The Battle of the Styles: Society, Culture and the Design of a New Foreign Office, 1855–61 by Bernard Porter (review)

This is an odd book. At one level, it is confusing in the sense that it does not know whether it wants to be a book on architecture and its history, or a book about the nature of mid-Victorian society and its class politics. At another level, it is largely superfluous, covering a great deal of old and well-worn ground on both the new government offices project in Whitehall from 1856 to 1868 and the history of Victorian architecture. There have been a number of comprehensive studies dealing with this project over the past thirty years—namely Michael Port’s Imperial London (1995) and Ian Toplis’s The Foreign Office (1987)—as well as several scholarly articles. This leaves one wondering what is new in this book. The answer, regrettably, is not very much.

This would not be so problematic if the book’s author, Bernard Porter, a professor emeritus of modern British history, had not begun by attempting to establish a distinction between “architectural history” and “general history” in the examination of buildings (xiv). The implication here is that architectural historians are only capable of getting the story partially correct and, therefore, are in need of help (by real historians, presumably). Needless to say, this is a false distinction, and one that historians of architecture will undoubtedly find patronising. Moreover, it is a distinction that will not be recognised by anyone working in the field of architectural history today (or indeed for the past forty years).

In terms of content, Porter builds his story around a specific aspect of the building of the new government offices: the war of words that erupted over architectural style during the commissioning of the project and the political controversy that followed. This was undoubtedly an important moment in the history of Victorian architecture, involving George Gilbert Scott, one of the profession’s biggest names. Although this debate has also been covered by others, Porter’s aim is to broaden discussion of it into what he considers to be its rightful “context”: Victorian society as a whole during the 1850s and 1860s (x). He generally tells this tale in a lively, engaging, and at times amusing fashion, bringing some new sources and insights to bear.

But Porter cannot stay away from architecture for long. It is here that he gets into trouble. Attempting to squeeze a single event and set of buildings through the wringer of Victorian society and politics in toto presents many dangers. To begin with, what conclusions can really be drawn from such an all-encompassing approach, either about the buildings, the debate, High Victorian architecture, or Victorian society? This is something that the author himself is of two minds about. For instance, because no wider or informed discussion of Victorian architecture is offered, the context is artificially confined. Indeed, in many instances the terms of reference are either too narrow or too wide to be useful. This is partly because the author’s use of “context” is very loose, suggesting that to understand a work of architecture as a cultural artefact is necessarily to see it as reflecting society as a whole, not any one aspect of it. This strikes me as a misunderstanding of what cultural history aspires to achieve.

In places, particularly in the chapter dealing with British imperialism, this approach leads to an awkwardly skewed if not misleading interpretation of the quality and value of the government offices project. Here the definition of imperialism is so narrow as to be unworkable. In this Porter fails to acknowledge the subtle and complex interplay between identity, nationhood, and empire (not imperialism per se) among educated people in mid-Victorian Britain. This dimension is absent partly because the author refuses to engage in any systematic analysis of the pamphlet war that engulfed the project during the late 1850s...