Chapter 4: Great Britain

IN English terminology, the most productive period of Nash and Soane, the two greatest Romantic Classical architects of England, extending from 1810 down to the thirties, is loosely referred to as ‘Regency’, and the rest of the first half of the century as ‘Early Victorian’. Neither term has much more specific meaning in an international frame of reference than does ‘Restoration’ or ‘Louis Philippe’ in France, not to speak of ‘Biedermeier’, which is sometimes used for this period in Germany and Austria. ‘Regency’ production includes the characteristic monuments of mature Romantic Classicism in England and also much work that makes manifest the Picturesque point of view. Early Victorian production illustrates the modulation of Romantic Classicism into the Renaissance Revival, and includes as well the most doctrinaire phase of the Gothic Revival (see Chapter 6).

Although current researches are somewhat amending the picture, it is accepted that private architecture has generally been more significant in England than public architecture. This was least true in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Soane had been Architect to the Bank of England, in effect if not in fact an important branch of the State, from 1788. Nash succeeded Wyatt in the office of Surveyor-General—although he was only given the title of Deputy—in 1813. And in 1815 Soane, Nash, and Smirke, undoubtedly the three leading architects of their day if one excepts Wilkins, became the members of a new board set up by the national Office of Works, which was at a peak of its authority and activity immediately after Napoleon’s downfall. Soane and Smirke, though not personal favourites of George IV, were knighted, like several of their German contemporaries. The principal building project of the day, the laying out and the construction of Regent Street and Regent’s Park, the latter on Crown land, had the fullest personal support of George IV, first as Regent and after 1820 as King.

Yet Soane’s most important work between 1810 and 1818 was private, except for what he built as Architect to the Chelsea Hospital, and, in the case of his house and his family tomb, wholly personal. All that remains of consequence of his work at the Chelsea Hospital, the stables of 1814-17, might as well be private, for this is no great monument with columned portico and Pantheon-dome such as preoccupied most architects of Soane’s generation and status abroad (Plate 28A). Rigidly astylar, boldly arcuated, and executed in common yellowish London stock bricks, with no more deference to the purplish walling bricks and bright orange-red rubbed dressings of Wren’s earlier buildings at the Hospital than to his English Baroque style, this is as utilitarian as any project of Durand’s. Moreover, in its very simple detailing this reflects, and quite consciously, something of that primitivistic aspect of international Romantic Classical theory deriving from the theories of Soane’s favourite critical author, Laugier. Above all, in the proportioning and in the organization of the arcuated elements, the design of the stables is personal almost to the point of perversity. It is far more comprehensible to the abstract tastes of the twentieth century than in accordance with the ideals most widely accepted in the England of Soane’s own day.

Soane’s Dulwich Gallery of 1811-14, outside London, is likewise built of common brick and has similarly primitivistic detailing. This structure is most characteristic of its period in being a museum, indeed it is the earliest nineteenth-century example; but it could hardly be more different from the line of sculpture galleries that runs from Klenze’s Glyptothek in Munich through Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. Nor does it much resemble the picture galleries of the period running from those in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin through Klenze’s Ältere Pinakothek in Munich to Voit’s Neuere Pinakothek, also in Munich. It is least unlike the last of these, although that was designed forty years later; this similarity may help to suggest how confusingly advanced in style Soane, eldest of the leading architects of the post-Napoleonic decades, remained even in middle and old age.

But Soane’s _Rundbogenstil_—so to apply this term out of its German context, as one might do even more properly to the Chelsea Hospital stables—is a round-arched style with a difference. There are neither medieval nor _quattrocento_ Italian overtones here. While Soane’s approach was creatively personal in the detailing as well as in the over-all organization, that approach seems most closely parallel to Durand’s rationalism, particularly in the technical skill with which the monitor-lighting was handled. The centrepiece of the Gallery is a mausoleum in which Soane’s virtuosity in three-dimensional composition—an interest that sets him well apart from most of his generation on the Continent—and also at abstract linear ornamentation, produced here by plain incisions in the stone slabs of the lantern, reaches something of a climax.

Even more of such ornamentation is to be seen on the family tomb in St Pancras churchyard of 1816 as also, though much more chastely handled, on the façade of his own house[72] of 1812-13 at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The interiors of this house are full of spatial exercises, many of them miniscule in scale, which Soane developed later in various public structures. It may suffice here to mention the small breakfast-room with its very shallow dome, its varied and ingenious effects of indirect lighting, and its characteristic decoration by means of incised linear patterns and convex mirrors.

In 1818 there began for Soane a new spate of public activity that continued down to 1823. A series of offices at the Bank of England[73] now carried further the spatial and decorative innovations of the interiors of the 1790s. Whether or not these were finer is a matter of taste; but the continuous arched forms without imposts, the smoother surfaces, and the very abstract linear decoration certainly represent a more advanced stage of Soane’s personal style (Plate 28B). Under the Act for Building New Churches of 1818, which generated great activity in the ecclesiastical field, Soane was one of the guiding architects; he built, however, only three churches for the Commission that was set up by the Act. St Peter’s, Walworth, in South London, of 1823-5 is both elegant and ingenious in the way the galleries are incorporated into the internal architectural organization rather than treated as mere afterthought. The other two are less successful.

Almost all the other churches built under the Act, or by other means, in these years were rather conventionally Grecian, that is if sufficient funds were available; otherwise they were what is called ‘Commissioners’ Gothic’ (see Chapter 6). The contrast that the former provide with the Walworth church helps to emphasize the highly personal character of Soane’s achievement even in his least esteemed work. St Peter’s was evidently designed from the inside out, and owes almost nothing to the architecture of any period of the past. The type-church of the age in England, however, comparable in historical significance to Lebas’s slightly later Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris, is St Pancras of 1818-22 in the Euston Road in London built by William Inwood (_c._ 1771-1843) and his son (H. W., 1794-1843). Very evidently this was designed from the outside in, for its features are derived from the Erechtheum, a monument which the younger Inwood actually went to Athens to measure after the church had been begun.[74]

English tradition required a lantern above the temple portico at the front, and so the Inwoods devised a sort of Gibbsian tower for St Pancras out of elements borrowed from the Athenian Tower of the Winds. Urbane yet rather barren, the interior lacks even the tepid religious feeling of the French basilicas of the day. The architects, and contemporaries generally, were more interested in the caryatid porches—for there are not one but two—that flank the rear.

Other Inwood churches in London, such as All Saints in Camden Street of 1822-4 and St Peter’s in Regent’s Square of 1824-6, are equally Greek in detail but less directly related to particular ancient monuments. They are also much less impressive. No more interesting are most of the Grecian churches built by other architects. St Mary’s, Wyndham Place of 1823-4 by Smirke, however, is set apart by the circular tower placed on the south, a feature which he had already used on St Philip’s, Salford, of 1822-5. His church at Markham Clinton in Nottinghamshire of 1833, cruciform in plan and with a fine octagonal lantern, is considerably more original, but it was rather a family mausoleum than an ordinary parish church.

A revolution was getting under way in Great Britain in the realm of church architecture at this very time, and the heyday of the temple church was destined to be brief. After the early thirties only Nonconformists continued to build them. But such a Congregational chapel as that built by F. H. Lockwood (1811-78) and Thomas Allom (1804-72) in Great Thornton Street, Hull, in 1841-3, its broad temple front flanked by lower side wings, still had real distinction, a distinction rarely maintained after this date, although rather similar structures continued to be erected for several more decades both in London and in the provinces.

In Scotland, where Greek sanctions lasted longer than in England, Alexander Thomson (1817-75) built in the fifties and sixties three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world. His Caledonia Road Free Church in Glasgow of 1856-7 was designed for those Presbyterians who had left the established Scottish church in 1843 (Plate 29). This owes a great deal to Schinkel’s suburban Berlin churches, which Thomson must have known through the _Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe_. The composition is more Picturesque, in being markedly asymmetrical, and the superb tower at the corner reduces the temple front to a subordinate element in a sort of Italian Villa composition. Yet the idea for this sort of composition may well have come from Schinkel also, a derivation which the rather _Rundbogenstil_ character and asymmetrical organization of certain of Thomson’s earlier suburban villas seems to make still more probable. The interior of the church is very different from that of Soane’s in Walworth, but it is equally architectonic in the Schinkelesque way the galleries are incorporated in the general scheme. This is real interior architecture, not just a gallery-surrounded hall like the Grecian churches in England built back in the twenties.

Thomson’s more prominently located St Vincent Street Church of 1859, also in Glasgow, is not finer. But it utilizes a difficult site with striking success, and the exotic eclecticism of the spire is peculiarly personal to Thomson. His Queen’s Park Church of 1867, in a southern suburb of Glasgow, was as perversely original as anything by Soane, and is perhaps Thomson’s final masterpiece. Inside, he handled the light iron supports with clear logic and elegantly appropriate painted decoration. Both the heavy masonry tower—which is, of course, invisible from the interior—and the heavy clerestory are carried on these delicately proportioned metal columns with a frankness and boldness hardly equalled before the twentieth century. Externally Thomson detailed the trabeated masonry with the purity of a Schinkel and the originality of a Soane, yet he composed the façade in three dimensions in a fashion that is almost Baroque beneath his strange near-Hindu ‘spire’.

Thomson’s churches, late though they are, can be better understood as examples of Romantic Classicism, sharing important qualities with the boldest French projects of the 1780s, than in relation to any other stage of nineteenth-century architectural development. Yet it will be evident later that they also have a good deal in common with the architectural aspirations of their own quarter of the century (see