Chapter 10: )

Similar mansards, but flat-sided not bulbous, and similar detail characterize a pair of tall terraces that Knowles built in 1860 on the north side of Clapham Common, south of London. These constituted a subtle suburban attack on Early Victorian traditions of terrace-design that soon had metropolitan repercussions. His Thatched House Club in St James’s Street in London of 1865 has a great deal of very rich carving by J. Daymond in the naturalistic vein, but is less interesting in general composition.

Knowles’s Grosvenor was still new when John Giles outbid it with the Langham Hotel, begun in 1864. Given a much finer site than Knowles’s at the base of the broad avenue of Portland Place across from Nash’s All Souls’, Langham Place, Giles rose boldly—most people now think too boldly—to the occasion (Plate 80A). Certainly he overwhelmed Nash’s delicate and ingenious steeple by the rounded projection and the tall square corner tower—now bombed away at the top—with which he faced it. Equally certainly his massive north façade, with its boldly modelled flanking pavilions and its profusion of lively animal carvings, would overwhelm the urbane refinement of the nearby Adam terraces flanking Portland Place had these not by now been replaced by far inferior buildings. For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the ‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced), the Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel, but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc.

That this degree of architectural originality, presented with such bold assurance and even bombast, should within a decade or two have come to seem tasteless and actually ugly—as, indeed, it has seemed to many ever since—is not of major historical consequence. The age that achieved it rejected as tasteless and insipid the architectural production of the previous hundred years, and most notably Late Georgian work of the sort to which the Langham stood in close proximity. What _is_ of consequence is that such High Victorian buildings, even when not Gothic, possessed a vitality and a contemporaneity within their period that was very largely lacking in parallel work on the Continent, most of which in any case is a decade or more later in date. In their parvenu brashness, the Grosvenor and Langham balance the contemporary achievement of the Gothic church architects—an achievement generally more acceptable even today as it was already to highbrows and aesthetics in the sixties—without necessarily equalling it (see Chapter 10).

In the English hotel boom of the early and mid sixties which these big London hotels set off, some variant of the anglicized Second Empire became the accepted type of design; indeed, a mansarded French mode continued to be used as late as the nineties[207] for such a big London hotel as the Carlton built by H. L. Florence (1843-1916) in 1897. Many heavily mansarded London hotels of the seventies and eighties are now gone or have been turned, like the earlier Westminster Palace and the Langham, to other uses—among these the former Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square of 1878-80 by H. Francis and the front block of the former Cecil in the Strand built in 1886 by Perry & Reed may at least be noted here, since they remain so conspicuous and are so exasperatingly unavailable to travellers.

It is a resort hotel, however, the Cliff (now the Grand) at Scarborough in Yorkshire, built by Brodrick at the height of the boom in 1863-7, just before he retired to live in France, that remains internationally the most notable example of the type (Plate 79). And the type could be found in such remote spots as the famous ‘ghost town’ of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City, Nevada, where the large and elaborate hotel is no more, or Leadville, Colorado, where the more modest and much later Vendome Hotel, built by Senator Tabor for his ‘Baby Doe’, is still in use, as well as in big European cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfort, Brussels, and Budapest.

The site of Brodrick’s Grand Hotel is a superb one on the edge of the Scarborough cliffs above the North Sea, as different as possible from the setting of the New Louvre. Its corner pavilions are capped, not with ordinary high mansards, but with curious roofs like pointed domes, richly crowned with elaborate cornices. In the intricacy of their silhouette these are not unworthy rivals of Barry’s Halifax tower. The massive walls are not of freestone in the manner of Paris nor yet of pallid Suffolk brick with light coloured stone or cement trim as in London. Instead, they are of warm red brick with incredibly lush decorative trim of tawny terracotta—a combination that M. D. Wyatt also used on the most elegant Second Empire mansion in London, Alford House, which stood from 1872 until 1955 in Prince’s Gate at the corner of Ennismore Gardens (Plate 83A).

Public and private architecture could hardly hope to rival the sumptuousness of the new hotels, and in Britain rarely attempted to do so. At Liverpool T. H. Wyatt in 1864-9 carried a U-shaped range of ornately pavilioned and mansarded blocks that housed the Exchange around the open space at the rear of the Town Hall, somewhat as Outshoorn carried his Galerij around the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam; but that is now all gone.

In the English countryside, the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham, built in 1869-75 by J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet (1829-1903), and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire by another French architect, G.-H. Destailleur (1822-93), largely of 1880-3, are unique examples of extensive mansions completely in the Second Empire mode (Plate 76B). In London Montagu House, designed in 1866 by the elderly Burn for the Duke of Buccleuch, once raised in Whitehall the mansarded pavilions that Barry and the winners of the Government Offices competition had proposed in 1857, but this has now been demolished.

The most notable Second Empire ensemble in London, however, still partly survives (Plate 80B). Facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace and extending southward from the group of Late Georgian monuments around Hyde Park Corner, are the terraces of Grosvenor Place. These were designed[208] in 1867 and built in the following years. They provide one of the more striking features of the London skyline inherited from the Victorian period. Rivalling the high roofs and, almost, the tall steeples of the Victorian Gothic, the mansards over the end houses are carried to fantastic heights and capped with pointed upper roofs, providing several storeys of attics; while the centre houses have convex mansards like square domes taken straight from the New Louvre.

Below these Alpine crests, elaborated at the base with rich stone dormers, the enormous houses are all of fine Portland stone—hardly to be found in any earlier nineteenth-century London terraces except those of Ennismore Gardens—and detailed with a plausibly Parisian flair—it is even said that draughtsmen were sent to Paris to study Second Empire work at first hand. English are the porches, however, which make plain that these pretentious ranges are rows of dwellings like those in nearby Belgrave Square. English, also, are the red stone bands, novel touches echoing the fashionable ‘structural polychrome’ of the contemporary Victorian Gothic, just as the tall mansards echo its pointed roofs (see