Long life
Home-made preserves
Nigel Nicolson
Ihave never met Jeffrey Bernard, but having been his neighbour in these columns for the past two years, I would like to send him greetings and sympathy. This get-well column is not about his amputation, but about something that might cheer him up, or if not him, me: the extraordinary beauty of England 200 years ago and how we must preserve what remains of it.
It was the last episode of Middlemarch that set me on this trail. The BBC's bril- liant adaptation of the novel only erred in its romanticising of the scene. George
Eliot's story was set in Coventry at the time of the Reform Act of 1832 when the indus- trial revolution was already corroding a mainly half-timbered town. In the .film we were transferred to Stamford in Lin- colnshire in about 1760, a lovely town of stone Georgian buildings, and the Casaubons were given the most beautiful country house in England, Brympton d'Evercy in Somerset. This was all very fine, but it was a softening of the original. Another example was the final scene when Dorothea and Ladislaw met to confess their love for each other. In the book they were indoors while a violent storm raged outside: 'There came a vivid flash of light- ning which lit each of them up for the other.' In the film they meet in a sunlit gar- den.
It is symptomatic of our idealisation of the past. The late 18th century represents for us all that was loveliest about our coun- try, and so it makes a more suitable setting for a love story than the shoddy period that succeeded it. Of course in recollection we glamorise it. It was also the period of extreme poverty, Botany Bay, cholera and the lash. But is undeniable that England was more beautiful than at any other time. It was still largely rural, and in small towns like Stamford the neatness of the houses and the dignity of the municipal buildings expressed a taste that we lost somewhere about the time of the Reform Act. They couldn't fashion a cottage chair or a pewter coffee-pot without making it an object of utility and grace, and because thousands of craftsmen simultaneously were creating splendid objects for the few that could afford them, the appreciation and practice of the arts was more widespread than at any other time in our history.
Last week's Antiques Fair at Olympia, with an excellent stand devoted to Jane Austen, was an illustration of this. The loveliest objects were of her period. When one left the halls for the Hammersmith Road, the contrast was shocking. Only the big London buses were objects of delight. The age when urban rebuilding was most extensive coincided with extreme deca- dence in taste. The contamination spread to the whole of Europe. One must go to Savannah in Georgia to see how well it could still be done.
Two hundred years ago it would never have occurred to a man to paint his front door pink when all the others in the row were dark green. Now the licence to do what you wish with what you own has gone too far, and the Government rightly intends to introduce in conservation areas stricter rules to preserve the character of domestic buildings surviving from a more gracious age. Let there be a Council of Civic Design to match its Industrial counterpart, a changing exhibition of good and bad. We cannot do much with Hammersmith Road, but we can protect Stamford from architec- tural blight and save the Haworth moors from battalions of windmills.
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