High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The Seven Lamps advanced the religious view of architecture. It was conceived as an exposition of the moral force of the discipline. The seven lamps are the seven spirits that architecture should embody: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Architects, amateurs of architecture and the art-consuming intelligentsia devoured it in the two or three decades after it was written, when Ruskin’s sway was greatest. Ironically, the foremost exponent of the Gothic Revival, George Gilbert Scott, had a cordial detestation for Ruskin of the sort that the man who does often conceives for the man who simply teaches; despite there being a similar religious motivation behind his own buildings, and having at first been influenced by The Seven Lamps and The Stones. By the time The Seven Lamps appeared Scott was a reasonably well-established architect, who had been building Gothic Revival churches across England for several years. Scott’s own preference for the Gothic, and his belief that its degeneration had led to the classical becoming so popular, had been his artistic creed since the mid-1840s, and was similar to Ruskin’s. Scott’s eventual disregard for Ruskin came not least because of an ego every bit as monumental as some of his buildings.

  In ‘The Lamp of Obedience’, Ruskin set out some of what he considered the ground rules for the Gothic Revival. ‘The choice of Classical or Gothic . . . may be questionable when it regards some single and considerable public buildings; but I cannot conceive it questionable, for an instant, when it regards modern uses in general: I cannot conceive any architect insane enough to produce the vulgarisation of Greek architecture.’2 Beyond even that, Ruskin was clear which styles of Gothic were preferable: the Pisan Romanesque, the early Gothic of the Western Italian republics, the Venetian Gothic (‘in its purest development’) or the English earliest Decorated. ‘The most natural, perhaps the safest choice, would be of the last, well-fenced from chance of again stiffening into the perpendicular’. Ruskin also sought to define the moment in the adoption of ‘unnatural’ window tracery when the Gothic started to decline in the fourteenth century, so could be particular about these things.

  Carlyle’s reverence for the Middle Ages complemented Ruskin’s belief that architecture should exhibit the best moral aspects of a people: architecture had political and philosophical as well as aesthetic roots. Ruskin’s and Scott’s generation was also affected by Matthew Holbeche Bloxam’s Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, published in 1829 as a slim volume and revised so extensively during the author’s long lifetime that it reached a three-volume edition by its eleventh printing in 1882. Despite – or perhaps because of – the pressures of secularisation, both the Established Church and the dissenting creeds strove to build churches and chapels, and to make them look like medieval institutions. What Bloxam called the ‘vestiges of antiquity’ to be found in the British Isles were of huge importance to him, and he made them of huge importance to many of his fellow countrymen and women, by whom hitherto the physical manifestations of the past had been taken for granted.3 As well as instilling a consciousness of the past, Bloxam provided a blueprint of the different types of Gothic. This would have been well known to specialists such as Scott and Ruskin, but not to the clergy, industrialists, politicians and private individuals who would be the patrons of Scott and other architects.

  Gothic churches are a familiar Victorian legacy to even small towns, and other Victorian architecture is ubiquitous. The expansion of the population in the second half of the nineteenth century meant many more houses were built, for all classes of the population. Schools, hospitals, courthouses, town halls, shopping streets, universities and colleges, lunatic asylums, libraries, museums, art galleries, market halls, public houses, municipal baths, theatres, concert halls and railway stations remain monuments of the age. The names of the men who designed them resonate too: notably Scott, Butterfield, Street, Pugin, Waterhouse, and Bodley. The abundance of private and public commissions ensured the profession of architect flourished as never before. It would not be until the end of the nineteenth century that the first university courses in architecture were established: Scott (like others) had pupils articled to him for five years, who learned on the job. To judge from the enduring quality of the work, it was no bad training.

  II

  Ruskin led the battle between Gothicists and classicists. In Bradford in the late 1860s, in a lecture on the occasion of the decision to build a new exchange there, thirty years after he had first joined a society at Oxford to preserve Gothic architecture, he said he had noticed that in the new northern towns ‘the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic.’4 He could not understand why. ‘When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses.’ He asked why ‘you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another’.5 He worried that if the people regarded Gothic as so sublime that it had to be reserved only for religious buildings (and the schools, then, were usually religious foundations or enterprises) ‘it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life.’ The world of commerce – the fruits of which were to build Bradford’s new exchange – had become a substitute religion. As he had written in The Stones, ‘the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and . . . its renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption.’6

  To Ruskin and his followers the division between the two schools of architecture had a profound theological significance. The one indicated piety, godliness, the glory of God; the other self-interest and the glory of Mammon, and the advance of secularism. There was something about the Gothic style that spoke of the pursuit of perfection; something about the Renaissance style that spoke of indulgence and self-satisfaction. ‘Do you mean’, Ruskin asked his audience at Bradford, ‘to build as Christians or as infidels?’ For, he added, ‘in all my past work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture is essentially religious – the production of a faithful and virtuous, not of an infidel and corrupted people.’

  This did not mean good architecture had to be ecclesiastical; it just had to be the work of ‘good and believing men’.7 For, he said, ‘every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion’.8 Now, though, Christianity had become the ‘nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property and sevenths of time; but we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property, and six-sevenths of our time . . . the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the “Goddess of Getting-on”, or “Britannia of the Market”.’9 Talking of the harbours, warehouses and exchanges that were the temples of this faith, he observed: ‘It is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to her; you know far better than I.’10

  The Oxford Movement affected ecclesiastical architecture. The pursuit of religious perfection was, its adherents felt, possible only in a Gothic church building. Perhaps most influenced among architects was William Butterfield, the longest lived of the great Victorian builders – he died in 1900 just short of his eighty-sixth birthday. He was the son of a Nonconformist chemist, apprenticed to a Pimlico builder at sixteen. At twenty-four he was articled to Harvey Eginton, a Worcester architect, and set up his own practice in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1840. Like Scott and Street he travelled widely on the Continent to learn about Gothic buildings, and to absorb their influence. Butterfield joined the Ecclesiological Society – which had been founded at Cambridge in 1839 as the Cambridge Camden Society, devoted to the study and promotion of Gothic architecture – and regularly wrote for, and published designs in, its magazine the Ecclesiologist. Then the Oxford Movement shaped him. His religious feelings translated into designs not merely pre-Reformation in their elevations but also in their interior decoration. In endorsing the aims of
the Ecclesiological Society he accepted that churches had to be planned as metaphors for the spiritual functions of sacrament and worship. This is why his churches are so different from those built or restored by his very Protestant contemporary, Scott.

  To go inside Butterfield’s masterpiece, All Saints, Margaret Street, is to be transported: either to somewhere in Italy, or back to the English Middle Ages of lavishly painted walls and Catholic – or rather, Anglo-Catholic – images. The church is a few dozen yards north of the vulgarity of London’s Oxford Street, on the site of the eighteenth-century Margaret Chapel, which had by the late 1830s become a centre for Tractarian worship. It has been said that All Saints, designed in 1850 (the year Pusey laid its foundation stone) and completed in 1859, initiated high Victorian Gothic. Pugin might quarrel with that: there are few interiors of which All Saints is more reminiscent than the House of Lords. The tall spire of the church – almost the only part easily visible from a distance, as other buildings enclose it in this crowded part of the West End – is of north German influence, and the use of brick reminiscent of German churches too. Butterfield fiddled with the decoration for the rest of his life – another forty years after its supposed completion – but the exuberant floor tiles and the marble and granite pulpit are from the original plan.

  Butterfield’s patrons were the Ecclesiological Society, with two of its members in particular taking the closest interest: Sir Stephen Glynne and Alexander Beresford Hope, a Conservative politician who would in 1865 become president of the Institute of British Architects. Beresford Hope was an unrepentant medievalist who paid much of the £70,000 cost. All Saints realises the ideal the Society’s members had for Christian worship. It was intended as a ‘model’ church, with extensive use of polychromy. Outside, its red brick includes courses of black or blue bricks. There was an element of this in Butterfield’s original plans, but these were revised extensively during 1849–50. This was at the behest of the patrons as well as of the architect, the use of colour having been influenced by The Seven Lamps. There are bands of stone on the spire. Inside, there are courses of marquetry and decorative tiles, and judicious use of marble. It is that, the painted walls and the coloured roof that make it seem Italian. However, the tracery, arches and capitals mimic a style on the cusp of Early English and Decorated. The riot of decoration in the windowless north aisle is the epitome of Italian style, though a modern critic has called it ‘dazzling, though in an eminently High Victorian ostentatiousness of obtrusiveness . . . from everywhere the praise of the Lord is drummed into you. The motifs are without exception big and graceless.’11 Even the Ecclesiologist thought it ugly, though conceded the power and force of its decorations.

  Over the next twenty years Butterfield would use polychromy in other notable commissions. Between 1868 and 1876 he built at Rugby School in this style, and Keble College, Oxford. He built a number of other churches and chapels, mainly in the South Country, notably Wiltshire. He also restored many churches, obliterating genuine Gothic features, a vandalism he had in common with Scott.

  III

  The Gothic may have been the divine style, but many who had to live and work in it loathed it. A battle raged during the late 1850s and 1860s about whether it, or the classical style, should be the predominant style in Britain’s public architecture. As with so many other Victorian disputes on high-minded matters, it was frequently conducted in the gutter.

  Even before the Palace of Westminster was completed it was intensely unpopular, and not least with Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister from 1855 to 1858 and again from 1859 to 1865. This was the era of ‘the Great Stink’. Parliament then sat only outside the shooting season, usually from early February until mid-August. The last two months of the session became unbearable as the temperature rose. It was hot in the building, which had inadequate ventilation, and the windows could not be opened because the smell was too nauseating. Various reasons have been cited for Palmerston’s dislike of the Gothic – such as his having had to work in ill-lit buildings as a younger man and not wishing to inflict the experience on anyone else – but his dissatisfaction with the Gothic House of Commons (where, as an Irish peer, he sat as an MP) might also have had something to do with it. He felt the Regency buildings of his youth represented the height of architectural achievement, and thought them more suitable to be used as government offices than something resembling ‘a continental cathedral’.12 Gothic, when it came to public buildings, was an experiment he wished not to be repeated. Palmerston was, in architectural terms, a philistine. When he had extended his estate at Broadlands in Hampshire he had, precisely because they failed to conform with his Regency prejudices, pulled down an ancient manor house and cottages, much to the fury of local antiquaries.

  The Foreign Office, an early Georgian house in Downing Street, was inadequate for a country with a growing empire and a great power in the world. Sir Benjamin Hall, the First Commissioner of Works, and the man after whom the bell in Westminster’s clock tower would be named, had instituted the competition not just to build a new Foreign Office, but also a new War Office (the conflict in the Crimea had not long ended; and the government had realised that, in an age of expansion, more wars were possible). There had been numerous submissions by British and European architects; an exhibition of their drawings had been held in Westminster Hall; and judges had been appointed. When Hall explained to the Commons on 10 August 1857 why public money would be spent replacing this inadequate building with something in keeping with mid-Victorian Britain’s idea of itself, he found himself under attack for the way in which the competition for the buildings had been conducted.

  A committee had the previous summer examined only two witnesses about this huge outlay of public money: the official surveyor of public works, Mr Hunt, who would have known on which side his bread was buttered, and Sir Charles Trevelyan. Trevelyan had sounded a note of caution not about the idea, but about the process – he had recommended that ‘before anything was done in the matter of rebuilding the public offices some comprehensive plan should be agreed on, combining administrative efficiency, perfect accommodation, architectural beauty, and that the buildings should be raised gradually, one after another, as necessity called for them.’13

  Hall had put the question out to competition partly because he disapproved of how the government exercised patronage, and partly because he had a low opinion of James Pennethorne, the government’s official architect, who had worked on ideas for the site since 1854. The result of the competition was chaotic. ‘A French gentleman got the first prize for the block plan, including both Foreign and War Offices; an Englishman got the prize for the Foreign Office, which was incapable of being worked into the block plan; and another Englishman got the prize for the War Office, which was equally at variance with the block plan and with the Foreign Office.’ None of these prize-winners was George Gilbert Scott, whose acquisition of the commission for the offices was, it was alleged, not remotely regular, but the result it seemed of patronage and jobbery. Hall had swiftly dismissed as inadequate the plan the judges had chosen (with some strong dissenting opinion) as the best for the Foreign Office, by the Scottish architects Coe and Hofland. In his despair Hall returned to Pennethorne, which caused further complaints from the profession.14 One came from Scott, who had come third in the Foreign Office competition, and who had already acquired a reputation for blowing his own trumpet. In his memoirs Scott castigated the judges as men ‘who knew amazingly little about their subject’ and who ‘were not well-disposed towards our style.’15 Beresford Hope, Butterfield’s patron, argued that the whole project should be put on hold while a Royal Commission considered, in depth and without such haste as had already been witnessed, what to do about the whole question of improving Whitehall. He convened a meeting of eminent architects, among them Scott, Barry and Digby Wyatt, to arrange to protest at this affront, and to have the competition reopened.

  George Cornewall Lewis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a polymath who in his spare time
wrote books on linguistics, astronomy, philosophy and law, wanted to proceed without delay; but did not imagine that meant the government should ‘seize the occasion offered by the want of new public offices to embellish the metropolis with a series of magnificent palaces’.16 He was supported by Russell, who noted that the architects ‘very naturally gave play to their fancy, and a series of beautiful plans and sketches of buildings, embellished with every costly architectural decoration, had been sent in, of no other use, in my eyes, than to gratify the sight of the public, and to show the comparative ingenuity and ability of the French and English architects.’17 Russell exhibited the radical antipathy to ostentation, believing his generation did not need to flaunt its power by architectural might. Instead, he said, ‘I hope . . . that in future the Government will, in erecting new buildings, consider exactly what is required for the purpose to which the building is to be applied.’ He claimed to be articulating the opinions of the Monarch, who had declined when Peel was prime minister, and again under Russell, the offer of building a new palace for her and her family because she ‘with her usual thoughtfulness and forbearance, immediately desired that no additional expense should be cast upon her subjects. We have now schemes proposed for the erection of buildings far more like palaces than public offices.’

  Hall justified his initiative by claiming, with a little hyperbole, that ‘there were no public offices in the world which were so inconvenient or in so ruinous a state as our own’.18 He certainly had a point about the War Office, which had ‘several branches . . . located at different places in the West-end.’ He defended himself against the charge of extravagance by saying that the accommodation proposed was requested by Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, and Panmure, the Secretary for War. And if the elevations were deemed grand then, Hall argued, ‘surely it was desirable, if they were to rebuild the public offices, that they should have some design for an elevation which should be really worthy of the country, seeing that the constant complaint was that the public buildings in the Metropolis were such wretched abortions.’19 However, Hall was chastened: he agreed that for the moment land would be set aside in Downing Street, but building would only start once the Commons had sanctioned it – and agreed to find the money.