First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  But Victorian can never be smart. It will even defy the analysis of the “doctors” busy classifying everything around us. You have to use your eyes when looking at it.

  Much Victorian architecture is really bad and shoddy. That famous drawing of Doré’s is a true condemnation of much Victorian industrial building. A modern Doré, I should add, could equally condemn our own jerry-building in the period between the wars and in the present glorious age of prefabs.

  I think the chief objections to Victorian architecture are being overcome by time. No one likes the architecture of his immediate predecessors, and most of the writers of architectural books are the children of Victorian parents. Indeed, most widely-read writers from H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy to Berta Ruck and Denise Robins, are writers of the age of reaction from Victorianism. They like few ornaments, plain walls, pastel shades, open windows and as little decoration as possible, or, if there is any, a sort of diluted Swedish such as may be bought at Heal’s. Again, twenty years ago, young men prided themselves on having social consciences rather than æsthetic perception. Victorian building was utterly condemned and stood in their minds for back-to-back houses in Leeds and those soulless stacks of Dwellings for Artisans which were built with the idea of class distinction. And oh! how horrible class distinction seemed to be in those class-conscious days twenty years ago.

  The Victorians very much enjoyed decoration, and decoration in the ’thirties was considered immoral. The Tower Bridge was the symbol of all that was sentimental and therefore wicked.

  Finally, Victorians were condemned for not planning. But this last condemnation is based on ignorance. There are throughout England industrial estates very carefully planned, as well as middle-class and upper-class neighbourhoods which now may well have become slums owing to the poverty of our people, but which in those days were not so drab as modern town planners’ brochures like to make them appear.

  On the credit side, the Victorians were allowed to have produced some good buildings provided no architect had been near them. Civil engineers were, we were told, the great Victorian architects. The Crystal Palace was the first prefab, and this is quite true. Engineering triumphs by Brunel, Stevenson and Barlow were photographed and admired. Cubitt’s King’s Cross Station, London (1851), was preferred in all its stark simplicity to the romantic outlines of Gilbert Scott’s St. Pancras Hotel. And here we may say that the functionalists were echoing opinions expressed seventy years before by Ruskin.

  But can it really be that the Victorian age in England which produced such great poets and artists produced no architects? Of course it is not true. And the way to look at Victorian architecture is to look at it in terms of architects. In former days, even in Georgian times, there were regional styles, and the style predominated over the man who wielded it. The builder was capable of being an architect and had more say in building and finishing an architect’s design than he had in the nineteenth century, when architecture became a conscious profession. Builders thereafter did their best to imitate architects, but they rarely produced anything remarkable as a work of art except here and there in the building of mills and factories.

  So in this most exciting of all architectural adventures—the hunt for what is good in Victorian brick and stone and iron—we move from the world of the dilettante and his craftsmen to the drawing rooms, clubs and studios of professional gentlemen. Talk is of the Battle of the Styles and of this man’s new church and that man’s town hall. So-and-So’s son and So-and-So’s pupil are watched with interest. The centre of architectural activity is now London, and London men go by train all over England at the behest of rich Liberal merchants and Tractarian landowners. Sir Gilbert Scott finds himself away in the Midlands and telegraphs to his office “Why am I here?” It was no unusual thing in those days for one London architect to be doing thirty large buildings at once. They had their equivalents, these great London men, in certain of the bigger provincial cities: the Worthingtons in Manchester, Pilkington, a Gothic Revival architect of real merit, in Edinburgh, Fulford in Exeter, Ordish in Leicester, and so on. But primarily it is London that is the centre, and I will now flick over with you an album of some of the drawings of these great men and talk a little as we watch the Battle of the Styles.

  First there was the Classic Survival, a fine Graeco-Roman style suitable for London Clubs, Town Halls and the Head Offices of Banks. The noblest Classic Survival buildings are, I think, Goldsmith’s Hall, London (P. Hardwick, 1829–35); St. George’s Hall, Liverpool (H. L. Elmes, 1841); Euston Great Hall (P. Hardwick, 1840–7), and the work from the ’sixties until the ’eighties by J. Gibson for the National Provincial Bank. There are also the scholarly works of C. R. Cockerell for the Bank of England, and there is his Ashmolean and Taylorian building at Oxford. We might tack on to the Classic Survival the Byzantine Revival which may be seen in Christ Church, Streatham Hill, by Wild (1841), and that strange church by Sir William Tite at Gerrard’s Cross (1859), and Pollen’s University Church in Dublin (1858).

  The Classic Survival is like a grand after-dinner speech, full of wisdom and elegant oratory. It goes with the port and brandy and the leather arm-chairs and the great velvet curtains of the London and provincial clubs and the station hotel. But the young men are not listening. They have turned from Greece and Rome to their own island, to chancel, screen and organ loft, to reredos and stoup. Some are led by the romance of medievalism to the Church of Rome; some continue to follow Pusey. The Gothic Revival of Queen Victoria’s reign is all mixed up with social morality and religion which were deep concerns of educated people in those days.

  Perhaps the most disastrous influence on the Gothic Revival was that of Pugin, because he it was, and not Ruskin, who said that no building was Christian unless it had a pointed arch. He was a lonely genius, a craftsman interested in detail and with an eye for colour and material and decoration. One feels that he was more interested in detail than structure. The plan and the grouping of the towers of the Houses of Parliament are Sir Charles Barry’s, though the delicate decoration is Pugin’s. I do not think it fair that Pugin should be given all the credit, as he now is, for Barry’s building. Pugin could produce lovely buildings such as his Roman Catholic Cathedral at Birmingham, where he had not too much money. But his followers brought discredit on the Gothic Revival.

  Sir Gilbert Scott, for instance, is a Pugin architect, and he it was who carried out Pugin’s ideas to extreme lengths, insisting on Gothic for all occasions except on that great day when Palmerston finally thwarted his attempts to gothicise Whitehall. Pugin’s books of Gothic detail and the many books that followed, giving mouldings and bosses and ball flowers and sedilia and even windows and doors suitable for domestic Gothic—these were a gift to the industrious copyist. Why England is filled with dull churches imitating medieval churches in Northamptonshire, Rutland and Oxon, may be put down to Pugin and later to Parker’s Glossary of Gothic Architecture and those books of examples which I have mentioned. So long as a building was exactly like some medieval one in style, it was all right. And that chief Gothic stylist, Sir Gilbert Scott, was a man who, for all the 700 and more buildings that he designed, produced comparatively few which were original. Masonry and sound roofs and correct mouldings, he and his often more talented assistants employed. But Gothic to them was a style, not a way of building.

  There were, it is true, one or two medievalists who produced enormous imitations of old styles which had a dignity, spaciousness and grandeur equal to, even if slightly and unaccountably different from, their precedents. The Catholic Apostolic Church in Gordon Square, London, by the brothers Brandon (1855), and Lancing College chapel by Carpenter (1854), are the best examples of the pure medievalist architecture in the Pugin tradition that I know. The work of Pugin’s sons and successors has, I think, always been a little over-elaborate and lacking in proportion.

  But the Gothic Revival architects of the ’fifties and ’sixties who should be taken most seriously are those whom Professor Lethaby us
ed to describe as “hards,” saying that their work was founded on building, on materials and ways of workmanship and proceeded by experiment. “One group I would call the ‘softs,’ the other the ‘hards’; the former were primarily sketchers of ‘designs,’ the others thinkers and constructors.”

  The “hard” architects are few and great, and the three most remarkable pioneers who thought and constructed in Gothic rather than imitated, were William Butterfield (1814–1900), George Edmund Street (1824–81) and J. L. Pearson (1817–98). They were men of convinced Tractarian opinions. Their religion pervaded their work. They were more interested, certainly at the beginning of their careers, in constructing and “thinking in Gothic,” as George Truefitt described it, than in style.

  Butterfield in 1849 produced a church made out of bricks (All Saints, Margaret Street, London), and realising that bricks could not be carved like stone, he decorated his blank surfaces with coloured bricks, using little decoration at the base of his brick buildings and more towards the top. All his buildings are thoughtful, many of them inspired; none of them is like any medieval building anyone has ever seen. Butterfield worked on the principle that, since he was building in an age when workmen knew how to use brick and cast iron, he would build in brick and cast iron where those materials were most easily come by. In those parts of the West Country where stone was easily available, he used stone.

  George Edmund Street was primarily a country architect, and his simple village schools and chapels-of-ease and convents in the Oxford Diocese are examples of Gothic continuing rather than Gothic revived. He followed the principles of construction which he found in old barns and farm buildings and applied them to the simple new churches he built in local materials.

  Pearson was primarily interested in vaulting and thrust and counter thrust. He was almost entirely a church architect and his tall, narrow, stone and brick vaulted interiors are seen at their best at St. Augustine’s, Kilburn (1871), St. Stephen’s, Bournemouth, the Catholic Apostolic Church, Paddington, and Truro Cathedral. These architects built for the glory of God. Street alone of them seems, towards the end of his life, to have been slightly affected by the world and to have produced less interesting works, though his later work, the Law Courts, will impress everyone for its many-vista-ed thoughtfulness.

  Other “hards” whose work will be admired by anyone who bothers to look at them are James Brooks—St. Columba’s, Haggerston; St. Chad’s, Haggerston; St. John’s, Holland Road, Kensington: William Burges—St. Finbar’s Cathedral, Cork; a house in Melbury Road, Kensington; the Speech Hall, Harrow School: E. G. Paley, a North of England architect: J. P. Seddon—University of Wales, Aberystwyth: S.S. Teulon—St. Stephen’s, Haverstock Hill, London: William White—All Saints’, Notting Hill; St. Saviour’s, Highbury, London: Henry Woodyer—St. Michael’s, Tenbury; St. Paul’s, Wokingham; New Schools, Eton.

  Hard or soft, these Victorian architects were often an inspiration to their pupils. Mr. Street’s office seems to have been a very gay place. When William Morris, Edmund Sedding, who was known as “Jaggy Baggy,” Norman Shaw, known as Corporal Bullfoot, and J. D. Sedding were in the office in Oxford, there was one pupil there named Hayward who stuttered. He sang better than he spoke, so it became the custom to chant to him in Gregorian plainsong through rolled-up foolscap. On Ascension Day Mr. Street gave them the day off, provided they went to church, remarking, “Some of you, I know, have voices.” Life in Scott’s office was equally gay, for the Master was away getting jobs much of the time and he talked very good sense to his pupils. Butterfield’s office, however, cannot have been a very enjoyable place. He never entered his drawing office himself, the late Harry Redfern who was articled to him tells us, and referred to his draughtsmen as clerks. Butterfield himself, looking rather like Gladstone, sat silent in an adjoining room and his clerks would bring their drawings in to him, which he corrected in ink much to their annoyance. No holidays were allowed except church holidays, no smoking of course and only when he had left his Adelphi office for the Athenæum did his clerks dare to go out for lunch. The extreme churchiness of these great Tractarian architects produced reactions in their pupils and children. George Gilbert Scott junior, the eldest son of old Sir Gilbert and father of Sir Giles, became a Roman Catholic soon after his father’s death. Possibly, as a kind of revenge on the usual copying of his father, he became one of the most original of the later architects of the Victorian age. In 1877 he designed St. Agnes, Kennington (now bombed), in a brick perpendicular style unheard of at that time and imitated everywhere for the next sixty years. Unlike his father, George Gilbert Scott junior defended the Classic style and was instrumental in saving the decent brick classic parish church of Hampstead. He added an east end to Sir Christopher Wren’s chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which I think enhances the look of the chapel and is in exact keeping with Wren’s style.

  George Gilbert Scott’s friend G. F. Bodley, another pupil from Scott’s office, designed some churches in the manner of St. Agnes, Kennington, of which I particularly remember Hoar Cross, Staffordshire; Holy Trinity, Kensington Gore; the Cowley Fathers’ church, Oxford, and St. German’s, Roath, Cardiff. A pupil of young Scott’s was Temple Moore, who produced a beautiful, long, limpid perpendicular style partly his own and partly, it seems, Bodley’s and the younger Scott’s. The best examples of his work I know are St. Wilfrid’s, Harrogate; All Saints’, Basingstoke; All Saints’, Tooting, and Pusey House, Oxford.

  From Street’s office emerged the most influential and attractive of all Victorian architects—Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912). He was not a church architect. “I am a house man,” he used to say to Sedding, “and soil pipes are my speciality.” The church which he designed at Bedford Park (1876–7), that early attempt at a garden city which owes its inspiration to Shaw, lacks mystery, but his secular buildings are unexampled. He started as a designer of Tudor-style houses such as “Leys Wood,” Sussex (1868), and “Wispers,” Midhurst (1875), making full use of tall external chimneys, half-timber gables and irregular sites. And then in 1873 he electrified the Metropolis by building the New Zealand Chambers in Leadenhall Street, City, in what was for some weird reason called “the Queen Anne style” but was in reality a form of Dutch Renaissance. He invented a façade for narrow city streets, which let in plenty of light and yet was neighbourly as street architecture. Thereafter he built much in a style more nearly approaching Queen Anne, and a foretaste of Lutyens, both small houses and large. Perhaps the best is 170 Queen’s Gate, just near Colcutt’s beautiful Imperial Institute. Other good works of his are Swan House, Chelsea (1876); Greenham Lodge, Newbury (1879), and New Scotland Yard (1887). Shaw was primarily interested in the purpose of a building and in the materials and methods of construction. Style was almost an afterthought. It was through thinking like this that he designed New Zealand Chambers and the town houses and offices for which his name will always be remembered. Shaw, more than anyone, was the originator of the small, simple, suburban house which first flourished in garden cities and has now reached local councils and official architects. Men who admired Shaw were first J. J. Stevenson and E. R. Robson, who designed the London council schools, and later Voysey, Baillie Scott, Leonard Stokes, Ernest George, Edwin Lutyens, Edgar Wood and the Tugwells, who built modest villas harmonising with the countryside, and individual in style. Shaw, indeed, was the founder of modern English architecture as we know it at its domestic best. Towards the end of his life he said that, if he were still in practice as an architect, he would be using concrete. And, indeed, he did use concrete construction of a most daring kind never seen in England before, when he built the convent for our Church of England Sisters of Bethany at Bournemouth in 1874.

  One of Shaw’s closest friends was J. D. Sedding, a church architect whose work still seems modern whether it is Classic or Gothic. He designed Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell (1888), and Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London (1890). Shaw, Stevenson, Godwin, Sedding, George Gilbert Scott junior, Bodley and their fol
lowers represent the traditional English styles coming through Gothic Revival and out again into the open. They are the product of the arts and crafts movement and they are not escapists. They were interested in plan and material, both of the house itself and of every detail in the house, and from that some of them moved on into the planning of towns as a whole, but such men were rarely successful as domestic architects.

  There were one or two freaks at the end of the last century whose work is fascinating, but outside the main stream. W. H. Crossland, for instance, in 1887, having been sent round to the châteaux of France by Joseph Holloway (the maker of Holloway’s Female Pills), came back and designed that outsize château in red brick and Portland stone called Holloway College on the fir-clad heights above Egham. Beresford Pite, a sound architect and beautiful artist, won the Soane Medallion in 1880 for a design for a West-End club house in a Wagnerian Gothic style that exceeded the wildest fancies of the earlier Gothic Revivalists. Some architects, such as Henry T. Hare and T. G. Jackson (Anglo Jackson), went in for the early Renaissance manner, others went in for a sort of Beardsley-esque baronial. The chief protagonists of this style were two great architects, C. R. Mackintosh and George Walton. They are wrongly, I think, heralded as pioneers of modern architecture. They now seem to me to belong to the art nouveau of the 1890’s and I associate them with the early work of Charles Holden. Their ecclesiastical expression is to be found in Caröe’s strange art nouveau church of St. David at Exeter.