July 1, 2024: Interviewed by Rock Badger Agency.

It was great to sit down with Calypso Newman from Rock Badger Agency to talk about the inspiration behind Not Quite Past and what we're all about.

For a brief excerpt, we were asked:

"Where did the idea behind Not Quite Past come from?

Jack: The short story is this: Adam and I do these architectural visits (with these books from the Buildings of England series called Pevsners). We were on one of our architectural visits around the country, this time to Birmingham.

In the Victorian era, it was a powerhouse of design and manufacturing. This era is seen everywhere in glorious factories and grand civic buildings. Birmingham was a centre of high-quality manufacturing—amongst the most advanced in the world at its prime–specialising in guns, textiles, toys, brass and other things—typically goods made of many small, fine components.

Following the Industrial Revolution, many people were dissatisfied with the cheap quality and crude design of manufactured goods. There was a huge push to raise the standard and aesthetics of manufactured goods, to blend master-craftsmanship with mass production.

This was, for instance, part of the motivation for the creation of the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. When it was founded in 1852 by Henry Cole, it was actually called the Museum of Manufactures. The V&A was meant to be an encyclopaedic repository of all the great crafts and artistic traditions of the world. They wanted artisans and captains of industry to come to the museum, be inspired by the grandeur and beauty of past works, study them intensively, and then spread what they saw and learnt into the productions of the day. That’s why there are those two extraordinary “Cast Courts” in the V&A: having the original artefact was not entirely necessary (contrary to what we might assume about museums today), since, for their purposes, all they needed were the exact forms from which to study.

Let me get back to Birmingham!

So we had come to see the famous red brick neo-Gothic and Arts and Crafts buildings of Birmingham, but it was outside the Bell Edison building that our idea first came to us. There is this incredible terracotta brick gable ornament to the top. It was complex, beautiful and also mass produced. I thought, what happened to mass-produced ornament on our buildings? Surely something like this could easily be made in our day, but even easier? But ornament is barely present in contemporary building. We have much more advanced techniques since the 1800s, and yet our ornament has not kept pace at all. It feels as if ornament exists in a state of banishment, while a tyranny of glass, metal, white unmoulded walls, or brick New London Vernacular towers carries on virtually unchallenged.

This discussion about industrial production, ornament, and the modernist built environment continued, amplified by each Victorian red-brick building we saw, covered in highly complex, rooted, playful ornament."