“I was so cynical, I just wanted to get out of this place and get married, so I’d do anything.” He submitted a parody of modernism, “a hideous building” that reached up into the clouds. Needless to say, “they loved it. They thought they’d got a convert”.
Terry’s fortunes changed when, in 1962, he started working for the traditional architect Raymond Erith, who reasoned that “if buildings have been going for two thousand years without cement or steel, and a lot of them are still standing, it must be the way to build”. Planners were unconvinced: one client wanted to donate an almshouse to his local village, in classical style, but the project was vetoed on the grounds that it was “not in line with modern thinking”.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s that Terry’s commissions grew in size and acclaim, climbing a social ladder: Queen Mother Square at Poundbury, Brentwood Cathedral, an expansion of Downing College, Cambridge, and the magnificent Fort Brecqhou in the Channel Islands. Society was exhausted with modernist novelty, a critique articulated most powerfully by Prince Charles, who provides the foreword to this book (and describes Terry as one of the most accomplished exponents of his school, “learned” and “erudite”).
Terry, who is discreet about his clients, says the Prince “was always supportive” – as was Margaret Thatcher, who hired him to renovate the three state drawing rooms at No 10 in 1988. “She thought the rooms were boring,” he was later quoted as saying, “she felt that after the Falklands War, the time had come to do something mildly triumphalist and confident.” He added a small portrait of someone thatching in the corner of one of his friezes.
The restoration added to the popular impression that Mrs T was getting too big for her boots, and critics sniped that the new classical movement was chocolate box and uninspired, the tired replication of a rigid template. Terry’s book demonstrates this is nonsense: there are governing principles, but from these develop countless interpretations.
One can see this in Terry’s masterpiece, the Richmond Riverside, completed in 1987, which, far from being a faux-acropolis on the Thames, is a pleasant jumble of styles that rise up on a green bank, as if they grew rather than were built. “The highest praise” that can be made of a building, Erith told Terry, “is if someone says it has always been there”, and to Terry’s delight, a walkers’ guide to Richmond advised its readers to stop and admire “these beautifully restored 17th and 18th-century buildings”. In theory, concludes Terry, one could extend a village so faithfully to its original aesthetic that no one would notice or object – an idea that the Tory government is starting to explore.
