Review: Vivien Horler

Sir Herbert Baker – A biography, by John Stewart (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Teak, dressed stone, pillars, barley-sugar chimneys are all among the trademarks of the work of the great British architect who left such an indelible imprint on our architectural heritage.

Yet I had no idea of the range of Sir Herbert Baker’s work in the dying days of the British Empire. From the Union Buildings, the Reserve Bank Building and the Railway Station in Pretoria, to Groote Schuur (the residence), Rust en Vrede in Muizenberg and all those grand and gracious homes on Parktown Ridge, Baker’s work is ubiquitous in South Africa.

Then there is St George’s Cathedral, Rhodes Memorial on Devil’s Peak, the Woolsack in Rondebosch, along with Welgelegen, both now part of the University of Cape Town, and Sandhills, Baker’s own beach cottage on the dunes at Muizenberg.

But his South African buildings aren’t the half of it. Walk around central London and look at those great and seemingly forever-there buildings, and it turns out half of them – I’m exaggerating wildly – were designed by Baker and his team.

South Africa House on Trafalgar Square, India House on the Aldwych, even the revamped Bank of England, for goodness sake. Church House – the administration building of the Church of England, Rhodes House in Oxford, a college building in Cambridge, half a dozen English churches.

And then there are the ones much further afield, like the great imperial government and parliamentary buildings in New Delhi, ironically opened less than 20 years before India gained its independence, a slew of cemeteries and memorials in France to the fallen of World War 1, the Law Courts in Nairobi along with the old Governor’s Residence there, and a church in Western Australia.

But this biography, by award-winning British architect John Stewart, is obviously more than a list. It’s also an account of the life of a decent, conservative upper-middle class man of his times, a friend of Cecil John Rhodes – who gave him his first big break in South Africa with the remodelling of Groote Schuur; as well as Lord Milner and Jan Smuts – whom he could thank for the SA House commission in London; Rudyard Kipling and even TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

The book is also an account of his bitter years-long bitter feud with Sir Edwyn Lutyens, the other top British architect of his day and who worked with him on the Delhi parliamentary buildings. By this account Lutyens was a brilliant architect, mercurial, as well frequently unreasonable and often outrageous.

There is so much in this biography, from a brief history of South Arica from the end of the Boer War, that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Back in the day architects learnt in the offices of other senior architects, so Baker never went to university, although he did a pupilship in the offices of a leading London architect.

After running a lacklustre career as an architect in Gravesend, he accompanied his brother to South Africa where the latter wanted to farm in the Elgin area.

Herbert Baker was well-spoken, pleasant, intelligent, and British of course, and fitted in with the ruling Cape Town society of its day, which led to his introduction to Rhodes, then prime minister of the Cape Colony, and the making of his career.

His South Arican experience stood him in good stead in his Kenyan and Indian endeavours in dealing with the sun in buildings not yet cooled by today’s ubiquitous air-conditioning. He wrote: “What I learnt in South Africa… is the sun is the most powerful ally of the architect in designing for beauty…[The architect] has only to model his plain wall surfaces and apportion his openings under wide overhanging cornices or eaves, and the kindly sun casts its deep cool shadows diffused with soft-toned reflected light on the bright warm whites and greys of the walls below.”

Stewart’ is clearly partisan, but this biography is not a hagiography – he can be sharply critical of Baker’s work, such as on the Barclays Bank building in Adderley Street, which he says lacks s a lightness of touch and has overworked detailing, or London’s SA House whose pediment over the main entrance he describes as “weak”.

This is as fascinating glimpse of the British Empire in its waning days, and South Africa was very much a part of that.

What I didn’t like about the book was the font size. This biography will appeal, generally speaking, to older people, and yet without the keen eyesight of an 18-year-old you might be deterred. A friend picked up my copy the other day and said: “I was thinking of buying this for my mother’s birthday present.” And then she opened it and said: “Ah, perhaps not.”

But that’s not the note on which to end this review.. A major article on Baker’s work in the British Architects’ Journal of February 1927 stated: “So often in Baker’s work, is found strength and power combined with grace, refinement, and simplicity which must please even the most casual observer; and when such a combination exists there is surely good design… Baker’s work always gives the expression of being fit for purpose, well-constructed, and decent to look at – probably the three main essentials of good building and good architecture.”

Can’t say better than that.

• This biography is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for March.