Book Review by Professor Sir Colin Stansfield-Smith - TrustNews March 10
This is a beautiful book. On opening it, the first impression given by the exceptional illustrations, drawings, watercolours and photographs, is a visual and aesthetic one. It creates a real desire to walk and explore this fascinating historical city, so diversely and richly described.
The author claims that the book is a personalised view, but it is imbued, through its attention to detail, with much scholarship. It is composed, essentially, for the citizens of Winchester who are familiar with its morphology, its buildings, its streets, its spaces, and its landscape. For the visitor, it offers an invitation, and the promise of a rich historical experience.
The introduction to the Winchester Conservation Area and the analysis of the Conservation Area setting are particularly interesting, and visually attractive. Most of the text tends to be descriptive, with a format shaped by the conservation districts and suburbs, and this determines the sequence of walkways and promenades. It does not prioritise; even a unique and remarkable environment like St Cross relies mainly on a commentary expressed through beautiful photos and drawings. The maps and diagrams are an essential part of this analysis or ‘reading’.
The City Walls are described somewhat indirectly, and in association with other features in the chapters titled ‘The Walled City’. The City Walls are elements which define the layers of history. Winchester removed most of its city walls after the Civil War, and in the early Twentieth Century, and yet, as the book describes, it remains a city of walled enclosures - an urban form of precinct within precinct. Winchester’s city walls only remain as fragments, but in spite of this their survival as primary elements is a continuous reminder of historical permanence and continuity. The walled presence is now psychological and surreal, depending on its physical materiality and location. They cannot be recreated and they are psychological. Walls that had a function of defining territory, of protecting inside space from outside intrusion, of making a statement of power and privilege, of excluding the non-privileged, have finally become benign artefacts in their own right; significant museum pieces.
The book’s interest is, therefore, culturally all embracing - historically, socially and artistically. Aldo Rossi’s commentary in his book ‘The Architecture of The City’ has a poignancy and relevance for Rutter’s descriptive analysis:
‘This city makes its own statement of a collective memory, and is a theatre of human events. This theatre is no longer just a presentation, it is a reality; it absorbs events and feelings, and every new event contains within it a memory of the past, and a potential memory of the future’.
There is a passing comparison with Salisbury, and the book creates a yearning to extend such a study to Winchester’s rivals, Chichester and Canterbury, both full of similar layers of history and ingredients, but dominated by a cathedral with differing emphases.
Winchester’s past has given it an unrivalled superiority in its enjoyment of royal and privileged patronage. The book describes the commissioning of national status architects by rich sponsors; particularly of Christopher Wren in the building of a royal palace, the legacy of which leaves the city with a formal renaissance space, stunningly situated on the site of the former barracks. Nineteenth Century Architects like Blomfield, Tite, Champness, Owen Browne Carter and Baker are represented in college, hospital and County Council. Historically,Winchester has a confidence about itself which is not now reflected in its commission of architects in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Century. Not surprisingly, the text is understated and somewhat diffident in its commentary on the contemporary scene, but one would have thought the work of Plincke, Leaman & Browning was worthy of a credit, given its contribution over some forty years to the quality and character of the city.
What is interesting is that, although by training an architect, which is evident in the text and drawings, the author demonstrates a planner’s range of focus. The book offers a contradictory account where the major strategies of contemporary vehicular access and movement are irreconcilable with the rhythms and precious qualities of a historic city - all part of the confusion and complexity of modem urban thought.