Survey of Southwark
Saviour and Christ Church, Southwark. (The County Hall. 3os.)
THE first feeling aroused by this volume must necessarily be one of pleasurable anticipation. The detailed Survey of London issued conjointly by the L.C.C. and the London Survey Committee has already done so much valuable work to elucidate and record the history of London's development, and has set and maintained so high a standard of scholarship and book-production alike that we naturally turn with eagerness to see what its latest publication has in store for us, particularly as it crosses the river for the first time, and concerns itself with a district on the Surrey side. Southwark Cathedral, Guy's Hospital, the territories of the Bishops of Win- chester and the dubious delights of the Elizabethan Bankside supply a welcome variety of subjects for consideration, so we know before- hand that the Committee concerned has, on this occasion, a particu- larly rich field for its labours.
How rich, however, we have hardly appreciated until we turn the leaves at i andom and come upon drawing after drawing of graceful eighteenth-century house-fronts, fanlights, door-heads and panelling that introduce us to a Southwark only too easily forgotten. The streets that sprang up, in the latter half of that century, on the old open tenter-grounds have a character. of their own, with their tall first-floor windows, wrought-iron balconies and lamp-brackets, and their elegance of indoor wood and plaster-work. One does not expect to find in Union Street such a feature as the great double doors on the first floor of Nos 59-61, illustrated on pl. 63, while the preceding plate preserves a record of the stately house in the same street once inhabited by George Gwilt, the architect and antiquary, but demolished at the end of the nineteenth century.
Turning to study the book in detail, the reader may well experi- ence a certain disappointment. On the very first page he is dis- concertingly confronted with a small, dark drawing of a late fifteenth-century jug which has apparently added a thousand years or more to its age and presents itself boldly as a " Roman vessel from Park Street." Roman Southwark is mentioned and dismissed in a single paragraph, but the prefatory list of figures in the text states that the jug was found in 1786, and that the illustration is " from a drawing by George Gwilt in the Council's. collection." The antiquaries of 1786 may have worked at times on the omne ignotum pro Romano principle, but the study of ceramics has made some progress since their day, and one would expect the archaeo- logists of the Council to have kept up with it.
A few pages later comes another shock. Where the reader might justifiably expect an account of the Cathedral Church, the principal ecclesiastical monument of the two parishes under review, he is confronted instead with the bland announcement that " a detailed survey of the church of St. Saviour's has not been included in this volume, partly because it would make the book too bulky and partly because a number of books have been written on it, whereas the topography and architecture of the rest of the district haye been much less adequately dealt with," and a footnote cites some histories of the CathedraLpublished in 1818, 1904 and 1905. The reasons alleged are naive rather than convincing. This book is, or purports to be, the official survey of the district and the buildings in it, and the compilers accordingly are hardly entitled to pass over an important item and salve their consciences with the re- flection that someone else did the work quite adequately between forty and fifty years ago. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments dealt successfully with the problem of a disproportion- ately important building, in the case of Westminster Abbey, by devoting one volume deliberately to West London (excluding the Abbey) and a separate one to the Abbey itself, and it is to be hoped that the Council may find some such means of repairing a serious and unjustifiable omission.
It is pleasant to see that much of the subsequent work, particularly the detailed descriptions and measured drawings, comes up to the standard set by the earlier volumes in the series, but there are one or two unhappy innovations in the matter of illustration. The plates, for instance, instead of being grouped together at the end for easy reference, are scattered in bunches here and there about the book, which makes an individual plate-number harder to find, without bringing it noticeably nearer to its appropriate letterpress. It may be queried, too, whether the Council has been quite wise in supplementing the photographs and measured drawings with a number of rather depressing little sketches which apparently try, to make up in heaviness of shadow for a chronic weakness of line, and there is no doubt that the present thin-drawn armorial illustra- tions in the margin fall far short of the fine work for which the Council used to depend on the late Rev. E. E. Dorling. It would be a pity to think that his high standard was to be so easily
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