Architecture

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 Chapter 9).

Soane in his latest work seems at times to have produced what were almost parodies of his characteristic Bank interiors, approaching in their strangeness and their oriental allusions the exotic spires of Thomson. As these things do not survive, it is hard to know whether the Court of Chancery at Westminster of 1824-5, with its pendentives cut back so that they are no more than a sort of plaster awning, or the Council Chamber in Freemasons’ Hall, with its strange canopy-like covering, were effective or not. But these interiors do help to explain why the idiosyncratic, not to say cranky, Soane left on his death in 1837 no such living tradition behind him as did Schinkel in Germany.

Nash, Soane’s rival as England’s leading architect in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, was a very different sort of man. Until his marriage he was of no great prominence; it was the Regent’s favour which then brought him to the fore. As an urbanist, if not as a designer of individual buildings, he was worthy of his opportunities—and no architect of his generation had greater. His distinction at what is today called ‘planning’ resides not alone in the amplitude, the elasticity, and the resultant variety of his schemes, but as much perhaps in his ability as an entrepreneur in carrying amazingly extensive operations to completion. Few, moreover, succeeded better than Nash in modulating Romantic Classicism towards the Picturesque; and this was over and above his important direct contribution to Picturesque practice in the building of castles, villas, and cottages.

At the beginning of the second decade of the century the lease of the Crown’s Marylebone Estate fell in. Nash’s scheme for its development, by far the most comprehensive, won the day, evidently because he had the personal backing of the Regent. Nash’s scheme of 1812, somewhat modified in ultimate execution, provided for a park—Regent’s Park—surrounded by terraces of considerable size organized into a series of palatial compositions (Figure 10). The traditions of homogeneous terrace design go back to the early eighteenth century, and terraces facing out towards open scenery appeared soon after the middle of the century. But what Nash planned for Regent’s Park, and in the main executed, vastly exceeded not only in extent but also in originality the early eighteenth-century terrace in Grosvenor Square, where the idea of over-all composition was probably first tried out, or the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Crescent at Bath by John Wood II (1728-81), which was the first terrace to face not a square or a street but open park-like country. This work around the park alone should have been enough to make Nash’s reputation.

But in these unquiet years, when the world was briefly trying to live at peace with Napoleon, Nash sensed the Regent’s ambition to embellish London in a way to rival the Emperor’s plans for Paris. He therefore projected a street which should proceed, much as had been proposed even before this, along the line where the residential West End began, northward from the Regent’s residence at Carlton House to the southern entrance of the new park. An early scheme for such a street, entirely lined with colonnades and interrupted by squares in which public structures would stand in splendid isolation, suggests his original aim of emulating the Rue de Rivoli and Parisian monuments like the Madeleine and the Bourse. As the project was gradually adjusted to the realities of the situation, most of its geometric regularity and practically all of its Parisian character disappeared. The colonnades survived only along the Quadrant leading out of Piccadilly Circus; the Duke of York’s Column in Waterloo Place, rising between the two blocks of Carlton House Terrace, which eventually replaced Carlton House, is the one feature of Napoleonic scale and character. It is not by Nash but by the Duke of York’s favourite architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775-?1850), and was built only in 1831-4.

Instead of an imitation of Paris, something vastly more original was created, an example of civic design whose full implications are perhaps not wholly digested even today. Nash, the former partner of the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), in his new Regent Street as well as in his Regent’s Park and its surrounding terraces, sought to carry out, not with natural scenery but with urban scenery, the principles of Picturesque landscaping. Yet his architectural vocabulary remained well within the accepted range of Romantic Classicism.

Waterloo Place is wholly formal, serving as a sort of forecourt to Carlton House when it was laid out in 1815. But going up Lower Regent Street the separate buildings erected in 1817-19 were separately designed, to a harmonious scale but with no over-all regularity of shape and size. At Piccadilly, first the Circus, also of 1817-19, a circular place, and then the Quadrant of 1819-20 took care most ingeniously of a drastic leftward shift in axis. A relatively monumental façade, that of the County Fire Office, faced the head of Lower Regent Street; the other façades of the Circus were regular and plain in an almost Soanic way (Plate 30). The Quadrant gained great distinction from its projecting colonnades of Doric columns (made of cast iron) and from the skilful placing of a domed pavilion opposite its western end.

From there on the street, as carried forward in 1820-4, proceeded more directly, but with great variety in the individual façades—one terrace of houses over shops (1820-1) was by Soane. There were also special pavilioned structures to phrase several slight changes in direction and to mark the openings of intersecting streets. At Regent (now Oxford) Circus a second circle, similar to that at Piccadilly but elaborated by Nash with a Corinthian order, marks a major cross artery. Above this the street continues quite straight for a little way; then comes another sharp leftward shift in the axis. There Nash placed his All Souls’ Church, which was built in 1822-4. Its curious fluted steeple still rises through the colonnade that crowns the tower to provide a pivot by which the eye is carried around the sharp corner. Almost at once another right-angled turn leads into the broad pre-existing esplanade of Adam’s Portland Place. From here on all is formal again as at Waterloo Place.

At the upper end, between the top of Portland Place and the Park, was to be a large residential circus. Of this only the two southern quadrants were built—one of them the earliest portion of the whole scheme, initiated at the very start in 1812. As executed, there are above this—for this part of the scheme is all extant—two regular terraces facing each other across Park Square.

In 1813, as has been said, Nash succeeded Wyatt in the Surveyor-General’s office; but it was in the role of private entrepreneur rather than as an official that he executed the Regent Street scheme, hazarding his own rising fortune and using every device of subleasing to carry the project through. This he accomplished in the relatively short period of fifteen years, even though the renewal of the war held up execution for several years immediately after the start. Of all this nothing remains below Portland Place but the planning and All Souls’. However, in the district east of Lower Regent Street, the Royal Opera Arcade still exists behind New Zealand House and, much larger and more conspicuous, the conventional temple portico of the Haymarket Theatre of 1821 stands at the end of what is now Charles II Street.

At the base of Waterloo Place, facing the Green Park, the two ranges of Carlton House Terrace, built in 1827, still rise above their cast-iron Doric basement colonnades. In the lower half of this square, south of Pall Mall, with the two clubs on either side—one by Nash, the other by Burton—and the Duke of York’s Column silhouetted against the distant scenery of park and Government buildings between the two wings of Carlton House Terrace, Nash’s urbanism can still be fully appreciated. The full grandeur of Napoleon’s Paris or Alexander I’s Petersburg is lacking, but so also is their archaeology. This obviously belongs to the nineteenth century. It establishes, for modern eyes, Nash’s capacity as ‘planner’ quite as much as do his terraces around Regent’s Park, as these were carried out in 1820-7 by himself and by various younger architects working under his general supervision.

Curiously enough, the first Regent’s Park terrace, built in 1821 while construction was still proceeding in Park Square, was at least nominally by young Decimus Burton (1800-81), the talented son of the builder James Burton, who was as active here in these years as in Bloomsbury. Dignified and severe, although not Grecian in detail like the handsomer Ionic York Terrace and its flanking Doric villa completed the next year, Cornwall Terrace certainly lacks the specifically Nashian qualities. Happily typical of Nash’s response to urbanistic opportunities is the way he opened York Gate in the middle of York Terrace through to the Marylebone Road in order to incorporate visually the new façade provided by Thomas Hardwick (1752-1829) in 1818-19 for the Marylebone Parish Church.

Sussex Place of 1822, with its curved plan and its ten domes, is much more notably Picturesque; but the most spectacular composition of all is Cumberland Terrace, Nash’s in general conception, but executed by James Thomson (1800-83) in 1826-7 (Plate 32). This is far more palatial, at least superficially, than the rather humdrum Buckingham Palace that Nash was gradually erecting for the King from 1821 on.^[75] When seen through the trees of the park or in sharp perspective from the ring road, this range of houses provides a Picturesque three-dimensional composition of a dream-like order—what matter if the conventional Classical elements are organized and executed in a very slapdash way?

The total scope of the Regent’s Park development provided a ‘New Town’ in a rather complete sense inspired possibly by Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’. There were detached villas in the park, mews behind the terraces, a market-place to the east, modest two-storey houses near by in Munster Square and, finally, the two Park Villages, carried out by his protégé Sir James Pennethorne (1801-71) after Nash’s ideas from 1827 on. These last are extensions of the Picturesque hamlet, consisting of groups of semi-detached villas some of Italianate, some of Tudoresque character, loosely strung along curving roads, which provide the very prototype of the later-nineteenth-century suburb.

To most of his professional contemporaries, and not least to his associates on the Board of the Office of Works, Soane and Smirke, Nash seemed an opportunist and almost a charlatan. He differed as markedly from the archaeologically-minded Smirke as from Soane, even if he was as ready to borrow Greek orders from the one as incised detail from the other. Despite the independent stylistic position of Soane and of Nash, Britain could hardly have produced a line of archaeologist-architects from James Stuart to C. R. Cockerell—a line at least as distinguished as the French line from Leroy to Hittorff—without developing by this time Greek Revival doctrines quite as rigid and as self-assured as those of France and Germany. From the end of the second decade of the century the Grecian mode was, indeed, rather more firmly entrenched in Great Britain than anywhere on the Continent.

The historical importance of Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge has already been noted. If Wilkins was never able to complete this, so that it remained but a fragment of an ideal Grecian college, he had greater opportunities later in London, opportunities which on the whole he muffed. His University College of 1827-8 in Gower Street impressed contemporaries because its central temple portico ran to ten columns in width. It is not otherwise distinguished, and the advancing wings of the quadrangle are not by him. His St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, of the same date, is a much more modest building (Plate 31). Yet it already shows some of the restlessness, if little of the elaboration, of later Grecian work on the Continent, such as Klenze’s Hermitage Museum in Petersburg. The hospital, although the theme of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus is ingeniously exploited, lacks the delicacy and elegance of Decimus Burton’s Ionic screen of 1825 across the way (Plate 31).

The hospital is, however, rather more original than Burton’s nearby Constitution Hill Arch, also of 1827-8, now moved back towards the Green Park. This is one of the two erected in connexion with the new Buckingham Palace and in conscious rivalry of those Napoleon had set up in Paris and other Continental cities. The other one, originally forming the entrance to the court of the palace, is Nash’s Marble Arch of 1828; that was moved to the corner of Hyde Park where Park Lane meets Oxford Street in 1851 after the palace was refronted by Blore in the late forties. Neither arch has the urbanistic value of Benjamin Dean Wyatt’s Duke of York’s Column or of the Nelson Column, erected in 1839 in Trafalgar Square by William Railton (1803-77), because of their very casual siting. Apsley House, as remodelled by B. D. Wyatt for the Duke of Wellington in 1828, rising too high beside the Burton screen, is not altogether an addition to the group at Hyde Park Corner.

Wilkins’s largest and most conspicuous work, and the one which ruined his reputation, is the National Gallery of 1832-8. The long façade of this, extending across the top of Trafalgar Square, is excessively episodic and best seen in sharp perspective looking along Pall Mall East or from the south side of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The order is not Greek, since the columns of the portico Henry Holland (1745-1806) erected in front of Carlton House in the early 1790s were re-used, and the little dome behind the central pediment is almost Byzantine in character. Comparison of this Picturesque-Classical composition with Cumberland Terrace is inevitable; the honours are all Nash’s.

If Wilkins made the first Grecian spurt, it was Soane’s pupil Smirke who held the course. In Trafalgar Square the unified range of buildings built in 1824-7 on the west side that once housed the Union Club and later the College of Physicians contrasts most strikingly with Wilkins’s National Gallery. Heavy, dignified, and immaculately ‘correct’ in its Greek detailing, this block also shows considerable variety in the handling of standard Romantic Classical elements without any such striving for Picturesque effect as the National Gallery. Later additions on the west have not seriously damaged Smirke’s work.

It is highly typical that the most considerable Grecian edifice of London should be a museum and library. The British Museum, begun by Smirke in 1824, was not completed until 1847.^[76] Its principal internal feature, moreover, the domed Reading Room built of cast iron in the central court (see Chapter 7), was designed and carried out in the mid fifties by Smirke’s younger brother Sydney (1798-1877). Only the King’s Library was finished rapidly within the twenties to house the library of George III. This is dignified and crisp, if somewhat less immaculately correct than Smirke’s façade in Trafalgar Square.

The characteristic south front of the Museum, one of the most overwhelming examples of Romantic Classical stylophily, or love of columns—there are forty-eight of them—was one of the last portions of the whole to be completed (Plate 33). The great temple portico and the colonnade that is carried round the inner sides and the ends of the flanking wings was probably not decided on until the thirties; such a redundancy of columns seems to belong well into the second quarter of the century—compare Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (Plate 34A) or Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The façade of Smirke’s General Post Office of 1824-9, with columns used only at the centre and the ends, and two ranges of good-sized windows between, was more characteristic of the usual Romantic Classical balance between columnar display and rationalistic provision for internal function.

Wilkins and Smirke were not alone in providing Grecian public buildings for the London of George IV. The London Corn Exchange of 1827-8 by George Smith (1783-1869) was an excellent example, less heavy than most of Smirke’s work, less inconsequent than Wilkins’s. Decimus Burton, who provided various gatehouses at Hyde Park as well as the screen at Hyde Park Corner in 1825—the modest ones at Prince’s Gate are almost identical with Schinkel’s tiny Doric temples at the Potsdamer Tor in Berlin—also provided the finest façade in Waterloo Place when he built the Athenaeum there in 1829-30. This clubhouse is severe and astylar externally but grand and sumptuous within to a degree hitherto unknown. Henry Roberts (1803-76), a Smirke assistant, followed his former master closely in the design of the Fishmongers’ Hall built in 1831-3. His great Ionic portico rises as splendidly above the solid substructure that flanks the Thames as Klenze’s Walhalla does above its stepped terraces.

Corporate clients that came to the fore in the thirties saw in the solemn Grecian mode the best means of achieving representational monumentality in their buildings; moreover, they were increasingly ready to employ leading architects in order to obtain it. C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863), the son of S. P. Cockerell, soon to be Soane’s successor as Architect of the Bank of England, began his distinguished career as a favourite servant of the financial world by providing the Westminster Insurance Office in the Strand in 1832 with a range of Doric half-columns. Five years later, in the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, he attained a still greater effect of dignified restraint, with no loss of sumptuousness, in an astylar façade of great originality.

The new railways, whose earliest stations had been very modest indeed, were as interested as insurance companies and banks in the representational dignity of Classical frontispieces. At Euston Grove in London, before what was intended to be a double station planned by the engineer Robert Stephenson (1803-59)[5^a] in 1835 to serve the London & Birmingham and the Great Western Railways, there rose from the designs of Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) the Euston ‘Arch’, a giant Greek Doric propylaeon; for the Birmingham terminal of the railway at Curzon Street Hardwick provided a second gateway that is more in the form of a Roman triumphal arch. This theme John Foster (1786-1846) expanded into a continuous Roman screen in front of Lime Street Station at Liverpool in 1836. At Huddersfield James P. Pritchett (1789-1868) and his son Charles fronted the main station block in 1845-9 with a Roman temple portico and flanked it with minor colonnaded features. The Monkwearmouth station by John Dobson (1787-1865) of 1848 is similar, but Grecian in its detailing.

More appropriate to modern eyes was the endless red-brick façade designed by Francis Thompson for Robert Stephenson’s Trijunct Station in Derby of 1839-41. This was astylar but had various subtle projections and recessions of the wall plane and a comparable variety of levels in the very long skyline. Thompson also, in the stone towers he designed for Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1845-50, handled his material with a superbly rational directness (Plate 61). The technical significance of such structures as examples of the new uses of iron which the railways encouraged, must be considered later (see Chapter 7). Of comparable quality to Thompson’s work is the enormous Royal Navy Victualling Yard at Stonehouse of 1826-35 by the engineer Sir John Rennie (1794-1874)—able son, like Robert Stephenson, of a more famous engineer father and also a brother-in-law of C. R. Cockerell. Despite the severity characteristic of the period, this has an almost Baroque plasticity and vigour of silhouette rarely achieved by contemporary architects before the mid-century.

Except for certain large provincial and suburban Nonconformist churches, the heyday of the temple portico came to an end about 1840. The last prominent example in London is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir William Tite (1798-1873) in 1841-4, but there is nothing Classical about other aspects of this prominent structure. The side, rear, and court façades are in a sort of Neo-Baroque that prefigures the bombast of the third quarter of the century (see Chapter 9).

Grecian public monuments were as characteristic of provincial cities in the twenties and thirties as of London, perhaps more so. Francis Goodwin (1784-1835)^[77] provided Manchester with a handsome town hall in 1822-4, now long since superseded. In the latter year he lost the competition for the new Royal Institution there to the young Charles Barry (1795-1860), hitherto most unsympathetically employed in building cheap Gothic churches for the Commissioners.^[78] This edifice Barry erected over the years 1827-35. Happily it still stands, serving as the Manchester Art Gallery, an excellent example of Barry’s command of that Grecian idiom which his more personal Italianate mode forced into obsolescence even before this building was finished (see below).

In 1828 Foster began the fine Grecian Custom House in Liverpool, completely destroyed, alas, in the blitz; while in 1831 Joseph A. Hansom (1803-82) won the competition for the Birmingham Town Hall with the most striking British example of the temple paradigm. This characteristic Romantic Classical edifice, raised on a high rusticated podium, was slowly executed by Hansom and his partner Edward Welch (1806-68) over the next fifteen years and more.

The more widespread the use of Greek forms became, the less vitality and character they seemed to retain. It is not the columnar detail, so much more correct than that at Regent’s Park, which gives interest to the terraces—built from the twenties on—that George Basevi (1794-1845) designed for Belgrave Square in London or to those of slightly later date designed by Lewis Cubitt (1799-?) and by John Young in Eaton Square; it is the remarkable scale and extent of this newest urban development, rivalling that at Regent’s Park, which was undertaken by the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), Lewis’s brother, for the Grosvenor Estate behind the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

So also at Newcastle, where Thomas Grainger (1798-1861), with the presumptive assistance of Dobson^[79] as designer, laid out and built up a series of streets from 1834 on, it is not the more correctly Greek orders that make Grey Street a finer piece of urbanism than Nash’s Regent Street; it is the fine, creamy freestone that replaces London’s stucco and the skilful organization of the ranges of buildings, all so much more carefully grouped and related to one another than in Regent Street, along the curving and rising slope. The Grey Column, built by John Green (?-1852) in 1837-8, is superbly placed in the best manner of the period as a focal accent at the top of the development just like the Duke of York’s Column at the bottom of Lower Regent Street. The cleaning of many buildings has of late much enhanced the attractiveness of central Newcastle.

It was not until the early forties that Greek Revival buildings began to be characterized by contemporaries as ‘insipid’. But Basevi’s façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, begun in 1837 and carried to completion with some emendations by C. R. Cockerell in 1847 after Basevi’s death, well illustrates some of the changes that were already coming over Romantic Classical design. As at Wilkins’s National Gallery, the silhouette is elaborately varied—here much more skilfully than in Trafalgar Square. As with Tite’s Royal Exchange, there is also a most un-Grecian sort of plastic bombast. The orders are not Grecian but Roman, moreover, and the spirit is more Roman still, but Roman of the later Empire in the East, as at Baalbek or Palmyra.

St George’s Hall in Liverpool, the latest of the major Romantic Classical monuments of England, was finished like the Fitzwilliam by C. R. Cockerell long after its original designer’s death. It displays much less bombast and much more true grandeur of scale. The young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-49) won two successive competitions, for a Hall and for Law Courts, in 1839 and 1840 respectively. Then, when it was decided to combine the two in one structure, he paid a visit to Berlin to study the work of Schinkel. Schinkelesque, indeed, is the long colonnade facing Lime Street Station, and even more so the curious square piers, free-standing in their upper half, that Elmes used elsewhere on the building (Plate 34A).

The temple portico at the south end is conventional enough, but with its steps boldly raised above a massively plain foundation wall; the rounded end to the north is much more original and also rather French in feeling. French surely, but of the Empire rather than the contemporary July Monarchy, is the tremendous scale of the whole and the stately axial planning of the sort to be seen in many Prix de Rome projects of the preceding fifty years. The great hall is slightly larger than its prototype in the Baths of Caracalla.^[80] As completed by Cockerell in the early fifties, the interior lost all the Grecian severity of the exterior. Together with the elegant elliptical concert hall, planned by Elmes but entirely executed by Cockerell, the great hall belongs to the next period of architectural development as much by its rich decoration as by its date.

It was in Scotland, not in England, that the Greek Revival had its greatest success and lasted longest. There seems to have been some special congruity of sentiment between Northern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ancient world. Edinburgh, which considered itself for intellectual reasons the ‘Athens of the North’, set out after 1810 to continue in a more Athenian mode the extension and embellishment of her New Town begun in the 1760s. The result rivals Petersburg as well as Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. Indeed, in Edinburgh, what was built between 1760 and 1860 provides still the most extensive example of a Romantic Classical city in the world.

If the architecture of Edinburgh is largely Classical—the most conspicuous exceptions are the inherited medieval Castle on its rock at the head of the Old Town and the Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens—the setting is extremely Picturesque. The fullest scenic advantage was taken of the castle-crowned hill, above the filled-in and landscaped North Loch, and of the two heights to the east and the south-east, Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. The latter was kept quite clear of buildings, the former gradually turned into a sort of Scottish Akropolis. Perhaps fortunately, the largest structure there, the National Monument, a copy of the Parthenon by C. R. Cockerell and the local architect W. H. Playfair (1789-1857), was never finished; thus it appears to be a ruin and adds to the Picturesque effect of this terminus to the eastward view along Prince’s Street.

Calton Hill is approached, and the view of it framed, by Waterloo Place, the buildings of which were erected by Archibald Elliott (1763-1823) in 1815-19. This is no unworthy rival of the homonymous square in London, despite the lack of a central column. The view had to remain open to the hill beyond, where Playfair’s Observatory was rising in 1814-18 and later, in 1830, the Choragic Monument by Thomas Hamilton (1785-1858) dedicated to that very un-Grecian poet Robert Burns, as well as various other objects of visual interest. In St Andrew’s Square in the New Town, however, is the Melville Column. This was built by William Burn (1789-1870) in 1821-2 and based, like the Colonne Vendôme in Paris, on that of Trajan.

These Scottish architects were perhaps more fortunate than Dobson in the material available to them; Edinburgh’s Craigleith stone becomes with time a rather deep grey, but not so black as that in Newcastle when left uncleaned. Seen in Playfair’s terraces, executed gradually from 1820 to 1860, which run around the base of Calton Hill on the south, east, and north, the effect may be rather dour; but the dignity and solidity of these Grecian ranges, rivalled in the contemporary circuses on the slopes to the north of the eighteenth-century New Town, are undeniably impressive.

From the completion of his Observatory in 1814 to the completion of the Scottish National Gallery forty years later Playfair continued to ornament Edinburgh with Classical (and on occasion with non-Classical) structures. Looking south along the cross-axis of the new Town, one sees just beyond Prince’s Street his Royal Scottish Institution begun in 1822, its rather massive Doric bulk happily crowned just after its completion in 1836 by the seated figure of the young Queen Victoria (Plate 34B). Behind this lies his Ionic National Gallery of 1850-4, which is not unworthy of comparison with Smirke’s British Museum begun more than a quarter of a century earlier. High to the rear, on the slopes of the Old Town, rise the two towers of the Free Church College, also by Playfair and begun in 1846, framing with their crisp Tudorish forms the richer and more graceful spire (sometimes attributed to Pugin) of Tolbooth St John’s, which was built by James Gillespie Graham in 1843.

Finer than any individual work of Playfair’s, and splendidly sited on the south side of Calton Hill, is the High School by Thomas Hamilton (1784-1858). Begun in 1825, this complex Grecian composition shows how well the lessons of the Athenian Propylaea were learned by Scottish architects. More original, but still essentially Grecian, is Hamilton’s Hall of Physicians in Queen Street of 1844-5.

Banking was not far behind State and Church as a patron of monumental architecture in Scotland. Before the astylar palazzo mode took over the financial scene, two banks grander than any in London had been erected in the Edinburgh New Town. The Commercial Bank of Scotland of 1846 in George Street by David Rhind (1808-83), despite its pedimented portico, is no longer Greek in detail; the British Linen Bank of 1852 in St Andrew’s Square by David Bryce (1803-76), more plastically Roman still, has giant detached columns upholding bold entablature blocks, an idea deriving from C. R. Cockerell’s rejected competition design for the Royal Exchange in London.

As the earlier mention of Thomson’s churches in Glasgow will have indicated, the Greek Revival lasted even longer there than in Edinburgh. But such edifices as the Royal Exchange of 1829-30 by David Hamilton (1768-1843) or Clarke & Bell’s Municipal and County Buildings of 1844 do not rival the work of Playfair and of the other Hamilton in the capital; nor is there in Glasgow much good urbanism of this period. In his domestic work Thomson remained closer to the conventional norms of the Greek Revival than in his churches. However, in Moray Place, Strathbungo, of 1859, where he lived himself, he produced the finest of all Grecian terraces (Plate 35A) and, still later, in Great Western Terrace an ampler if less original composition.

In England the Greek Revival was barely established as the dominant mode in the twenties before it was challenged. Barry, as has been noted earlier, began his career with the building of cheap Commissioners’ Gothic churches, but his favourite mode was the Renaissance Revival. We have seen that in Germany the Renaissance Revival may be considered to begin with Klenze’s Munich work of the mid twenties. Now, in 1827-8, Barry built the Brunswick Chapel, later St Andrew’s, at Hove in a quattrocento mode—the exterior, that is, for the modest interior can hardly be thus characterized, and in its present form includes various changes since Barry’s time. The façade looks rather nineteenth-century French to modern eyes; yet comparable French churches, such as Lequeux’s Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe in Paris, are mostly from five to fifteen years later (see Chapter 3). Barry doubtless turned to some of the available French publications on the Italian Renaissance for his detail, most probably to the Architecture toscane of Grandjean de Montigny and Famin, but he certainly did not derive the design of his church from current Continental practice.

Following immediately upon the Brunswick Chapel, Barry built for Thomas Attree of Brighton a symmetrical Italian Villa, now the Xavierian College, with an architectural garden setting. This was part of a scheme, otherwise unexecuted, for surrounding Queen’s Park, east of the town, with a range of detached houses, some Italianate, some Tudoresque, in an extensive suburban development of the order of Nash’s only slightly earlier Park Villages. The intended effect can best be seen in Decimus Burton’s Calverley Estate at Tunbridge Wells carried out over the years 1828 to 1852.

Far more important, however, was the fact that Barry in 1829 won with a palazzo composition the competition for the new Travellers’ Club. This was built in Pall Mall in the next two years beside the prominent corner site where Burton’s astylar but still Grecian Athenaeum was rising. Raphaelesque on the front—although not as derivative from Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace in Florence as was claimed at the time—but rather Venetian on the rear, this clubhouse notably eschews the flat barrenness and the giant orders of the Grecian mode to throw emphasis on the elegant aedicular treatment of the windows and the bold cornicione which crowns the top (Plate 35B).

Very soon Charles Fowler (1791-1867), who owned the copy of Durand’s treatise now in the Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was introducing a more utilitarian sort of Italianism in the Hungerford Market in London of 1831-3, now long gone, and in the Lower Market at Exeter of 1835-6. There the Durandesque and almost basilican interiors, destroyed in 1942, contrasted markedly with the Greek Doric detailing of the façade of his Upper Market of 1837-8.

In 1836 Barry designed a larger edifice of the palazzo type, the Manchester Athenaeum built in 1837-9. But this was overshadowed in size, in prominence, and in quality by the new Reform Club next door to the Travellers’ in Pall Mall; for this he won the competition in 1837, and it was built in 1838-40 (Plate 35B). Here his model was obviously San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in Rome. But there are many differences such as the unaccented entrance, the balustrade which sets the façades back from the pavement, the simpler and more San Gallesque top storey, the corner emphasis provided by prominent chimneys, not to speak of the metal-and-glass roofing of the central court.

Barry’s two Pall Mall clubs provided architectural paradigms much followed through the forties and well into the third quarter of the century. Moreover, W. H. Leeds (1786-1866), in the text of a monograph on the Travellers’ Club-House published in 1839, developed at some length the arguments for a Renaissance Revival. A little less evidently than the Continental work of these years in Renaissance modes, but none the less truly, Barry’s palazzi represent a continuation of Romantic Classicism. In the block-like unity of the external masses, the regularity of the fenestration, and the extreme orderliness of the planning his palazzo mode is at least as characteristic an aspect of later Romantic Classicism in Great Britain as is the Rundbogenstil on the Continent.

This is considerably less true of two other directions in which Barry first turned in the thirties. It would be premature, however, to discuss here the design with which Barry won the competition for the new Houses of Parliament in 1836 (Plate 54). As the first major public monument to be designed anywhere in Gothic this constituted above all an epoch-making step in the English revolt against Romantic Classicism (see Chapter 6).

This is not so much the case with Barry’s first and only important essay in the ‘Jacobethan’ mode—or the Anglo-Italian as he preferred to call it—the remodelling of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, proposed as early as 1837 and carried out over the next two decades (Plate 37A). Despite the Picturesque effect of its towered and bristling silhouette, this great country house rigidly maintains the quadrangular plan of the Reform Club and is almost as regular as that in composition, and even more coldly crisp in its detailing. Much the same can be said of Mentmore House in Buckinghamshire, built by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65) in 1852-4 in a very similar vein but more directly derived from Smithson’s Elizabethan Wollaton Hall near Nottingham. In general, however, the extremely popular Jacobethan Revival of these years, even more than the contemporary revival of the style François I in France, represents a reaction not merely against the Greek Revival, as does the palazzo mode, but against the basic disciplines of Romantic Classicism and was one of the major stylistic vehicles of the later Picturesque.

On the other hand, the utilization of pre-Gothic medieval forms in England in this period, so closely similar in its result to the Romanesquoid aspect of the Rundbogenstil, seems to have been only partly Picturesque in intention. From the twenties on a very considerable number of churches, mostly small, had Norman Romanesque detail, but usually there was little or no attempt to break away from the hall-like tradition of the Late Georgian church in their plans. However, three rather large churches that are early medieval in inspiration but not Norman in detail deserve particular mention, for they are among the finest, though not the most historically significant, built in Britain in the early forties.

St Mary and St Nicholas’s, Wilton, built by T. H. Wyatt (1807-80) and David Brandon (1813-97) in 1840-6 for Sydney Herbert and his Russian mother, might almost have risen in the Prussia or the Baden of this period. However, this Italian Romanesque basilica, with tall, detached campanile and rich internal polychromy of Cosmati-work brought from Italy, is rather more archaeological than Persius’s or Hübsch’s churches in Germany. On the other hand, the so much more original Christ Church of 1840-2 in Streatham, south of London, by J. W. Wild (1814-92) is so similar to Prussian work that some knowledge on Wild’s part of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier might almost be assumed (Plate 36). Although the exposed yellow brickwork and the touches of external brick polychromy are notably premonitory of the next period, the splendid obelisk-like campanile and the crisp ranges of clerestory windows, for all their pointed tops, are quite as much within the range of Romantic Classicism as the German churches that this recalls. The handling of the galleries of the interior had local precedent in Soane’s churches of the twenties as well as in Schinkel’s of the thirties. Although the barrel vaults are presumably only of plaster, St Jude’s, Bethnal Green, in London, built by Henry Clutton (1819-93) in 1844-6, has an impressive cruciform interior. The exterior here is notably Germanic with two thin towers flanking the great polygonal apse.

But these three churches, for all their individual excellence, are exceptional in England. They are related to the broad contemporary current of the Renaissance Revival that Barry had set under way only in rejecting Grecian sanctions even more completely than he. Barry was himself too versatile ever quite to repeat the strict palazzo formula of the Reform Club, although he almost came to that in the British Embassy in Istanbul of 1845-7. For this he provided sketches as early as 1842 and later emended the plans of the local executant architect, W. J. Smith. This structure, carrying the Renaissance Revival to, or even beyond, one edge of the western world as Grandjean de Montigny did to Rio de Janeiro at the other edge, is considerably larger than the Reform Club and rather bleak, though splendidly sited and very dignified indeed. At Bridgewater House in London of 1847-57, however, Barry enriched the palazzo paradigm quite considerably, not only by the introduction of a good deal of carved work but also by breaking the continuity of the garden front towards the Park in order to emphasize the end bays. This personal compositional device is even more conspicuous on the river front of his Gothic Houses of Parliament.

It was for clubhouses and business buildings that Renaissance models were most generally used in England after 1840. For the remodelling of the Carlton Club in 1847 Sydney Smirke, who had provided the winning design in a select competition, based himself, not on San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in sixteenth-century Rome as Barry had done at the Reform Club next door, but on Sansovino’s Library in sixteenth-century Venice. Before this was finished in the mid fifties, C. Octavius Parnell (?-1865) and his partner Alfred Smith had erected across Pall Mall in 1848-51 the Army and Navy Club based on Sansovino’s Palazzo Corner della Cà Grande. Both are now gone.

But if these architects in London were moving in the late forties towards an altogether richer and more plastic sort of High Renaissance design, from which almost all traces of the cold asceticism of Romantic Classicism had departed, most provincial architects were content to stick fairly close to the Farnese Palace model of the Reform Club well down into the sixties. This was most notably true in the design of edifices for financial institutions. In 1840 George Alexander (?-1884), who had made his own study of the cinquecento in Italy, designed the Savings Bank in Bath as a little Reform Club; the next year in the Brunswick Buildings in Liverpool A. & G. Williams applied the formula to a much larger block of general offices. Henceforth the mode was solidly established for almost a generation.

Barry usually gave a characteristically Italian Villa bent to the many country houses that he remodelled by introducing a tall loggia-topped tower (used to store water for the more elaborate sanitation now demanded) placed asymmetrically at one side of the main block. The first of these was at Trentham Park, near Stoke-on-Trent, where a second later rose in the stable court; the finest are those at Walton House near London of 1837 and at Shrubland in Norfolk of 1848-50. In these the inherited Georgian blocks became subordinate parts of rich three-dimensional compositions almost like the villas that Schinkel and Persius built at Potsdam. The rebuilding of Osborne House as a country retreat for Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight gave Royal sanction to the Italian Villa mode. Unfortunately she did not employ Barry; the work was done in 1845-6 and 1847-9 by the builder Thomas Cubitt and the design was dictated, if not actually prepared, by Prince Albert.

Despite the continued use of Greek forms for certain purposes and in some areas, the controls of Romantic Classicism were loosening rapidly in Great Britain in the forties. A real change of style was at hand; but since certain stylisms, such as the conventional use of Renaissance forms, tended to continue indefinitely, it is hard to know just where to draw the line chronologically.

The Geological Museum in Piccadilly in London, built in the late forties by Pennethorne, Nash’s protégé and his successor at the Office of Works, was far more successful than the ballroom wing he added in the early fifties to Buckingham Palace. Even that, however, was a considerable improvement on the curious façade—more Neo-Baroque than Neo-Renaissance—with which Edward Blore (1787-1879) masked the front of Nash’s edifice in 1847. The Museum was more successful precisely because its exteriors retained the regularity and severity characteristic of Romantic Classicism. Still later, the Free Trade Hall built by Edward Walters (1808-72) in Manchester in 1853-6 followed the lusher Sansovinesque Italianism of Smirke’s Carlton Club, while his many handsome warehouses there moved ever farther away from the severity of Barry’s Athenaeum despite their generic palazzo character. Yet the Corn Exchange in Leeds, erected as late as 1860 by Cuthbert Brodrick (1825-1905), is still Romantic Classical in the cool regularity of its diamond-rusticated walls broken only by ranges of plain arches (Plate 37B).

There can be little question, however, that his Town Hall in Leeds of 1855-9, despite the reiterative grandeur of its giant colonnades and the evident derivation of its principal interior from St George’s Hall in Liverpool, is in English terms definitely ‘High Victorian’ (Plate 78A). If the Corn Exchange can hardly be considered typically Early Victorian in character, and in any case is some ten years too late in date, it might almost be called Louis Philippe, so close is it to some French work of the 40s.

Run-of-the-mill English railway stations of the forties, mostly designed by engineers and minor architects, clearly rank in their dullness with the most utilitarian French work of that decade. They indicate to what depths of conventionality late Romantic Classicism in England had sunk by this time. Yet Lewis Cubitt’s long-demolished Bricklayers’ Arms Station in London of 1842-4, with its entrance screen compounded of rustic Italian elements derived from the books of Charles Parker,^[81] seems to have had considerable plastic interest. Moreover, the great plain arches at the front of his King’s Cross Station of 1850-2 (Plate 66A) remain to signalize to every traveller a masterpiece of the period more than worthy of comparison with Duquesney’s somewhat earlier Gare de l’Est in Paris (Plate 22B).

On the whole, however, for all that King’s Cross is one of the major late monuments of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism, it is better to consider railway stations in relation to their sheds of iron and glass, technically, that is, rather than stylistically (see Chapter 7). They illustrate especially well something which the stylistic preoccupations of the first half of the nineteenth century tended to mask from most contemporaries, the success with which new functional needs were satisfied in this period by the bold use of new materials and new types of construction.

Yet the most characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism in Europe after those prime urbanistic symbols of Napoleonic or counter-Napoleonic triumph, the arches, the columns, and the obelisks that rose in all the great cities from Petersburg to Madrid, are the museums and libraries, starting with Soane’s Dulwich Gallery, begun in 1811, and ending with Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, opened in 1850. These are useful, yes; moreover, they serve what were effectively new purposes, purposes closely related to the rising ideal of providing cultural opportunities for the general public. On the whole, however, they could be carried out—and so they usually were down to Labrouste’s library—with established methods of construction; while their cultural significance—and in the case of the sculpture galleries from Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun in 1816, to Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum, opened in 1848, their very contents—seemed to justify, if not indeed to demand, the use of Greek or Roman forms.