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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2016
In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review (AR) and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitled The Castles on the Ground (Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reason The Castles on the Ground is most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.
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47 Ibid., letter from Richards to Pevsner dated October 1939.
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57 Ibid., Report of the County Archivist (April 2006–March 2007), p. 7.
58 Ibid., Peggy Angus Archive, letter from Richards to Peggy Angus, undated.
59 Ibid.
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70 Ibid.
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89 Ibid., Letter from Sigfried Giedion to Hartland-Thomas (25 July 1946).
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., General Secretariat Papers, Notes of Discussion at MARS Group Meeting (undated).
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96 Ibid., p. 37.
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98 Ibid., TGA 955/1/1/10, ICA Papers, ICA Statement of Policy and Aims.
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101 Ibid., p. 165.
102 Ibid.
103 Hugh Casson first appeared on the MARS members list in March 1945.
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124 Zurich, Institute of History and Theory of Architecture, GTA Archives, General Secretariat Papers, Letter from Sigfried Giedion to Hartland-Thomas.
