Inside RIBA's doors, visitors are greeted by a guard, a barograph, a box with signage, and an abundance of tightly spaced black and white pictures, framed and aided on all sides by wall-text panels, pull-quotes and colour-coded floor-to-ceiling reproductions. An institutional buffer zone, almost impossible to neutralise, positions Edwin Smith as an artiste (above and beyond his vocation as a photographic topographer of rural vernacular Britain) and ascribes a visual identity to a culture long considered by many to be 'verbally rich but visually impoverished'. The question is: what is the current import of a collection of images that, in the effort to record, go a long way to constructing the very notion of 'Britishness'? And for those of us particularly invested in the ability of the built environment to communicate, what does Britishness actually look like?
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