Filthy streets lined with charity shops, pound shops, and vaping shops. Rubbish strewn across the walkways. Half-built or half-collapsed buildings covered in scaffolding. Fast-food joints on every corner, their logos printed on the litter that blows down the road. Very few English folk around, though a few of them lie homeless on the pavement. Many languages yelled aggressively from hidden allies. A vision of a third-world town. Raise your eyes a little above the shop fronts, however, and you will see glorious Restorationist Romanesque, sumptuous Regency facades, and medievalist romanticism expressed in high Victorian gothic. This is the town of Northampton, the capital of the ‘Rose of the Shires,’ as Northamptonshire is known. Northampton is like many once magnificent English towns in that it has been wholly left to deteriorate into a maze of rubble that is inhospitable to the indigenous population of these isles.
One need only look at Godwin’s Guildhall, an astonishing example of Ruskinian gothic in the centre of Northampton, to have some idea of the pride that historic county towns like this one formerly possessed. In the centre of Northampton is a remarkable example of Restorationist ecclesiastical architecture: All Saints’ Church dominates the main square (happily, Northamptonshire was always a hotbed of cavalier loyalism), for which King Charles II gave a thousand tons of timber for its completion—earning himself a rather fine statue atop the church’s narthex. But today, part of that church has been turned into a café, which is generally quite full while the nave remains largely unvisited. Northampton’s once splendid square, which is now surrounded by American fast-food establishments and kebab bars, is further spoiled by scattered rubbish and broken glass.
Northampton is just one example of a well-established and ever-growing problem in the UK: our towns are being left to rot. County towns are especially bad in this regard. From Bedford to Dumfries, these once noble, historic towns are falling apart. It was decided not to renovate our ancient towns and refurbish the old buildings into affordable housing and commercial establishments offered with a preference for small, local businesses. In turn, beautiful and once illustrious buildings are now left boarded up, ultimately to erode and one day be knocked down. Consequently, Brits have abandoned such areas, and newly arrived immigrants with which our small island has been flooded decade after decade, have colonised entire towns. This process has of course completely changed the nature and character of what ought to have been the social hearts of the shires.
The damage began after World War II, when elites driven by the mania of ‘progress’ sought to smash apart those towns that had been insufficiently damaged by the Luftwaffe, and rebuilt the townscapes with endless, colossal, concrete boxes coated in warped, bluish glass. Such monstrous labyrinths that they created are in fact the most edifying examples, given that many towns—especially England’s old seaside towns—were just abandoned altogether without any rebuilding taking place. Those eroding towns and their once beautiful Edwardian buildings have been given over mainly as social housing for new arrivals from North Africa and other places, paid for of course by the taxpayer. In every town across the UK, streets are now lined with vaping shops and Turkish barbers, which are widely believed to be fronts for money laundering operations.
Historically, the city or large town was really a creation of the merchant class, the bourgeoisie who derived the name of their social class from the borough of the city, that suburban sphere between the countryside and the city square where the market could be found. From the end of the Great Migration period in the 10th century to the mid-Renaissance period in the 16th century, the merchant class comprised a tiny subsect of any given society, functioning as the mediators of exchange for goods, nearly all of which were made in the countryside, by rural communities.
The city, then, was economically contiguous with the countryside, and it was also physically contiguous with the countryside. One moved in stages from the rural landscape into the city: from the fields into the borough, from the borough into the square. The city square would of course be dominated by the cathedral spire or tower, indicating the rustic origins of urban life, namely in the communities of farming monks and canons around which tenant farmers and free peasants gathered, and to whom traders then flocked to provide their services.
Today, this connaturality and contiguity of the city with the countryside has almost entirely gone, across much if not all of Europe. The modern town is not a community of communities—boroughs, new towns, old towns, and market squares—but a monstrous metropolis populated by isolated individuals, often very recent arrivals, most of whom do not even know their next-door neighbours. Modern cities are grey islands separated by oceans of overly industrialised countryside. That countryside is itself largely visible only from the motorways that join up those urban islands, inhuman speedways which are a scourge both to wildlife and our own respiration. The modern city has little if any connection with the rural communities outside its concrete corridors, belonging as it does to an international economy driven by a chiefly digitalised global industry.
The slow divorce of city and countryside has in large part been the effect of Europe’s radical technological transformation. This transformation, which began to accelerate during the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, sped up even more dramatically in the post-war decades of the 20th century. Imposed on us in these decades was the architecture that conveyed this divorce of landscape and townscape. What remained after World War II of the old cities of Europe that had grown up organically over the centuries was destroyed by progressivist ideologues. Urban populations residing in freshly bulldozed cities, from the 1960s to the ’80s, were forced by progressivist hubris to undergo the experiments of architectural modernism, Bauhaus, Brutalism, and then the postmodernism initiated by Le Corbusier (whose ambition to destroy the whole of Paris was thankfully never realised).
These architectural experiments were exported, either wholesale or in part, to every city in the world. Now, in England, when you drive from the rolling fields and dotted woodlands of what’s left of our ancient countryside into London, Manchester, Coventry or any other city, you feel as if you have been beamed up by some UFO of a hostile alien race and relocated to a dystopian world many galaxies away, where the extra-terrestrial beings must be utterly different from us, for no human could possibly be happy dwelling in such a place.
We are accustomed to thinking that it was ever thus, and that there has always been a gulf between urban and rural life. The rustic English farmhouse and the inner-city Georgian terrace, however, shared certain forms and principles of an architectural vernacular, and they emerged from a common culture and a national way of life. It is very difficult for the modern mind to grasp that the urban-rural dichotomy is one that belongs almost wholly to modernity.
Now, Britain’s ancient towns have become places impossible to inhabit, and this has led to a catastrophe for the British countryside. The rural landscape of these isles is famous throughout the world both for its variety and its beauty. But farmers, Britain’s most underappreciated community, are presently evermore pressured due to economic deprivation to sell off their land to developers. Currently, across much of the south in particular and of Britain in general, great stretches of our once treasured countryside are being built over with cheap housing from prefab materials. These housing estates are not designed to be places of settling, but property-ladder complexes, where people can buy their first properties with a view soon to moving on. Hence, they are not equipped with a main green for picnics and cricket, a post office, a pub, a hall, a church, or any of the other basic local institutions that make a British locality a place of settlement. Rather than focusing on the abandoned towns and renovating them, those towns are left to erode while the rural landscape is rapidly becoming marred by bad and thoughtless urban build-up.
King Charles, as Prince of Wales, decades ago sounded the alarm and called for a totally different approach to building to that which had infected the country in the post-war era. He waged a heroic campaign against the destructive barbarism of architectural elites and called for planners to use local materials and draw from a received tradition of building while using modern technology to work efficiently and safely.
Charles was roundly mocked then, as often he is now, and yet he has been entirely vindicated. Poundbury, in Dorset, which Charles supported and patronised from the beginning, was and is a huge success—whilst the ancient towns on which modernist architects were allowed to experiment are now wholly unloved. In his brilliant A Vision of Britain, which he published in 1989, Charles advanced ten very general architectural principles on which he thought future building in Britain should be based. But his call was derided and then neglected by the talentless progressives that dominated the architectural world.
Today, however, it is precisely Charles’s principles that developers try to apply, though few would admit that he was right all along. They’ve realised that it is those very principles that make their properties more desirable and hence more marketable. Developers are not very good at applying those principles, but at least they are now trying: across the country they are opting for neo-Georgian facades with local stone veneers and bay windows, and they’re moving away from the modernist boxes into which they tried to herd people decades ago. Unfortunately, rather than applying the principles to the renovation of old towns, developers are building all over the countryside, and thus irreversibly wrecking the landscape.
Had this country had a conservative government for the past 13 years, its government would have done everything in its power to conserve the historic towns as well as conserve its celebrated rural landscape. It would have practised conservative paternalism and protectionism to make the towns and cities affordable for new housing, prioritising the refurbishment of old buildings, and it would have adopted such protectionism to privilege the purchase of property by family businesses that produce or sell locally sourced goods.
One of the many tragedies of living in modern Britain today is that of watching its ancient towns and cities corrode, whilst they are being colonised by a new nondescript, nebulous, global human being with no piety towards a particular place—at least, certainly not towards the town, county, and nation in which he dwells. And indeed, this is why our elites do not care about the problem I raise herein. The nobleman and the peasant always had more in common with each other than either did with the middle-class person, as the former were people of somewhere and the latter was a person of anywhere—to use David Goodhart’s now famous terminology. So too, today’s powerholders are people of anywhere and hence have far more in common with the people of nowhere who have colonised every town in Britain, than they do with the people of somewhere whom ordinary Brits used to be and largely still are. That is why the problem I raise is not treated as serious by today’s powerholders: they do not see it as a problem at all. And as we are condemned to watch our urban centres decay—a decomposition of once magnificent and often ancient townscapes and cityscapes that formerly punctuated the green horizon with medieval towers and Victorian spires—we should be furious at the fact that the desecration of our land needn’t ever have happened.
