West Country Modernism: an introduction
Imagine a small girl running up the newly laid concrete path to a semi-detached house. One of her older sisters is close behind her, and further back her parents are carrying suitcases. A van will be following along with the furniture. When the girls reach the house they find one of the small metal-framed windows has been left open. The older sister boosts the little girl up and she climbs inside. She rushes to the front door, excited to open it to her family and welcome them into their new home. She’s so small she discovers she can’t reach the latch.
When people think of modernism and the West Country, if they think of it at all, it’s the bright white lines of a Deco hotel waiting for the cast of a Christie whodunnit. Or the curves of Tate St Ives, with sand and surfboards outside. A romantic riviera of nostalgia. Or perhaps they see the big post-war rebuild of Plymouth, or the less well-known post-war phoenix in Exeter. All of that exists, and all of that will form part of this project.
But I want to write about more than that.
I want to write about the type of council house that my mum – that little girl running excitedly up a path – moved to in the 1930s. I visited that house when I was also a child, after it became my uncle’s home. I can remember sitting on the steps and looking over towards Devonport and the docks. I want to write about the tower blocks, the once-glamourous cinemas, the solid civic buildings. The buildings that form the fabric of people’s lives. I’ve always been fascinated by how our built environment shapes our communities and sense of self.
This is a journey into the West Country between 1920 and 1980. A world where modernism sat alongside ancient landscapes. Where people built an optimistic world that has left behind its own, modern standing stones.
Why I’ve started West Country Modernism
One prompt for this project was finding a copy of Discovering Exeter 11: Twentieth-Century Architecture by Eduardo Hoyos-Saavedra. This was a project marking the millennium by cataloguing many examples of modernism within the city and placing them in the context of what is essentially a medieval settlement on top of Roman remnants. Another prompt was my wanders around the Marsh Barton industrial estate in Exeter. This estate has been earmarked for redevelopment for some time, which means some of the more interesting midcentury buildings on it may be demolished soon. I kept thinking I should photograph them before they go. Over in Plymouth, the postwar civic buildings have reached the end of their lives.
So I’ll be exploring individual buildings, but also why they were built, how people responded to them, and what their futures are. I studied the history of art and design (and film) in the 1990s and have written about the impact of the built environment on culture. After twenty years doing other things, this project is a chance to go back to that abiding fascination.
Setting the time boundaries
The immediate question that arises is what am I including in modernism? I know this is debatable. In art, you can date it from the 1870s, or even from Turner’s earlier near-abstract paintings. In design, it ties to concepts of the machine age. I’ve chosen the timeframe of 1920 to 1980.
This starts a generation earlier than what is commonly called midcentury modern design, which is the tighter time window of 1945-1970. I wanted to cover the more modernist elements of social housing before world war two, so starting with the homes for heroes building program after world war one allows me to cover that. That program is what provided my mum’s family with a modern council house instead of the tenement she was born in.
If 1920 is where ideas about a modern socially informed state began to be implemented, then the cutoff point becomes when the UK turned back towards individualistic capitalism. A time when social housing was sold off, and the world was becoming post-modern (another ridiculously hard concept to agree on). So 1980 provides a pleasing, if slightly arbitrary, end point.
The period covers the interwar years, the postwar rebuilding and the start of the industrial decline. It covers several major architectural movements, all of which are represented around the West Country.
Setting the geographical boundaries
Which raises the next question: what is the West Country? It’s not an officially described area. The UK government splits England into regions, of which one is the south west. That runs from Land’s End to Gloucestershire and Salisbury. But the Cotswolds feels very different to Devon and Cornwall, even if we do all roll our r’s in a similar way. For the purposes of this project, I’m defining the West Country as the four ceremonial counties on the south west peninsula: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. There needs to be a coast.
I’m excluding Bristol for the moment. I love the city, but if you said you were going to the west country for a holiday, people would not picture BS1. There are also people documenting modernism in Bristol in a way that seems absent about places further west.
What to expect
My aim is to post at least twice a month throughout 2025.
One post will look at a specific building, location or structure. It’ll cover who made it, when they did, why they did and its social impact.
The other post will be a field journal of sorts. Where I’ve visited, what I’m reading and researching and news of buildings I’m keeping an eye on.
Posts will initially be behind a paywall, in order to recoup some of the project costs (in both time and expenses). There are two tiers of subscription available.
Premium subscribers receive an email with early access to the posts, and a warm west country thank you.
Free subscribers will get a preview of a post, and will be notified when posts come out from the paywall.
As I write this, we are having a classic wet West Country New Year’s Day. I’m hoping that’s not an omen.
A journey around modernist buildings in the West Country.