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This chapter will tackle the contested nature of the ‘colonial’ built environment in nineteenth-century Ireland, building on the work of Edward McParland, Alistair Rowan, Lindsey Proudfoot, Alex Bremner, and others. It comprises two parts: the first is an analysis of the processes of production of ‘state’ architecture, with a focus on the network of courthouses, prisons, asylums, and workhouses erected in the early nineteenth century. The study will be based around the Irish grand jury system of local administration and a small number of specific case studies. The colonial question is framed through a Four Nations approach and focuses on the tensions and conflicts within and between Westminster, Dublin Castle, and Irish local government. The second part considers the legacy of this built environment in the early twentieth century; how political events shaped representations of these buildings; and how processes of destruction and demolition codified interpretations and meanings of the colonial question. Moving beyond the high-profile destruction of Dublin’s Four Courts and General Post Office during the revolutionary period, this analysis will look at the fate of lesser-known public buildings in provincial towns into the early 1920s.
Architecture is understood to be meaningful beyond mere structure. It is argued that a building conveys a host of different meanings as it evolves, from conception to construction, occupation and reception. Multiple understandings across different contexts, from the architect responsible, the client, the building’s occupants, and its reception by contemporaries and subsequent critics, provide evidence about it in terms of its immediate environment, wider culture, and historic context. Australia House is the first of London’s Dominion Houses, constructed by the British empire’s self-governing Dominions between 1913 and 1959 in an imperial precinct encircling Trafalgar Square. Australia House gave impetus to the idea of an imperial precinct and to a style of building that expressed an imperial presence and added to London’s architectural vocabulary. This chapter will show how new insights on the phenomenon of empire can be gained, explored, and explained through consideration of architecture that sprang from the imperial experience. It will do so by showing how Australia House is a manifestation and an enduring example of the impact of the wider British empire on the built environment of modern Britain. It will show how the complex history of empire within Britain can be read through its architecture.
Tudor and Stuart officials in Ireland formulated a number of strategies for ordering, settling, and civilising Ireland. At the heart of nearly each one was the assumption that introducing agriculture and a cultivated landscape was the essential first step towards achieving their goal. Amidst the confiscations and Plantations there was a consistent effort made to transform the landscape and to create a contrived environment that emphasised human control over nature. The alteration of Irish land and the built environment in this period reveals an ideology of colonialism that can be read in the landscape and also the material culture that resulted. The need to replace one culture with another, to supplant a natural environment with an engineered one, an uncultivated landscape with a civilised, rational one, was to provide a focus, a battleground, even a language for the conflict associated with the policy of Plantation. Indeed, land was often at the centre of the violence in Ireland. This chapter will consider the constructed environment from fences, bridges, barns, houses, and forts as both signifiers of civility and as targeted markers of a colonial strategy characterised by dispossession and alterations to the land and material culture of Ireland.
To accompany the first Imperial Forestry Conference in London, the recently formed Department of Overseas Trade organised an exhibition of empire timber in 1920. Its object was to bring ‘into more universal use the numerous though little known timbers of Empire’. This new emphasis reflected a postwar commitment to fostering greater trade and cooperation with colonies and dominions rich in forestry resources. From the late 1920s, the Empire Marketing Board took a more active role in promoting empire timbers, hosting a permanent display at the newly established Building Centre in New Bond Street (1932). At the Royal Institute of British Architect’s new headquarters at 66 Portland Place (1934), empire timbers were used extensively for furnishing and ornament, especially those from the Dominions and India, representing the profession as an imperial interconnected confraternity of practitioners. At the Imperial Forestry Institute in Oxford, Hubert Worthington’s building, designed in 1939 but not opened until 1951, was replete with samples of empire timber, ‘donated’ by colonial forestry associations in a context of timber supply shortage after the war. These interconnected exhibitions and projects highlight how the architectural profession conceived of its role in a global imperial supply chain. This chapter discusses not only these events and places, but also how the architectural ‘shoppers’ of empire timber promoted the craft processes needed to work these materials, demonstrating how the empire timber campaign was a tenet of a longer discourse on design reform in early twentieth-century Britain.
On the south side of Leadenhall Street in London, where Richard Rogers’s Lloyds building now rises, a major three-year refurbishment project was completed in 1729. Assorted buildings, cellars, and yards on the site had served as the headquarters of the English East India Company since the late 1630s, and steadily accumulated in both size and renown under the name of East India House. A design approved in 1726 was to transform a tangled enclave with timber-framed frontage into a more orderly plan adorned with a ‘stately’ stone façade. Inside were ‘Spacious Rooms, very commodious for such a publick Concern’. By far the most discussed feature of this significant rebuild is the surviving series of paintings depicting the company’s overseas settlements. However, little attempt has been made to recover and read the interior as its early viewers would have done; that is, through the opening frames of the imperial capital’s streetscape and the corporation’s contemporary façade, and through the lens of the specific commercial and political concerns of the day. Taking as its cue shifting viewpoints (in both space and time) implied in eighteenth-century travel guides and accounts, this chapter looks again at the 1729 refurbishment of East India House, the paintings produced shortly afterwards, and the interior of which they were a part, in the context of changing concepts of nation and empire. Reuniting building, painting, and other furnishings in a single visual field, the chapter situates and studies them as part of the integrated architectural setting of company, city, and colonial settlements.
The (in)famous Scottish China Trade firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co. has gone down in history as one of the leading dealers in narcotics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, James Matheson on his return to Britain in the 1840s was parodied by Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil as ‘one McDruggy, fresh from Canton, with a million of opium in each pocket’. The sojourning type represented by Jardine and Matheson was relatively common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, with family ties and business networks facilitating a system of patronage and investment that deliberately promoted both Scottish and British imperial interests across the globe. As a result, returnees were often eager to plough their profits into purchasing estates and buildings in Scotland. This re-investment of colonial wealth in land and infrastructure had a marked impact on the Scottish landscape, demonstrating in visually conspicuous ways the wider effects of empire and imperial trade on the metropolitan scene. Although a growing literature on the Indian nabob and West Indian absentee planter has sought to reveal these effects in relation to what can be identified as the ‘imperial landscapes’ of England, very little has been done on the impact of China Trade ‘Taipans’, especially in Scotland. This chapter considers the ways in which the wealth of these returnees impacted the landscapes and buildings of post-Union Scotland, arguing that issues of cultural and familial identity played a discernible role in fashioning a particularly Scottish response to the effects of imperial encounter as represented in architecture and the wider built environment.
Clustered in court housing and cellar dwellings down near the waterfront, the ever-increasing numbers of ‘low Irish’ in Liverpool were viewed with disdain and alarm, embodying the pathologies of violence, unreason, and contagion that obsessed early Victorians. Even before the famine influx of the 1840s, there were calls for drastic interventionist social engineering, justified through ethnic denigration of the Irish ‘other’, a ‘contaminating’ presence within the unreformed and unprotected ‘social body’. Pioneer public health initiatives, followed by compulsory demolition and displacement, soon added to social tensions as Irish nationalist politicians, a growing force in the north end, came to condemn the actions of the Insanitary Property Committee as a form of political gerrymandering. When the Committee was replaced by the Housing Committee, Irish councillors led the way in promoting community-based housing provision, insisting on rehousing within demolition areas and advocating alternatives to ‘workhouse-like’ tenement blocks. Thanks to their input, Liverpool became ‘a mecca for housing experts’ by the beginning of the twentieth century. Harford, the Irish leader, proudly noted that ‘no city in Europe had gone so far as Liverpool in the practical direction of “housing the poorest poor”’.
Colonial students – and postcolonial students in India’s case – were a source of some anxiety to the British state in the period immediately post-1945. Ostensibly, students were to survive and hopefully to flourish, to study hard and to return to their home country. In the process they would have become a friend of Britain, citizens of one of the members of the ‘family’ of imperial and post-imperial nations beginning to be called ‘the commonwealth’. But would colonial students mix with anticolonial and even Communist Party elements while in Britain, or become disaffected by their experience of racial discrimination, thus returning home radicalised to help lead their country’s agitation against empire? Or, in India’s case, would they drive its post-independence resurgence? Despite these fears, the provision of colonial students’ housing was almost entirely left either in the hands of charities, religious groups, and philanthropists, or to the whims of the market. In 1952 arrived one kind of architectural answer in the form of the Indian YMCA building in Fitzroy Square. Designed by Ralph Tubbs, it is a fascinatingly conflicted building. On the one hand it can be seen as a way of schooling Indian students on how to live in Britain; on the other, it was an exemplification of the benefits that the British might gain from Indian students. This chapter discusses how the Indian YMCA building was concerned with making accommodations and being accommodated; about showing how to be Indian in Britain, and how the British might be a little more Indian.
This book considers the impact of colonial and imperial cultures on the landscapes and urban environments of the British Isles from the sixteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century. It asserts that Britain’s 400-year entanglement with global empire left its mark upon the British Isles as much as it did the wider world, and that buildings were among the most powerful and conspicuous manifestations of the myriad relationships that Britain maintained with the theories and practice of colonialism in its modern history. The volume’s content is divided in two main sections: that concerning ‘internal’ colonisation and its infrastructures of control, order, and suppression; and that concerning wider relationships between architecture, the imperial economy, representations of empire, and postcolonial identity. With specifically commissioned new scholarship, the chapters in this volume present for the first time a coherent analysis of the British Isles as an imperial setting understood through its buildings, spaces, and infrastructure.
This section begins with a discussion of the principal objectives and concepts underpinning the study, and well as the intellectual and historiographic context within which the study is situated. Here the notion of ‘inner empire’ is both explained and justified as a scholarly framework. It then proceeds to an overview of scholarship to date, highlighting key moments in the development of the field. Finally, it outlines the content of the book, chapter by chapter.