Chapter 14: )

Godwin in two rather modest town halls, one at Northampton of 1861-4, which is very rich in sculptural detail, the other at Congleton, Cheshire, of 1864-7, which is more severe and ‘Early French’ in character, produced two further High Victorian Gothic[234] works of the highest quality (Plate 92A). Unfortunately by the time the taste of the authorities in the larger English cities caught up in the late sixties with the advanced position of the High Church architectural leaders, those leaders had left that position far behind. As a result, many of the biggest and most conspicuous public edifices are very retardataire. Gothic designs won only low premiums in the Government Offices competition in 1857, although both Street’s and Deane & Woodward’s—on which Ruskin advised—were of considerable distinction. When Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905) two years later won the competition for the Manchester Assize Courts he elaborated the design of this large public structure along the rather unimaginative lines of Deane & Woodward’s earlier Oxford Museum, then just reaching completion.

At best Waterhouse had a rather heavy hand and an uncertain sort of eclectic taste somewhat like G. G. Scott’s. He lacked the cranky boldness of a Butterfield, the sophistication of a Street, and the sense of craftsmanship of such men as Webb and Godwin who were his own contemporaries. But he did have real capacity as a planner of large and complex buildings, something at which most of the leading church architects had little or no experience. Thus his Manchester Town Hall, begun ten years later than the Assize Courts in 1869, while lacking all the refinement of Godwin’s smaller and earlier ones, is a large-scale exercise in High Victorian Gothic of some interest. But inevitably the High Victorian Gothic was a mode less well suited to this kind of monumental exploitation than the contemporary Second Empire mode as naturalized in England and America. For all the skill of Waterhouse in the organization of plan and general composition and in the bold detailing of materials inside and out, the Manchester Town Hall is a late and inferior work—late, that is, in the phase of style which it represents, though not so late in the highly successful career of its architect. It may properly be compared, and to its own manifest advantage, moreover, with Schmidt’s Rathaus in Vienna.

The other most conspicuous High Victorian Gothic public monument, the Law Courts in London, is the work of Street, an older and far more distinguished architect; but it came very late indeed in Street’s career, so late that he died before it was finished in 1882. Designed originally for a competition held in 1866, many years dragged by during which the site was twice changed—once southward to the river’s edge and then back to the north of the Strand—before it was even begun in 1874. Other work of the late sixties and early seventies by Street indicates how completely his own taste had turned away from this sort of French thirteenth-century Gothic even before the Law Courts were started.

At St Margaret’s in Liverpool, for example, which he designed in 1867, Street reverted to English fourteenth-century models; thus, like Bodley at All Saints’, Cambridge, he seemed to be returning to the particular stylistic ideal with which the ecclesiologists had started out twenty-five years before. In the Guards’ Chapel at the Wellington Barracks in London, however, which was all but completely destroyed in the blitz, he in 1877 remodelled the interior of an engineer-built Grecian edifice with incredible sumptuousness in a sort of Byzantinoid Italian Romanesque, using a stone-and-brick banded barrel vault and a glittering investiture of gold and glass mosaic that quite outshone the comparable work of Continental architects in the _Rundbogenstil_. Then, in remodelling the interior of St Luke’s, West Norwood, near London, built by Francis Bedford (1784-1858) in 1823-5, equally Grecian, he used in 1878-9 round-arched Italian detail. Despite the bold banding in brick and stone, this is certainly not Gothic or Byzantine, but rather recalls the Tuscan Proto-Renaissance, or even the _quattrocento_.

Certain buildings by Deane & Woodward and by Scott at Oxford and Cambridge have already been mentioned; much more exists by Scott, Waterhouse, and various others, very little of it of any distinction, yet sometimes fitting not too uncomfortably into the general scene. The most striking example of Victorian Gothic architecture at Oxford, fortunately on an isolated site opposite the Parks, where it had no neighbours earlier than the Museum, is Butterfield’s Keble College, a complete entity in itself, largely built in 1868-70. With its walls so violently striated with bricks of various colours, Keble would have been a most disturbing increment to any existing college; on the other hand, Butterfield’s quietly stone-banded chapel at Balliol of 1857 is that college’s happiest feature, the rest being largely the work of Waterhouse.

Since Keble was founded by Butterfield’s pious High Church friends for clerical students, the chapel, which was added to the group in 1873-6, understandably dominates the whole. Tall and richly decorated, this has many of Butterfield’s virtues, but it quite lacks the directness and the poignance of his best work of the fifties and early sixties. The hall and library are less monumental than the chapel, fitting more easily into the ranges of sets that surround the two quadrangles. The over-all composition is fairly regular, and there is less coarse or fussy detailing than Scott and Waterhouse used for their ‘Collegiate Gothic’. Moreover, the scale of Keble is modestly domestic and, despite its considerable size, the features are simple and crisp; but in the relatively clean air of Oxford Butterfield’s polychromy has received less of the desirable mellowing than it gets in London. The banded walls certainly lack the harmony that the softer colours of the materials used in his country church interiors generally produced.

By the time Keble was completed—indeed in advanced circles well before it was begun—such polychromatic brashness was out of date. Yet at Rugby School, where Butterfield’s buildings of 1868-72 awkwardly adjoin various earlier nineteenth-century Gothic structures, the polychromy is even louder; moreover, it is still less mellowed by time. Although Butterfield lived on through the rest of the century and continued to build many churches and some schools, this first and boldest of High Victorian Gothic architects was more and more left behind after the mid sixties by the evolving taste of his own High Church milieu.

There are other High Victorian Gothic collegiate groups which are, or would have been if carried to completion, far finer than Keble. Being at less renowned institutions than Oxford, they are less well known. University College on the sea-front at Aberystwyth in Wales is by J. P. Seddon (1827-1906), from 1852 to 1862 a partner of John Prichard. This structure was begun in 1864 to serve as a hotel, incorporating as its most inappropriate nucleus a small Castellated villa built by Nash for Uvedale Price in the 1780s. The failure of the hotel project, the slow and faltering start of the college, and the necessary repair and rebuilding after two fires have left a complex pile of most disparate character, even though it is almost all by Seddon. But certain aspects of the building, the bowed section on the sea-front—originally the hotel bar, later the college chapel!—and the entrance and stair tower on the rear are among the grandest and most boldly plastic fragments produced in this period (Plate 91A). Neither Oxford nor Cambridge has anything of comparable quality.

For Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Burges prepared in 1873 a splendid plan worthy of its fine new site on a high ridge south of the city (Plate 88). Unfortunately only one side of one quadrangle was finished according to his designs; but that is perhaps the most satisfactory of all his works, and the best example anywhere of Victorian Gothic collegiate architecture. The brownstone from nearby Portland, Conn., favourite material all over the eastern states during what Lewis Mumford has called the ‘Brown Decades’, is especially well suited to Burges’s heavy and well-articulated detail. The rough quarry-facing of the random ashlar contrasts tonally with the more smoothly cut trim in a fashion that is polytonal if not polychromatic. The roughness of the stone walls also enhances the massive proportions of the long dormitory range and of the paired towers with their boldly pyramidal roofs. Yet for the classrooms this masonry is articulated into banks of large mullioned windows. Despite the general regularity and even symmetry of the composition, there is plenty of functionally logical variety in the handling of the different sections. Burges was happy in the Scottish-born Hartford architect who supervised the work, G. W. Keller (1842-1935); and Keller revealed his continued debt to Burges in the construction of a Memorial Arch in the park in Hartford which is one of the very few examples of such a Classical monument completely translated into Gothic terms, and not without real interest.

Burges undoubtedly enjoyed more what he did for the Marquess of Bute, beginning in 1865, in restoring Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in Wales. ‘Restoring’ should be put in quotation marks, for by the time Burges got through with them both were almost as much fake castles as any built in the first half of the century. They lie somewhere between Fonthill Abbey and Peckforton in intention and are considerably more sumptuous internally than either. Although Cardiff Castle, which had been subjected to drastic Georgian remodelling, was gradually re-castellated with considerable consistency, the work there never reached completion. It is chiefly the incredibly rich interiors that are of interest, even if the interest is of a rather theatrical order.

Castell Coch near Llandaff, restored in 1875, interiors of equal fantasy, almost comparable to those of Neuschwanstein; that is, they are more like settings for Wagnerian opera than anything the Middle Ages actually created. But the quality of the imagination and of the execution is of a very much higher order than Ludwig II commanded. Externally Castell Coch is a sober and plausible restoration-reconstruction of a smallish castle, chiefly of archaeological interest, but most romantically sited and solidly built. Beside its integrity the more famous restorations by Viollet-le-Duc at Pierrefonds and Carcassonne appear rather harsh, and obviously modern.

The McConochie house, built in Cardiff for Lord Bute’s estate agent, is one of the best medium-sized stone dwellings of the High Victorian Gothic, superior in almost every way to Burges’s own house at 9 Melbury Road in London. That was built later, in 1875-80, by which time the operatic medievalism of the interiors was quite out of date (see Chapter 12). Here in the Cardiff house the tight asymmetrical composition, the excellent detailing of the handsome stonework, and a generally domestic rather than Castellated air prepared the way for Burges’s fine collegiate work in America.

English architects in the sixties were capable of exploiting a wide range of different aspects of the High Victorian Gothic in almost precisely the same years. Only the size and departmentalized organization of G. G. Scott’s office, the largest of the period and more like the ‘plan-factories’ of the twentieth century (see Chapter 24), can explain how he could be nominally responsible for such a quiet, well-scaled, and advanced church as St Andrew’s, Derby, designed in 1866—some say by Micklethwaite, who was working for him at the time—and also for such a strident, complex, and over-elaborated edifice as the Midland Hotel fronting St Pancras Station. The design for this was prepared in 1865 for a competition held, curiously enough, two years after the shed had been begun by the engineers W. H. Barlow (1812-1902) and R. M. Ordish (1824-86). Such a drastic divorce of engineering and architecture could hardly be expected to produce a co-ordinated edifice, yet both aspects of St Pancras have considerable independent interest. The shed, ingeniously tied below the level of the tracks and rising, for purely coincidental technical reasons, to a flattened point of slightly ‘Gothic’ outline, has the widest span of any in the British Isles and, until the nineties, in the world. It is, therefore, a nineteenth-century spatial achievement of quantitative, if not so much of qualitative, significance. The masonry block at the front is one of the largest High Victorian Gothic structures in the world. It long had ardent admirers, and it has come to have them again, for it epitomizes almost as notably as the Albert Memorial the aspirations of Scott and his generation. The contrast to its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt’s Kings Cross Station, begun some fifteen years earlier, or even to Paddington, where the engineer Brunel and the architect Wyatt collaborated so happily, is striking. The taste of English railway authorities, as of most patrons of architecture, had been revolutionized by the general triumph of the High Victorian Gothic in the late fifties and early sixties. Yet on its completion in the mid seventies St Pancras was even more out of fashion in advanced circles than were Street’s Law Courts, the construction of which only began at that time, so rapidly did taste continue to change in the late sixties and early seventies.

By 1870 church architecture, for example, was in general much chastened. Externally Teulon’s St Stephen’s, The Green, on Rosslyn Hill in Hampstead of 1869-76 is not polychromatic but all of purple-brown brick with some creamy stone trim. It builds up, moreover, somewhat like Shaw’s Bingley church begun a few years earlier, to a tall rectangular crossing tower with rather quiet, more or less ‘Early French’, membering. Inside Teulon achieved in the brickwork a kind of golden harmony of tone resembling that of White’s interior in St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, completely eschewing the bold and almost savage patterns of contrastingly coloured bricks he had favoured since the early fifties. In the tremendously tall interior of Edmund Scott’s already mentioned St Bartholomew’s, Brighton—aisleless, chancel-less, and provided with broad, flat internal buttresses—the traces of brick polychromy are hardly noticeable on the walls of a space so grandly proportioned (Plate 93B). The later ciborium here is not by Scott.

Burges in the two Yorkshire churches which he began in 1871 at Skelton and at Studley Royal, both near Ripon, the latter with a very fine rectory near by, still aimed at a rather satiating luxury of both coloured and sculptural decoration in the interiors. But Pearson at St Augustine’s, Kilburn Park Road, in London, initiated at this time a new line of vast plain churches (Plate 93A). That line would culminate in the archaeological correctness of his Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, started in 1880 and finally completed by his son (F. L., 1864-1947) in the present century. His last work, the cathedral of Brisbane, Australia, designed shortly before his death in 1897, was only begun by his son in 1901.

As Pearson’s Kilburn church was built in 1870-80, it should perhaps more properly be considered Late Victorian than High. But Pearson retained here and to the end of his life, particularly in his tall towers and spires, a truly High Victorian love of grand and bold effects. However archaeological he became, and with his passion for rib-vaulting he could from this time on be rather more archaeological in a Franco-English way than Viollet-le-Duc in France or Cuijpers in Holland, his spaces are usually nobly proportioned and his masses crisply composed no matter how ‘correctly’ they are membered. At Truro, where the cathedral rises suddenly out of narrow streets, its granite still almost unweathered, Pearson’s handling of the relationship of the three tall towers carries vigorous plastic conviction; Burges had attempted the same effect at Cork with rather less success when the High Victorian was still at its highest. Brisbane Cathedral is plainer and tougher than Truro despite its very late date.

It would be inappropriate in this chapter to carry the story of Victorian Gothic much further. Scott and Street died in 1878 and 1881 respectively, though Butterfield and Bodley outlived Pearson. Butterfield seems to have frozen for life in the mode of his early maturity, and as a result produced ever feebler work after the mid sixties; Pearson was able to maintain a leading position with a younger generation grown chaster and more archaeological in its standards without forsaking his pursuit of those more abstractly architectonic values which give distinction to his earlier work. It was above all Bodley, however, with his Late Decorated verging on Perpendicular, who set the pace in Anglican church-architecture from this time forward. His personal style, still tentative at All Saints, Cambridge, in the mid sixties, was mature by the time he built St Augustine’s at Pendlebury in Lancashire in 1870-4. Crisp and almost mechanical in its detailing, this tall rectangular mass, buttressed by an internal arcade, is impressive both inside and out (Plate 92B), yet it wholly abjures most of the qualities that had for two decades given special vitality to English Neo-Gothic.

With various modulations what might, rather ambiguously, be called ‘Bodleian Gothic’ remained the favourite of Anglicans in and out of England well into the twentieth century. The continuing admiration for the work of Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960) in certain milieus suggests that it has not even yet been finally superseded; but much of Comper’s large-scale work dates from before Bodley’s death in 1907. For example, his principal London church, St Cyprian’s in Glentworth Street, was built in 1903. This crisp and clean example of revived Late Gothic, with its elegant gilt font-cover and screen, may wind up this account more appropriately than the vast unfinished cathedral at Liverpool begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), a grandson of the first G. G. Scott, in 1903. But neither is Victorian Gothic; both are rather manifestations of one aspect of twentieth-century ‘traditionalism’ (see Chapter 24).

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