32 C O N T E X T 1 1 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 GRAHAM TITE Lost: from Babel to 9/11 Preservation of architecturally valuable and historic fabric owes much to a publishing fad inspired by a passion for recording, and to photography and perhaps even music. Messages about conservation reached me just as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. I rapidly located one of the first courses available in the new subject, at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh. I gave notice at my job in London and was soon on the overnight coach north. Messages of the sort were coming out from publishing houses and elsewhere. I have recently taken time out to look back 40 years (and more) at how books in English, for example, made a contribution to the development of our profession, helping to create a platform of public opinion on which the conservation edifice could stand. One book in particular deserves mention first. This is Lost NewYork by Nathan Silver, which first came out in 1967 and was re-issued in 1993 and 2000.The ‘Lost’ type of book took its form as well as its global popularity from Silver’s innovative pages, relying as they do on compelling black-and-white photographs of this mostpictured great city. There is a text, but it is the pictorial record of former structures dating from the era of New York’s rapid growth as a commercial and mercantile seaport that makes a first opening of this book into a shattering experience. By 1971, Hermione Hobhouse had given us a counterpart volume, Lost London.That was soon to be followed by other UK publications, such as Lucinda Lambton’s VanishingVictorianaof 1976 or PSH Lawrence’s An Eton Camera 1850-1919, published in 1980. A second book dealing with the rest of 20th century Eton followed soon after. To be included in these books, a building did not necessarily have to have been demolished. A vanished world of customs and costumes was also recorded here against a background of various buildings including, valuably, minor ones that would escape the attention of formal architectural history.These books served to warn against demolition. At Eton they led to the setting-up of the college’s own archive of historic photography. To understand all this more fully we must look first at books about bombing and rocket attacks in the second world war, and the inevitable loss of buildings. Susanne Everett’s Lost Berlin was published in 1979 by an American publisher. It showed in pictures and words the social life of the German capital in the 1920s and 1930s, and the building stock that would be practically obliterated later (much of it having enjoyed only a few decades of existence). London’s losses were recorded much sooner. From the first raids in Croydon and Central London on 15th and 24th August 1940 respectively to the last rocket on 27th March 1945 (killing 130 in Stepney), the damage spread right across London, with Holborn, the City and Stepney bearing it most. After the first bout of bombing, the architectural historians John Summerson and JM Richards issued Bombed Buildings of Britain in 1942. In 1947 a second edition completed the wartime record. A complex situation was made worse by the practice of demolishing structures damaged by enemy action, but cleared prematurely before their architectural merits and likely future could be ascertained. In 1947 I find the first of all the ‘Lost’ books: a slim, modestly illustrated volume ‘produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards’, written by William Kent. The Lost Treasures of London consists of seven architectural walks around central London areas. Each walk takes in a mixture of surviving buildings and wrecked ones. The use of the L word implies an assumption that reconstruction would not take place. In contrast, the architectural writer Harold Philip Clunn, whose books were mainly pre-war, produced the more up-beat London Marches On in 1947. Some few chosen parts of the heritage would live on to be reconstructed, despite terrible damage. Twenty years earlier, Clunn had already produced
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