Pseudo-Georgian London

"And not only in London, but all over Britain. This is a glorious little book. Bronstein is an artist primarily, though reading his writing in this book you wouldn’t necessarily think so. His style is very dry and witty, and really revelatory. He manages to capture something elusive that we’ve seen happen in our towns and cities, something that we have not really been able to articulate: fake Georgian is an ideal way to monetise a desire for heritage-inspired design. As a kid, he remembers going around big DIY stores and being seduced by all the eighties wallpaper and mock-up photos of ideal eighties houses. It may be tacky but it’s also designed to be seductive. It seeps into your brain. Many of the places featured in Bronstein’s drawings are like Laura Ashley wallpaper —rather ubiquitous, and yet totally ignored. These invisible, often risible buildings, he’s put centre stage. This is a really clever sleight of hand the way that he’s done it, creating fictional facades that are nonetheless totally feasible. None of them individually would qualify as architectural icons. They are the reverse of a branding strategy for a place, almost totally anonymous, urban fabric as unprepossessing wallpaper. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That he’s able to step back from that and actually reveal them to you is a masterstroke. To my mind, these ersatz buildings are accidental icons, because they reveal a cultural drive towards an unthreatening idea of heritage, something that you see exemplified in Poundbury for example. King Charles is perhaps the ambassador, or the estate agent, for this idea of heritage. Often, these buildings don’t even result from the work of developers’ grand schemes as was the case in Poundbury. Often they’re the work of many individual architects and the result of their singular visions, not a pattern book version. The results are a brilliantly multi-layered rendition of this idea. As Bronstein shows them, these urban scenes come across like a cardboard toy theatre that we all inhabit. His illustration style lends itself to thinking of them in this way, the city like an amazing theatrical model, a set where you can pull the layers back to constantly reveal a new detail, one which you can’t quite believe you’ve never noticed, as it’s been right in front of your eyes all this time. His writing betrays a sense of pride and even revelation. He can’t quite believe that all of this stuff exists! What’s more, he can’t quite believe that nobody else has noticed it! The project has the feel of an extraordinary anthropology experiment. Noticing things about ourselves as a culture that have so far gone unremarked, and doing so in a remarkable way."