I recently acquired a collection of the late Sir John
Betjeman’s radio broadcast talks, and was surprised and delighted to find
mention of our neighbourhood in his
account of architecture in British towns and cities.
| Sir John Betjeman (image copyright BBC) |
On Friday 11th June 1937, John Betjeman (as he was then)
spoke about Exeter in a series called “Town Tours”. He wrote of the traffic jams in Exeter’s High
Street, the “inappropriate fronts of shops clapped onto medieval buildings”
there, and the olde gift shops (so olde that they must be new). But, he said, there is another side to
Exeter, a city of fine buildings that the racing motorist would miss. So, “move to Mount Radford or Victoria Park
Road” where the retired people of the city are in a place as quiet as a Devon
village. “The houses are covered with
cheerful stucco. They are plain and set
back in large gardens filled with all the shrubs and flowers that grow so
easily in the mild Exeter climate”.
“What a genius the man who designed these houses must have been”. The poet describes a walk along one of these
roads, not identified, where “with the blue afternoon sky, the flowering
creepers, the yews, the long walls, the warmth, I felt I was in Italy”.
(It is interesting that he refers to the area as Mount
Radford. Ordnance Survey maps of the
1930s show the area as St Leonard’s Ward, with the Mount Radford name attached
to a small part of the neighbourhood.)
However, after this praise, he continued: “I wish I could
say that her newer houses were good. I
have seen worse. Indeed one speculative
builder’s estate, on the road to Topsham and opposite the barracks, is really
excellent – a well-chosen brick and well-proportioned houses. Each house is designed to command a
view. The Exeter Council estate at
Burnthouse Lane is not as good.” (He is
referring with favour to the houses around King Henry’s Road, some of which
were designed in the arts and Crafts style by the noted architect Louis de
Soissons.) In a second broadcast, two
weeks later than the one he gave about Exeter, he summed up what he had found
as he toured several provincial cities.
“in no town, except one small estate [in Exeter] did I find speculative
builders’ estates that were anything but an eyesore”.
Besides his scorn of the council’s design of an estate,
Betjeman was critical of the way that the council had allowed developments in
the 1920s and 30s in the city to be “treeless deserts of red brick”, because he
had found the 19th century streets to be blessed with their many trees.
What would Sir John feel if he could return to St Leonard’s
today?
(extracts taken from “Trains and Buttered Toast”, John
Murray, 2006 (edited by Stephen Games))
