Building Greater Britain

Building Greater Britain Kristina Jõekalda Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn A review of G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c. 1885-1920, New Haven, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, 2022. N owadays, scholars of architectural history rarely write purely stylistic histories, and this account of the all-continents-wide spread of so-called Edwardian Baroque in the age of empire (ca. 1875-1915) is by no means a formal history of the style. Rather, Edwardian Baroque is seen as the architectural language of British nationalism, one that “was responsible for building ... an enduring vision of a Greater British world, both physically and mythically.” Bremner masterfully shows how Edwardian Baroque, as an effort to link British communities across the world together in this era of New Imperialism, “was both a truly global phenomenon, and one that had imperial ambitions at ... its heart”—and the architects were well aware of them. The book looks at its most representative buildings in the major cities of England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, although the style itself was employed more extensively both geographically and typologically. Bremner leaves cultural buildings aside, chiefly discussing “the hard displays of imperial power:” town halls, municipal or post offices, law courts, railway stations, telegraph receiving centres, the design of which sometimes included details as minute as the suits of clerks working in them. As rightly pointed out, courts in particular “held an important niche position in projecting the supposed moral right of Britain to rule nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface, and a fifth of its population.” As a revival style that was then named “English Renaissance” or “Grand Manner” (or even “Wrenaissance”), the Edwardian Baroque revisited 17thcentury architecture of the heroified Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones, those “most English of English architects.” The term “Edwardian Baroque” gradually entered serious scholarship in 1950s, but—despite its vast grasp in the physical space—the style remains little studied to date. This is the first attempt to research Edwardian Baroque in its global socio-political context. abe Journal 24 | 2024 Kristina Jõekalda 238 | And an Australia-born scholar teaching in Scotland, with decades of research on the British empire and Victorian cultural politics to his credit, is an excellent candidate for such a task. King Edward VII ruled for nine years, but the buildings discussed actually date from the 1880s to 1920s, thus encompassing also the late Victorian era and the early reign of George V. In the colonies, Edwardian Baroque really took off only in the early 20th century, owing in part to the increasing mobility of architects, and also to the professional press. To address its complexities, Bremner offers a cultural history of the style, devoting long sections to reception and historiography. The richly illustrated book indeed shows not only buildings and plans, but also tourist booklets, posters, newspaper clippings, maps, and paintings, all of which make the history around the buildings come alive. As for the narrative sequence, the book starts with two background chapters about stylistic revival and empire building. It then comes to the Dominions not one by one, but sometimes typologically, sometimes through personal accounts or other leads. For some tastes, parts of the book might be overly focused on London, but it is a critical reading, showing how the fear of lagging behind its other major cities shaped the capital of the empire—and how the style does not make sense if looked at through the context of British Isles alone. The monograph opens with a grand introduction, and ends with an equally fitting conclusion. One might wonder why some of the highlights and generalizations therein were not left for the intervening chapters. For the most part, the book explores how the style has traveled from the 17th to the 19th century, but the introductory and concluding parts also discuss how it has been received or how its ideological components have been resurrected in the 21st century. Such parallels are very welcome for the reader. Discussions of the Edwardian period are connected to our day by more than security interests and the race for better communications technology. Brexit and the “post-truth” era have stirred a new wave of imperialist ideas and a quest for authentic Britishness; again, an “anxiety (if not confusion) over Britain’s place in the world” is often contemplated. Stylistically, we are not simply talking about creative remakes here, there, and everywhere of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Bremner helps us understand the complexity of defining the style also by showing how this “architecture of Greater Britishness,” often constructed of Portland stone or similar-looking alternatives, was generally thought to entail qualities like good proportions, relatively modest decoration, sobriety, muscularity, strength, dignity— rhetoric that goes back to Jones and Wren themselves. Even under Queen abe Journal 24 | 2024 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c. 1885-1920 Victoria, both British nationalism and its architecture were heavily masculine. Edwardian Baroque was thought to correspond perfectly to the Anglo-British self-image characterized by “clear, rational, and moderate thought and action” and national exceptionalism. Bremner also demonstrates, how the ideas of British cultural supremacy were not directed at the colonies alone. The cultural comparison involved in architectural histories circa 1900 were not kind to their French, German, Dutch, and Spanish counterparts, either. The “English Renaissance” was seen as superior even to Italian Renaissance at times. Not least, the national historiography relied on the idea of the superiority of English language, a point that is certainly relevant, even if that consideration causes some sections of the book to range far from the field of architecture. To further complicate the attempts at defining it, Edwardian Baroque is sometimes interchangeable with Beaux-Arts architecture. In Australia, architecture from this era is known instead as Federation style. None of the main promoters of the style—architects John Belcher, Edwin Lutyens, John Brydon, William Young, Stanley Hudson, John Campbell, John Smith Murdoch, David Ewart, etc.—in fact employed it consistently. Many of them were also scholars and ideologues, educated in the public schools of Britain, seen as the breeding ground for imperialist thinking. Most of the leading architects were Brits, while some were Scotsmen or originated from the Dominions. It was this kind of architecture that served the social function of making the government itself look trustworthy and its infrastructure efficient. None of this was self-evident, however. Instead of being viewed in terms of its formalist characteristics, Edwardian Baroque is therefore seen “as a manifestation of something residing much deeper in the collective psyche of the British nation”: as a strategic plan to deal with growing political, financial, military, scientific, and technical insecurities, aggressively readdressing Britain’s international power. It is suggested that the style’s many variations actually “created something of an aesthetic bulwark against the real and imagined imperial decline” during the age of Great Power rivalry culminating in World War I. The aftermath of the two Boer Wars is another recurring theme in the book. Its most essential contribution is indeed showing how it was this uniformity sought in crisis that led the architects of Edwardian Baroque to create symbols of the “superiority of European civilisation vis-à-vis the non-European (or non-Western) world,” trying to annihilate distance while “fabricating a unified image of global Britishness.” abe Journal 24 | 2024 | 239 Kristina Jõekalda 240 | Regional specificities were not really aimed at in the Dominions, but local plant motifs were often combined with British regal symbols in the decor, and personifications of different parts of the empire realized as sculptures or reliefs—mainly reproducing romanticized stereotypes such as “the pioneering Australian bushman, the New Zealand farmer, the Canadian mounted policeman (“Mountie”), or indeed the big-game hunter or high-veld frontiersman of southern Africa.” The book effectively demonstrates how the actual as well as visual rhetoric of Edwardian Baroque was often openly racist and chauvinist, aligned with what we now call toxic masculinity. It unveils more ideas of pure-bloodedness and “Teutonic ascendancy in the context of Aryan cultural exceptionalism” than many readers would probably associate with Britain. A truly interesting chapter is that on Herbert Baker, one of “the most imperially minded British architects,” living in South Africa. Working often with his infamous patron Cecil Rhodes, Baker was essentially “Mediterraneanizing” the Cape, conveniently excluding the indigenous population from his attempts to promote the Teutonic patriotism of the white British and Dutch (Boer) community. His massive and polemical Union Buildings in Pretoria (1910– 1913) were the biggest structure in the empire at the time. Baker went on to design the state administration buildings in New Delhi. Although, as the only biographical chapter, it might seem slightly out of place in the middle of the book, this short section allows Bremner to introduce some examples of the style in India. At other times the design was done from afar. We are shown how planning the Hong Kong Supreme Court in Victoria (by Aston Webb, E. Ingress Bell, 1898–1912) entirely from Britain led to great failings in understanding the urban significance of the site. Sometimes the finalized structures seemed out of proportion, considering their surroundings. This was instead due to the high ideals and ambitious future prospects in the minds of the clients—such as in the case of the Legislative Building in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada (by E. & W. S. Maxwell, 1908–1912). In a book full of architectural photographs of similar-looking buildings in completely different contexts, it is mostly the surrounding trees that give some sense of their geographical positioning. As for the book design, my only complaint is that the full-page cover images of chapters are sometimes reproduced twice in the space of a few pages (and in some cases their large format does not do justice to the images). Were the Edwardian Baroque buildings in city centers welcomed by the local community? According to Bremner, yes—mostly due to their perceived abe Journal 24 | 2024 G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c. 1885-1920 modernity, and the use of expensive and locally not well-known construction materials, attesting that “exotic” meant something completely different in various parts of the empire. Both architects and clients tended to see Edwardian Baroque as a safe choice, not likely to be torn down by the coming generations. Although planned as symbols of Britishness, the buildings tended to be admired even by those who were then seen as the “lesser” races, often pushed to live in designated zones of the cities. Contemporary newspapers approved of the style chosen, even if they were occasionally sharply critical of the procedure whereby the architect was appointed (instead of being chosen after a competition was organized). Next to the wide array of archival discoveries across the world, the excerpts from speeches given at ribboncutting ceremonies, and long insights into the various considerations for choosing a certain style (or agreeing to it), are especially valuable. Although carefully composed, the chapters sometimes appear to be a collection of essays rather than a monograph. Chapter 6 on memorials, for instance, opens with long sections on Alois Riegl and other notes that would have been more appropriate at the beginning of the book. Some readers may find that the author is somewhat relentless in trying to convince the reader that this architecture was heavily instrumentalized in the service of the empire, and the present. The political dimensions of Edwardian Baroque are perhaps more evident to readers today than they were twenty years ago, when research first started for the book. But it is not least thanks to Bremner’s previous work that we see it that way today. A brief insight into the “downfall” and conservation history of the style would certainly have been intriguing additions. However, it is pointless to criticize such a far-reaching book for not covering even more. It does a most excellent job at reminding us how big—and, at the same time, how small—the world is. Narrating the globe, the title of another recent book on architectural historiography,1 aptly captured that. Bremner’s review of the style talks about topics as wide as rebuilding state power, the rhetoric of political language, imperial patriotism, legal imperialism, colonial nationalism, gentlemanly capitalism, ties to freemasonry, and the architectonics of memory. In other words, architecture (and the intricate network of people around it) is used to tell the much wider story of the attitudes towards empire and nationhood—as a key to an effective imagined community. 1 See especially Alex Bremner, “An Aryan Descent: Race, Religion, and Universal Civilization in E. A. Freeman’s A History of Architecture (1849)” in Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani and Christopher Drew Armstrong (eds.), Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023, p. 277-293. abe Journal 24 | 2024 | 241