Ghastly Good Taste: Or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture

by John Betjeman

'My own interest started in seeking out what was old. When the guide told me that this was the bed in which Queen Elizabeth slept, I believed him. When owners of country cottages in Suffolk told me their cottage was a thousand years old, I believed them too. I thought that this or that church was the smallest in England, and that secret passages ran under ruined monasteries, so that monks could get to the nearest convent without being seen. The older anything was the lovelier I thought it'. Most famous for his poetry, John Betjeman was also passionate about architecture, 'preferring all centuries to my own'. In his first prose work, "Ghastly Good Taste" (1933), he vigorously defends his love of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, considered deeply unfashionable at the time. With the savage humour of his famous satire "Slough", he attacks notions of Modernism and (at the other extreme) unthinking antiquarianism.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1933

Reviews

[Anthony Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

A 1970s reprint of Betjeman’s 1933 original. He starts it with a new Introduction – An Aesthete’s Apologia - and his opening sentences are ‘I wrote this thirty-eight years ago. I was twenty-six, in love, and about to be married. When Anthony Blond said he would like to reprint it, I thought I had better read it, and he kindly sent me a copy. I was appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds.’

I rather felt the same. I also for the most part found it hard to follow and am pretty sure that Betjeman’s capacity for presenting a coherent argument was not, certainly in 1933, well developed. He is often far more interested in a flamboyant declaration of what he considers beautiful while simultaneously failing to notice that a reader might misunderstand his tone, and consider him to be lacerating the very same people or buildings that he is lauding. A consummate namedropping as a display of learning came across to me as mere dilettantism. His brain is full of stuff by which he is energised and excited, but it has not had time to process it.

I am not remotely clear about what I am to make of a paragraph like this, for example: -

“Only when ‘architecture’ was considered something to stick on to a building afterwards to make it ‘showy’ or upper class, were the mistakes made. Heaven knows there were hundreds of such mistakes. But they were good, vulgar mistakes, like a dropped ‘h’. I would any day prefer an ornate sham-marble Victorian mantle to a ‘refeened’ pseudo-Queen Anne effort designed by some pupil of an architectural school today.”

Why? Are they not equally ‘vulgar’? Was a sham-marble Victorian mantle not as pretentious as a ‘showy’ ‘pseudo-Queen Anne effort’?

Well, maybe I wasn’t reading carefully enough to catch Betjeman’s tone, but there again, maybe he wasn’t writing lucidly enough for me to catch it.

[J Grimsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual with John Betjeman his impish humour and firmly stated views are a pleasure to read. You may not agree with all he says but his campaigns and ideas have helped set or ameliorate the trends of architecture in this country for years. The book as you would expect is well written and quirky and does not take itself completely seriously.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best dry humour to be found on the subject. Classic.

[Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only knew of Betjeman as a poet so I picked up this book quite by accident. These are excellent and witty essays on his other specialty: architecture.