‘Piloti’ reflects the fizz of interwar architecture

Standing on the platform, I fumble with my bag as the train doors open. My copy of ‘Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39’ cartwheels out of the bag and onto the tracks. Aaagh! I turn to my fellow passengers, whose faces are a mix of shock and pity.

The book spent 24 hours there, beside a crushed Tango can, until a man with an extendable claw retrieved it.

The book was worth the wait. It’s hefty (and yes durable) – over 500 pages with wodge of back matter. Rosemary Hill, who edited the book after her husband Gavin Stamp’s death, has said that there was always another chapter to be written, and thinks it unlikely that it ever would have been truly finished.

Also known as Private Eye’s ‘Piloti’, Stamp seems to have been the first person to tackle the huge breadth and complexity of this period of architecture – and the result is an astonishing achievement. The interwar years were bookended by trauma and destruction and yet they were also fizzing with new ideas, innovations and possibilities. Stamp refers to a vast array of buildings, including war memorials to missing soldiers, mock-Tudor homes, stepped stone skyscrapers and a cigarette factory adorned with bronze Egyptian cats.

Unusually for an architectural history book, it argues that the period had no definitive style. It is not a simple story of Art Deco domination with a smattering of modernism. Stamp has identified nine broader categories to structure the book – Armistice, The Grand Manner, Swedish Grace, Brave New World, Tutankhamun, Merrie England, New Georgians, Modern Gothic and The Shape of Things to Come. However, as the introduction is keen to stress, these trends, happenings and influences formed ‘more of a spectrum’ than ‘polarized categories’. Buildings sprang from shared contexts and were often conceived following, alongside or in spite of each other.

Stamp revels in the indistinct nature of many of the structures he covers. He eloquently maps out connections, contradictions and hybridisations. The iconic K2 phone box, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the mid-1920s, he dissects into its classical, Soanian and Georgian inspired elements – before reflecting that it also housed modern technology and was mass produced. Similarly, he highlights how curious it was that Elizabeth Scott’s Northern European-inspired brick design for The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon was selected in the midst of a Tudor and Shakespearian revival, when suburbs of half-timbered houses were springing up across the country.

The book is a reminder that an international outlook is not a new phenomenon. Following the horror of World War One, British architects looked overseas for inspiration – to the brick sophistication of northern Europe, the glamorous cinemas and skyscrapers of America and a sense of the ‘exotic’ from ancient Egypt. Factories, such as The Willans and Robinson Factory in Queensferry, Flintshire, were built with blocky, temple-like sections. Cinemas adopted giant lettering on their facades and elaborate decoration on their interiors – The Astoria in Brixton, London, was decked out like a Hollywood vision of an Italian courtyard. Municipal buildings, such as both Hornsey and Greenwich Town Halls, drew their simple, oblong clock towers from Dutch design.

Stamp meticulously charts how these influences permeated architectural discourses; through study trips, coverage in the architectural press, connections between university professors, tracking who was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal and of course which architects emigrated to Britain.

The book also details extraordinary British projects built overseas. Most notably, the work of The Imperial War Graves Commission which was tasked with constructing memorials and cemeteries to commemorate fallen and missing soldiers. Over 900 cemeteries were built in France and Belgium alone, and others in locations as distant as Iraq and South Africa. The scale and symbolism of the project is almost unfathomable.

The architecture of the British empire is also explored. However, these buildings are mainly described within architectural parameters, rarely exploring their colonial and political contexts. There is an ‘old school’ feel to this writing, which closely details form and style and connects buildings to other buildings, rather than to wider issues. It’s an approach which is sustained throughout the book – the growing fascism in the mid-1930s preceding WW2 is only touched upon. That’s not to say that there isn’t value and craft to a form-focused history, but there's certainly opportunity for further research and discussion.

The is a highly referential book that would benefit from more photographs. Points can be missed if you’re not immediately familiar with a building or the flow of the text interrupted by repeated Google-ing. That said, most spreads include an image and there are clusters of colour plates – and it would be a push to extend the already lengthy page count.

As the book was never finished, it has no conclusion. Fittingly, Rosemary Hill fought to keep the term ‘definitive history’ out of the title. ‘Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39’ is expansive, informative and groundbreaking in its scope. However, it is also knowingly and necessarily partial. It reveals how architects responded to new challenges among social upheaval, technological innovations and an international melting pot of influences and opportunity. 

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39, by Gavin Stamp, is published by Profile Books, 2024