ABSTRACT
Then, suddenly, briefly-from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, we could say-the lamp of architecture flared up and helped illumine the world of general culture itself enjoying something of a renaissance during and after the Second World War. A distinguished cohort of critics of whom any nation would be proud flourished on the airwaves and in the papers as well as between hardcovers: both professionals like Nikolaus Pevsner, J.M.Richards and John Summerson, and amateurs such as Osbert Lancaster, Sacheverell Sitwell and John Betjeman. All spread the gospel of historic architecture to an ever-growing audience, but the professionals-feeling more responsibility to the present vitality of their craft-strove also to advertise (to a degree, even to invent) the British modern. This latter enterprise proved a failure. Today’s architectural consciousness, greatly heightened from prewar levels, is historic but not modern. Modern architecture did not tread the path urged upon it by the critics, and the path it did take diverged so far from the public’s needs and tastes that it seems now to have wandered into oblivion.
