Chapter 10: High Victorian Gothic in England

BY 1850 Neo-Gothic was accepted as a proper mode for churches throughout the western world. Only in England, however, had it become dominant for such use. Moreover, Gothic was a more than acceptable alternative there to Greek or Renaissance or Jacobethan design for many other sorts of buildings also. Only in the urban fields of commercial construction and of terrace-housing was its employment still very rare. On the Continent the nearest equivalent in popularity and ubiquity to the Victorian Gothic was the German _Rundbogenstil_. Neo-Gothic, although used more and more everywhere after 1850 for churches, attracted few architectural talents of a high order (see Chapter 11).

There are several reasons why the Gothic Revival was able in England, and almost only in England, to pass into a new and creative phase around 1850. One was certainly the ethical emphasis of its doctrines, an emphasis more sympathetic to Victorians than to most Europeans of this period, but not without its appeal on the Continent towards the end of the century. Another reason was the informality, not to say the amateurishness, of architectural education in Britain, encouraging personal discipleship and the cultivation of individual expression rather than providing for the continuation of an academic tradition.

Related to this is the private character of architectural practice in England as compared to its more public responsibilities and controls on the Continent. The desirable professional positions in France, and to almost the same degree in many other European countries, were those offered by the sovereign or the State. But after the time of Soane and Nash official employment ceased to carry either prestige or opportunity in England, the Houses of Parliament notwithstanding—it was not Barry’s work there but his clubs and mansions that established his high professional reputation. As in the eighteenth century, a social and aesthetic _élite_ still provided both critical esteem and the most desirable commissions for Victorian architects; by 1850 a large part of that _élite_ was very church-minded and thoroughly Gothicized. Not until the mid sixties was there any significant change; even then those responsible for this change, both the architects and their patrons, had all been brought up in the churchly Gothic Revival tradition.

The High Victorian Gothic opened with the building of a London church. All Saints’, Margaret Street, designed in 1849, largely completed externally by 1852, and consecrated in 1859, was the result of no imperial fiat, like the Votivkirche in Vienna or the big churches of the sixties in Paris, nor did it occupy like them an isolated site approached by wide new boulevards. Intended as a ‘model’ church by its sponsors, the Ecclesiological Society, and financed by private individuals, All Saints’ is set in a minor West End street at the rear of a restricted court flanked by a clergy house and a school (Plate 6A). But for its tower, the tallest feature of the mid-century London skyline, it would have been hard to find; but once found, it could never be ignored.

The architect of All Saints’, Butterfield, had been for some years, together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of the Pugin-like ‘correctness’ of his revived fourteenth-century English Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths. As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in London, and that red brick is banded and patterned with black brick, a theme varied on the tower by the insertion of broad bands of stone. ‘Permanent polychrome’, achieved with a variety of materials, thus made its debut here. In the interior, moreover, the polychromatic effect was even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to speak of onyx and gilding in the chancel itself (Plate 85). The very exiguous site forced any expansion upwards; the nave is tall, the vaulted chancel taller, and the subsidiary structures flanking the court are even higher and narrower in their proportions.

While the construction of All Saints’ proceeded there was much concurrent and complementary activity in the English architectural world. In 1849 a young critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900), had brought out an influential book, _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which many of the recommendations ran parallel to, if indeed they did not influence, Butterfield’s latest stylistic innovations. Notably, Ruskin urged the study of Italian Gothic: if All Saints’ is, in fact, not specifically Italian in the character of its polychromy, it seemed so to most contemporaries. The real foreign influences here, as in the profile of the fine plain steeple, are German if anything. Butterfield’s moulded detail continued to follow quite closely English fourteenth-century models.[218]

In this same year 1849 Wild[219] was building on an even more obscure London site in Soho his St Martin’s Northern Schools with pointed arcades of brick definitely derived from Italian models. Moreover, he was being acclaimed for doing this by the very ecclesiological leaders who had ten years before condemned his Christ Church, Streatham, as ‘Saracenic’. With the publication of the first volume of Ruskin’s next book, _The Stones of Venice_, in 1851 (the two less important later volumes came out in 1853) and the appearance of _Brick and Marble Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy_ by G. E. Street (1824-81) in 1855, Italian influence increased. Street’s name, moreover, introduces the third of the three men most responsible for the sharp turn that English architecture was taking in the fifties.

Without depending on polychromy, Butterfield designed in 1850 and built in 1851-2 St Matthias’s off Howard Road in Stoke Newington, a London suburb, another church of novel character. Unconfined by a closed-in urban site, this also showed in its great scale and the bold silhouette of the gable-roofed tower—still standing today above the bombed ruin of the church—how the timid Early Victorian Gothic of the forties could be invigorated. Moreover, at St Bartholomew’s at Yealmpton in Devonshire, built in 1850, Butterfield introduced in a country church striped piers of two different tones of marble and considerable coloured marquetry work. A former fellow assistant of Street in G. G. Scott’s office, William H. White (1826-90), at All Saints’ in Talbot Road, Kensington, in London, begun in 1850, also used the new polychromy that soon became the principal, though by no means the only, hallmark of High Victorian Gothic.

A large country house of stone by S. S. Teulon (1812-73), Tortworth Court in Gloucestershire, built in 1849-53, has no polychromy, although its architect was soon to be the most unrestrained of all in its exploitation. His patrons, moreover, would be notably ‘lower’ in their churchmanship than the members of the Ecclesiological Society who employed Butterfield. But in the boldly plastic massing of Tortworth, leading up to a tall central tower of the most complex silhouette, Teulon exemplified the new architectural ambitions, ambitions that would soon be finding as striking expression in secular work as in ecclesiastical building whether ‘high’ or ‘low’.

Street had been a favourite of the High Church party since he first began building small churches and schools of a most ‘correct’ sort in Cornwall on leaving Scott’s office.[220] He was also the author of several critical articles published in _The Ecclesiologist_, notable for their cogency. In these he commented, for example, on the applicability of the arcades of Wild’s school to commercial building; he also attacked the curious habit of the forties, most prevalent with the ecclesiologists, of designing urban churches on confined sites as if they were to sprawl over ample village greens. Street began his first important church with associated school buildings, All Saints’, Boyn Hill, at Maidenhead, in 1853. Here he employed red brick and almost as much permanent polychrome as Butterfield at All Saints’, Margaret Street. He also handled the detail, particularly on the schools, with something of the same sort of brutal ‘realism’ (to use the catchword of the period) that Butterfield used on his subsidiary buildings.

In the same year in London Street’s former employer Scott, long established as the most successful, if hardly the most ‘correct’, of Early Victorian Gothic practitioners, and since 1849 Architect to Westminster Abbey, built in Broad Sanctuary contiguous to the façade of the Abbey a Gothic terrace. That the use of Gothic should have been encouraged here by the Abbey authorities is not surprising. But they themselves may well have been surprised at what their architect produced; for this is no flat range of Neo-Tudor fronts in stock brick, but a plastic mass of stonework bristling with oriels and turrets and capped with a broken skyline of stepped gables. Nothing here recalls the rather French thirteenth-century Gothic of the Abbey itself; instead the effect is Germanic, recalling the medieval houses of the Hansa cities. The work was executed with a boldness of detail doubtless less personal in character than Butterfield’s or Street’s, but quite as striking to the casual observer.

Scott’s houses had little influence, however. Gothic terraces were no more popular in the fifties and sixties in England than in the preceding decades. In residential districts the flood of more-or-less Renaissance stucco continued to spread, little affected by the High Victorian Gothic. As we have seen, the Second Empire mode also had only a very limited success in this field of construction, a field dominated not by architects but by builders.

In 1853 also Scott provided for the Camden Church in the Peckham Road in South London—Ruskin’s own family church—a new east end in a round-arched and banded medievalizing mode; Ruskin himself collaborated on the window design, or so it is said. There is sufficient Gothic ‘realism’ in the detail here to justify considering this a round-arched variant of the High Victorian Gothic; but it is definitely of Italian inspiration. It seems also to be related to the later _Rundbogenstil_ of this decade in Germany and Austria; nor is it altogether without resemblance to such a contemporary French church as Vaudoyer’s Byzantinesque cathedral of Marseilles.

Several far more important and better publicized interventions in architecture on the part of Ruskin followed immediately. In considerable part because of his personal influence with Oxford friends, the Gothic design of the Irish architects Sir Thomas Deane[221] (1792-1871) and Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) was accepted for the University Museum at Oxford in 1855. Woodward had already proved himself a would-be Ruskinian in detailing their design of 1853 for the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin, in a Venetian (though largely _quattrocento_) way. As the Oxford Museum rose to completion in the next four years, Ruskin was in continuous contact with Woodward, providing himself the design for at least one window as well as encouraging the delegation to the Irish carvers of much of the responsibility for the ornamental decoration—of which only a small part was, in fact, ever executed. The work of the O’Sheas is better appreciated in Dublin, where the decoration both of the Trinity College building and of the Kildare Street Club of 1861 was carried out by them in a very free and yet boldly naturalistic vein.

The most interesting feature of the University Museum—and one that it is surprising to find Ruskin, who hated iron and all it stood for in the nineteenth-century world, involved with—is the court, with its roof of iron and glass (Plate 86B). How different this is, however, from what iron-founders without architectural control were providing at the same time in the Brompton Boilers! Yet it is even more different from Hopper’s or Rickman’s iron Gothic of fifty years earlier (Plate 60B). For all the elaboration of the ornament, which is very metallic in character but also very aware of Early Gothic precedent, what is most notable is the highly articulated character of the structure, as if the architects had asked themselves: ‘How would medieval builders have used structural iron had it been readily available to them?’ Is this, perhaps, the first echo in England of the theories of Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect who was to exercise an international influence equal to Ruskin’s over the next generation? Probably not, as his own enthusiasm for iron began only rather later (see Chapter 16). Whether or not there is specific influence from Viollet-le-Duc here, his great archaeological publication, the _Dictionnaire raisonné_,[222] had begun to appear the year before. Very soon the structural expressiveness of ‘Early French’ detailing, studied by English architects at first hand as well as in the woodcuts of the _Dictionnaire_, began to supplant Italian polychromy as the hallmark of advanced fashion in the higher aesthetic circles.

A more modest Oxford building by Deane & Woodward, the Union Debating Hall of 1856-7, has more vigour on the whole than does the Museum, particularly in its characteristically notched brick detailing. It also has the advantage of murals by the young Pre-Raphaelites. One of these, who had just left Street’s architectural office to turn briefly to painting, was William Morris (1834-96).[223] His ceiling here initiated the most distinguished career of architectural decoration of the second half of the century. Morris as a critical writer was destined, moreover, to be at least as influential on later architecture as Ruskin or Viollet-le-Duc.

Of the same date, 1856, is perhaps the most successful of Butterfield’s extant churches, that at Baldersby St James near Beverley in Yorkshire, with its contiguous group of vicarage, schools, and cottages. All of stone externally, the polychromy here is rather a sort of ‘poly-texture’ most effectively handled in the banding of the tall pyramidal spire above the plain square tower (Plate 87). Internally a delicate harmony of pink and grey-blue bricks, with accents of creamy stone, replaces the acid chords of All Saints’ in London, a harmony rivalled in the Welsh church of St Augustine’s at Penarth near Cardiff built a decade later in 1866. At the same time, Teulon at St Andrew’s in Coin Street off Stamford Street south of the Thames in London was using the boldest of brick-and-stone banding externally and, inside, elaborate patterns of light-coloured brickwork. Moreover, the rather Germanic planning of this church, demolished since the Second World War, was highly unorthodox by ecclesiological standards. Already it was evident that within the High Victorian Gothic there were to be two streams, one High Church in its patronage and led by architects of considerable learning and sophistication like Butterfield and Street, another more characteristically Low Church and often quite secular; this was generally coarser and more philistine, not to say outright illiterate.

Yet not all the best work of the High Church architects was ecclesiastical. By 1857 J. L. Pearson (1817-97) had already built some respectable if not very interesting churches distinguished chiefly by their very fine spires; but his first work of positive High Victorian character was Quar Wood, a country house he built in Gloucestershire in that year. The skilful asymmetrical massing around the stair tower here, the plastic variety provided by several different types of steep roofs, the crisp precision of the detailing, all combine to produce a modest mansion that is as different in effect from Teulon’s mountainous Tortworth as both are characteristic of the beginnings of the High Victorian Gothic.

Two houses begun soon after Quar Wood, both within the broad frame of reference of the maturing High Victorian Gothic, could hardly differ more from one another. In remodelling Eatington Park in Warwickshire in 1858 John Prichard (1818-86) attempted to mask an underlying Georgian mansion with a profusion of bold innovations in the detailing. Stone polychromy, applied sculpture, bold plastic membering of wall, roof, and chimneys, all are used here more abundantly than ever before. The Red House at Bexley Heath in Kent, on the other hand, which Philip Webb (1831-1915), who had been a fellow pupil with Morris in Street’s office, built for Morris in 1859-60, is notable for its extreme simplicity. So also is the house now known as Benfleet Hall that he built in 1861 at Cobham in Surrey for Spencer Stanhope, another of the young artists who had collaborated on the murals of the Oxford Union. This has a rather better plan than the Red House.

These houses have no external polychromy, only plain red brick beautifully laid; there is no sculptured detail at all; and the few breaks in the loose massing of the walls and roof are closely related to the informal ease of the rather novel plans. Only the high roofs of red tile are similar to those of Pearson’s Quar Wood. But in the plain, very ‘real’, detailing and the segmental-headed white-painted window-sash of an early eighteenth-century sort, set under pointed relieving arches, the relationship is close to the secular work of somewhat older men—to Butterfield’s vicarages of the forties (Plate 122B) and more notably to his clergy house and school at All Saints’, Margaret Street (Plate 86A). Webb had himself worked on some of the latest of the rather similar vicarages and schools that Street had been building for a decade. His first big country house, Arisaig, built of local stone in the remote Scottish Highlands forty miles beyond Fort William in Inverness-shire beginning in 1863, may properly be considered High Victorian Gothic also (Figure 23). It is especially interesting, like Benfleet Hall, for its plan (see Chapter 15).

Down to about 1860 the development of the High Victorian Gothic was on the whole convergent. Henceforth, ambitious young architects tried harder to have personal modes of their own like Butterfield; yet, conversely, many formed loose stylistic alliances in which individual expression became merged in some sort of group expression. The boldest and the most unruly were no longer likely to be of the High Church party, but rather of the Low. St Simon Zelotes of 1859 in Moore Street in London by Joseph Peacock (1821-93) hardly compares with the work of Butterfield and Street in distinction; but its internal polychromy of white and black brick outbids that of their best London churches, also built at the end of this decade.

Butterfield’s St Alban’s in Baldwin’s Gardens off Holborn in London, erected 1858-61, is all rebuilt now. But something of its splendidly tall proportions, if not the rich brick and tile marquetry of the wall over the chancel arch, can still be apprehended. The contrast in quality with Peacock’s work was once amazing. Street’s St James the Less in Thorndike Street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London also of 1858-61, is less fine but still much superior to Peacock’s work (Plate 94B). The tall square tower, set apart like a campanile, has a curiously gawky roof based on French models and the interior is somewhat cavernous. But in the richness of its red and black brick patterns, used both inside and out, and in the naturalistic carving of the nave capitals this church of Street’s rivals Butterfield’s All Saints’ and St Alban’s and is, unlike the latter, still completely intact.

Various younger men of Webb’s generation were beginning to make important contributions in church design also. G. F. Bodley (1827-1907), trained in his kinsman Scott’s office rather than in Street’s, built St Michael’s, Brighton, in 1859-62. This must have been very striking for the boldness of its scale and for the vigour of its structural expression before it was overshadowed by the tall later nave beside it added by William Burges (1827-81).[224] But it is not the parody of ‘Early French’ detailing in the square archivolts and spreading capitals of the nave arcade, so soon to be abjured by Bodley, that is significant here but the fact that this was the first church to receive an over-all decorative treatment, including stained glass, at the hands of Morris and his associates, who included the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones.

There is still finer glass of this period designed by Burne-Jones in the east window of Waltham Abbey in Essex, where the rear wall was rebuilt in the heaviest ‘Early French’ taste by Burges in 1860-1. As a painter Burne-Jones is hardly to be compared with Ingres; yet as a designer of stained glass the superiority of such early windows of his as these at Waltham Abbey to the ones by Ingres at Dreux and at Neuilly is amazing. It is not the least claim to distinction of the High Victorian Gothic that it nurtured this brilliant revival of decorative art led by Morris. Many churches of the sixties and seventies are worth visiting solely for their windows by Morris, Brown, and Burne-Jones to which there are apparently no worthy Continental parallels.

A quite different sort of contemporary church is White’s Holy Saviour, Aberdeen Park, in London, of 1859. Externally this is quiet and rather shapeless; but inside the red brick of the exterior gives way to a subtle harmony of patterned brickwork in beiges, browns, and mauves—assisted in the chancel by some additional decorative painting—that is unequalled in High Victorian polychromy. Also rather different from standard High Church Anglican work of the day is the Catholic church of St Peter in Leamington of 1861-5 (Plate 89A) by Henry Clutton (1819-93). He had won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France in 1855 with a design prepared in collaboration with Burges, but was not allowed to supervise the construction because he was a Protestant; English Roman Catholics were not so bigoted. Internally the characteristic articulation of Puginian planning was given up; nave and apse form one continuous vessel, almost basilican in effect, under a barrel roof that ends in a half dome. Unfortunately, the painted decoration of the walls and the ceiling here has all been destroyed; the effect must once have been much less barren than it is today. Externally, plain red brick is most happily combined with stone trim treated with great simplicity and yet with extreme subtlety. The inspiration is Early French, perhaps influenced by Viollet-le-Duc,[225] although Clutton knew old French work at first hand; but the smooth concavities and the delicately varied chamfers are handled with the greatest originality and justness of scaling. The fine tower, at once sturdy in its detailing and svelte in its shape, has lost the original pyramidal roof.

Not unworthy of the church, and vastly superior to Clutton’s rather dull country houses, is the contiguous rectory here, a rectangle in plan with the long gable broken only by elegantly chamfered pairs of brick chimneys (Plate 89A). The expanses of plain brick wall are regularly but not symmetrically pierced by coupled windows divided by colonnette mullions of stone. In simplicity of massing this rectory surpassed the Red House and Webb’s other—and in some ways better—early house for Spencer Stanhope, Benfleet Hall. In their simple dignity such things contrast sharply with the more ambitious secular work of the day, by this time reaching peaks of elaboration almost exceeding Prichard’s Eatington Park.

Teulon’s Elvethan Park in Hampshire of 1861, for example, is perhaps the wildest of all High Victorian Gothic houses; this mansion is so complex in composition and so varied in its detailing that it quite defies description. Polychromy runs riot, forms of the most various but undefinable Gothic provenience merge into one another, and the result seems almost to illustrate that original mode of design which Thomas Harris (1830-1900)[226] had just christened ‘Victorian’ in describing a project he published in 1860 for a terrace of houses at Harrow.

However, several churches of the mid sixties rivalled Elvethan Hall, if not Harris’s ‘Victorian Terrace’. There was, for example, Teulon’s own St Thomas’s, Wrotham Road, of 1864, piling up to its heavy central tower among the railway yards of Camden Town in London; and there was also his much more peculiar St Paul’s, Avenue Road, also of 1864, in the approaches to Hampstead. This was purged early of its original internal decoration but it long remained externally an almost unrecognizable variant of the standard Victorian Gothic church. Both have been demolished since the war. At St Mary’s in the London suburb of Ealing, built in 1866-73, Teulon used iron columns for the nave arcade; a still wilder Low Church architect, Bassett Keeling (1836-86), did the same in two London churches, St Mark’s in St Mark’s Road, Notting Dale, and St George’s on Campden Hill (where they have since been replaced), both begun in 1864. Nor were Teulon and Keeling by any means the only architects to revive the use of iron columns in the sixties; even Burges introduced them once in a church, St Faith’s at Stoke Newington, now largely demolished, and also in his Speech Room at Harrow School of 1872.

Of a quite different order is another London church, St Martin’s in Vicars Road, Gospel Oak, also begun in 1864. This is by E. B. Lamb (1805-69), an architect who had already begun to show rather High Victorian tendencies in the thirties. There is no polychromy here, and the inspiration from the past is neither Italian nor French but the still heterodox English Perpendicular. The massive plasticity of Lamb’s personal mode, with much large-scale chamfering and a consistent use of segmental-pointed arches in several orders, is happier where it was exploited more simply on the nearby rectory. The interior of his church, which has a sort of central plan with wide transepts and only a slightly prolonged nave, is a forest of timber-work ingeniously bracketed and intersected in a fashion peculiar to Lamb. Only perhaps in an international context, in relation to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’, is this sort of structural articulation intelligible (see