying rich and getting richer – without any redistribution of wealth.

My 2024 books of the year

 

And the books keep piling up ... some of the books I haven't even started yet

2024 has been a good year for books. I’ve written separately about my two favourites, The Voices of Morebath, by Eamon Duffy, and Witold Rybczynski’s Home: a Short History of an Idea. Both these books continue to resonate several months after I finished them, the first helping to answer the question “What is religious belief and how was it manifested in the common people in pre-reformation England?”, and the second the equally fundamental question, “What does home mean now, and when did it start having the present-day associations we have with the term?”

More light-heartedly, the discovery of the year was E F Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1931), a truly comic novel that had me in stitches. Perhaps it’s easier to write social satire about a distant generation to our own, but it certainly seems difficult for comic novelists to achieve with the present day (at least, if Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia are typical). Benson is mercifully free of any self-importance, and his premise of elderly society women attempting to gain or maintain top social status in a provincial town is a perfect one: this is a novel of triviality, but written with such verve, and with such awareness of conversational put-downs, that you begin to anticipate the next social catastrophe. Elizabeth Mapp fails to respond to Lucia’s application for the annual art show, and whole chapters are devoted to the build-up, and consequence, of such a faux pas. It sounds insignificant, but in the hands of a skilled writer like Benson, who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh at his most satirical, it  has a glorious verve to it. 

I read that Miranda July’s All Fours, a novel that appeared on several critics’ books of the year, has comic elements, but for me any comedy was outweighed by the narrator’s monstrous egotism. Except, perhaps, for the joke that by the end of the novel, she hadn’t even reached the menopause she so dreaded. 

In complete contrast, Fin de Siècle Vienna, a series of essays by Carl Schorske, was heavy going (no reading aloud!) but rewarding. I bought it to accompany a trip to Vienna during the summer, and it added a whole dimension. I am no expert in the complicated emergence and fortunes of Austria-Hungary during the 19th- and early 20th centuries, and I needed to create my own notes of terms, people and events, to make sense of it, but it was worth the effort. Schorske has the knack of taking two historical figures, such as the writers Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and finding remarkable similarities and differences between them, such that these contrast build up an impression of the society and politics of the period. The crucial comparison is the essay on the Ringstrasse, the famous circular road around the historic centre of Vienna, and two of the urban designers involved in its construction, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, the former a traditionalist, the latter a modernist. Similarly, Schorske’s chapter on the early years of the state of Austria finds unlikely parallels between three contemporaries, Georg von Schönerer, Karl Lueger, and the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as he charts the tragic decline of democratic institutions and thinking during the early 20th century. One of the most impressive tools Schorske uses is the apposite quotation. Quotes appear in one location, then are recalled in a different context where they become hauntingly significant. Thus, Hofmannsthal: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him they will follow.”; or Freud’s “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up hell” (the epigraph to his The Interpretation of Dreams, a quotation from Virgil; Virgil was referring to the River Acheron). A haunting book, Fin de Siècle Vienna depicts the steady descent of a nation to some of the most shocking events of the 20th century.

Of course, all my efforts at reading were dwarfed by Jane’s completion of A la recherche, by Proust, all seven volumes and 1.5 million words of it (not all in 2024, I hasten to add). I’ll leave to her the task of formulating a critique, and I look forward to it.  

The Future of Dinosaurs (David Hone), an interesting overview of the prehistoric animals, by an academic palaeontologist, was enjoyable, but read like a research proposal (“If only we had more specimens, more evidence”) rather than an attempt to tell us what we do know. Nonetheless, it contained some interesting details, when the author managed to get over his excessive qualification of results. Some dinosaurs had lips, but no ability to move them. We have more specimens of Anchiornis (a feathered troodontid) than any other dinosaur, but that doesn’t stop the world writing about Tyrannosaurus, with (according to the author) only 12 good complete specimens found, which means that a lot of what is written is guesswork.  

In summary, I’ve learned during 2024: something about dinosaurs, a lot about Austria-Hungary, the English Reformation, even something about the back-stabbing that takes place in a small English coastal town. But I can’t say I’ve learned much more about the menopause. 

Lucy Prebble, The Effect (Corpus Playroom, Cambridge)

 

Photo by Anna Shvets (CC0)

The Effect was great fun: entertaining (for the most part) to watch, with some good ideas. The plot is quite straightforward. Connie and Tristan, two twenty-somethings, have joined a medical trial which involves them being given increasing doses of an antidepressant drug. They interact, and the question is, is their interaction caused by the dopamine released by the drug, or is it a natural attraction?

That would be quite sufficient for a theme, but it’s not sufficient for a full West End play, which requires two hours. So the plot is, in my opinion, rather artificially thickened, to no great effect. The subplot is that the two doctors, one in charge of the trial (Dr Toby Sealey) and the doctor actually carrying out the trial (Dr Lorna James) had an affair some years ago. I found this subplot less convincing, perhaps because I was watching a student performance, in which the younger roles are always easier to cast than parts for 40- or 50-year-olds.

Prebble has a fine ear for dialogue, and writes some sparkling exchanges between the two young participants. It’s the classic contrast of higher-educated versus lower-educated, with all the corresponding differences in attitude and expectations, and performed brilliantly by the young actors, who are on stage most of the time. It reminded me of Shaw: the ability to construct a lively dialogue out of the simplest of scenarios.

There are some interesting puzzles to clarify, possibly just the clever decisions by the playwright to challenge your expectations. Of course the young man tries to get off with the young woman. Of course, the young woman is suspicious. But everything about the boy is not what it seems. He’s called Tristan, unlikely for someone from Wood Green in Essex, although it no doubt ticked a significance box for the author. More surprising, he turns out to be a believer in God, unlike her. And when rejected, he makes it clear that this is not a quick affair, but the love of his life. This is, for me, where the play begins to break down. I don’t see any justification for the two to stay together for life; I just can’t see it working. Where did eternal love come in? She has studied psychology and sociology, while he appears to be from the University of Life, although he is clearly an excellent learner.

The need to extend the play led to the introduction of some less essential material. Once the couple had got involved, their subsequent discussions were, for me, somewhat convoluted – what did they need to talk about? Even more cumbersome was the situation of the junior doctor, Lorna James. Whatever her background, her character didn’t quite gel for me, and it didn’t seem to matter too much to me if she did or didn’t resolve things with the older doctor.

The play throws in references to the ethics of medical trials (“you’re only interested in a side-effect if you can sell it!”), depression, and as I mentioned, attempts a subplot between the two doctors. But the main story is what gripped me. Its theme is summed up in a marvellous exchange between the two principals. She claims he is only attracted to her because of the drug. She says that if he were drunk and made a pass at her, she wouldn’t take it seriously. He replies that males only make a pass when they are drunk because they are too shy to open up normally. Of course, there is some truth in both arguments. Prebble’s achievement is to combine the two so that both are believable – until they fall in love for ever. 

Woman of the Year (1942)

 

Seems like a classic case of American anti-intellectualism. Spencer Tracy (Sam Craig) and Katherine Hepburn (Tess Harding) are both journalists working for the same newspaper. He writes a sports column, while she writes on global affairs. The contrast could not be greater. She speaks many languages, he just one. She intermingles effortlessly at parties, while he communes with other sports reporters at a local bar. He is boring, unimaginative, uninterested in world affairs – probably like most of the audience. 

The principle of not alienating your audience comes into effect here. Do we praise the intellectual and leave everyone in the cinema squirming in their seats, wishing they had paid more attention to their studies? Certainly not: we look for every opportunity to take the intellectual down a peg or two. Therefore, the film puts him in the ascendent with all this. Walter Brennan plays the bartender, and, of course, we warm to him. 

However, there are some slight variations on the anti-intellectual theme. Hepburn is not depicted as asexual. Her first appearance in the film begins with the camera lingering on her legs, and we are invited to think she is clearly aware of the sexual impact of those leg; this is an intellectual and a sexual being, a remarkable combination for 1930s Hollywood. 

The ending of the film is  woeful. Apparently, the final scene was tacked on by the studio, after early screenings were not liked. The audience, and the studio, wanted to see on screen Hepburn being put firmly in her place. It shows Hepburn trying to make breakfast and causing havoc. The scene goes on too long, but conveys the main point: intellectuals can’t cook. Tracy, in contrast, shows us he knows how to cook, although he does not take kindly to cooking for others – he is asked to cook not just for Hepburn but for the assistant, Gerald (Dan Tobin). Clearly, it’s not a man’s job to cook for others. 

As so often in Hollywood, the movie Is memorable for some of the character actors. Gerald, Ms Hepburn’s assistant, has just the right combination of snobbishness and efficiency, implying a put-down just by his manner. Gladys Blake, the woman who shoos the party away from the wedding night has just a few seconds of dialogue, but sorts everyone out with wonderful efficiency.

The final agreement, which we are expected to accept, is that she is not Miss Harding or Mrs Craig, but Tess Harding Craig. Hepburn, replying that “I think it’s a wonderful name”,  makes it clear she has accepted her inferior status. It’s the age-old story, the taming of the shrew.

Compared to the Hollywood screwball comedies, this film is low on jokes but high on relationships and trying to demonstrate solid principles. We listen to the wedding ceremony in great detail, as if this is one of the fundamental gospels of American life. 

Most actors claim only to be following the script, or the director. Yet, apparently, Hepburn chose this story, this director, and was complicit in this ending. I can’t help feeling that the Hollywood stars I want to remember are those that revealed some independence from the system, not those who abandoned their principles in pursuit of stardom. This film is nothing less than the capitulation of someone exceptional - a Woman of the Year, no less - to a position of inferior wife. 

A Citizens UK meeting

 

From the Citizens UK website: smiling citizens interacting

I’m always interested in events and ways in which people interact, so when I was invited to a Citizens UK meeting, I went along. The confusion started there, however, since the meeting was actually entitled a Weaving Trust meeting.

What is a Weaving Trust? Nothing to do with weaving, although a comparison was made during the evening, with mentions of wefts and warps, which I didn’t quite see the relevance of. The meeting was enjoyable – it’s always fun to meet new people – but I was left afterwards rather mystified about what the meeting was trying to achieve. This post is an attempt to try to understand what Citizens UK is about. 

What happened at the meeting

We (about 20 of us) had a series of 1-to-1 conversations, lasting about six minutes each, starting with general chat, as a way of getting to know each other. Then we had conversations with others about issues such as hopes and fears for our community. By the end of the evening, about two hours later, we had practised our arts of rapidly getting to know others – in fact, it must be just like speed dating, although, I hasten to add, I have no experience in that area. I will say, however, that those partners I spoke to who managed to talk about themselves for the whole six minutes would not be the ones I would choose to talk to again.

By the end of the evening, what had I learned? This event was at a local C of E church (other venues have included a college and mosque), and, perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the participants were involved with the Church in some form. That doesn’t invalidate the evening, but the mix of people was somewhat one-dimensional.

I felt we had got to know each other, but for what purpose? The Citizens UK website describes (and someone in the tea break confirmed this) that the idea of the group is to get together to eventually campaign on “issues”. But we didn’t discuss what these issues might be! From the website, I gathered, some groups in other areas have taken on issues such as misogyny and Islamophobia on the Underground, which of course would be worth campaigning about. But, typically, you don’t form a group and then think about an issue’

What interests me is exactly what happens in practice when you have an issue to discuss. For example, I observed a group of residents in our street campaigning for the local authority to provide planters for the pavement, since the houses have no front gardens. I was surprised to hear the negative comments from some residents: “people will just throw rubbish in them!” “The leaves from the trees will block out all the light”. My interest, then, was not how to campaign, but what to do about disagreement. It looks to me like any issue you care to mention will have people with an opposite view. How do we resolve that? The answer, or at least one potential answer, came almost accidentally, from an interfaith counsellor at a local university. She described how religious groups can come together by recognising difference; you can’t reconcile religions, but you can accept and learn about different practices and points of view. Now that’s an interesting angle, which might be a way forward … but only if we agree which issue we are talking about !

Even an issue such as “taking action on Islamophobia and misogyny on public transport”, which I wholly support, looked to me to be an unlikely target for our group, since pretty much everyone in our group would accept this should be eliminated – clearly, the people in this meeting weren’t the ones causing the problems! A wider group might reflect a bigger range of opinions, but I don’t imagine the kind of people who would shout racist slogans would be people who joined a Citizens UK group.

I was intrigued to learn more about the organisation. Citizens UK appears to operate on a membership model, but membership is only for institutions. How does that work? We came to this meeting as individuals, and I for one am not a member of any of the suggested groups who were invited to become members.

One further question: how is this operation funded? The website is pretty slick, with pictures of citizens happily interacting, and the event had refreshments and lots of clever people presenting it. Are they all volunteers? It turns out this operation, or at least much of it, is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, which would explain how the group can have 16 local organisations (Cambridge is just one).

Finding out more

Looking for “Weaving Trust” I came across a report by Amanda Tatersall, based at the University of Sydney, “a globally recognised social change researcher and community organiser”. The project has for its goals three strategic aims:

1.      Develop leaders

2.      Strengthen institutions

3.      Make change

This sound alarming! It sounded to me when I read it much like early Fascist groups in Italy or Germany. Why develop leaders when we were carrying out an exercise in communication?

I’m happy to be corrected about any of the above, but I can’t help feeling that if I come away after two hours having to look up what this initiative is all about, perhaps others will have the same response. 

Visiting Rye with Pevsner

 

It’s always a pleasure to look at towns with Pevsner (The Buildings of England) in hand. For this trip, I used the original edition of Sussex, dating back to 1965. Today, of course, the series has greatly expanded and the feel of Pevsner has been greatly diluted. I don’t have the latest volume of Sussex for comparison, but I would guess that the text is at least 50% longer, and the text coverage much more comprehensive. But it is not only that the later editions have more text. As Pevsner explains in the Foreword, he only did East Sussex, while Ian Nairn wrote West Sussex, which enables the reader to compare the two approaches. In an interesting comment, Pevsner writes: “Mr Nairn has a greater sensibility to landscape and townscapes than I have, and he writes better than I could ever hope to write. On the other hand, those who want something a little more cataloguey and are fervently interested in mouldings and such-like details, may find my descriptions more to their liking.”

 

Well, Pevsner covers the Rye in around 1,400 words (three and a half pages). This is amazingly concise. The perambulation of the town omits many buildings that in the later edition would certainly have a mention, not just the more recent buildings. Most intriguing is where Pevsner pauses, to see the workings of his mind when he spots something that interests him. Generally, Rye is covered with simple brief mentions, although he notices the widespread Rye checkerboard pattern of red and black bricks. He only really pays attention to three buildings in the whole town, apart from the church: the Town Hall, the old Grammar School, and the Old Hospital.

While for the most part he records dates and styles of buildings, no doubt following the working notes prepared from him by his dutiful, but not necessarily inspired, assistants in advance of the perambulation, for these three buildings he seems to come to life. It is certainly dating and detail that fascinates him.

The Old Grammar School

For the Old Grammar School, he is intrigued by the use of brick for giant pilasters and Dutch gables. He immediately runs through a checklist of early uses of each motif, and satisfies himself that here they are “remarkably early”. For the church, as usual, the focus is on dating as well. The transepts are “still essentially Norman”. In the South transept (sorry, S transept) “slightly post-Norman (dogtooth) bits have been reset.” It feels almost as if he was too frightened to relax from his academic dates and styles focus to let go and respond to the surroundings – for pretty much everything else in Rye, we get just the  date and a few words about notable features.

You cannot help feeling that the essence of  Rye hasn’t been captured. Rye, which was full of visitors on the Friday and Saturday we visited, is one of the great exemplars of a rural English town; but you feel somehow that Pevsner would never have lived there; not enough issues of dating and precedence to engage him fully. 

In contrast, Pevsner shows almost no interest in Lamb House, one of the largest buildings in the town (“clearly of the early C18 with its panelled parapet and its angle pilaster strips”). Of course, even if the building is unmemorable, the situation is astonishing. The view from the living room facing the church is right along West Street; you could not hope to have a more central location in the old town. You can’t help feeling this must have had an effect on Henry James’ writing. Why otherwise seek out this obscure rural location and live there for 19 years? 

Pevsner’s introduction is sketchy and raises as many questions as it answers: “The E part of the town has largely disappeared, owing to the action of the sea”, yet the town “started to diminish in the second half of the C16, when the harbour silted up”. For him, the two themes of Rye are the brick, already mentioned, and “the open view to the plain”. Actually, for a hill town, there is not much of a view to the plain. There will be a view from most of the private gardens facing S or W, but the only large-scale public view in Rye is to the E. For example, I was not able to make out Camber Castle, about a mile to the W, when looking from the old town.

In contrast, Nairn is highly aware of the surroundings, whether positive (“Up Waltham … a wonderful group in a download valley … from the S, church, farm and barns look like a monogram in flint”) or negative: “Southwick … A bit of everything and not quite anything … The genus loci seems to have gone on strike, or to have been locked out.” As the man himself states, Pevsner feels his primary role is to establish those dates: which giant order of pilasters came first, Rye, Kew, or Blickling? And I have to say, I’m not really that bothered. I'd be more interested to know what Rye represents to all those day trippers.  

 

Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986)

 

Bertha Wegmann, The Artist's Sister, 1882

Top marks to Rybczynski for choosing such a great topic: “home” is something we all think we know, and take for granted, but which doesn’t quite correspond with anything we learn in our academic studies. Nobody studies “home”. He describes it as follows: ““This book is an attempt … to discover … the meaning of comfort” [p vii], and indeed he does (on the very last page) define the term, but his book achieves more than that. In the course of describing how architecture and interiors moved towards our present-day ideas of comfort, it is at the same time a very revealing depiction of the architectural profession, based on Rybczynski’s own experience, which is perhaps what makes his books so readable: he is honest enough to admit when his experience clashes with his reading. When Rybczynski designed houses for clients, “I found that the architectural ideals I had been taught in school frequently disregarded – if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of comfort.”

So this book isn’t just about home, or comfort; it’s about architects and their changing relationship, and sometimes actual discomfort, with the term “comfort”. It is the story of how architects followed style at the expense of comfort and technology, at some point in the C19, and as a result, have had only a subordinate role ever since, for many aspects of home design, specifically, kitchens and bathrooms. When we have a kitchen extension, the architect might design it, but we hire a kitchen designer to plan the layout. Why this split?  Because we don’t believe the architect has comfort as the main goal.

In this account, Le Corbusier represents a perhaps depressing milestone in that strange divergence: the moment when the architect fails to respond to people and their preference for such things as kitchen and bathroom design, or to the intelligent use of technology. By the C20, Le Corbusier could design a house as a “machine for living”, yet turn his back on the great comfort-based innovations, and way of thinking, described by R in his historical chapters.

Criticisms

I loved Rybczynski’s book, but it has some faults. Inevitably, tackling an inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging subject such as comfort would be difficult to do with primary sources.

I would feel happier about Rybczynski’s text if he provided better citations, and better illustrations. For example, he claims (ch4 p84) that the first sloping-backed chairs since ancient Greece appeared during the reign of Louis XV. It should be possible to provide pictures, in fact, a book of this kind cries out for illustrations.  

I don’t believe that comfort appeared first in C16 Netherlands – there are plenty of examples of comfort in earlier Renaissance paintings, even if they were not primarily studies of interiors. The birth of the Virgin, for example, is a common subject for depicting a domestic interior.

Hans Fries, Birth of the Virgin, 1512

Much of the book is a historical survey of interior design as it is affected by architectural styles. We begin with medieval times. As we move through history, he gives us  a potted history of major movements, which are sometimes only tenuously related to comfort. As he acknowledges, the “Georgian style” (for want of a better word) was fixed in the C19 and remains the style of comfort to the present day. Although he makes the fundamental split between comfort and style, I think he should have concentrated on that topic. For example, he makes a  clear and interesting distinction between French and English styles: the former remained formal, and based around the court, while English style was less formal and more practical (“The preference for country homes … resulted in a style of living that was much more relaxed than its French counterpart, and that eventually produced a different domestic ideal”. [p106, ch 5]. But having made this distinction, Rybczynski then continues to focus on the fashionable at the expense of comfort, by describing C20 styles that look to me anything but comfortable, such as Art Deco (although he later valiantly claims that Art Deco was more human-centred than subsequent styles such as minimalism, which wouldn’t be difficult). As an architect and architectural historian, Rybczynski tries to show some solidarity with architects, even doing his best to defend Le Corbusier, but it’s cleaer from the author’s own description that C19 architects, by concentrating on the visual, lost the opportunity to take responsibility for interior design, and never regained it. Worse, they showed little interest in technology and the infrastructure of buildings. If we want evidence of modern architects rejecting comfort, we have only to browse the many depressing accounts by family members growing up in their father’s (inhuman and impractical) architectural statement, such as Elizabeth Garber’s Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (2018).

 

The present day

To complete R’s fascinating journey through architectural history from the point of view of convenience and comfort, we should move to the present day. The modern home really is a “machine for living in”, even if Le C would have been dismayed at our lack of attention to style. More important than a specific style, we expect all devices in the home to be linked, and to respond to our controls. We want to be able to play music and video from our phone to the TV. We want to charge our electric car, and to be able to control domestic appliances, such as dishwashers and blinds, with our phone. We want the home to be intelligent enough to transfer energy back to the grid when the domestic generator (from solar power or heat pumps) has a surplus above the house’s own requirement. If we want advice on all of this, do we go to an architect? I don’t think so. Architects lost touch with technology over 150 years ago. Yet the joined-up house would be central to what we today define as comfort. And comfort, in the broad sense that Rybczynski defines it, as the tailored and appropriate use of technology, has led to the growth of the design and build movement, with an architect frequently not even involved in the project. Visit any recent hotel or hospital building: these are spaces where function is far more important than any style. They do not look like designed spaces, even though they are highly functional.

Oh, and, in case you are wondering, what exactly is comfort? Rybczynski defines it as “a cultural artifice” involving “convenience, efficiency, domesticity, ease, privacy, intimacy” – whatever environment provides a feeling of well-being, in other words.