Using Vaughan Williams’ work, composed against the backdrop of two world wars, as an analogy, we explore how the best architecture responds to its context.

Think of any English period drama on film or TV and it’s almost guaranteed that Ralph Vaughan Williams will appear on the soundtrack. With The Lark Ascending, he provided a musical motif that will forever be associated with birdsong, rolling hills and endless rural summers. But although it might suit the needs of the visual arts, this view of Vaughan Williams’ work is superficial. He often said that his work had no meaning, but it’s important to remember that it was composed across two world wars and that he had experienced their horrors first-hand during his time in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Vaughan Williams saw himself as both a Londoner and a socialist. His symphonies can feel uplifting or tragic, depending on the listener. They may have no prescribed meaning, but they are loaded with context.

 

Understanding this misappropriation of the arts is important, particularly in architecture. Planning policy, for example, is intended to support sustainable development and high-quality design, but it can often become a constraint. Given the volume and diversity of the projects they review, it is understandable that planners resort to blunt tools, just as musical directors cherry-pick from Vaughan Williams’ back catalogue. Guidance, for example, that materials “must be of a similar appearance to those used in the construction of the exterior of the existing” creates a superficiality in our architecture, keeping it firmly within a generally unremarkable Victorian or early twentieth-century vernacular.

 

There are examples, though, where art and context are perfectly matched. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis grows out of a song by a sixteenth-century royal musician and composer. The music is used to great effect in Industry, a BBC drama series about the world of high finance, accompanying a tense scene that lifts the veil on those who hold real power  and those who are to be sacrificed. It evokes Englishness but gains a deeper meaning from the context of the action it accompanies.

 

Similarly, architecture is at its best when it responds to context in every sense. Niall McLaughlin’s West Court at Jesus College, Cambridge, Nithurst Farm by Adam Richards and the Royal Courts of Guernsey by Nicholas Hare are all excellent examples of architecture that respects its context and employs ‘materials of similar appearance to the existing’, while also deftly addressing contemporary challenges around embodied energy and climate change.

 

Architects are now designing in the context of hotter summers, more intense rainfall and the demands of multigenerational living, just as Vaughan Williams composed against a backdrop of social injustice and war. Like his music, excellent contextual architecture can be like a tiger in the grass: look fleetingly and you’ll miss it; look carefully and you’ll discover a masterpiece of subtlety, rich in layers of meaning that even the architect may not have consciously contemplated.

 

Andrew Mulroy

Mulroy Architects, December 2025