This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Surrey is not large. Before 1888 it included all London south of the Thames, but today, as much of it has been absorbed by the capital, it is just 40 miles wide and under 17 deep, with a population of around two million. As noted by Ian Nairn, who co-authored the 1962 edition of Surrey with Nikolaus Pevsner, no other English county has been so dominated by a neighbouring city. 

In the 18th century, the ties with London were generally gentle and beneficial, but the coming of the railways in the 1830s and 40s, and the extension of the Underground in the 1920s, caused an explosion of development — growth contained, to some extent, by the Green Belt, established just in time in 1938.

The ebullient Roderick Gradidge regarded Surrey as his favourite county, and he contributed massively to a reassessment of its late-Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture. Through his perceptive Dream Houses: The Edwardian Ideal (1980), Gradidge fired a new appreciation of English masters such as Lutyens, Newton and Lethaby, who drew on tradition and had been ignored by those who were persuaded that certain Arts & Crafts architects were “pioneers” of the Modern Movement. This delusion he robustly dismissed, although it was uncritically perpetuated by those who only look with their ears, having been blinded by the absurd claims of Pevsner and others. 

Nairn also knew there was plenty of good architecture in Surrey, but that it is very often of the “small, the picturesque, or the recherché” kind. “The landscape is all of those things,” he firmly declared. Indeed, and there is still some unspoiled Surrey country to be enjoyed.

Surrey was extensively revised by Bridget Cherry in 1971, but this edition by Charles O’Brien is much bigger and far more comprehensive than its predecessors, hugely improved by the splendid colour photographs, many by Robert Forster. I have some quibbles, though: Nairn’s assessment of Ernest Newton’s Red Court, Haslemere (1894), is retained: “an ominous house with sterile Neo-Georgianism just round the corner … it has segmental windows combined with gables in an acid way. The fundamental and fatal pettiness of scale and detail is already evident.” Oh dear! 

Gradidge, on the other hand, held that Newton “never put a foot wrong” and sympathetically analysed Red Court. Furthermore, Hermann Muthesius, in his wonderful Das Englische Haus (1908), wrote that Red Court was “most important”, illustrating the architect’s “plain, broad, austere manner”. He praised the “vocabulary of forms” employed by Newton, a distinguished former pupil of Norman Shaw. Given the illiteracy, incompetence, squalor, failure and aesthetic offensiveness that mark much “architecture” today, we could do with more buildings with Newtonian qualities, and less of the acidulous about his fine work.

However, let us turn to some of the pleasures in this rewarding book. There is Middle Row in Bletchingley, replete with much tile-hanging; the delightful village green at Brockham; the fascinating church of St Nicholas, Compton, with its extraordinary and very strange two-storey sanctuary; the 12th century wall painting of the Purgatorial Ladder in the church of Sts Peter & Paul, Chaldon; the stunning Baroque funerary monuments in the churches at Bletchingley (a prodigious affair by Richard Crutcher), Reigate and Ockham; the exquisite screen (c.1480) in St Nicholas’s Charlwood; Vanbrugh’s austerely tough Belvedere at Claremont House; the delicious garden buildings at Painshill Park (including the Gothick Temple); the glowing interiors of the Drummond Mortuary Chapel, Albury (by Pugin and Earley); St Peter’s, Hascombe, and the Wisdom of God at Lower Kingswood (by Barnsley); the splendid Lutyens houses at Munstead Wood, Tigbourne Court (Witley); and Goddards (Abinger). There is also Norney Grange at Shackleford, a fine dwelling by Voysey of the 1890s.

One of my own favourite buildings is the Memorial Chapel to the 2nd Lord Ashcombe’s three sons (killed 1916–18), in “Great” Scott’s Church of St Barnabas, Ranmore. It is essentially a remodelling (1918–19) of the south transept by Charles E. Sayer, with screen by Laurence Turner, altar by Farmer & Brindley and wall paintings by E.R. Frampton. 

There are other delights, properly acknowledged, such as the superb planting of Brookwood Cemetery by Robert Donald; Heywood Sumner’s sgraffito decorations in St Mary’s, Sunbury-on-Thames; the strange and rather exotic Horsley Towers at East Horsley (1847–60), a fantasy by the 1st Earl of Lovelace; and the stupendous Royal Holloway (1879–87), designed by W.H. Crossland (a pupil of “Great” Scott) in a gloriously free Loire-Château style, constructed of vivid red brick with Portland stone dressings.

This mostly excellent book describes and illustrates the Mortuary Chapel erected at Compton 1895–98 to designs by Mary Watts, the supervising architect being G.T. Redmayne, with Louis Reid Deuchars assisting the direction of ornamental work. The terracotta modelling and interior decorations (completed 1904), all stuffed with heavy symbolism, and drawing on Scots, Irish and Scandinavian motifs, were carried out by villagers, the whole in memory of George Frederic Watts. 

Here Nairn got it absolutely right: the interior of the Chapel was unpleasant because of the “intolerable torpor and weariness of the motifs … it is one of the most soporific rooms in England”. Nairn called Watts “a brave but baffling failure”, an opinion with which I would not quarrel, as the whole ensemble — including the cloister (1908–11) and the collection of paintings inside the Watts Gallery (1903–04 by C. Hatton Turnor) — gives me the creeps.

Curiously, it is proposed in this book that Guildford Cathedral (by Sir Edward Maufe), because it is on a hill, needs “enclosure and the animation of daily life around it” — something which “works at Lincoln, St Paul’s, and countless others”. Yes, but it would depend on who did that enclosure, for the few ancillary buildings actually erected in the vicinity have no relationship with the Cathedral. They are, in any case, “lacklustre”, as this book labels them (with excessive kindness). The Cathedral’s very stripped and sober free Gothic interior is impressive, and the church as a whole is adequately celebrated.

There have been losses, of course. One of the most serious was Clandon Park, a fine house by Giacomo Leoni gutted by fire in 2015 when in the National Trust’s tender care. Although the shell of the building survives, its future is uncertain. I also wonder if the word “outstanding” is appropriate in the context of the span housing at Templemere, Oatlands (1962–64): to me it always looked insubstantial, terribly dated and thin. 

Surrey records what is, in parts, a delightful county — but why was it printed in China?