by Simon Heffer
On 23 August Scott wrote again to Gladstone. ‘A deputation of architects has recently waited upon Lord Palmerston to express their concurrence in his views. It is, of course, a mere truism at a time when an art is divided into two rival branches to say that there are, of course, abundance of its practitioners to express their adherence to either – such expressions have, therefore, little moral value, even if made at a suitable time and with the best motives. In the present matter I strongly hold that the right time for such expression had long since gone by, and that the coming forward to give an additional blow to a brother architect in a moment of weakness was anything but a generous act.’39 Scott felt it was ‘more or less directly connected with a wish to displace me and to substitute another architect in my place. This Architect is Sir Charles Barry’s son who, although among the first to congratulate me on my appointment and to wish me success has not (I am sorry to say) ceased from that turn to make use of all means in his power for my displacement.’
Scott added that
I felt convinced that advantage would be taken by his advocates of certain expressions made use of by those who spoke in the House of Commons in favour of my design, to the effect that, being a Gothic architect it would be inconsistent to ask me to make a design in another style; and I imagine that such has been the case, for Lord Palmerston, though he had hitherto always said that from knowing that I had been educated in classic architecture he felt no doubt that I could design as well in either style, yesterday told me that he had been considering what Lord John Manners and others had said and felt there was a great deal in it; and that he had consequently been thinking of associating another architect with me to assist me in doing so. On my remonstrating, he consented to postpone such a step and I have since written to him giving my reasons for considering it to be wholly incompatible with my position.
He spoke to Gladstone of the ‘utter impossibility’ of such an arrangement as Palmerston suggested. ‘I was appointed by Lord John Manners in conformity with the report of a select committee’, as ‘the architect to design and carry out necessary work’ and ‘it made no mention of the subject of style, though it was, of course, natural that I should follow that of my competing designs.’ He added:
Now, I put it simply on the ground of moral right that if this design be disturbed either from a new Government not approving the style or from the House of Commons taking the same view, I have a clear claim to the refusal or acceptance of the commission to make a new design, and that it would be a distinct infringement of this right if a competitor were prescribed to me. . . . It is morally impossible for two artists to work together at the same design unless one is the actual designer and the other quite subordinate to him. . . . The peculiar position which I hold in my profession and the strong opinions I have expressed as to the demand for reformation and ‘new blood’ in our vernacular architecture will compel me in any new design I may make to claim the right to considerable freedom and originality and prevent my making a design in the ordinary and, as I think, dull and worn-out style which has so long been considered in this country to be what is meant by ‘classic’ or ‘Italian’ architecture.
Scott, never the most balanced of men, now found himself ‘thoroughly out of health, through the badgering, anxiety, and bitter disappointment which I had gone through’.40 He took two months off, the first holiday this workaholic had had in years. He steeled himself to call Palmerston’s bluff, and to agree to design an Italianate building. He did it not just to spite Palmerston, but to spite fellow architects who had lobbied him (he suspected: and he may well have been right) because they were jealous of Scott’s pre-eminence and of his success. ‘To resign’, he wrote, ‘would be to give up a sort of property which Providence had placed in the hands of my family, and would be simply rewarding my professional opponents for their unprecedented attempt to wrest work from the hands of a brother architect.’ His design would be ‘Byzantine . . . toned into a more modern and usable form, by reference to those examples of the renaissance which had been influenced by the presence of Byzantine works.’41 For all his reluctance, he claimed to have found it ‘both original and pleasing in effect.’
Scott then discovered why Palmerston had suggested he might design the building jointly with another architect. Palmerston had in secret asked Charles Barry Junior to make a design for the Foreign Office. Scott heard this through a friend. ‘Lord Palmerston had hoped at first to be able to thrust this gentleman upon me as a colleague; but, failing that, had secretly encouraged him to make a design, that he might have “two strings to his bow”.’42 Palmerston still held out hope of having Barry’s design. He asked Scott to ‘modernise’ his Byzantine plan: he strove to be so unreasonable that eventually Scott would give up. The Office of Works sought to force further changes to Scott’s conception of the Italianate. Scott was unhappy, but did it.
The debate leaked into the press. One of Scott’s supporters wrote to The Times saying that the Gothic was as convenient as the classical, but cheaper. This prompted Matthew Arnold to write that ‘the one famous experiment we have before our eyes seems to contradict this assumption: The Houses of Parliament are eminently inconvenient and eminently dear.’43 After a swipe at Barry – ‘not a good Gothic architect’ – Arnold also ridiculed the notion that Gothic was ‘the national architecture of England. It might be so if there had been no Revival of Letters, no Reformation, no Elizabethan Age, no Revolution of 1688, no French Revolution. As it is, it is not so.’ Arnold, a sometime evangelical, could hardly be expected to endorse the feudal-Catholic fantasies of Pugin and Ruskin.
As soon as Parliament went into recess in 1860 Palmerston sent for Scott and told him he could forget any idea of his original Gothic design being used, and that his Italianate one was ‘a regular mongrel affair’: he would have nothing to do with that either.44 Palmerston delivered the ultimatum he had been building up to for months: ‘He must insist on my making a design in the ordinary Italian, and that, though he had no wish to displace me, he nevertheless, if I refused, must cancel my appointment,’ Scott recalled. For good measure he said that the whole configuration of offices would have to be changed, as the India Office, he had decided, would share the St James’s Park front of the building with the Foreign Office.
Scott ‘came away thunderstruck and in sore perplexity, thinking whether I must resign or swallow the bitter pill.’45 His friends told him to think of his family, and his reputation, and that it was no bad thing for an architect to be receptive to the views of his clients. Wresting himself out of a ‘terrible state of mental perturbation’, Scott bought a pile of books on Italianate architecture, bit his lip, and ‘set vigorously to work’.46 His ego drove him: ‘I was so determined to show myself not behindhand with the classicists, that I seemed to have more power than usual.’ Palmerston approved the design; the Gothic party in the Commons attacked it, egged on, privately, by Scott.
Scott admitted afterwards that he would never have embarked on the process had he known what it would have entailed. He built, as it turned out, one of the most stately of Victorian buildings, but one entirely out of kilter with the spirit of the age, and outside the normal run of his work. ‘I was step by step driven into the most annoying position of carrying out my largest work in a style contrary to the direction of my life’s labours. My shame and sorrow were for a time extreme, but, to my surprise, the public seemed to understand my position and to feel for it, and I never received any annoying and painful rebuke, and even Mr Ruskin told me I had done quite right.’ That he should resort to invoking Ruskin in his support shows exactly how wounded Scott was, and how deeply he felt his reputation and his integrity had been affected.
There is no question that a Gothic palace where Scott’s Italianate pile now stands would, as Simon Bradley has put it, ‘throw Whitehall out of balance visually’.47 Bradley also observes how Scott managed to suppress ‘his usual leaning towards picturesque variety’, though he and other critics have found the grand building pic
turesque nonetheless, especially the end near St James’s Park that once housed the India Office. The asymmetrical tower Scott sneaks into the building here is a hint of the architect’s Gothic leanings. Otherwise it is a symmetrical building, and Scott had intended domed towers on each of its four corners, until the expense proved too much. The building exhibits the Renaissance styles of Genoa and Venice, but there are some foliage pier capitals further showing Scott’s true colours.
Scott remained a constant irritant to politicians, usually through subtle and not-so-subtle acts of touting for business. He wrote to Gladstone, for example, on 2 January 1872 to say that the restoration of the Chapter House at Westminster – which Scott flatteringly called ‘emphatically your own work’ – was complete.48 ‘You have seen it when approaching completion, and therefore know the beauty of the building thus recovered by your timely intervention from depredation and ruin.’ There was a purpose behind Scott’s ingratiation. ‘You must, however, have observed one glaring and painful defect; and, had you been there during a sunny day, you would have been the more strongly impressed by it. I allude to the absence of stained glass, which renders the building, with all its dignity and beauty, a mere Greenhouse.’ He continued: ‘The internal space is surrounded by probably more glass than wall – so that to speak of the building as “restored” while this remains untempered and unadorned, is a misnomer.’ He said that stained glass would cost £6,000: ‘My object in writing is to entreat you to complete the good work you have begun and carried on so far towards a successful completion, by allowing the funds necessary to this very essential part of it.’
Money was rarely an object in Scott’s view. Writing to Gladstone from Rome on 8 December 1873 he said he had heard from Ayrton, the First Commissioner of Works ‘informing me that Her Majesty’s Government had not entertained favourably my appeal in favour of flanking towers which formed part of my design for the front of new Home and Colonial Offices. May I be excused in saying that the intelligence is a source of bitter disappointment to me, and in entreating you to give the question a more favourable consideration?’49 He said the towers were an ‘inherent part’ of the design, which would be ‘reduced to an idealess mass by their omission.’ He continued:
As an artist, I beg to enter my firm, though respectful protest against the omission which I view as in every sense as a great and serious mistake. As the author of the design I feel myself bound to use every effort to induce you to allow me to carry it out in its integrity; as well as, failing that (which I earnestly trust will not be the case) to protect my future fame against the [illegible] arising from the abortive character of the design if thus shorn of its leading characteristics. But what is my future reputation compared with the spoiling of a great public building? Were I to lodge in every Academy in Europe drawings of what I intended and protests against its mutilation, it would avail nothing when compared with the fact that a building erected . . . in one of the greatest thoroughfares of the Chief City in the world had been deprived of its most pronounced features!
In ‘entreating’ Gladstone again to act, Scott urged him to ‘avert this severe blow upon the architectural fame of our Country!’ Gladstone’s private secretary has written ‘he must be mad?’ on the back of the letter: Gladstone asked ‘when and by whom were the cupolas first struck out?’ It turned out that in 1870 Lowe, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had set out to reduce Scott’s estimate by a third ‘by various alterations’, including the cupolas: which Ayrton had disliked from the start. State patronage at a time of British pride was a magnificent boon to the lucky architects: but, in utilitarian times, every penny was counted, and art – Gothic or classical – came second.
It is, as Bradley has put it, a ‘persistent legend’ that Scott recycled his plans for the Gothic Foreign Office into the building many regard as his masterpiece, the overwhelming and now magnificently restored Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station in London.50 The building exhibits much of the detail, and evidence of the research and study, that Scott put in to his designs for the government offices. They are what a near-contemporary critic described as reminiscent of ‘the Lombardic and Venetian brick Gothic’ with ‘touches of Milan and other terracotta buildings, interlaced with good reproductions of details from Winchester and Salisbury cathedrals, Westminster Abbey’ and even ‘the ornaments of Amiens, Caen and other French edifices.’51 The building is of brick from Nottingham – a station on the railway’s route north – dressed with stone from elsewhere in the Midlands. Had Scott had a free hand it would have been a storey higher, with a taller clock tower. So representative did this building become of the high Victorian style that it attracted many twentieth-century critics who wished to demolish it, including its owners, British Railways. What is certainly true is that the experience of designing a great Gothic building was one of the influences brought to bear on the Midland Hotel, which stands today as one of the greatest and most powerful representations of an age when buildings were made not simply to last, but to represent to the future a whole idea of culture.
IV
The battle between the Gothic and the classical was not, however, over. The next great government commission would give the Gothicists the chance to reassert themselves and, albeit with great pain and difficulty, they seized it. In the mid-1860s the government decided there should be new law courts on a site near the Inns of Courts, where the Strand meets Fleet Street in London. In 1861 the government began to issue compulsory purchase orders for properties on the site, most of which were among the most revolting slums in the metropolis. Henry Abraham, a surveyor who worked for the government and had hopes of being asked to design the courts, gave a vivid description of how dreadful life was on the site: ‘It is almost impossible to remain for any length of time on some parts, the stench is so dreadful. The condition of the people is, I can use no other word than, terrible; the vice and wretchedness in the young, the decrepitude in those of middle age, and the dreadful condition of those in premature old age is appalling.’52 During his survey he was attacked by some locals and nearly robbed. Much of the area appeared to be a gigantic brothel, and there was no drainage of any description.
As satirised by Dickens, the law had enormous backlogs, and justice was denied to many litigants who ran out of money. Eventually this was recognised, and in the mid-nineteenth century reforms of legal procedure took place, creating courts of appeal and higher courts in civil cases. Sir John Soane had built some higher courts around Westminster Hall, but these were now inadequate. In keeping with the physical modernisation of Parliament and Whitehall, it was felt a new palace of justice would symbolise this new era for law in England. The expense, however, would be vast, and Gladstone was horrified by projections made during 1861 and 1862 for likely cost. The conflict between his ambition for the enterprise – he was its most high-profile supporter – and his personal and professional belief in economy was stark, and apparently irreconcilable. In February 1865 he reported the cost would be £892,895.53 His ideas, shared with those who later submitted designs, were based upon a great hall, off which the courts, offices, retiring rooms and other facilities would be sited, on four floors.
When Gladstone presented a plan in the summer of 1865 it provoked demands to consider a site on the Embankment, then being developed, east of Somerset House but adjacent to the underground railway and road being built along the river. Pennethorne surveyed the site and his estimate of £1 million for the land alone put paid to that discussion – for the moment. The question also arose of what would be done with the 4,175 people it was computed would be evicted from the Carey Street site when their 343 dwellings were compulsorily purchased. It is a measure of what a slum this was that the working-class element was set at 3,082, living in 1,163 rooms in 172 of the houses. In Robin Hood’s Court fifty-two people lived in two houses.54 The numbers in the slum were even greater than these figures, because many buildings were lodging-houses that accommodated even more by night. Despite some Liberal MPs demanding new lodging-hou
ses be built, the government held to the view that the denizens would inevitably find somewhere better than their existing accommodations, and proposed nothing to help them. As with the provision of education, a roof over the head of the poor was not, at the time, considered a matter for the State, but for private charity, if necessary.
A new Royal Commission assembled in the summer of 1865 to decide how to proceed. It decided that even more functions would need to be housed in the new buildings, including those of the Masters in Lunacy and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This required a bigger building, and more land, with an extra cost estimated at £488,620, which shocked Gladstone. There was a strong feeling at Westminster that the design should reflect the great standing of the nation; and that the selection panel – which as well as Gladstone included the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Works – all had too much else on their plates to make a sensible decision, arrived at after lengthy consideration.
On the original list of six architects invited to compete for the commission was George Edmund Street. Street, born in 1824, had been a pupil of Scott and has been judged by history to be almost equal to him. After an unsuccessful start as a solicitor – his father’s profession – Street had been articled to Owen Carter, a provincial architect in Winchester whose masterpiece was the Winchester Corn Exchange. Carter also had a profound interest in the Gothic and built several straightforward Hampshire churches in the style. Street pursued his own studies in Gothic architecture and was well versed by the time he joined Scott’s practice in 1844. He had obtained an introduction to Scott through a connection, and was taken on as temporary help. Scott soon realised his qualities and gave him a permanent job. He admired his pupil greatly, both because of his thoughtfulness about architecture but also because of his skill as a draughtsman. His contemporaries in Scott’s practice were G. F. Bodley and William White, and together they began to revise the idea of the Gothic away from the purist strain championed by Pugin. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s their view would prevail: this was the school that came to be called high Victorian.
