Noteworthy speakers at Oxford Literary Festival suggest there’s more than meets the eye when we look at familiar buildings

Simon Jenkins and Diana Darke: Architecture at the Oxford Literary Festival

29 March – 6 April

By Jon Lewis

Building Sights

Two noteworthy speakers at the Oxford Literary Festival suggest that there’s more than meets the eye when we look at familiar buildings. By coincidence, their journeys into discovering what lies hidden begins with their own homes.

Simon Jenkins, now a Guardian columnist and former editor of The Times as well as chairman of the National Trust, analysed the facade of his own house in South London. In a street resembling many in England, his home was designed with references to classical Greek styles.

In his new book A Short History of British Architecture: from Stonehenge to the Shard, Jenkins charts a battle over the centuries between architects who favoured classical designs and those that went for the more extravagant Gothic style that originated in France. Gothic architects were less doctrinaire. Jenkins’ favourite Gothic building is Kings College Cambridge but perhaps the best known are the Houses of Parliament. Tudor England favoured classical designs, with Tudor buildings influencing the Arts and Crafts movement such as Cragside in Northumberland. It is this style that dominates many a suburban street with their individualistic Tudorbethan houses.

Diana Darke is an Arabist who worked at GCHQ Cheltenham who’s interested in codebreaking. Her book Islamesque: the Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments, begins with a quest in the courtyard of her Damascus home. There is a zigzag carving running around it that emerges from a circle. Darke noticed this image across the Muslim world by fountains and carved into buildings. She says it means water and refers to the letter M. The design reoccurs in medieval European buildings like Durham Cathedral along with dozens of other Islamic motifs. Her theory is that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Europe did not have the knowledge of geometry or the technology to build cathedrals and other large buildings and so Muslim craftsmen and architects from Sicily and Southern Spain were hired. They incorporated zigzags, lozenges, eight-pointed stars, images from the Islamic stories of Paradise, two animals playing musical instruments and so on into Europe’s medieval buildings.

Both talks suggest we should look at our buildings more closely.