Off the Couch

English Heritage keep their Images of England site rather quiet. A shame, as it's an invaluable resource. On the ‘Advanced Search’, one can bring up a map of the country, click on area, and see an illustrated list of all the listed buildings in said area. When looking up suburban North London, I found that a particular favourite building of mine – Belvedere Court, between East Finchley and the Hampstead Garden Suburb, was rather more interesting than previously thought. It’s a very elegant and large-scale bit of second-division Modernism, the geometry tempered by little deco and quasi-Biedermeier details. Anyway, not only does this appear to have been one of those much-vaunted Experiments In Living rather than just another suburban block, but it was designed by Ernst Ludwig Freud – son of Sigmund, and trained by Adolf Loos. Surely another part of Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self could have been spun out of this connection? After Bernays’ use of the talking cure as instrument for popular control, we could have had another Freud’s importation of Modernism – something which many have considered, as per Karl Kraus’ line on psychoanalysis, to be ‘the disease to which it thinks itself the cure’ – as another example of cross-continental cross-pollination that came to oppress where it intended to liberate. Obviously E.L Freud is a peripheral figure, but it would have been no sillier than the importance apportioned to Esther and Matthew Freud…