But texture, too, has a part to play. The materials used in old buildings were all “home-made”; therefore they lacked the smooth mechanical surface that is so antagonistic to Nature, and thus the very defects of their manufacture prevented any clash between nature and art. But, above all, most of these old farms and cottages were simple, spontaneous, unsophisticated, and English. Their design and their construction were traditional, born of the soil on which they stood. The snobbery of the Victorian suburban villa was unknown to the village yokels who produced masterpieces of cottage design. The very simplicity of their “programme” was their salvation. They had to provide a dwelling-house of given size from local materials. There was no question of deciding between Welsh slates and red tiles: only one form of roofing was available locally. The rooms were shockingly low, according to our ideas, but as an external result there was a long low roof, and low eaves, all assisting to produce an unobtrusive effect attuned to the landscape. On the other hand, the fireplace and the chimney above it were large, for wood was the only fuel available, and thus bold chimneys are found externally. The windows were glazed with small panes because nobody then could make large ones. The old-fashioned cottage, a truly beautiful thing, was the work of competent men who, generally speaking, were content to satisfy a utilitarian demand without trying to create a sensation. On the other hand there is a question that I have not yet heard asked: was there never an ambitious tradesman or tradesman’s wife in the past who wished to create an architectural sensation in the village? Surely a flamboyant half-timbered inn must have looked rather startling when first erected? And the village “highbrow” of 1750 or so who procured from an architect in the nearest town a design for a Palladian façade in the latest mode, did he not create a discord in the harmony of the village street? The answer to this compound question must be in the affirmative, but the results are less obtrusive than they would be to-day. The black and white inn would have the same proportions, the same fenestration, the same doors and chimneys, as a brick building in the same street; and the “genuine antique” façade from Palladio would become a little less exotic by the time that the village bricklayer had finished with it. The harmony and repose that characterises the old English village is mainly due to its isolation: there was no disturbing influence from outside, no filtration of alien ideas, and no introduction of discordant materials. But the “silk” stockings and the gramophone-records that now decorate the shop-window of the village store have their counterpart in the modern architecture of the village street.