T is for TASTE

Taste arrived in Britain around 1615. Some rich people went to Italy and brought it back on their shoes. Although it arrived ahead of the Great Plague it has never reached pandemic proportions nor proved fatal in all but extreme cases. The more prevalent strain, which we call ‘bad taste’, is something that the majority have long developed a tolerance for and largely ignore. Its symptoms are barely discernible among the other more obvious afflictions which affect the larger part of the population.

Several decades may pass with no widespread outbreaks of what may be termed ‘good taste’. Older aristocratic families tended to be susceptible due to progressive inbreeding and regular exposure to fine art and architecture. In the present day the usual symptoms are a profound sense of melancholy which may, if untreated, lead to an acute aversion to travelling anywhere outside a conservation area. This used to be treated by a weekend in Blackpool but the recommended course now is to lock the patient in a room with a television.

The symptoms of good taste tend to be confined to a minority and include an exclusive, snobbish sense of recognition of certain fixed aesthetic values*. It is not especially contagious and is transmitted with some difficulty. A characteristic of those affected by it is their persistence in trying to commodify and sell it despite the long established principle that money cannot buy good taste. Almost invariably these fools will be parted from their money. In architecture there have been cases of people who have bought buildings at their market value which were commissioned by those with good taste. They have then found themselves caught in possession of other values.  This is not uncommon and may be explained briefly as follows.

As with individuals the effects of good taste on the architecture produced is insidious. Such is its nature that a building so affected may not immediately be recognised as displaying any unusual characteristics. It may be difficult to accept that the symptoms can be so invisible to the naked eye but this has long been the case. This has also been the case with fashion more generally as may be illustrated by the man who remarked to Beau Brummell that “it has been wemarked that I am the most well dwessed man in town”. Brummell’s response was, “If you were well dwessed it would not be wemarked upon”.

This is not to suggest that good taste is necessarily bland or unremarkable but is something that may be frequently overlooked in the visual clamour of the uncouth that invariably surround and envelop it. It is for this reason that it may be more visibly evident and ‘wemarked upon’ when encountered in a lower density rural setting but we are, here, principally concerned with the urban. In the town or city we may pass a building or pass through a place often before, by some trick of the light or circumstance, we note that it is unusual in being good.

It has curiosity value and is often rewarding to find and identify examples of good taste when walking in our towns and cities. Some places have owned to having an abundance of it, albeit very retrospectively, and have made a virtue of it. These are worth visiting but may be of more interest to the casual or less committed urbanologist. At their extreme they may present the dichotomy of architectural good taste being seriously compromised by the complete absence of that commodity in souvenir shops and the hordes of curiosity 'seekers' visiting them. The purist will say that one does not properly 'seek out' good taste on a charabanc. That is tourism, not urbanology.

*Note. These symptoms were first diagnosed by John Summerson in his book Georgian London in 1945