Mathew Aitchison

Townscape: scope, scale and extent

Background Despite the looming catastrophe of war in the late 1930s, The Architectural Review’s (AR) war policy was one of silence. This policy was more stubborn hope than conviction, born of the chance the war might still disappear and life could return to normal. But any such hope was dashed in December, 1940, when a German bomb scored a direct hit on the AR’s printers in London. The result: the January, 1941, edition was the only number of the AR not to appear during the entire war and soon after the magazine’s policy was refocused to include it. Under the persistent threat of the Blitz and with Britain’s economy consumed by war, the AR’s editors had more pressing concerns than developing new campaigns in architecture and town planning. The offices of the AR’s parent company, the influential publishing house The Architectural Press (AP), had already been evacuated from the prestigious Queen Anne’s Gate to a suburban address in Cheam. After the evacuation, the AR’s longstanding editor J.M. Richards had continued to run the magazine in London out of a small suitcase. But in the spring of 1942, Richards withdrew from the AR and applied for a war job. He left for Cairo one year later and would not return until February, 1946. Hubert de Cronin Hastings was the enigmatic proprietor of the AP at the time; he was also the AR’s chief editor: a position he had held since the late 1920s. With Hastings ensconced in the AP’s suburban Villa, it was left to Richards to find a replacement editor for the AR in London. He nominated the émigré architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who had been in the country for less than ten years but had already published a number of articles in the AR and was about to publish a second major book. Pevsner’s early years in England had not been easy; with the onset of war, things had only become worse. He had been briefly interned in 1940, but was soon released, and narrowly avoided being shipped to Australia with other ‘enemy aliens’. Pevsner had swept rubble from the streets and fire-watched from the roofs of London’s historic buildings: an editorial position at a magazine of the British Establishment was a major advancement. Hastings had proved himself an insightful editor throughout his term, with a good eye for attracting the best people for his paper, but it was mainly Richards who ran the magazine. Pevsner’s editorial experience, on the other hand, was limited: now he was charged with managing an internationally renowned magazine for an indefinite period under the most extreme of conditions. Pevsner was a good choice, not only for his scholarly credentials and reliability, but as an enemy alien he was not liable to be enlisted for war duty like many of the AR’s contributors. Besides Pevsner’s duties of bringing out the monthly editions of the AR, Hastings soon put him 621

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