Lynne Walker: Learning from the Thesis
To mark her forthcoming appearance at this year’s Awards Ceremony, our Annual Lecturer Dr Lynne Walker met with Aymee Thorne Clarke to discuss her 1978 thesis on Arts & Crafts architect and scholar E.S. Prior, the influence of her supervisor Nikolaus Pevsner, and re-occurring subjects in contemporary architectural culture.
Could you say a little about your early career and what lead you to the subject of your thesis?
Lynne Walker at St Mary Brookfield, London (1869–75) by William Butterfield, October 2020.
As an art history undergraduate in the US, my initial studies were devoted to the history of painting and sculpture, I found architecture dry and rather heavy-going. However, reading Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design was an epiphany and my allegiance from then on was to architecture. After completing my degree and moving to London, post-graduate work seemed a natural step. I applied to the History of Art Department at Birkbeck to do a PhD in architectural history on a proposed but unspecified 19th-century topic. Peter Murray, who was head of department, conveyed his regrets that there was no one available to supervise this area, but he arranged for me to meet the Emeritus Professor, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.
Disappointment turned to elation! The Arts & Crafts Movement was very much a Pevsnerian topic, and he called for the development of Victorian architectural history through more research on individual architects. A sign of the times, it produced theses including James Brooks, James Knowles, W.R. Lethaby, and G.G. Scott, Jr. Pevsner and I went through a list of possibilities agreeing on the Arts & Crafts architect and scholar, E.S. Prior. Pevsner knew that Margaret Richardson had secured an archive of Prior’s drawings and photographs for the RIBA and he had the contact details of a close family member. Both became the basis of my research. He sent me off to go through the RIBA Library and Drawings Collection with the parting advice ‘Read the will; find out who got the money!’
What was your experience of being supervised by Pevsner?
Pevsner was not only a model of academic engagement, prolific production and integrity but an accessible, conscientious supervisor, eagle-eyed to content, style and language. He scrutinized every word I wrote. Before supervisions, which occurred after each chapter was drafted, a letter typed on small half sheets of stationery would be sent to highlight general areas for discussion with other brief remarks and corrections noted on the script in a spidery hand. At the end of this well-practiced process, the whole thesis was re-read, reviewed and passed. There was however never any instruction per se. Independence of critical thought and action were inculcated through expectation. A bibliography, provisional list of Prior’s work and outline were not requested but, in due course, produced, eliciting the gentle comment, ‘That was what I had hoped’.
The breadth of references and media in the thesis is quite striking, especially without the accessibility of online catalogues. Could you describe your research methodology?
Home Place (also called Voewood), Kelling, near Holt, Norfolk (1903–05) by E.S. Prior (architect) and Randall Wells (clerk of works). Credit: Martin Godfrey Cook: Edward Prior: Arts and Crafts Architect, 2015.
My experience of having Pevsner as a supervisor has had a profound and lasting effect. As a student, I was given enormous freedom to follow my own interests and methods without prescription. Archival research and its interrogation were the focus, but other key approaches had a long-lasting influence. The interdisciplinary approach of the thesis employed social history in relation to architectural history (as initiated by Mark Girouard), and this was foregrounded in my later work, for example, on suffrage and the home. Like other historians, I subsequently drew on a wide range of disciplines, such as art and design history, philosophy, sociology and social geography. Closely related was an exploration of the role of the client in architectural production which became important for understanding and depicting the central part played by women patron-builders (or in Peter Thornton phrase ‘client-architects’) before the professionalization of architectural practice.
Oral history was also an important tool, which became an effective technique applied to different topics throughout my research. When writing the thesis, it was still possible to interview Prior’s daughter, niece and grandson and to hear from the vicar of a Prior church about the infamous structural issues that were encountered in its construction. Outside existing printed archives, the sculptor, Lawrence Bradshaw, was able to give a unique, incisive verbal description of Randall Wells, a Prior collaborator on his two best known buildings, Home Place (also called Voewood) and Roker Church. In my work, the interview became a highly useful way to research inter-war women architects, who were not represented in archival collections; whereas, interviews provided an essential means for getting under the skin of contemporary women practitioners.
One final observation here should be about the implications of the thesis in terms of conservation. It authorized my advocacy for defending Prior’s buildings from demolition or spoilation, a job that fell to me.
As you suggest in the thesis, Prior’s scholarship was one of his greatest contributions, should more practising architects write about architecture?
I would welcome a return to the 19th-century model of the architect-historian, such as Prior, Lethaby and Blomfield, and encourage practising architects to write about architecture, other than their own. Architects have a different perspective and valuable experience of buildings both contemporary and historical than architectural historians. In the recent past, we have the example of a practising architect, Roderick Gradidge, who took a leading role in challenging Pevsner’s dominance by promoting the alternative modern tradition that moved away from a single, linear modernism based on the Modern Movement. This argument broke open the study of a more diverse architecture of the 1920s and 1930s.
Many of the themes addressed relate to the view of history and there are a few references to the importance Prior saw in understanding ancient art and architecture, not for mimicry but for inspiration. On that basis, is there a role for the historian in the architectural profession? Especially one that is increasingly believing it is non-referential in its products of digital design.
St Andrew’s Church, Roker, near Sunderland, Tyne and Wear (1905–07) by E.S. Prior and Randall Wells (architects). Credit: James O. Davies/Historic England.
Well on the way to a better architectural world would be complementary practising architects who write about history and architectural historians who have a substantial place in the profession. Today, historians are employed or consulted by a few practices to advise on projects, often around conservation issues. However, architectural historians have more to offer as your question implies, to inspire and contextualise through a more general knowledge and discussion of historic architecture. Digital technology and design have a tendency to suck all the oxygen out of the process of architectural production and it becomes the focus of the process, leaving little space for a concern for architecture’s values, social role or its users or indeed its builders. History can broaden and enrich the design process, provide alternative questions for architects/architecture and suggest answers to design issues, while stimulating the architectural imagination and provoking a Ruskinian joy in labour.
Finally, as you have made a significant contribution to the history of gender and women in architecture, was there anything in your thesis, or the period in which you wrote it, that helped to refine your later interests and research?
Modern feminism crystallized in the 1970s when my thesis was written, but a feminist perspective on a project centered on a white male architect in a male-dominated profession may appear difficult to claim. However, the impact of gender and privilege on architectural and cultural production was impossible to avoid in the circle of public school, university-educated architects that Prior inhabited. As well as in the all-male Art-Workers’ Guild, the central organization of the Arts & Crafts Movement, which he co-founded. Prior was, nevertheless, an early member of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, which exhibited design work by many women in the applied and decorative arts often related to architecture.
This dissonance led to my curiosity about women’s participation in architecture as architects and to the beginnings of my work on women’s history. The thesis contained another ‘recessive gene’ which sparked new directions away from the patriarchal mainstream. It highlighted the philanthropic role of Prior’s aunts as donors to the Harrow Mission Hall which Prior designed and represented the entrepreneurial ambition of his mother, Hebe Prior, who was his client for a terrace of spec built houses, both endeavors just a few minutes’ walk from the Prior family home. I could not, and did not, get these activities and their implications for a broader approach— beyond the architect—out of my mind.
This is an edited version of an interview that can be read in full in the current issue of The Architectural Historian magazine, sent free to all members of the Society.
Dr Lynne Walker will be in conversation online with Dr Elizabeth Darling from 6:30 pm on 14 December at our Annual Lecture and Awards Ceremony. For further information and to register for the event, please click here.
Aymee Thorne Clarke is a trained archivist currently working for Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners architects. She studied Architectural History at Birkbeck and presented a paper at this year’s Annual Symposium, ARCH/TECTURES ARCH/VES.
Dr Lynne Walker is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and sits on the editorial advisory board of The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960-2015. Her interests include Cultural Memory, Gender Studies, History of Art and Modern History.
