Monday, April 06, 2020

Home thoughts from abroad




Just at the time when a colonial Governor, brought up in the traditions of Old England, was characterising as "contemptible" the architecture of my native country, I was trying to be cheerful, in the early months of winter, amongst the appallingly dismal frontages of Bayswater. I have learned to have a great regard for the symmetrical native architecture of the Maori race, a design which is steadily encroaching, with the Swiss chalet style, and what we know to be Elizabethan patterns, into the varied and altogether bright house-designing of New Zealand. In a dozen or so styles which have been crowded into sixty years of social life in New Zealand there is only one that I know of so wretched, so crude, so uninspiring and dreary as what I understand to be the Georgian architecture of many of the older residential quarters of London. That is the little two-eyed whare that is so common a feature of the back-blocks.


Scholefield, Guy Hardy. 
"Confessions of a Colonial." 
Otago Daily Times,
4 December 1909, 5



Martin Phillipps and The Chills




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