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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of a special edition of the prestigious Architectural Review. The June 1955 supplement was devoted to a now-famous single essay called ‘Outrage’, Ian Nairn’s critique of the ways in which Britain’s towns and cities were being rebuilt from the rubble and ruins of the Second World War. Nairn’s vividly written essay is based on what he saw travelling from Southampton to Carlisle and his belief that character and individuality in architecture was being lost to a drab urban sprawl that he termed ‘subtopia’ (see ‘Cathedrals of Commerce’ in CA 426). He went on to develop these ideas in articles for the Observer and the Sunday Times, in books on London and Paris, and in programmes for the BBC, between 1967 and 1978.
In those television programmes (some are still on BBC iPlayer), he travelled round Britain in a blue open-top Morris Minor that was almost an extension of his own personality; and some 58 years later, that car has been rediscovered. The Twentieth Century Society set out to find it for the anniversary with the help of members of the Morris Minor Forum and it turns out that the car, first registered on 1 April 1969, has been lovingly restored and now lives on in Cornwall.
A confirmed ‘Minorphile’
It will not be the first time the car has been overhauled. Describing himself as a ‘confirmed Minorphile’, Nairn wrote an article for the 7 August 1977 edition of the Sunday Times in which he described the reconditioning work carried out to the car by Charles Ware, proprietor of the Morris Minor Centre at Twerton, located in the western suburbs of Bath.
Nairn describes Ware as a polymath with an ebullient personality who trained at the Slade, abandoned painting for building, and became a property developer specialising in conservation. According to Nairn, Wade ‘became a millionaire, in the process saving Bath’s Kingsmead Square from demolition and organising the alternative Bath Festival, or Happening… come the property crash, he lost everything. So back to square one, he started again in the conservation business. Conserving Morris Minors.’ Nairn goes on to say that ‘Britain’s answer to the VW Beetle’ is a long way from the ‘sleek salesmen and bikinis on bonnets’ of posh cars at the Motor Show, but is classless and classic, and great fun to drive.
Nairn was only slightly exaggerating, for Charles Ware did not abandon art: he made a living as a lecturer in etching at the Slade for a decade and, while he was living in London, he purchased and restored boarded-up houses in Islington, many of which had been earmarked for demolition. Ware’s obituary in the Guardian (14 July 2025) says that he restored some 1,200 properties from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, thus playing a leading role in the regeneration of Islington at a time when people preferred to buy new houses and there was little demand for older properties.
Relocating to the Bath Academy of Art in the mid-1960s, Ware formed a consortium of architects to tackle the city’s war-damaged Georgian terraces, and he played a major part in the restoration and revival of the Theatre Royal. He was also a patron of talented young artists, including Roxy Music, for whom he provided funding and a van.
The 1975 property crash left him bankrupt and in debt to the tune of £1m – money that he paid back within two years. He took night classes in car maintenance, and Nairn’s article did much to help the growth and success of the Morris Minor Centre, which only ceased trading in 2021.
Inspired by wood
In 1978, who should come knocking on the door of the Morris Minor Centre than a young Luke Hughes, then an impoverished student looking to eke out his grant and now a very successful furniture designer. Luke’s work is celebrated in a Thames & Hudson monograph, Furniture in Architecture, and Aidan Walker’s ‘Introduction’ explains that (after a first degree in History of Art and Architecture at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge) Luke was set on following family tradition and had embarked on the study of law at Bristol. To support himself he worked for Ware restoring Morris Minor Travellers, with their distinctive wood-framed rear bodywork.
The love of wood soon triumphed over Luke’s somewhat half-hearted relationship with the law, and, in 1981, he set up his first furniture workshop in Covent Garden, initially making one-off items for individual clients, then designing a whole suite of household furniture (the Ovolo range) for John Lewis.
When an architect working on a new management training centre for the chemical firm ICI saw the Ovolo range, he commissioned Luke to provide the furniture for the bedroom suites and conference rooms, and this led to similar contracts from Courage Breweries and Boots. At the time, Oxford and Cambridge colleges were building new graduate accommodation that could also serve the conference trade, and Luke began working with the architects on projects that integrated furniture and architecture. Sir Philip Dowson (1924-2014), a founding partner at Arup Associates, who worked with Luke at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, bemoaned the fact that the creativity invested by an architect in a building was so often spoiled by ‘awful’ furniture, and that the ideal was that the two should complement each other.
Luke is soaked in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and inspired by the William Morris philosophy of the essential dignity of craft-based labour. His designs have affinities with the work of Ernest Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, and Gordon Russell – the Cotswold Movement pioneers. Luke has worked all over the world on prestigious projects, such as London’s Supreme Court and the British Embassy in Moscow, as well as university halls and lecture theatres from Yale to Cambridge.
With the trend for reordering and removing fixed pews in places of worship, Luke has designed stackable chairs and pews, sacristy furniture and altars, choir stalls, and cupboards for more than 100 parish churches and 24 cathedrals. To cite just one example, the seats for clergy that sit on the Cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey (CA 359) – as seen in royal weddings and a coronation – are Luke’s work.
And to bring this story full circle, the table at which Sherds is writing this column was one of the first items of furniture that Luke Hughes designed.
Medieval roads
Another famous Morris Minor fan was Nikolaus Pevsner who, together with Bridget Cherry, drove one around the country whilst doing the rounds for researching the Buildings of England series. If they were to set out on their journey across Britain today, they might well consult a new map that has just been published by David Harrison, called ‘A Road Map of England and Wales in the late Middle Ages c.1450 to 1500’.
With explanatory text on the reverse, the map is a distillation of years of research into the medieval records that mention roads, bridges, and causeways as well as their maintenance and repair (or vice-versa, when fines were imposed for damaging or blocking highways). Road and bridge construction was down to local authorities, but the monarch could grant them the right to charge tolls, known as ‘pavage’ and ‘pontage’ respectively. In time, pavage gave way to tollbooths, but most roads continued on the same alignments as they had for centuries previously, and many medieval predecessors underlie modern routes.
Bridges provide impressive surviving evidence of the medieval road system, often built by the same master masons who constructed churches and cathedrals (indeed, some bridges were built expressly for the purposes of carting stone for these places of worship). The roads themselves seem to have been constructed from clay or gravel, paved with locally quarried stone, with ditches on either side – legal cases about the liability for bridge and road repairs often involved the failure to keep ditches clear.
There is little evidence for signposts or milestones in the Middle Ages, but most people travelled along routes that they knew well. When travelling in unfamiliar territory, people would ask for directions, but the financial accounts of wealthy families show that they might hire a guide familiar with the area. With roads came the first commercial inns and stables, which began to appear in the 14th century, while England and Wales had 1,000 monastic institutions in 1500, where travellers could find hospitality – that word itself shares a common root with the hundreds of hospitals that provided communal dormitory accommodation for those on journeys. All in all, the map shows what an impressive travel infrastructure underpinned late medieval mobility.
