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As far as I was concerned, the Isle of Wight could remain a boil on the bottom of Hampshire — as it was in the original Buildings of England volume, published in 1967. The effect was then to present the island as the poor relation to the mainland county. The 50 pages devoted to the Isle of Wight did not make a particularly good case for its architecture. Now, nearly 40 years on, the island is given proper treatment as the first volume in what will be a mini-series of three (the mainland will be covered in North Hampshire and South Hampshire), and it is a pleasure to congratulate David W. Lloyd, a town planner and conservationist who helped to save the interior of the Royal Victoria Arcade in Ryde from destruction in the 1970s, on opening my eyes to the architectural attractions of the Isle of Wight.
Although Lloyd collaborated with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner on the original 1967 volume, he did not write the entries for the island, so he has brought a fresh approach to the subject. For instance, whereas the Herr Doktor Professor dismissed the Congregational church in Ryde by R. J. Jones (1870-2) as ‘an architectural nightmare’, Lloyd shrewdly notes that ‘its demolition in 1974 was a serious loss to Ryde’s townscape and skyline; its replacement is an insipid block, incongruously in red brick’.
It is idle to complain of the traditional Pevsnerian dry-as-dust treatment of buildings, as that’s rather the point of such a scholarly exercise. But happily Lloyd conveys a real sense of enthusiasm for his labours. Carisbrooke Castle, for example, celebrated as the jail of Charles I, is ‘a splendid place to visit — a combination of ruined and intact structures, some once domestic, others purely military in origin, with many vistas over attractive countryside’. English Heritage are rightly congratulated on the admirable job they have done in restoring Osborne, especially the ‘fantastic’ Durbar Room of the 1890s by J. L. Kipling (Rudyard’s father), Bhai Ram Singh, Princess Louise and others. Lloyd also has a sympathetic feel for country houses such as Appuldurcombe and Nunwell, for so long the seat of the Oglanders. He mourns the loss of Nash’s East Cowes Castle after the second world war and of Seaview Pier.
Modern buildings are typically ‘mainly mediocre or worse’, but Lloyd points out some stimulating exceptions, especially the Expressionist masterpiece by Dom Paul Bellot of Quarr Abbey (1911-12), with its ‘stupendous’ sequence of spatial experiences. Lloyd has as keen an eye for beautiful church monuments as for quirky little details — such as a rare survival of the early K1 telephone kiosk at Bembridge (1929) and J. B. Priestley’s writing pavilion at Billingham. There is no shortage of famous names to enliven the text, from Keats and Swinburne to Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron. A few more could have been added from among the former inmates of Bembridge School (including the late Sir Robin Day) and Parkhurst, which I learn was once a prison for women.
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