Thomas Hardy’s Architecture of History

Abstract

Addressing William Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1906, Thomas Hardy concluded his lecture by giving some perplexing and contradictory advice to architects: “If I were practising in that profession I would not, I think, undertake a church restoration in any circumstances.”¹ Equally puzzling, especially for an ex-architect, was his nomination of “a retired tinker or riveter of old china, or some ‘Old Mortality’ from the almshouse” who “would superintend the business better.”² Hardy’s peculiar judgment is founded on the impact and culmination of two somewhat divergent strands of thought in his 1906 “Memories of Church Restoration.” In these reflections, Hardy develops a predictably conservative argument regarding the philosophical quandary of church preservation. Finding an appropriate way by which to deal with England’s dilapidated old buildings had become a highly vexed issue that emerged, as we saw in Chapter 1, from debates on church repairs in the eighteenth century. Hardy confronts the still uneasy issues around the concept of preservation and is decidedly against the radical renewal of ecclesiastical architecture, generally called “restoration,” such as “the case in which a church exhibiting two or three styles was made uniform by removing the features of all but one style, and imitating that throughout the new work”³ or carrying repairs to damaged portions too far by making “look as good as new” even undamaged portions.⁴