I had been in Scandinavia, where I had participated in debates about the appalling damage Modernism has done to old-established towns. This was part of the Norwegian Architectural Uprising against the deliberate Ugliness inflicted worldwide by a quasi-religious fundamentalist cult, with beliefs founded on nonsense, humbug, and fake history concocted by those intent on constructing a Grand Narrative of Modernist architecture which, for all its influence, does not stand up to serious examination. The prime example of the Grand Narrative was that pernicious book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius, by Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83), published in 1936, the title of which says it all, for what Pevsner disgracefully did, peering myopically through his Gropius-tinted spectacles, was to suggest a respectable smooth development from Arts-&-Crafts architecture to the nightmare, dystopian world of Modernism. What happened was not a smooth transition, but a complete break with the past: it was a brutal severance too. Not even the protests of certain elderly, but real, architects from that gloriously creative pre-1914 world, such as C.F.A. Voysey (1857-1941) and M.H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who vigorously objected to being associated with something they abhorred, not least its Godless Ugliness, could deter Pevsner from making his absurd claims, and others floundered in his wake.
