Architecture

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 Chapter 15). But the solid, compactly planned, and simply detailed rectory has virtues not unworthy of comparison with Clutton’s at Leamington, if not perhaps with Webb’s more delicately scaled and functionally articulated early houses.

Two churches by Street, St John’s at Torquay of 1861-71^[227] and St Philip and St James’s at Oxford, which was completed in 1862, are more standard products of the early sixties. The former is notable for the very rich marble polychromy in the chancel and the full complement of windows by Morris and Burne-Jones; the latter is more ‘Early French’ with a tall tower rising in front of the polygonal apse and a curiously unorthodox but effectively ‘real’ way of running the nave arches into the east wall with no imposts at all. This device was repeated at All Saints’, Clifton, now a ruin, where the variety of colours of the fine local stones—orange and blue Pennant and cream Bath—permitted a more truly structural polychromy than usual and one of remarkable tonal harmony and elegance. All Saints’ was begun in 1863.

Both Burges and Pearson erected distinguished churches at this time, Burges in Ireland, Pearson in London. St Finbar’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Cork, designed in 1863 for a competition and built in 1865-76, is of unusual size for a British church of this period and, what is more unusual for a nineteenth-century cathedral, it was completed without serious modification of the original project. Provided with a fine open site and a full complement of towers, two flanking the west front and a taller one over the crossing, this rivals in elaboration the big Continental Gothic churches of the period (see Chapter 11). Moreover, the detailing is of a distinctly French twelfth-century order with very few eclectic or Italianate touches, thus recalling the winning design for Lille Cathedral that he had prepared with Clutton in 1855. Yet the contrast with contemporary Continental Gothic—especially with Lille Cathedral as finally executed by others—is almost as great as in the case of the rather more original English churches of this period by Butterfield or Street.

In the interior of St Finbar’s Burges developed the theme of articulation, a theme more characteristically Early English than ‘Early French’, with remarkable plastic vigour, while the handsome wooden roof, so rare a feature in medieval France, lends to the whole an unmistakably Victorian air. Less subtle, less aesthetic, than other churches of the sixties by younger men, St Finbar’s has the sort of athletic strength that is characteristic of much High Victorian Gothic, expressed in unusually literate, not to say archaeological, terms.

Burges’s church opened the road again towards a more ‘correct’ imitation of the medieval High Gothic, a road along which Pearson soon proceeded more rapidly and more doggedly than he. Yet Pearson’s own South London church of 1863-5, St Peter’s in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, is more typically High Victorian than St Finbar’s. The carved capitals and the heavy scale of the stone detail are rather ‘Early French’. But walls and vaults are of London stock brick and there is some polychromy of the quieter, less Butterfieldian, sort resembling a little White’s at St Saviour’s. The continuity of the chancel and rounded apse with the nave echoes the ‘unified space’ of Clutton’s Leamington interior. Puginian articulation of plan and mass was henceforth somewhat out of date.

The Albert Memorial^[228] in Hyde Park in London is a monument generally—and not unjustly—considered the perfect symbol of this High Victorian period, more perfect than the Houses of Parliament (in the early sixties at last approaching completion) were of the previous Early Victorian period. In 1861 Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, the Prince Consort, died. In the competition for a national memorial to rise in Hyde Park near the site of the Crystal Palace, held the next year, G. G. Scott almost inevitably won first place. Construction of the Albert Memorial began in 1863 and took nearly ten years. By the time it was completed in 1872 critics of advanced taste were already condemning it, yet it represents precisely what Scott most liked to do and what he undoubtedly did best—in his own words, this his ‘most prominent work’ represented his ‘highest and most enthusiastic efforts’. It is, moreover, an epitome of the aspirations^[229] that were most widely held when it was designed (Plate 90).

The contrast between this elaborate shrine and Scott’s modest and essentially archaeological Martyrs’ Memorial of 1841 at Oxford is very great—what a long distance the English Gothic Revival had travelled in a score of years! Among Early Victorian memorials the Prince Consort’s cenotaph is rather more like Kemp’s Scott Monument in Edinburgh (Plate 51) than like the Oxford one. But where Kemp’s is soft and monochrome, this is hard and almost kaleidoscopically polychromatic. Scott’s theme is still that of the fourteenth-century English Eleanor Crosses, as is certainly appropriate for a monument to a Royal spouse; but the inspiration came in the main from relatively small reliquaries and other medieval works executed in metal and embellished with enamels and semi-precious stones.

The Martyrs’ Memorial was purely English, the specific precedents for the Albert Memorial mostly Continental: Italian, French, German, and Flemish. The materials are cold and shining, polished granites, marbles, and serpentines of various colours; and much of the detail is executed in gun-metal left plain or gilded. A profusion of white marble sculpture at various scales leads up to the seated bronze figure of the Prince by J. H. Foley, finally installed in 1876, over which is a vaulted canopy of brilliantly coloured glass mosaic. Enamels, cabochons of marble or serpentine, and intricately crisp detail of the most metallic character carry out Scott’s basic idea of a ciborium enlarged, like Bernini’s in St Peter’s, to fully architectural scale.

Beside the Albert Memorial most of Scott’s other work of this period lacks interest. His churches, particularly, are likely to be dull and respectable, reflecting the new eclectic tastes of the day only in a rather inconspicuous way. His Exeter College Chapel at Oxford of 1856-8 is a sort of Sainte-Chapelle; St John’s College Chapel at Cambridge of 1863-9 is equally monumental but somewhat less French in character and also more original in its proportions. His secular work at Oxford and Cambridge is also dull, lacking the Ruskinian touches that give a certain vitality to the Meadow Buildings built for Christ Church in 1863 by Sir Thomas Deane and his son Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-99).

Far finer, however, is their Kildare Street Club in Dublin, facing the Trinity College Museum across an expanse of lawn; for this continues the best Ruskinian tradition of the work that they did earlier with Woodward.^[230]

A very striking example of the Gothic of the early sixties in England, superior to anything at Oxford or Cambridge, is the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum of 1861 by G. Somers Clark (1825-82), now the Wanstead Hospital, in a suburb north-east of London. This is actually more what is supposed to be ‘Ruskinian’, because of its Venetian detailing, than the very original Dublin clubhouse with its consistent theme of segmental arches and its bold naturalistic carving; but, like that, the Wanstead building is generically High Victorian in the asymmetrical massing, the strong colours of the black-banded red brickwork, and the surprising richness of the decoration Clark lavished on a utilitarian structure.

In the early sixties several younger men, most of them trained in Street’s office, were already turning away from the stridency of the work of the High Victorian leaders towards a simpler and suaver mode. Webb’s houses of this period have been mentioned, and will be again (see Chapter 15). Here the plain row of small London shops that he built at 91-101 Worship Street, Finsbury, in 1861 might be described. In them the material is not even red brick, but London stocks excellently laid. Almost nothing is overtly Gothic, yet a sense of medieval craftsmanship controls the handling of both the wide shop-windows below and the sash-windows in the upper storeys. Above all, the general composition is quiet and regular, more like Clutton’s Leamington rectory than the asymmetrical articulation that is characteristic of Webb’s own houses of these years.

A similar quietness controls the design of the wing that W. Eden Nesfield (1835-88), son of Barry’s collaborator on Italian gardens, William A. Nesfield (1793-1881), and a pupil not of Street but of Burn and Salvin, was adding to the Earl of Craven’s seat, Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, beginning in 1863. This was Nesfield’s earliest work. Despite his own studies of French Gothic,^[231] which he had published the previous year with a dedication to Lord Craven, and the tracings he is supposed to have made from the illustrations of Gothic detail in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire, the arches at Combe Abbey are round, not pointed, and the major architectural theme is the English late medieval ‘window-wall’ of many lights divided by stone mullions and transoms.

In a completely new house, Cloverley Hall, that Nesfield began in 1865 together with his partner Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), the great window-bays and the other ranges of stone-mullioned windows in the beautifully laid salmon-pink brick walls were even more the principal theme of the design. But in the decorations, delicate in scale and elegant in craftsmanship, a new sort of eclecticism made its appearance. Basically the house derives from those manor houses of the sixteenth century that were uninfluenced by Renaissance ideas; but in the detailing of Cloverley there were Japanese motifs, notably the sunflower disks that Nesfield called his ‘pies’, reflecting the new interest in oriental art that such painters as Whistler and Rossetti were taking. Except for its relatively early date, Cloverley Hall has no place in a discussion of High Victorian Gothic, for it is characteristically Late Victorian (see Chapter 15).

Nesfield’s partner Shaw, however, built in the sixties two churches that were still High Victorian in style, one in Yorkshire, the other at Lyons in France. Holy Trinity at Bingley of 1866-7 is one of the finest examples of the ‘Early French’ phase of the Victorian Gothic (Plate 94A). Externally it builds up to a very tall central tower, superbly proportioned and very simply detailed, that more than rivals in quality Street’s at Oxford. Internally the fine random-ashlar stonework—there is no polychromy—the very bold and structural detailing of the square archivolts and the simply carved capitals illustrate even better than does Webb’s domestic work in brick the new and more sophisticated attitude towards the building crafts. The principles involved go back to Pugin; but now for the first time in Webb’s and Nesfield’s and Shaw’s work of the sixties one senses a real respect, at once intelligent and intuitive, for the differing nature of different materials. Such a respect would continue to give special virtue to the work of the most distinguished English and American architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapters 12, 13, 15, and 19).

The Lyons church, which Shaw began in 1868, is perhaps the finest of the many Victorian churches built on the Continent for local English colonies, but very different indeed from that at Bingley. A city church set between tall blocks of flats, this is also very tall in its proportions and has a more urban character than that of the Yorkshire church. French freestone does not lend itself to the particular type of semi-rustic craftsmanship that was now rising to favour with the younger English architects; hence the Lyons church is less significant than the Bingley one in that respect. But Shaw was not primarily a church architect, nor did he long remain a High Victorian (see Chapter 12).

More characteristic of the various new directions that the Victorian Gothic was taking in the mid sixties, directions that soon also led quite away from the High Victorian, are two new churches both designed well before Shaw’s at Bingley and Lyons were begun. At All Saints’ in Jesus Lane, Cambridge, begun in 1863, the spikiness of the Italianizing Victorian Gothic and the rugged structuralism of the ‘Early French’—rarely carried farther than in Bodley’s own early work—gave way to something much more English in inspiration. There is, for example, a very deep chancel and only one aisle, not to speak of a battlemented tower at one side, out of which rises a small stone spire. In fact, Bodley returned here to the fourteenth-century Decorated models preferred by Pugin, some so ‘late’ as to suggest the still forbidden Perpendicular.

Bodley now made even more use of the decorative talents of Morris and his associates than at St Michael’s, Brighton. His St Martin’s-on-the-Cliff, Scarborough, completed in 1863, is a finer church than either St Michael’s or All Saints’. Falling between them in style as well as in date, this has less historical importance, but it also was richly decorated by the Morris firm. At All Saints’ painted polychromy, but of a rather subtle order much superior to most of that of the forties, entirely replaced permanent polychrome. The brocade patterns stencilled on the walls seem almost to be designs of Pugin strengthened in their outlines and their colours by Morris. Although Bodley’s mature career as one of the two principal Late Victorian church architects did not really get under way until 1870, Victorian Gothic was evidently coming full circle at All Saints’, and the High Victorian phase was nearly over.

The other important new church of this period, St Saviour’s, Penn Street, in the Hoxton district of the East End of London, was begun in 1865 by James Brooks (1825-1901). Unfortunately this was very badly damaged in the blitz, and has since been demolished. St Saviour’s was of brick and included some polychromy like Brooks’s slightly earlier East End church, St Michael’s in Mark Street, Shoreditch, of 1863-5. But what was really significant at St Saviour’s was the unified interior space, ending like Clutton’s Leamington church and Pearson’s Vauxhall church in London in a rounded apse (Plate 89B). Notable also were the Webb-like quietness of the general composition and the straightforward handling of the main structural elements. In another, happily unblitzed, church by Brooks in the East End of London, St Chad’s, Nichols Square, in Haggerston, which was begun in 1867, the same qualities can be seen in a more mature state. Moreover, the rather plain windows and the simple moulded brick trim are echoed at domestic scale on the nearby rectory.

The fine vessel of the interior of St Chad’s, with its simple nave arcade of stone, clean red-brick walls, quietly structural wooden roof over the nave, and brick-vaulted chancel, contrasts strikingly with the hectic elaboration and dramatically vertical proportions of Butterfield’s last London church of any great interest, St Augustine’s, Queen’s Gate, of 1865-71. Two churches of the late sixties outside London, All Saints’ at Babbacombe near Torquay, which was built in 1868-74, and the earlier mentioned St Augustine’s at Penarth, begun in 1866, are much more satisfactory examples of Butterfield’s middle period.

Brooks continued through the seventies to develop the implications of his East End churches with great success. The largest and most notable is that of the Ascension, Lavender Hill, in Battersea, which was begun in 1873 and completed by J. T. Micklethwaite^[232] (1843-1906), a former assistant of G. G. Scott, in 1883. The vast lancet-pierced red-brick hull of this church is one of the landmarks of the South London skyline; the interior, which is perhaps a little bare, has nevertheless a monumentality of scale rare in English churches of any period. However, this monumentality is rivalled both inside and out in St Bartholomew’s, Brighton (Plate 93B), completed in 1875 by Edmund E. Scott (?-1895), and considerably later in Brooks’s own London church of All Hallows, Shirlock Street, begun in 1889 and never provided with its intended vaults.

Victorian Gothic, whether Early or High, is primarily an ecclesiastical mode. The leading Neo-Gothic architects were happiest when building churches; their few secular works—if parsonages, colleges, and schools can really in this period be called secular—generally have a churchy tone. But it is characteristic of the High Victorian Gothic as opposed to the Early Victorian Gothic, and a fortiori to Neo-Gothic on the Continent, that it became for some twenty years, from the early fifties to the early seventies, a nearly universal mode.^[233] A good many houses have already been cited; and certainly no churches of this period provide finer specimens of High Victorian Gothic than the warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, which was built by E. W. Godwin (1833-86), a friend of Burges, in the early sixties (Plate 113), or the office building of 1864-5 at 60 Mark Lane in London by George Aitchison (1825-1910). The one is an especially subtly polychromed attempt to follow Ruskin’s Italianism, the other more ‘Early French’ in its detail, but both use round-arched arcading throughout their several storeys (see 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).