ABSTRACT
The definitive history that lends a satisfying narrative and rationale to those changes in British architecture marking the period between the Late Victorian, the Edwardian, and the inter-war years up to the 1951 Festival of Britain has yet to be written. The usual emphasis is upon cultural fractures rather than insidious continuities and, with the hindsight we now enjoy, it is perhaps those continuities that mock the constant references to Modernistic change. Certainly there was remarkable and radical change, but the Post-Modern movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, for example, manifest an indignant outburst of residual sentiment that mixed a contemporary dynamic with what many saw as some unpleasant body prompted to emerge from a submarine condition. And that sentiment continues to occasionally re-emerge. A building built in Piccadilly, adjacent to Emberton’s Simpson building of 1935 and opposite Shaw’s strident hotel frontage of 1905, was erected in 2007 as strangulated witness to the fact that PoMo and the body of sentiment informing it lives on, but with little semblance of the wit and inventiveness of 6KDZ-RDVV%HOFKHU/XW\HQV%XUQHW*UHHQHWDO
Below: the building Maxwell Fry, as a young voice of Modernism, deemed to be “vulgar and childish, displaying all the worst sentimentalities of uncultured commercialism.”
