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| FEATURES |
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According to Lucy Archer, daughter of the late architect Raymond Erith, who designed the pub in North End Way, Hampstead: “There was huge opposition when it was built in 1963. People wanted it to be more modern.” But, typical of Erith, he preferred to show how a modern, open-plan building could be made attractive and functional using a traditional timber frame. He said: “Wood suits pubs. With a concrete frame, the beams have to be cased. My posts and beams are the real thing. You can see them and touch them and the landlord can knock nails into them.” The result was a building lauded by Highgate-born poet laureate Sir John Betjeman at Erith’s memorial service following his death in 1974 as “true Middlesex” and “a delight”. According to Mrs Archer, Erith’s adherence to tradition in an age of modernist architecture “inevitably limited his commissions, especially for public buildings, which is why Jack Straw’s Castle is so important”. The former pub, while retaining its outside appearance, is being turned private inside, with flats and a gym. However, many more Erith buildings can now be appreciated in a new exhibition of his work, Raymond Erith, Progressive Classicist, at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn. The show marks the centenary of the architect’s birth in 1904 and has been curated by Mrs Archer, not only his daughter, but also an architectural historian. The show includes Erith’s extensive yet seamless remodelling of 10 Downing Street, where one contemporary wag wrote Harold Macmillan “was chased out by termites” in 1959. Also on show are pictures of more local Erith buildings, including the new Common Room and Buttery at Gray’s Inn, South Square, Holborn (1971) and the 1968 London Underground ventilation tower in Gibson Square, Islington. Mrs Archer says the exhibition couldn’t be in a better place – The former house of Sir John Soane, the neo-classical architect active around 1800. “My father trained in the age of the young modernist architects,” she says, “but he didn’t want to throw out tradition. He was genuinely inspired to learn from Soane, to move classical architecture on, as he felt Soane had done. “So he must have spent a lot of time at Sir John Soane’s Museum when he was young, and I can remember coming to meet him here when I was about 18.” The resulting Erith designs, Mrs Archer says, were never pastiche, but “modern and geometric. They couldn’t be anything but 20th-century buildings. But he would also always look at the surrounding neighbourhood and wanted them to fit in and appear as if they had always been there.” So Jack Straw’s Castle, which replaced an earlier, bombed-out pub on the site, was unusual in being “a completely free-standing one-off, and the only time when Erith achieved the shock factor”, Mrs Archer says. The Hampstead Heath pub was typical in showing the famous Erith sense of humour. Jack Straw was the deputy leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, who is said to have lived on the site and bequeathed his name to the earlier pub. The architect of its replacement therefore gave Jack Straw’s Castle wooden battlements and two towers and one housed the building’s water tanks and the other the lift gear. London born but Surrey bred, Raymond Erith had a highly unusual childhood. Mrs Archer explains: “He contracted tuberculosis at the age of four and was largely bedridden until 16, when he recovered. But this gave him a lot of time to think, and he developed a great intellectual independence. “He spent a particularly lonely time between the ages of five and eight at a nursing home in Margate, Kent, where, to pass the time, he started drawing. One picture of a lighthouse was precociously drawn on fancy grey paper which he had specially requested to be brought from home. “He never talked about his illness afterwards, because he absolutely didn’t want to be seen as an invalid. And he was always a very happy person from a very affectionate family, who made his sick room the centre of the home. “Nevertheless, he only managed to complete four terms at school. But he still got accepted to train at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, at the age of 17, in 1921.” Now 65, Mrs Archer, lives in an Erith house originally built for her grandparents in Essex, the area he later moved to himself. “It was very exciting to watch him at home, drawing,” she recalls. “He had tremendous concentration. If one of us four girls would come marching down the corridor, he used to shout out ‘Don’t shake!’ And sometimes he would draw through the night. Then, over breakfast, he’d make a deliberately provocative remark, to get us all thinking and discussing.” The exhibition features some of Erith’s sketchbooks, filled not only with exquisite watercolours, but obsessive drawings of nuts and bolt, reflecting the intensely practical interest he inherited from his father, a mechanical engineer. Raymond Erith died suddenly, aged 69. Mrs Archer recalls: “He had a cough which was diagnosed as lung cancer, he got through a dangerous operation, then died two days later from a heart attack. He had been so active so it was a tremendous shock.” |
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