In England and America there followed immediately upon the ‘High Styles’ of the fifties and sixties phases of stylistic development that cannot readily be matched in the other countries of the western world. This is true both of the quality of the achievement and also of its significance for what came after. Beginning just before 1870 in England and but little later in the United States, these two phases developed in far from identical ways. In both cases their conventional names, ‘Queen Anne’ and ‘Romanesque Revival’, are misnomers. It was a long time before the Queen Anne of the seventies actually became a revival of early eighteenth-century architecture in the same sense as the Greek, Gothic, or Renaissance Revivals. The supposed Romanesque Revival in America of this period was not very archaeological either. It is therefore less inaccurate to label these modes by the names of their principal protagonists: ‘Shavian’ for Richard Norman Shaw (even though that proper adjective refers more familiarly to George Bernard Shaw) and ‘Richardsonian’ for Henry Hobson Richardson. Shaw, however, shares responsibility for the effectiveness of the mutation away from the High Victorian with other men, notably his early partner Nesfield, Webb, Godwin, and J. J. Stevenson.^[261] Of all this group, Shaw was unquestionably the most successful, the most typical, and the most influential, though not the most original.

Except for Pugin, no architect since Robert Adam had so much effect on English—and for that matter also on American—production. Moreover, his influence lasted for some thirty-five years, rather longer than did Adam’s. Yet it is not possible to define the Shavian mode clearly as it is the Adamesque or the Puginian. An architectural Picasso, Shaw had many divergent manners which he developed successively, but of which none—except the High Victorian Gothic—was ever entirely dropped. Each of these manners, down to the very end of his long practice, found in turn a following. His latest and most conspicuous work, the Piccadilly Hotel, built in London in 1905-8 between Piccadilly and the Regent Street Quadrant (Plate 107), is more characteristic of the Edwardian Age of the opening twentieth century than his early church at Bingley is of the High Victorian. Outside church architecture the intervening Late Victorian can hardly be defined better than in terms of his various manners, and even in church architecture he had a real contribution to make, if a lesser reputation than Pearson or Bodley.

Yet Shaw cannot be rated with Soane or Schinkel as a nineteenth-century architect of absolutely the first rank; nor yet with his American contemporary Richardson, even though Richardson’s career came to an end a score of years before his. Shaw’s work reflects all too clearly, despite his own vast and sanguine assurance, the general uncertainties of the years after 1870. Webb, though less successful and famous, eventually had more influence, not so much on English architecture in general as on the more creative and original men of the next generation. The later history of European architecture would be much the same—if not that of American architecture—had Shaw never existed; but the modern architecture that first came into being after 1900 in various countries of Europe owed something directly, and even more indirectly, to Webb. In this way Richardson also has more significance than Shaw, despite his lack of influence abroad, for Sullivan and Wright in America both learned much from him.

Norman Shaw was born in Edinburgh in 1831. Brought early to London, he was taken on in his early teens by Burn, the Edinburgh architect then settled in London, who had so great a success designing Jacobethan and Scottish Baronial mansions for the high aristocracy in the forties and fifties. Shaw also studied at the Royal Academy, winning in 1853 their Silver Medal, and in the next year their Gold Medal, with the award of a Travelling Studentship that took him to Germany, Italy, and France. The project which won him the first medal was a surprising production for its period, and quite without relation to his own High Victorian Gothic work of the next decade that has been described earlier (see Chapter 11). A vast design for a college with central domed block and side pavilions loaded with giant orders, this project is more Vanbrugh-like than Second Empire. In some sense Shaw’s career was to come full circle stylistically; but even in the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand in London of 1902-3 and the still later Piccadilly Hotel he would hardly be as whole-heartedly Neo-Baroque again.

In 1858 Shaw published, as has been mentioned before, what is perhaps the most attractive of High Victorian Gothic source-books, Architectural Sketches from the Continent, based on his European studies; doubtless on the strength of this book he became at this time, or shortly after, Street’s principal assistant—chief draughtsman, one might call it—in succession to Webb.^[262] There he remained for four years, leaving in 1862 to form a partnership with Nesfield, whom he had first known in the early fifties in Burn’s office. As has already been noted, Nesfield was the son of Barry’s collaborator in garden design for all his major country house commissions. Younger than Shaw, Nesfield had gone to Burn’s office in 1850 a year or two after leaving Eton, and in 1853 had moved to the office of his uncle Anthony Salvin, another successful builder of aristocratic country houses. Nesfield, in this year 1862, issued a book rather like Shaw’s of four years earlier as has been mentioned in connexion with his work for Lord Craven at Combe Abbey. Other aristocrats with whom he had connexions through his father soon began to employ him on more modest jobs.

Building lodges and other accessories to great country estates, and in 1864 one in Regent’s Park where everyone might appreciate his highly personal touch, Nesfield revived in effect the Picturesque Cottage mode of half a century earlier. But the materials he used were more various,^[263] including tile-hanging and pargetting, and his designs had a general finesse that was much more craftsmanlike than those of the slapdash Nash and his rivals in this genre (Plate 50A). In Nesfield’s first major work, Cloverley Hall in Shropshire, begun in 1865, several characteristic features appear for which his lodges hardly prepared the way (see Chapter 15). There a tall great hall provided the principal interior, and the areas of mullioned windows in the Tudor tradition were so extensive as to constitute real ‘window-walls’ (Figure 24). His very refined and ingenious ornamentation at Cloverley, some of it of Japanese inspiration, has been mentioned.

Even earlier, in 1862, when Japanese art was just beginning to be an inspiration to advanced painters in Paris and in London and the Japanese Government first sent examples of characteristic work to an international exhibition, Godwin, who was just at that point throwing off the influence of Ruskin, had stripped bare the interiors of his own house in Bristol and decorated them only with a few Japanese prints asymmetrically hung. By 1866 Godwin was designing wallpapers of notably Japanese character for Jeffry & Co. and from 1868 ‘Anglo-Japanese’ furniture for the manufacturer William Watt.^[264] But japonisme is only a minor theme of this period,^[265] and it hardly influenced Shaw at all.

Half a century earlier the prestige of a ranking novelist, Sir Walter Scott, had helped to launch one of the most popular Picturesque modes, the Scottish Baronial, when he asked Blore to imitate the old Border castles in designing his house at Abbotsford. Now in 1861 Thackeray, a novelist many of whose novels were set, not in the Middle Ages, but in early eighteenth-century England and Virginia, designed for himself a house in Palace Green in London opposite Kensington Palace, much of which is more or less of that particular period. This house echoes the modest red-brick manor houses of the time of Queen Anne on both sides of the Atlantic, but it could hardly be less plausible. At the same time Wellington College by John Shaw (1803-70), which was begun in 1856, was reaching completion in a much richer, almost Second Empire, version of the Wren style of 1700.

The serious adumbration of a Queen Anne mode really began a few years later with a small public commission of Nesfield’s. His lodge at Kew Gardens, designed in 1866 and built in 1867, though simple, is already almost an archaeological exercise in early eighteenth-century^[266] brickwork (Figure 18). This Kew lodge he followed up a few years later with a big but remote country house, Kinmel Park near Abergele in Wales, built in 1871-4 though possibly designed a bit earlier. To this we will be returning shortly. Shaw had nothing to do with Kinmel Park, since his partnership with Nesfield came to an end in 1868; that was just after the completion of Cloverley Hall on which he certainly collaborated even if his personal contribution there cannot now be readily distinguished. Already in 1866, before Shaw parted from Nesfield, however, his own career had opened with the designing of the Bingley church (Plate 94A) and of Glen Andred, near Withyham in Sussex, a house of great originality of character (Plate 102B).

Glen Andred is little more related to the new Queen Anne mode of the Kew lodge than it is to the Gothic of the Bingley church. It does, however, seem to derive somewhat from earlier Nesfield work, or possibly from Devey. Where the High Victorian Gothic had rejected English precedent in favour of Italian and French models, this first Sussex house of Shaw’s is resolutely regional in character. The tile-hung walls above a red-brick ground storey, the white-painted wooden casements, almost as extensive as the ‘window-walls’ of Cloverley, the loose asymmetrical organization of the massing are all related to a local Sussex and Surrey vernacular of no particular period (Plate 102B). The entrance front is more formal, carefully balanced if not precisely symmetrical, and here the pargetting in the central gable is of Jacobethan character. But the great stair-window and the graceful massing of the tiled roofs, quite in the finest tradition of the Picturesque but handled with a new ease and casualness, are more important elements of Shaw’s first manner, which can be called ‘Shavian Manorial’. The hall across the front between the two projecting wings is modest in size, with the principal living rooms loosely grouped round it. Thus this may be considered an early example of what I have rather clumsily called the ‘agglutinative plan’, but as it was never published the extent of its actual influence must remain uncertain.

There was little logic to Shaw’s regionalism. Already in 1868 he was applying his Sussex vocabulary of materials and forms to the Cookridge Convalescent Hospital at Horsforth near Leeds in stony Yorkshire. In general, however, he kept this manner for work near London, using it even as late as 1894 for a house called The Hallams near Bramley in Surrey. He also introduced tile-hanging on some of his houses in London such as West House, at 118 Campden Hill Road, of 1877 and Walton House in Walton Street of 1885 as well as—rather more appropriately—on the suburban Hampstead house that he built in the same year for Kate Greenaway at 39 Frognal.

Shaw’s first client had been a painter, J. C. Horsley, R.A., for whom he made some alterations in the early sixties and whose son later entered his office. Glen Andred was for another painter, E. W. Cooke, later R.A., and West House was for George Boughton, R.A. Kate Greenaway, better known today than these forgotten academicians, was an illustrator of children’s books much patronized by Ruskin. F. W. Goodall, R.A. (1870), Marcus Stone, R.A. (1876), Luke Fildes, R.A. (1877), Edwin Long, R.A. (1878, and again in 1888), Frank Holl, R.A. (1881), are other successful painters and fellow academicians—Shaw became an A.R.A. himself in 1872 and an R.A. in 1877—for whom he built houses (with the dates of the commissions). All but Goodall’s house at Harrow Weald were either in Melbury Road in Kensington in London or else in Fitzjohn’s Avenue near his own Hampstead house of 1875 at 6 Ellerdale Road. Where the prosperous artists, themselves presumably aping the aristocracy, led, magnates and City men were now quick to follow. The Newcastle steelmaster Sir William Armstrong had Shaw build Cragside near Rothbury in Northumberland for him as early as 1870.

Leyswood, near Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1868 at the same time as the Cookridge Hospital, was one of Shaw’s most influential works (Plate 123). More archaeologically manorial than Glen Andred, it provided a mass of suggestions that English and American architects borrowed again and again over the next twenty years and more. Because of Shaw’s later leadership, it is natural for posterity to note what was new here; contemporaries, used to the wild vagaries of the High Victorian Gothic, saw Leyswood rather as a reaction against the ‘modernism’ of the fifties and earlier sixties. Tile-hung upper storeys and barge-boarded gables, richly half-timbered—the half-timbering a mere sham applied over solid brickwork!—long banks of casements that approach the twentieth-century ‘ribbon-window’ and great mullioned bays providing ‘window-walls’ as extensive as Nesfield’s at Cloverley clothed an interior that was not at all medieval but a more developed example than Glen Andred of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19). The main reception rooms were grouped about a central hall, from one side of which rose elaborate stairs arranged in several flights about an open well. Webb had already essayed this sort of planning in a more orderly way at Arisaig begun in 1863 (Figure 23); but it was Shaw’s version, not Webb’s, that was generally imitated (see Chapter 15).

Shortly after Leyswood, and following fairly closely its manner although with fewer Late Gothic elements of detail, came the house later called Grim’s Dyke built at Harrow Weald in 1870-2 for F. W. Goodall, afterwards the country house of the composer W. S. Gilbert, and Preen Manor in Shropshire also designed in 1870. Then followed Hopedene, near Holmbury in Surrey, and Boldre Grange, near Lymington in Hampshire, in 1873; Wispers, Midhurst, in Sussex, in 1875; Chigwell Hall in Essex, and Pierrepoint, near Farnham in Surrey, in 1876; Merrist Wood near Guildford in Surrey, and Denham at Totteridge in Hertfordshire, in 1877; and so on down into the nineties.

After their showing each year at the Royal Academy Exhibition Shaw’s brilliant pen-and-ink perspectives of these houses were published photo-lithographically in the professional press; moreover, from 1874 the plans were usually given as well, the first published being that of Hopedene. Not surprisingly these were the most influential of Shaw’s works abroad, providing in the late seventies and early eighties one of the most important sources of the American ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15). Beside them, moreover, Webb’s more prominent London works of the late sixties, the house for George Howard, later Earl of Carlisle, built in 1868 near Thackeray’s in Palace Green, Kensington, and the small office building at 19 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, also of 1868, appear somewhat cranky and overstudied, still rather too Gothic in detail and lacking the comfortable air of his country-house work. However, the modest London studio-house at 14 Holland Park Road, Kensington, which was designed in 1864 and built in 1865 for Val Prinsep, like Morris and Spencer Stanhope one of the crew of artists who worked on the decoration of the Oxford Union, must have been more like the Red House and Benfleet Hall before it was recurrently enlarged by Webb in the following decades. Another London studio-house for the water-colour painter G. B. Boyce at 35 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which was begun in 1869, is in rather better condition today and quite exemplary in its quiet way despite some changes by Webb and others.

At this point came Nesfield’s Kinmel Park. Shaw and other advanced architects must have been aware of the character of the designs for this house from 1870 or 71, even though it was neither shown at the Royal Academy nor published then, and took some four years to complete. Kinmel is much more complicated stylistically than Nesfield’s Kew lodge of 1866-7, but it offers the next step in the development of the new Queen Anne mode. At first sight it might appear to be related rather to Second Empire work, for the main block on the entrance side is symmetrical, high-roofed, and dominated by a bold central pavilion. Moreover, the detailing of the red-brick façades with their profuse light-coloured stone trim is almost as French of Louis XIII’s time as it is English of Queen Anne’s day. The garden front, which is carefully ordered but not symmetrical, and the service wing to the south, much more loosely composed and with a profusion of small-paned double-hung sash-windows and dormers, are more definitely English and also more original.

Webb had been using such windows and even approaching the Late Stuart vernacular in his houses for a year or two before Kinmel was begun. This was most evident at Trevor Hall (Figure 25), built at Oakleigh Park near Barnet in Hertfordshire in 1868-70, for that modest country house was quite symmetrical in design although almost devoid of any sort of ‘period’ detail, whether Gothic or Late Stuart. To more acclaim, Webb had also been responsible for designing with William Morris a little earlier, in 1866 and in 1867, the Armoury in St James’s Palace and the Refreshment Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former, particularly, is a very original masterpiece of nineteenth-century decoration, hardly at all related to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic, yet reflecting the eighteenth century only as regards the treatment of the wainscoting and the door and window casings (which may be of eighteenth-century date). The Refreshment Room is also very fine and now accessible to the public (Plate 97B).

Just after 1870, while Kinmel was still in construction, the main line of development moved from the country into London. The Education Act of 1870 required the building of innumerable new schools, particularly by the London School Board. Among the architects successful in the first competitions that were held for designs for these schools were E. R. Robson (1835-1917) and J. J. Stevenson (1831-1908); they used a non-Gothic vocabulary in London stock bricks trimmed with red bricks cut or moulded along seventeenth-century vernacular lines.^[267] This mode was not unrelated to the more definitely Queen Anne models provided by the Kew lodge and by Kinmel, but the new London schools were more irregular in composition and naturally much more cheaply built. Robson, appointed architect to the London School Board in 1871, soon made this mode the official one for schools in London County and this, of course, before long influenced Board School design nationally.

In 1871 Stevenson, like Shaw a Scot out to make a London reputation, built a new house for himself in what is now Bayswater Road. This he named the Red House, like Morris’s at Bexley Heath of a decade earlier, in order to call attention to the fact that its brickwork was not covered with stucco but exposed like that of the Thackeray and Howard houses in Palace Green. In fact, however, it was built like the Board Schools of brownish stock bricks with red-brick detail elaborately moulded, gauged, and cut in the Late Stuart way. Although Stevenson’s house had little of the real elegance of Kinmel or the natural ease of Shaw’s manors, its novelty and its fairly conspicuous location would have attracted attention in any case. But Stevenson, a very accomplished publicist, saw the advantage of proclaiming for this hybrid mode a name, ‘Queen Anne’, which was evidently no less applicable to Nesfield’s Kew lodge and Kinmel or even to his friend Robson’s schools. Thus was a revival formally launched.

Two new buildings in London by Shaw, begun in 1872 and in 1873, were definitely in the new mode. Only at this point, indeed, does the term Queen Anne begin to make any sense as applied to Shaw’s work. Despite the valid claim to priority that Stevenson made for his Red House in a paper read in 1874 at the Architects’ Conference ‘On the recent reaction of taste in architecture’ in which he claimed the Queen Anne mode was a ‘Re-Renaissance’ (sic), and his own relative success from this time on as a fashionable London house-architect, the Queen Anne became Shaw’s from the moment that he first turned his hand to it in 1872. Whether the original idea came to him from Devey or from Nesfield—he had probably worked himself on the drawings for the Kew lodge—or was merely an attempt to outbid a rival Scotsman on the London scene makes no real difference.

New Zealand Chambers, the office building which Shaw erected in 1872-3 in Leadenhall Street in the City, was certainly totally unlike anything the Age of Anne ever saw except for the cut-brick detailing of the pedimented entrance. Boldly projecting red brick piers divided the tall façade into three bays, while between them rose oriel windows broken by ornately sculptured spandrels imitated from the mid-seventeenth-century ones on Sparrow’s House at Ipswich. The small panes and thick white sash-bars of these windows made the scale surprisingly domestic in contrast to the usual boldness of High Victorian commercial work, and the whole composition was effectively tied together by an ornately pargeted cove cornice that ran straight across the top (see Chapter 14). Above this the rather simple range of continuous dormers in the roof was very much in the spirit of the ‘ribbon-window’ bands on his country houses.

So dazzled were contemporaries by the lush exuberance of Shaw’s ornament on the spandrels and the cove that they hardly noticed the way in which the bold articulation of this façade by the brick piers, with the areas between nearly all window, frankly reflecting the internal iron construction, provided most satisfactory lighting for the offices; nor that Shaw, while keeping his scale intimate in all the detailing, was not afraid to stress the verticality of his façade by avoiding emphasis on the storey lines. Only the weaker features of the design—the arbitrary asymmetry of the entrance, the profuse ornamentation, and the underscaling—were generally imitated.

Lowther Lodge, built in 1873-4, a large free-standing mansion in Kensington Gore, still survives—it is now the home of the Royal Geographical Society—as New Zealand Chambers does not. Here the vocabulary of cut and moulded brick is more consistently Late Stuart, although the general composition, with many gables, two tall polygonal bay-windows, quantities of dormers, and tall fluted chimney stacks, is as romantically complex as that of Shaw’s manors in Sussex and Surrey. However, both the front and the rear façades, when studied, will be found to approximate symmetry in their principal portions as does the front of Glen Andred; and the main rooms inside, the hall at the front and the drawing-room behind, are quite symmetrical and have recognizably Early Georgian (rather than specifically Queen Anne) fireplaces and door and window casings, although their grouping is still, so to say, agglutinative.

In a Surrey house of the same date, 1873, like Trevor Hall unhappily demolished, Webb moved rather farther in a similar direction. Joldwynds near Dorking was quite as symmetrical as Trevor Hall but even less Gothic. The vocabulary of tile-hanging on the upper storeys, with weather-boarding in the gables, was as authentically regional as that of Shaw’s nearby houses, but the vaguely eighteenth-century vernacular of the detailing was much simpler than Shaw’s repertory of moulded and cut brickwork at Lowther Lodge.

Nesfield, in designing what is now Barclays Bank in the Market Square of Saffron Walden in Essex, remained more eclectic, staying closer to the manorial mode of Cloverley Hall yet using again various Japanese motifs in the rich decoration. This was built in 1874. Godwin, who had just moved to London with the actress Ellen Terry and was now largely occupied with designing stage sets, developed further in the rooms of their rented house in Taviton Street in 1873-4 the Anglo-Japanese mode of his interiors of ten years earlier in Bristol. In 1874 he also arranged an exhibition of paintings in a similar spirit for his friend the painter Whistler at the new Grosvenor Galleries.^[268]

In the mid seventies, however, it was Shaw, not Nesfield or Godwin, who occupied the centre of the architectural stage. In the Convent of the Sisters of Bethany of 1874 in St Clements Road at Boscombe near Bournemouth he disguised his use of concrete, then a relatively new building material, with his familiar Sussex vernacular. He did the same in a slightly later series of designs for cottages made of patented prefabricated concrete slabs.^[269] It is worth noting, moreover, that the internal iron skeleton above the bold cantilever on the front of his Old Swan House (Plate 103) of 1876 at 17 Chelsea Embankment in London provides in effect an example of what would later be called ‘skyscraper construction’, since it carries completely the weight of the brickwork of the upper walls; this was a decade before the ‘invention’ of this sort of construction in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Shaw’s interest in technical developments and his enthusiasm for new materials and methods was evidently very great, always provided that he could bend them to his particular sort of retroactive pictorial vision. When he built the Jury House for the Paris Exhibition of 1878 of patent cement bricks, for example, he designed the façade very elegantly in his Late Stuart manner just as if it were of cut and moulded clay bricks. Godwin and Whistler, however, were showing at this same exhibition an Anglo-Japanese room of highly original character in association with Watt the furniture manufacturer.

Shaw’s excellent church of this period at Bournemouth, St Michael’s and All Angels, Poole Hill, begun in 1873, is Late Victorian in the crispness and clarity of its design but less archaeological than those of this date by Bodley. It seems to indicate that he could have made a great reputation as a church builder had he not been absorbed with secular work. But by the seventies secular work once again provided the field of major prestige in England, as it had hardly done since 1840, and so Shaw concentrated on it. Having revolutionized country-house design, he now turned, more definitely than at Lowther Lodge—by its size and open siting more a country house set in the city—to urban and suburban domestic work. In these his conquest was even more complete, at least in England and, as regards the suburbs, in America.

The Old Swan House and its neighbour Cheyne House at the outer end of the Chelsea Embankment, respectively of 1876 and 1875, are both mansions rather than ordinary terrace houses. They also represent a considerably further advance along the road towards a formal eighteenth-century revival than Lowther Lodge. Old Swan House is completely symmetrical, and the upper storeys are also quite regularly fenestrated in the early eighteenth-century way (Plate 103). However, the total effect is still highly Picturesque because of the way these upper storeys are cantilevered forward; from the cantilever depend, moreover, elaborate oriels of much earlier character very similar to those Shaw had introduced at New Zealand Chambers. Such oriels he long continued to employ; they are not only a principal feature of his own house in Hampstead, built in this same year, but also of the much later Holl and Long houses. Cheyne House occupies an irregular curving plot with the entrance in Royal Hospital Road; but Shaw used all his considerable ingenuity to give it symmetrical façades, even though the plan actually has little of the orderliness of that of Lowther Lodge.

If these two Chelsea houses seem to presage an early return to the serenity of Georgian street architecture, Shaw’s J. P. Heseltine house of 1875 at 196 Queen’s Gate in South Kensington unleashed a flood of the most individualistic house-design London had ever seen. Stucco-fronted houses of builders’ Renaissance design were still being erected on contiguous sites when this tall gabled façade rose, totally oblivious of old and new neighbours. Cut brick, moulded brick, terracotta, all of the brightest red, surround very large mullioned windows in a composition that is gratuitously asymmetrical at the base but symmetrical in the upper storeys below the crowning gable. For fifteen years such houses proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of western London. The best are by Shaw himself, such as those at 68, 62, and 72 Cadogan Square—the first of 1879, the others of 1882—and those at 8-11 and 15 Chelsea Embankment of 1878-9; but more are by other architects, and the vast majority by builders. In the Chelsea Embankment range River House at No. 3 is by Bodley; Nos 4-6 are by Godwin; and No. 7 is by R. Phéné Spiers (1838-1916), an architect whose Parisian training did not restrain him from following Shaw.

Collingham Gardens of 1881-7 by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and his then partner Harold A. Peto (?-1890), a sort of square with variously designed houses, all gabled, opening on to a lawn in the centre, provides a still more complete illustration of what may be called Neo-Picturesque urbanism. Not at all Shavian, the detailing of many of these houses is very similar to that of Cuijpers’s Rijksmuseum and none of it Queen Anne. The contiguous mansions that George & Peto built in 1882 near by in Harrington Gardens, one for W. S. Gilbert at No. 19 (Plate 104B), the other for Sir Ernest Cassel, the banker, are the most elaborate single London examples of their domestic work. The house of the composer of the Savoy Operas approaches very closely the German Meistersinger mode of the period, but the touch is much lighter—intentionally whimsical perhaps?—and both the organization of the whole and the execution of the profuse detail is very superior to what one finds in most contemporary German work (see Chapter 9).

Stevenson’s best and most Shavian houses in London are two that he built in 1878 in partnership with A. J. Adams in Lowther Gardens behind Lowther Lodge; however, those he built at 40-42 Pont Street have a certain interest because the mode that he exploited here is often called ‘Pont Street Dutch’, so ubiquitous is it in this part of Chelsea. This name also emphasizes the characteristic tendency of the late seventies and eighties towards varying the English late seventeenth-century vernacular mode by the introduction of Dutch and Flemish elements of detail, usually executed in terracotta, as George & Peto did in most of the Earls Court houses mentioned above. Thus, by the late seventies, the long-established London tradition of coherent terrace design came to an end. That was, on the whole, a real urbanistic misfortune, however excellent some of the best individual houses by the above-mentioned architects may be.

Shaw’s venture into the suburbs initiated a new domestic tradition of positive value and also a tradition of ‘planning’ that has continued with some modification down to the present, both in England and abroad. At Bedford Park, Turnham Green, then well beyond the western edges of built-up London, Shaw laid out in 1876 and largely designed an early ‘Garden Suburb’ (see Chapter 24), in fact, almost a ‘new town’, similar in some ways to the New Towns of the present post-war period, but without any industries of its own. Small houses, mostly semi-detached, i.e., in pairs, stand in their own gardens, simply and casually built of good red brick with a certain amount of modest Queen Anne detailing. The scheme is very complete, including a church by Shaw that is most ingeniously styled to harmonize with the domesticity of the houses, a club, a tavern, shops, and so forth.^[270] Godwin’s assistant Maurice B. Adams (1849-1933) and E. J. May (1853-1941) also worked here, as well as Godwin himself; indeed, some of the best houses are not by Shaw but by Godwin.

With characteristic versatility, while the construction of Bedford Park was proceeding in this simplified version of his middle manner, Picturesque but distinctly anti-Gothic, Shaw was also erecting at Adcote in Shropshire in 1877 a large Tudor manor house in reddish stone. This is notable for its restrained, almost ‘abstract’, detailing and for the tall mullioned window-wall of the hall bay, more than rivalling that of Cloverley Hall. Flete, a still larger house in Devon begun the year after Adcote, is also Tudor. Dawpool in Cheshire, demolished in 1926, was begun in 1882 in much the same mode but was even more extensive and elaborate than Flete. J. F. Doyle (1840-1913) of Liverpool collaborated on this.

The Bedford Park church of 1878, St Michael’s, is more or less Queen Anne, at least not at all Gothic. But at Ilkley in Yorkshire Shaw’s St Margaret’s of the previous year is a remarkably personal essay in the Perpendicular, low and broad and elegantly detailed. In quality this is well above his earlier Bournemouth church and rather more original in its proportions than the standard work of Bodley and his imitators at this time. Somewhat similar, and still more original, is St Swithin’s in Gervis Road in Bournemouth, also of 1877; while All Saints’, Leek, of 1886 carries almost to the point of parody the Shavian stylization of English Late Gothic proportion towards the broad and low—visually, that is; ritualistically they are quite as ‘High’ as Bodley’s.

Next Shaw produced his finest and most creatively conceived church, Holy Trinity, Latimer Road, comparable in quality to his early church at Bingley but wholly different in character. This was built in 1887-9 for the Harrow Mission in a poor district of western London. The interior of Holy Trinity is a single vessel, very broad and moderately low, covered by a flat-pointed wooden ceiling which is tied by vigorous horizontal members of iron cased in wood and heavily buttressed externally (Plate 106A). Behind the chancel, which is no more than a square dais on which the altar is raised, rises an ecclesiastical version of the Shavian window-wall, broad and low like the space it terminates but arched and lightly traceried at the top. The result could hardly be more different from Shaw’s domestic Queen Anne of these years. It is on such things as this church, in which his basic architectural capacities are revealed unconfused by frivolous elaboration of detail, that his claim to high talent, occasionally to genius, must be based.

If Shaw did not cease to design churches while continually extending the range of his secular practice, it is a still more notable testimony to the breadth of his approach that he built in 1879, in Kensington Gore between the Albert Hall and Lowther Lodge—and with a characteristic disregard for both—the first really handsome block of flats erected in London; the first, that is, unless one prefers the Second Empire ones of the late sixties in Grosvenor Gardens. The tall and extensive mass of this block, like that of most of his houses of the period, is extremely picturesque in silhouette because of the very tall and ornate gables that face the Park. But these are quite regularly spaced and the walls below them, with the multitudinous segment-arched, white-sashed windows all evenly phrased in threes, illustrate Shaw’s Queen Anne of the seventies at its most disciplined (Plate 104A).^[271]

As has been noted, Shaw was by now the preferred architect of most of his fellow Royal Academicians. Webb had built houses for several of the Pre-Raphaelite painters who were his friends and associates. Less successful and more advanced painters employed Godwin. Small though it is and now much remodelled, the White House in Tite Street round the corner from the Chelsea Embankment, which Godwin built for his friend Whistler in 1878-9, has one of the most original façades of the decade. As its name implies, although all of brick, it was not ‘red’ like Morris’s and Stevenson’s famous houses, but ‘white’ because the walls were so painted,^[272] recalling perhaps the white-painted Colonial farmhouses of Whistler’s New England youth. The sparse detail is related in its vaguely eighteenth-century character to the Shavian Queen Anne, but it is much more delicate and linear, indeed almost Late Georgian in inspiration. Most significantly, the composition of the façade as a whole, and even more evidently the asymmetrical placing of the door and windows, owes a great deal to those abstract principles of Japanese art which both Whistler and Godwin had been studying for almost twenty years.

Whistler had to sell his house almost as soon as it was finished in order to pay the costs of his unhappy libel suit against Ruskin, a legal battle in which the Late Victorian and the High Victorian came to violent grips. But Godwin went on to build several more studio houses in Tite Street at Nos 29, 33, and 44 in the next few years and also the Tower House in 1885. Similar, but inferior, is No. 31 by R. W. Edis, which John Singer Sargent later occupied. Also in Tite Street is the commonplace terrace house at No. 16, of which the interiors were decorated by Godwin for Oscar Wilde,^[273] the greatest aesthete of them all. Wilde’s influential ideas in this field, carried to America on a lecture tour in 1881-2, were largely derived from Godwin, it may be noted.

When Shaw turned again to commercial work it was to design in 1881 the offices for the bankers Baring Brothers at 8 Bishopsgate in the City of London. This small building was as discreet, as orderly, and almost as domestic as Cheyne House. But the next year, so chameleon-like was his development, he gave the more conspicuous Alliance Assurance Building at the corner of St James’s Street and Pall Mall opposite St James’s Palace broad, low, banded arches of brick and stone below and elaborated the vertical articulation of the upper storeys with profuse sculptural ornament.^[274] Very tall and scallopy gables provide a Neo-Picturesque effect only too comparable to the most vulgar ‘Pont Street Dutch’ houses designed by his rivals or even to contemporary Northern Renaissance work on the Continent. To emphasize his variousness further, there is diagonally across the street a later edifice for the same clients, built in collaboration with his pupil Ernest Newton (1856-1922) in 1903, so quietly academic in the Neo-Georgian taste of the early twentieth century that one can hardly believe it is also Shaw’s.

His next important secular works after the first Alliance building, both begun in 1887 like the Latimer Road church, contrast with each other almost as markedly as they do with that. Characteristic of the essentially private patronage—patronage from successful artists, patronage from business, patronage from the professional classes—responsible for the best English architecture of this period is the fact that Shaw’s first public commission came only at this advanced stage of his career. London’s Metropolitan Police Offices in New Scotland Yard, of which the original block was built in 1887-8 and the second block to the south added in 1890, have a splendid site on the Thames Embankment. Remembering, it would seem almost for the first time, his own Scottish birth—or possibly in apposite reference to the familiar name of the London police headquarters—Shaw designed Scotland Yard somewhat like a Scottish castle with corner tourelles and tall curved gables, but using throughout heavy and rather academic later seventeenth-century detailing of a much less regional sort (Plate 106B). Red brick and stone in combination make it also as colouristic as the Alliance building, the solidity of the proportions makes it weighty, and the high gables and tower roofs give it great variety of outline. As a result, the total effect is almost High Victorian in its vigour and its massiveness. Shaw is said to have regretted the need to build a second block; certainly it must have been more impressive when the original block stood alone like an isolated riverside fortress.

Scotland Yard seems to look backward somewhat, at least in relation to that gradual development towards orderliness and restraint of an eighteenth-century sort which can be discerned in Shaw’s work of the seventies despite all its variousness. On the other hand, the house that he built in 1887-8 for Fred White,^[275] an American diplomat, at 170 Queen’s Gate, so near to that strikingly aberrant terrace house of the previous decade at No. 196, seems to look forward into the early twentieth century, when the eighteenth-century Georgian would provide the basis for a quite archaeological revival. This plain rectangular block of red brick, orderly and symmetrical on the long façade towards Imperial Institute Road and also on the end towards Queen’s Gate, with three ranges of large sash-windows below an academic cornice, is therefore as much a historical landmark, if not an original creation, as was Glen Andred twenty years before (Plate #105:pl105). The suave and well-scaled ornamentation is concentrated at the doorway in the eighteenth-century manner, and the hip roof is unbroken except by regularly spaced dormers. Yet, curiously enough, the plan is somewhat less completely regular and symmetrical than one might expect from the exterior; for example, the large drawing-room towards Queen’s Gate is L-shaped.

Only the excellence of the craftsmanship here, based not on the Sussex vernacular but on the most sophisticated work of around 1720, the prominence of the tall chimneys, and the wide central dormer with its curved top reveal Shaw’s hand and suggest, perhaps, an early date; otherwise such a house might well have been built forty years or so later by many other architects, English and American (see Chapter 24). However, Webb at Smeaton Manor^[276] in Yorkshire, built in 1877-9, had already arrived at an almost identical regularity and formality of design (Plate 102A). Characteristically, however, he did not elaborate the exterior with borrowed eighteenth-century detailing, and the house remains almost undatable on internal evidence, like much of his best work.

Scotland Yard is an all but unique example of an English public building of distinction erected in the eighties. Before continuing with the account of Shaw’s work in the nineties, two prominent features of the London skyline, the most striking additions made since Butterfield’s spire of All Saints’ rose in Margaret Street in the fifties and the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament was completed in the sixties, should be mentioned. Both the Imperial Institute, towering over Shaw’s contiguous Fred White house in South Kensington, which was built in 1887-93 in honour of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, and the Catholic cathedral of Westminster, not begun until 1894, are especially notable for their very tall dome-topped towers. The cathedral, which was designed by J. F. Bentley (1839-1902), a pupil of Clutton, has also a magnificent domed interior. The Institute, built by T. E. Collcutt (1840-1924), was perhaps of less over-all interest but extremely refined and elegant in its detailing compared to the contemporary work of George & Peto, which it most closely resembles. Curiously enough, the very underscaled membering and even so dainty a trick as the use of single courses of red brick here and there in the stonework does not make the 280-foot tower petty. It may be compared to its own very great advantage with Haller’s contemporary tower, in a somewhat parallel Northern Renaissance vein, on the Hamburg Rathaus. Collcutt’s own earlier tower on the Town Hall at Wakefield in Yorkshire of 1877-80 was less successful than this London landmark, which has happily survived the rest of the building.

Bentley’s tower has a similar silhouette, but is more boldly striated by broad bands of brick and stone. The detail, partly Byzantine, partly Early Renaissance despite his distinguished early career as a Late Victorian Gothic church architect, is, like Collcutt’s, rather underscaled. This goes still further to prove the extent to which this period in England saw all architecture, even that of cathedrals, in domestic terms. However, well before Bentley began his cathedral—it is not even yet completed as regards the internal decoration—Shaw had turned towards considerably more monumental forms at Scotland Yard, and even to quite academic design.

At Bryanston, a large country house in Dorset begun in 1889 for Lord Portman, Shaw modelled the main block on Sir Roger Pratt’s Coleshill House of the mid seventeenth century; the side wings here are quite Gibbsian. This is the earliest example of what the English call ‘Monumental Queen Anne’—to distinguish this sort of work henceforth from the freer and more vernacular Queen Anne of the seventies and eighties—and the Americans ‘Georgian Revival’. Two years later Shaw built Chesters in Northumberland. This mansion is equally academic, if less derivative from particular sources; but it is also highly original in plan and conception. The composition of the incurved façade planes, moreover, is as knowing and as ingenious in its formal way as anything he ever built in a more rambling vein.

Later in the nineties Shaw’s stylistic uncertainty—or, if one wishes to call it so, his versatility—was notably illustrated in two large commercial buildings built in Liverpool. The façade of Parr’s Bank in Castle Street, built in 1898 in collaboration with W. E. Willink (1856-1924) and P. C. Thicknesse (1860-1920), is of the suavest academic order. Its proportions are surer than in any of his other works except Chesters, and yet he striated its light-coloured stonework with bands of green marble in a way few later architects working in this vein would ever have thought of doing. Two years later, in the offices that he built in collaboration with Doyle for Ismay, Imrie & Co., later the White Star Line—for whom he also designed the interiors of the liner Oceanic—he provided what was externally almost a copy of Scotland Yard, and yet inside he exposed the riveted metal structural members in a fashion at once frank and highly decorative.

If Shaw had had the opportunity to rebuild Nash’s Regent Street Quadrant completely according to the designs that he prepared in 1905 the loss of the original work might not be so serious. Approaching seventy-five, he turned here to a Piranesian Classicism. The colonnaded section finished in 1908, which forms the northern front of the Piccadilly Hotel, though flanked at both ends by an emasculated version of Shaw’s design carried out in 1923 by his disciple and biographer Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), rivals in boldness anything English architecture had produced since the days of Vanbrugh and Hawksmore. Even more spectacular, and also incomplete, since the gable at the east end was never built, is the Piccadilly façade of the hotel with its tremendous open colonnade raised high against the sky (Plate 107). The Classical serenity of this feature is characteristically contrasted with the voluted silhouette of the tall gable over the projecting wing at the west end, and the exuberance of the whole puts most other Edwardian Neo-Baroque to shame.

To summarize Shaw’s achievement or even to epitomize his personal style is almost impossible. He was, for example, in no ordinary sense of the word merely an eclectic; yet his modes were very various, more various than those of almost any other nineteenth-century architect of equal rank. After his first borrowings from Nesfield, however, they were all his own—his own, at least, until hordes of other architects in England and America took them up, one or two at a time, often vulgarizing them beyond recognition. He was probably not the most talented English architect of his generation and certainly not the most original. How much he owed to Nesfield at the start it is impossible to estimate, even though at least two of the characteristic Shavian modes seem to have been originally of his invention—if not, indeed, of Devey’s!

Yet ironically Nesfield’s own later work appeared to contemporaries almost like an echo of Shaw’s if it was known at all. He never had any such success as did Shaw, and died relatively young in 1888. Godwin also was somehow never able, after 1870, to repeat the public triumphs that had been his in the competitions of the early sixties. In his later life he turned more and more to designing sets and costumes for the theatre and died in 1886, two years before Nesfield. Webb lived on till 1915, although he retired from practice in 1900; his spirit, moreover, lived on in a quite different way from Shaw’s. It was through emulation of the craftsman-like integrity of Webb’s work that the attitudes, rather than the forms, of Pugin’s earlier Gothic Revival were transmitted to the first modern architects quite as much as through study of the writings of his friend and close associate Morris.