The Edwardian Baroque Anticipated the Architecture of Global Capitalism
A new book shows how the grand designs of Edwardian architects expressed the anxieties and illusions of their time. Imperial confidence in the peaceful integration of the world ran alongside fears of decline and collapse, echoing the dilemmas of our own age.
Illustration of the Central Criminal Court in London from the early twentieth century. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Edwardians have always haunted the liberal imagination. In a classic book of 1935, George Dangerfield argued that Edward VII’s reign ushered in The Strange Death of Liberal England. In the years just before World War I, the propertied men who ran the United Kingdom and its empire feared that both were about to collapse. South African Boers defied Britain in battle, Irish and Indian nationalists demanded independence, and women the vote. Heated arguments about how to pay for a welfare state and for rearmament against the aggressive German Reich exploded fiscal orthodoxies. Conservatives flirted with unpopular tariffs on food imports and populist Liberals terrified the aristocracy by demanding heavy wealth taxes instead.
If Dangerfield exaggerated the suddenness with which a centrist tradition can implode, then Brexit has given the Edwardian crisis a strange sense of present-day relevance. Brexiteers seem to have repeated the doomed arrogance of Edwardian imperialists in seeking tighter ties with Britain’s former settler colonies and in squaring up against China. Other parallels are even less cheering. Britain’s flatlining growth has revived fears of falling behind in a multipolar world. Then as now, London and its plutocratic, hedonistic elite dominated the nation and appeared to be divorced from its concerns. Alex Bremner’s wonderfully assured and richly illustrated Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885–1920 is therefore a timely book. Bremner proposes buildings as an overlooked source for the study of Edwardian angst, one which he suggests might lead us to “ponder afresh the dilemmas of our own age.”
The Baroque Revival
Bremner offers not a total history of Edwardian architecture, but an evocation of its most significant style, the “Baroque revival.” What makes an Edwardian building baroque? It is hard to give a precise answer, not least because the architects of the day maintained that a certain breeziness about rules was an English virtue. Baroque buildings were often described as “Anglo Classic” or in the “Grand Manner” or “Renaissance” style. They went up before and for years after the actual reign of Edward VII (1901–10). But they undeniably had family resemblances. They tended to be monumental edifices such as town halls, colonial parliaments, law courts, or memorials to the sainted Queen Victoria, although there were also baroque banks and railway stations.
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