The architectural conscience of the nation

Michael Hall, a former Architectural Editor and Deputy Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, looks back at the magazine’s formation of its architectural coverage from 1897 to 1939

- Michael Hall

FROM the moment I walked into the office at COUNTRY LIFE in May 1989 for my first day as its new Architectural Writer, I was made aware that I was joining an august tradition. Over the desk of the then Architectural Editor Giles Worsley were pinned the intimidating words ‘COUNTRY LIFE is the keeper of the architectural conscience of the nation’, written by the Liberal politician Lord Runciman in 1913, when the magazine was already 16 years old. Although COUNTRY LIFE had, in the 1970s, left its purpose-built office in Covent Garden for a tower block on the South Bank, the Architectural Editor still used one of the armchairs that the architect of its old home, Edwin Lutyens, had designed for it in 1905. On my desk, sandwiched between shelves stuffed with the ‘Buildings of England’ and the thick volumes of The Complete Peerage, I found a welcoming gift from the senior Architectural Writer, John Cornforth —a copy of his recently published book The Search for a Style: ‘Country Life’ and Architecture 1897–1935, which he had inscribed ‘Welcome to the Boys’ Brigade’. The joke was—perhaps unintentionally—pointed: COUNTRY LIFE had appointed its first female editor, Jenny Greene, only three years before, but it was not to hire its first female Architectural Writer, Mary Miers, until 1998.