John Betjeman: An eye for England

Of the many aspects of John Betjeman's life and work which will be celebrated in this his centenary year, the most profound is his influence on how we see our architecture and landscape. Jonathan Meades pays tribute to the man who taught us how to appreciate not just the buildings, but the places where we live

Yet - and this is seldom the case - the multiple roles, if that's what they were, are parts of a harmonious whole. They coalesce, they are consistent, they infect each other. He was proof of Buffon's dictum: Le style, c'est l'homme même. To separate the hymner of buildings and places from his fellows within the same skin is to somewhat diminish him, for Betjeman's haunting architectural prose and his memorable performances in front of camera are indissolubly linked to his poetry. This is not to say that the three are interchangable. On the contrary, whatever he did was technically specific to the medium. Nonetheless the astute eye, the heightened sensibility and the desperation to avoid boredom are constant.

The same goes for his subjects which are, in a way, his inventions, so persuasive and transforming is his vision. He treats architects dead long before he was born with the proprietorial familiarity that certain late Victorian novelists treat their characters. When he first wrote of, say, Cuthbert Brodrick or Harvey Lonsdale Elmes in the 1940s they could, for all anyone knew, have been his creations - much of his audience would never previously have heard of them, such was the mid-20th century's ignorant antipathy to the architecture of the mid-19th century. No single person effected the dissipation of that antipathy more than Betjeman who was for many years taken to be at best obstinately teasing, at worse perversely aberrant. Much later, in 1973, in Metroland, Eddie Mirzoeff filmed him at Grimsdyke. His immersion in the period with which he was by then popularly identified lends him the air of a revenant from the milieu of the Royal Academician Reginald Goodall who commissioned it, Norman Shaw who designed it and W S Gilbert who drowned in its pond: rhododendrons, the Old English style, a proximity to Harrow, a wasteful death - did he not invent this too?

Just as he tirelessly opened our eyes to neglected architectural idioms so did he persuasively broaden our appetite for places. Places rather than mere architecture were his greatest forte: architecture, a component of places, was too limiting. Betjeman was excited by the humble, by the everyday, by the allegedly meretricious, by preposterous kitsch, by fortuitous juxtapositions, by collisions of the bathetic and the sumptuous. He brought an aesthete's sensibility to bear on found objects which better behaved or less professionally opportunistic aesthetes would shy away from, shrieking. He wrote in 1965 to Laura Waugh about Compton Acres at Parkstone: "a series of gardens of such unexampled and elaborate hideousness that Evelyn will want to put pen to paper again, and that wonderful gift he has for bringing out the startling and alarming and funny in the trivial will be spurred into renewed activity." He was, needless to say, describing his own gift. Compton Acres, a twee creation of the 1920s, happily still exists, still simpers. It belongs to the same gamut of taste as Limited Edition Porcelain Masterpiece Collection™ Nuptial Souvenir Figurines of Sir Elton John and Mr David Furnish.

But such no-holds-barred bereavments of taste in large scale endeavours like landscape or architecture are rarer today than forty years ago when Betjeman discovered those gardens. He was of the same opinion as Vladimir Nabokov: "there is nothing more exhilerating than philistine vulgarity." But philistine vulgarity is not what it was in Betjeman's England. It is now "quoted", "ironically", in the mainstream - it has lost its innocence. We live in a more self-conscious and thus more self-curtailing age. The precepts of "design" are relentlessly disseminated and ubiquitously adhered to because we are, thankfully, visually literate. Even retail parks, an epithet Betjeman would have relished, are infested by synthetic modernism. Our Man In Malmesbury snooping (there is no other word) as he once did in arched alleys and down hidden paths where back gardens give onto allotments would no doubt find a town Responsibly Attuned To Its Heritage, where lean-to roofs in corrugated iron (the material of the future in 1900) have been replaced by historically appropriate tiles and where Daily Mail windows no longer illumine Jacobean cottages. Bricolage and extemporisation have been superceded by kits from B&Q: assemble it yourself is not the same as bodge it yourself, with scrounged materials intended for other purposes.

But then England is wealthier. What wealth brings, evidently, is the spread of tidiness. A derelict cottage or ivy-engulfed farmhouse is a rare sight. Buildings are saved, certainly, but at what cost? They are no more allowed to wither than are septuagenarian former starlets. It is improbable that Betjeman foresaw - or wished to foresee - the future absurdities of the conservation movement which he personified and popularised to the point where it is a cultural and social crime to support the demolition of, say, Georgian hackwork. He was however prescient about the fate of provincial town centres. In the introduction to his greatest book, First and Last Loves, he observes that: "when the suburbanite leaves Wembley for Wells he finds that the High Street there is just like home." That was over half a century ago. Half a century during which successive governments have failed to correct the retail corporatism which has scarred this country.

In general, though, the fabric which he recorded in that book and showed in his films is - astonishingly and hearteningly - extant. The society of Cheltenham, which he properly preferred to Bath, may have changed; the old India hands and the military widows have all gone now, the way of Adam Lindsay Gordon. (Did Betjeman know that Lindsay Anderson, to whom he wrote a fan letter after seeing If..., was a kinsman of that ill-starred poet)? But the terraces and caryatids have never looked better. The stucco gleams with new money. Tivoli blushes brightest pink towards summer dusk. Even the debased High Street is, with the exception of the dire Cavendish House, recoverable beneath the fascias and face lifts. What is irrecoverable is an England that was not yet built over - I mean, regenerated. An England which Betjeman had little cause to pay attention to, an often unremarkable, marginal England which is going or gone. And whose qualities may not be fully appreciated until it finds its peculiar rhapsodist. Let us think of it this way: Mr Prescott is merely supplying targets for a Betjeman of the future to drop his gentle bombs on. m

This article first appeared in Country Life. For full details of the many Betjeman centenary celebrations, including exhibitions, radio programmes, readings, films, train journeys, plaque unveilings and even a golf tournament - go to www.johnbetjeman.com