The Stationery Office has produced a great illustrated volume, yet priced very moderately at a guinea, contaifiing the Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of the City of Oxford, writes Prof, C. H. Reilly. It is an inventory and survey of all structures, great and small, which in the eyes of the Commissioners are important, from early earthworks to buildings and monuments, to paintings, panelling, and plate accredited to a date before 1714, This arbitrary date, settled some time back by Act of Parliament—a date, I suppose, had to be settled, but taste moves on—unfortunately excludes the great centre-piece of the whole city and University, James Gibb's "fine domed structure known as the Radcliffe Camera (1737), and the even more interesting, if less imposing, Radcliffe Observatory, attributed to Henry Keene (1772), but worthy of James Wyatt or Robert Adam.
The buildings scheduled for Oxford may remain for centuries, standing isolated in that already populous town, shaken by the modern traffic, eaten into by smoke and frost, and patched and mended year by year until none of their original exteriors is left; and yet the essential Oxford we lóve will have been destroyed if something more is not done, and done quickly. The fact is one cannot mix in the same street, or in the same small village, self-advertising modern commercial buildings with even late eighteenth and early nineteenth century ones, let alone with "buildings accredited to a date before 1714," There is the modern traffic, too, with its great omnibuses and lorries, as out of scale with the buildings as they are out of harmony with any peaceful occupations. If we really want "to preserve the essential quality of Mediæval and Renaissance Oxford and Cambridge, or eighteenth-century Bath, we must draw a ring round that part of it and exorcise not only the demons of modern building but those of modern traffic too.
Under the Town and Country Planning Act we have the power to control new buildings. Have we the witte do it properly in such areas? Can the town council of an expanding town like Oxford resist the temptation of flamboyant, advertising, speculative buildings, even. in a special part of it? Will its members be content to rule a city in which an important section must be treated as a museum? If we are in earnest in our desire to preserve the architectural beauties of the past in such places we must preserve the atmosphere natural to them. Some old buildings, like the Oxford colleges with their enclosed courts and gardens, carry, to a great extent, their atmosphere with them, once within their gates. Not so streets like the High Street or the Broad, or St, Giles or Holywell.
Nothing to Spoil Architectural Atmosphere My suggestion, then, is that in addition to the present excellent functioning of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments with regard to particular buildings, it or another commission, preferably one with some modern architects practising in the contemporary manner upon it, for they are the architects who really appreciate the old work and prove their fondness for it by refusing to forge copies of it, should select certain sections of such towns as Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, and even Brighton, and draw lines round them, and that these sections should be scheduled as a whole. Within the sections it should be the continuing duty of the commission to see that nothing should be permitted to be built to disturb the play of one old building against another or to interfere with the street vistas—in short, nothing to spoil the architectural atmosphere which it is desired to preserve, for in that atmosphere lies the spirit of the place far more than in any single building.
The moral is, if at the risk of repetition I must draw one, that the work of the. Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, fine as its Oxford report shows it to be, is not enough. May I suggest to its chairman, the noble earl who is Chancellor of University of Manchester and the leader in so many good causes, that it is time either for that Commission's terms of reference to be reconsidered and enlarged or, better still, for a new Commission tp be called and also placed under his wise chairmanship?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.