Pax Britannica (35 page)

In Simla, steel-bolted offices below the Mall; in Wellington, New Zealand, the largest wooden buildings in the world, designed
not to hurt if an earthquake demolished them, and containing all the Ministerial offices and all the Archives of State; in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, a white-walled and thatched-roof Government House built on the site of Lobengula’s kraal; and in Ottawa a Parliament building which illustrated, better than any other, the romance of the imperial ideal at its best, the dream of cloud-capped towers and halls of brotherly debate which shimmered in many an Empire-builder’s mind. The Parliament of the Canadian Confederacy was seen from the start as an epitome. Canada was the idealist’s end of Empire—a people united in reconciliation, a colony emancipated, a wilderness civilized, the principles of parliamentary democracy transferred in triumphant vindication from an ancient capital to a new. When they built their Parliament the Canadians were consciously building a symbol, and they chose a properly sacramental site. The west bank of the river at Ottawa is flat, and runs away sullenly into the wilderness and the frozen north. The east bank is high and wooded, rising in grand bluffs above the water, and offering wide desolate prospects in every direction. Up there, in a site unmistakably of the New World, the English architects Thomas Fuller and Frederick Stent erected the most sumptuously imperial of buildings. It was best seen from Major’s Hill, a little way downstream, for there its symbolisms showed clearest. To the left were the stepped locks of the Rideau Canal, descending steeply to the river in a virtuoso demonstration of man’s mastery over nature. To the right the river ran away infinitely cold and uninviting, sometimes clogged with huge rafts, and chuffed over by steamboats. High in the middle, lapped by respectful trees and statuary, the turrets, towers and variegated roofs of Parliament rose in mysterious supremacy—a tall clock-tower their apex, outlier wings with mansard roofs and gabled windows, the library of Parliament buttressed and octagonal like an English chapter-house—with roofs of green and purple, and stonework splashed everywhere with reds, yellows and whites. Proud Canadians took their sons up Major’s Hill, to point out the lessons of this majestic spectacle: and watercolourists threw an extra glow around it all, as they might embellish an allegory.
1

One day in 1836 Colonel William Light, Surveyor-General of South Australia, stood on a bluff above Holdfast Bay and chose the site of Adelaide. He was the bastard son of a Royal Navy captain and a Malay half-caste woman, and had gone to Australia at the invitation of Gibbon Wakefield, who had high-flown plans for one of his colonies there. Light’s job was to survey the country and apportion land to settlers, and almost the first thing he did was to pick a spot for the capital. The city was started absolutely from scratch, on military principles, in a place deliberately and scientifically selected out of the endless bush. First Colonel Light decreed a circular road, surrounding the entire site. He lined it all around with parkland, as an insulation against the bush, and in its centre he deposited a double city: to the north a residential area, around Wellington Square, to the south a business area, around Victoria Square. Between the two lay another park, with the Torrens River running through it, containing Government House, cricket grounds, a parade ground and an artificial lake. Adelaide was an elegant little city from the start, and though in the course of time Light’s plan was partly overlaid by haphazard development, still it remained a standing reproach to the cheek-by-jowl disoriented cities of the Mother Country.
1

It was a paradox of Empire that the British, the most pragmatic of peoples, should have best expressed themselves architecturally in planned townscapes—in groups rather than individual buildings, skylines rather than façades. This was partly because sites were generally virgin, and partly because soldiers so often laid out settlements, and partly because in their overseas possessions the British allowed themselves to be more formal and methodical than they often were at home. There were no sentimental yearnings for the
crooked way, the rolling way. Right angles were
de
rigueur
in the imperial towns, streets were often numerically named: many cities, like Adelaide, were built to a grid. Streets were often immensely wide, to allow ox-trains to turn in them, and the setting of spire against dome, tree against clock tower, was often arranged with methodical finesse. Foreigners were frequently struck by what seemed to them an uncharacteristic logic of design: von Hübner, surveying the straight broad streets of Australia, concluded that the young Englishmen of the colonies ‘lean to the American’. Certainly the cities which the British had summoned into existence across the world were notable for a spaciousness, an airiness, that suggested boundless promise—as though the colonial planners foresaw from the very start their couple of shacks and a lean-to shop transformed into a metropolis.

Melbourne, for example, had been founded only sixty years before, when a Mr John Batman signed a land agreement with the aboriginal chiefs of the area—the three brothers Jagajaga, together with Cooloolock, Bungarie, Yanyan, Moowhip and Mommarmalar. No Colonel Light stepped in, to enlighten its origins with green belts and zoning, but it had already become a city of consequence, gilded with the profits of sheep-range and gold-rush. It was built to a grid, regardless of the shape of the ground. Each main street was flanked by a lesser access road, so that Lonsdale Street had its Little Lonsdale Street in parallel, Bourke Street its Little Bourke Street, Flinders Street its Flinders Lane. The business houses had their front doors on a big street, their back doors on a small, and suavely among them proceeded the supreme Australian thoroughfare, Collins Street, already claiming itself to be the finest street in the southern hemisphere (to every other Melbourne Street, Miss Clara Aspinall had written in the 1850s, ‘there is an American, go-ahead spirit, very objectionable to the well-regulated minds of our sex’). There were no squares or crescents: the centre of the city was rigidly geometrical, partly because it made land sales easier, and it was in the suburbs that the individualism of Australia found expression. These were very British. Carlton was frankly modelled on Bloomsbury, and when they established their first seaside suburb the Australians naturally called it Brighton. Street after street the
villas extended, each in its garden, across the Yarra River and down to the sea; rich and showy houses, often delightfully touched up with decorative cast-iron, with ballrooms and nurseries, fern houses and coach houses, stucco decorations everywhere and stained glass on the landing. From these elegant and commodious retreats, as the panegyrists used to say, furnished in the costliest taste of four-poster and mahogany, such magnates as had escaped the bank crash of 1893 drove into town along broad tree-shaded boulevards, out of
rus
into
urbs
, to their flamboyant offices on Chancery Place, to lamb chops at the Melbourne Club, or simply to perform the social ritual known as ‘doing the Block’—strolling up and down the north side of Collins Street, fetching up at last at Gunsler’s Vienna Café, where
everybody
went.

English visitors might scoff at such a city (‘isn’t it a little far from Town?’), and Melbourne citizens of cosmopolitan pretensions habitually disparaged it, too. But these great cities of the white colonies—Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Durban—were already much finer places than the industrial cities of the English provinces. They were handsome towns: not subtly handsome, but boldly so. In the detail they often slavishly copied English patterns, but in the whole they had a freshness all their own, as though their builders had torn Birmingham or Manchester breezily apart, and begun all over again.

The British, who generally neglected their waterfronts at home, or blocked them all off with high-walled docks, used them rather better abroad. They created no Golden Horns, it is true, and wasted a few such marvellous sites as Wellington or Vancouver, but one did not easily forget the harbour-front at Hong Kong, the formal splendour of Empress Place in Singapore, or St John’s in Newfoundland, with its tumble of wooden houses secreted behind the Narrows.
Sometimes the imperialists even set out to give gaiety to their waterfronts. Almost the first thing they created at Aden was a forlorn and blistered Esplanade, facing Front Bay. Sydney Harbour was flanked with little villas, perched Riviera-like high and low along its banks, and the seafront at Durban, where the Zulu rickshaw boys waited outside the hotels with bells on their ankles and feathers in their rickshaw wheels, was already one of the brightest of Victorian water-places. As for the esplanade at Colombo in Ceylon, that isle of imperial delights, it was almost Breton in its seaside elegance, and only seemed to be awaiting Proust’s young ladies, to flounce along the boardwalk with their bikes and parasols. At one end stood the swanky Galle Face hotel, with its gay sunblinds and majestic hall porters; at the other the British Army barracks were built in sunny enfilade, like expensive hotels themselves; facing the sea was the oval-shaped Colombo Club, white, shuttered and Members Only; between them all stretched a huge seaside lawn, beautifully maintained by the Municipality, with white rails like a race-course all around it, and Dufy ships sailing brightly by beyond the seawall.

And at Madras, beyond the Coromandel surf, the British erected the best of all their city skylines, a romantic extravaganza comparable to that Whitehall view from the little bridge in St James’s Park. In London the oriental elaboration seemed gloriously alien: in Madras, the oldest British city of the Raj, exotic flourishes seemed only proper. The skyline was like a cross between the Kremlin, a story-book Damascus and St Pancras railway station. Its buildings were, in fact, quite widely separated, and various in their styles, and seen close to resolved themselves into huge warrens of courthouses and Government offices, all arched and vaulted, with sunshine and rain pouring alternately down open staircases, and immense piles of documents glimpsed beneath portraits of old Governors and judges through barred unglazed windows. When seen from a distance, though, through the haze of the Carnatic noonday as your ship approached the anchorage, something ethereal happened to those structures: their walls were lost in the bustle of the city, and only their bulbous roofs and towers seemed to float above Madras, insubstantial against the blur, portly for Victoria and domed for the East.

‘The Maharajah gave the order and Yakub Sahib made the garden.’ In every city the sahibs softened their architecture with gardens, and of all expressions of the imperial taste, the gardens were the most satisfactory. The English predilection for the paradise garden, nature unobtrusively coaxed into order, was richly encouraged in the tropics, where the imperial gardeners found plants readier than anything at home to intertwine and luxuriate in the profusion they preferred. This was a ruling race with green fingers. The great gardens of the British Empire were mostly botanical gardens created for scientific purposes, but they were never mere open-air laboratories, while around their own houses, and in their public parks, the British lovingly grafted imperial cuttings to the root of English landscape art.

The best of the imperial gardens had an air of exuberance, as though their creators have been given
carte
blanche
. The two famous botanical gardens of Ceylon, for instance, felt like English gardens magically released from the restraints of English taste and climate. Peradeniya, outside Kandy, was done to a Blenheim scale: the river Mahawali-ganga almost surrounded it, giving it a theatrical unity, and everything about it was lavish—royal palms, vast clumps of bamboo, greenhouses and wicker arbours veiled in creeper, an eerie grotto of an orchid house, flower gardens dramatically laid out, colour by colour in big bright slabs. Its high-altitude subsidiary, Hakgalla, was its antithesis. It stood secluded in the mountains beyond Nuriya Eliya, a favourite object of Grand Hotel excursions, and it was like an English garden in a dream, blurred and suggestive. Peradeniya was best seen on the evening of a sunny day, when the shadow gave depth to its grand manner, and threw the silhouettes of its palms nobly across the green. Hakgalla excelled in a Scotch mist in early morning, when its maze of little paths, thickets and hollows opened unexpectedly one after another through the haze. It was only just short of a wild garden, its foliage exquisitely checked on the brink of anarchy, and it was dominated by ferns—damp and lacy ground ferns, tangled rock ferns, and the beautiful tree ferns
peculiar to Ceylon, whose leaves formed a high caparison, and dripped their rain-drops all around the edge.

The British had never stopped creating botanical gardens—those on the island of Dominica, in the West Indies, though already a superlative collection of tropical plants, had been founded only in 1891. The gardens at Sydney, which meandered delectably along the shores of the harbour, predated the city itself, for on the same site had been planted the flowers and vegetables brought out with the First Fleet of convicts in 1788: but the senior imperial gardens of all lay on the banks of the Hooghly at Calcutta, removed from the city’s clutter on the other side of the river. Behind them passed the Grand Trunk Road, on the first stage of its march across India, and over their walls the masts and upperworks of ships could be seen, silently moving up and down the river. Into this retreat the British had brought tropical specimens from every part of the world—mahogany and Cuban palms, mangoes, plantains, giant South American creepers, tamarinds and casuarinas: and Bishop Heber wrote of the Calcutta botanical gardens that they would ‘perfectly answer to Milton’s idea of Paradise, if they were on a hill instead of a dead flat’.