First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  It has been hard trying to survey the juxtaposition of personalities and styles of Victorian architecture in one article. The subject is so much a matter of individuals. Trends and tastes are but surface ripples and end in journalistic generalisations, of which there is already far too much in what I have written. I would advise anyone who is interested in architecture, be it Victorian or Georgian, to look at some of the works of the great men I have mentioned here. There are bound to be examples within twenty or thirty miles of every reader, in England at any rate, and very often the work of these men extended abroad.

  Look at the buildings first; remembering if you are struck with horror and amazement that the Victorians had all the courage of their convictions and, more often than not, a disregard for texture and dislike of what they thought “late” or “debased,” that is to say the perpendicular Gothic and, later in the century, the Greek Revival classic style. Having looked, tried to sympathise, sifted good from pretentious, then is the time to read the stimulating works of those pioneers in the appreciation of Victorian building, Mr. Goodhart-Rendel, Sir Kenneth Clark and Mr. John Summerson.

  ILLUSTRATED NOTES TO VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE

  1 South London, 1872

  BUILDING NOT ARCHITECTURE. This view of crowded houses [1] between viaducts of South London is by Gustave Doré from his London (1872). It is no more Victorian architecture than Metroland is modern architecture. It is merely building, and it gives the Victorians a bad name. It is hurried development of houses for artisans built as near their work as possible. Today prefabs are built further from work, because today the motor car, not the railway, determines the siting of buildings. But are prefabs better? Victorians were a class-conscious people and artisans’ dwellings, middle-class dwellings and gentlemen’s residences were accepted standards of housing. One climbed or sank according to capabilities from one class to another.

  2 King’s Cross Station, 1851, by Lewis Cubitt

  3 York Central Station, c. 1890

  ENGINEERING. Victorian railway engineers with their viaducts, tunnel entrances and stations produced many fine additions to the landscape. Steam added dignity where the internal combustion engine has only brought squalor. King’s Cross Station [2], built in 1851 from designs of a civil engineer, Lewis Cubitt, is a simple building in London brick scarcely visible today because of a conglomeration of trivial building in front of it. It expresses its purpose clearly enough: one arch is the departure side and the other is the arrival side. A colonnade serves to protect people alighting from or entering carriages.

  This view of York Central Station [3] is a late Victorian photograph. The ironwork is by Butler & Sons of Leeds. It is of four spans of 55 feet and is 795 feet long. The cathedral-like beauty is fortuitous, except that Gothic is often engineering in stone and this is engineering in iron. It is, however, a mistake to confuse æsthetics with morality, to say that because a thing expresses its purpose it is ipso facto beautiful. Much depends on the purpose. Cathedrals were built to the glory of God when men believed in Him. Stations like York were built for railways when railways were admired and Britain was still proud of her craftsmanship and confident in material progress. Much modern public building is the product of unconfident committees of taste, such as the Royal Fine Arts Commission.

  4 St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, 1841, by H. L. Elmes

  THE CLASSIC SURVIVAL went on right through the Victorian age. It is a scholarly elaboration of the Greek Revival into Græco-Roman and Roman and even Baroque. For the most part it is the Conservative style and goes with big clubs, velvet curtains, municipal dinners, vintage port and good manners. One of its finest expositions is St. George’s Hall, Liverpool [4], designed by H. L. Elmes in 1841, who died before it was finished.

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  THE CLASSIC SURVIVAL was maintained by many architects, such as C. R. Cockerell, Tite, Brodrick of Leeds, Pennethorne and “Greek” Thomson. John Gibson, Sir Charles Barry’s pupil, built most of the National Provincial Banks in Great Britain and this example at Sunderland [5], 1878 is one of his last. It is full-blown Italianate adapted to commercial purposes.

  5 National Provincial Bank, Sunderland, 1878 by John Gibson

  THE GOTHIC REVIVAL. Victorian architects did not consider themselves as either gentlemen amateurs like Wren or as builders, as they did a century or more earlier. They had become “professional” and not trades-people, just as doctors had ceased to be “apothecaries” and lawyers mere “attorneys.” The Royal Institute of British Architects was founded in 1837. Henceforth the interest in architecture shifts from regional styles and builders to individuals. Who was in who’s office mattered and whether he was a Classic or a Gothic man. London men received many provincial jobs. Local styles disappeared in favour of individual styles by the big men. Without a doubt the more vigorous men were in favour of Gothic. There were the pure medievalists who believed Pugin’s false and then attractive dictum that the only Christian styles were the ones with a pointed arch. The Gothicists sunk themselves into the medieval dream of that eccentric and persuasive genius, whose accomplishment is usually less impressive than that of his followers. Raphael Brandon, who designed the superb Catholic Apostolic Church [6], Gordon Square, London, in 1855, was a medievalist. He and his brother produced standard works on roofs and Gothic ornament drawn and measured from English examples. They piled the fruit of their learning one on top of another so that Salisbury, Lichfield, Lincoln and Carlisle Cathedrals contribute details which support a hammerbeam roof of East Anglian type. The whole is welded together by an exquisite sense of proportion not so apparent in their other works. But this noble Gordon Square church for a beautiful liturgy is copying Gothic rather than thinking in it.

  6 Catholic Apostolic Church, Gordon Square, London, 1855, by Raphael Brandon

  7 Lancing Chapel, Sussex, 1854–1870, by R. C. and R. H. Carpenter and W. Slater

  THE MEDIEVALISTS, looking back to Pugin’s dream of the past, usually met with the approval of the Camden Society in the Church. They favoured Middle Pointed or Decorated, considered the most “perfect,” as opposed to Early Pointed or Early English, considered the most “pure.” Perpendicular or late pointed was called “debased.” Generally Camdenians copied, but they sometimes produced buildings as fine as any medieval one and except for texture hardly distinguishable from the medieval. R. C. Carpenter, his son R. H. Carpenter and their partner W. Slater built Lancing Chapel [7], Sussex, 1854–70, which is one of the best medievalist buildings.

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  THE SUCCESSFUL COPYIST was Sir Gilbert Scott, who had the biggest practice any one architect has ever enjoyed in Britain. He had a large office and talented staff and could himself design some severely handsome buildings, as in his additions to Bradfield Church, Berks, and his new church of St. Anne, Alderney, and he could be bold, as in the Albert Memorial, and use picturesque outline, as in his St. Pancras Hotel, London. But he thought of Gothic as a “style” and his staff turned out impressive designs to please committees. At the end of his life he designed the Rathaus at Hamburg [8], in the once popular Middle-Pointed style. But lest he should not win the competition for which his drawing was entered, he produced another elevation in Flemish Renaissance [9]. A true Gothic building could not so easily change its face. Scott often stands for “façadism.”

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  J. L. Pearson was a medievalist, who in the middle of his long life (1817–97) turned to French Gothic and produced an Early English of his own with brick-vaulting and stone ribs, which is ingenious and learned, producing many vistas of aisles tunnelled through external buttresses. The best example, St. John’s, Red Lion Square, London [10], was destroyed by the Nazis. But St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, the Catholic Apostolic Church, Maida Vale, London, and the stone built Truro Cathedral and St. Stephen’s, Bournemouth, survive. So does his beautiful early church of St. Peter’s, Vauxhall, London. He was primarily a church architect and a devout Tractarian, as were the majority of the best Gothic men—Street, Butterfield, Bodle
y, Brooks and Micklethwaite.

  8 The Rathaus, Hamburg, 1878, by Sir Gilbert Scott

  9 Alternative design for the Rathaus, Hamburg, by Sir Gilbert Scott

  10 St. John the Evangelist, Red Lion Square, London, 1874–1878, by J. L. Pearson

  RUSKINIAN GOTHIC was a way of “thinking in Gothic.” Ruskin, though not interested for long in the English Gothic Revival and then chiefly in Street, was instrumental in securing Benjamin Woodward to design the University Museum, Oxford [11] in 1852–55. It is the Oxford plan of a quadrangle with a deep plinth and a fine gate tower. The Glastonbury-kitchen style appendage was for lecture halls and laboratories. The workmen themselves decorated the buildings with carving. By comparison Meadow Buildings, Christ Church, by Woodward’s partner, Deane, is a wretched affair with its showy jumble of picturesque and unrelated features.

  11 University Museum, Oxford, 1852–1855, by Benjamin Woodward

  “THE HARDS.” Of Mid-Victorian architects W. R. Lethaby writes, “One group turns to imitation, style ‘effects,’ paper designs and exhibition; the other founds on building, on materials and ways of workmanship and proceeds by experiment. One group I would call the Softs, the other the Hards; the former were primarily sketchers and exhibitors of ‘designs,’ the others thinkers and constructors.” William Burges was an early and eccentric “Hard” who built a medieval world round him of jokes and pet animals and gorgeous colours. But he was also a sound constructor. He drew in bistre on vellum, as in these drawings for Cardiff Castle [12]. The house he built for himself in Melbury Road, Kensington (1870–81), survives with much of its original decoration [13]. It is a vision of reds and golds and coloured marbles, a Soane Museum interpreted in terms of Burges’s own square Gothic. He also designed Harrow School Speech Room, St. Finbar’s Cathedral, Cork, Brisbane Cathedral and the east end of Waltham Abbey.

  12 Drawings for Cardiff Castle, 1865, by William Burges

  13 William Burges’s house, Melbury Road, Kensington, 1870–1881

  14 All Saints’, Margaret Street, London, 1849–1850, by William Butterfield

  WILLIAM BUTTERFIELD (1814–1900) was an austere Tractarian and the most original architect of his time. He looked like Gladstone. He built All Saints’, Margaret Street, London, 1849–50 [14], in brick. That was because he believed that in a brick age you should use the material the workmen were then wont to use. He had his own brick Gothic style, not a copy of medieval but a development from it. His chief surviving buildings, besides this one, are St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, Perth Cathedral and Rugby Chapel. A severe small country church of his which is the essence of Butterfield is that at Milton, near Banbury. He was, unlike most Victorian architects, a sensitive restorer of old churches, cf. Ottery St. Mary, Shottesbrooke, and Tottenham. Butterfield never produced drawings to attract clients. They took him or left him. His “clerks,” as he called his pupils, drew for him in pencil. He corrected the drawings in ink and they had to start afresh. Scaffolding was dusted before he arrived on the site. These drawings sent to his builders, Purnells of Rugby, for Keble College Chapel, 1876, are for brick, since Keble is in the brick suburb of North Oxford with which it harmonises. The drawing [15] shows the principles of his use of coloured brick. A general Victorian principle was that Gothic is more elaborate the nearer it reaches Heaven. This Butterfield followed. But he also emphasised construction. Where there is a heavy downward pressure at the base the lines are few and horizontal and strongly marked. When the wall is a screen wall only, as above the East window, he uses chequer pattern. Roof thrusts are indicated by criss-cross pattern.

  15 Drawing for Keble College Chapel, Oxford, 1876, by William Butterfield

  16 St. Columba’s, Haggerston, London, 1867–1869, by James Brooks

  A follower of Butterfield was James Brooks, who built what Lethaby called “big-boned churches” for London in stock bricks. St. Columba’s, Haggerston, London, 1867–69, is a good example [16]. A rich chancel, whose height is emphasised by low nave arcades and whose beauty is enhanced by brick vaulting, leads the eye to the centre of Tractarian worship, the altar. Tractarians did not hold with more than one altar in a church and that visible from all parts of it. Light was to come from a large west window to fall on books, since this was a literate generation which used books and needed to see them.

  The most genial and active and influential of the “hard” architects was George Edmund Street (1824–81), who was in Scott’s office and then set up as a church architect first in Cornwall and next in the Diocese of Oxford at Wantage. He was a great craftsman and loved ironwork, masonry, needle-work and joinery. All his churches are carefully detailed and he saw to all this himself. William Morris, Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and J. D. Sedding were all in his office and caught his enthusiasm. He was an uncompromising Gothicist and his domestic work was always in local material and handled with great sense of massing, as at Cuddesdon Theological College, Oxford [17]. Street believed in sketching all the time and was a rapid draughtsman himself, as in this sketch of his of the ambulatory at St. Julien at Brioude, France [18]. His books on Spanish and North Italian Gothic are still standard works. Street died comparatively young while still at work on the Law Courts, London. His small simple buildings such as his village schools in Berkshire and his chapels of ease as that at Westcott, Bucks, had a perfection of proportion and good use of local stone which was never so well caught by any other architect then or since. His restorations were heavy-handed, but a fine large work of his was the Nave at Bristol Cathedral [19], where he continued the ingenious medieval scheme of the choir, putting tall windows in the aisle and lighting the nave from them.

  17 Cuddesdon Theological College, Oxford, 1853–1854, by G. E. Street

  18 Sketch by G. E. Street of St. Julien, Brioude, France

  Another “hard,” almost too hard to be enjoyable, was Alfred Waterhouse, whose best works are undoubtedly Manchester Town Hall, 1877 [20] and Assize Courts, 1859. He was a clever planner and had little respect for local material or styles or textures. The ugly part of Caius College, Cambridge, on Kings Parade, is his and so are Balliol College, Oxford, and the Prudential Insurance Building, Holborn, and the Gower Street Hospital, London. But like the other “hards,” he thought in Gothic and did not copy.

  19 Bristol Cathedral, restoration by G. E. Street 1868–1888

  20 Manchester Town Hall, 1877, by Alfred Waterhouse

  THE YOUNG MEN FROM MR. STREET’S OFFICE founded good modern housing. The greatest of them was Norman Shaw (1831–1912), who is described by Sir Edwin Lutyens as the greatest architect since Wren. “I’m a house man,” he used to say, “not a church man, and soil pipes are my speciality.” The comfortable modern house of the day is largely due to Norman Shaw, so are many modern methods of construction with reinforced concrete, which he used before anyone else. Shaw electrified the metropolis by building an office block, New Zealand Chambers [21], in 1872 in the City of London. He hit on a method of admitting as much daylight as possible into an office in a narrow street. This building was destroyed by the Nazis. The style was called “Queen Anne,” and Shaw built houses in the style in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead, and for merchant princes all over England. He varied it with Tudor. His “Queen Anne” style was usually a neighbourly decoration for well-lit and practical commercial or domestic buildings. New Zealand Chambers reduced to its bare essentials, as in the design of 1877 by West Neve in Devonshire Street, E.C.2 [22], is a foretaste of the modern simpler style of today.

  21 New Zealand Chambers, London, 1872, by Norman Shaw

  22 Design for Devonshire Street, E.C.2, 1877, by W. West Neve

  It is as well to see how domestic architecture seems of a different world compared with that of less than a century before. Here is a late eighteenth-century residence in Dublin, Charlemont House [23], designed by Lord Charlemont and Sir William Chambers. It exemplifies all the eighteenth-century characteristics: the rusticated ground floor, the large rooms on the first floor, a decent spac
e before the smaller windows of the bedroom storey, the glazing bars of the windows related to the proportions of the windows, the windows related to the wall, a parapet concealing the attics. All is symmetrical even to the chimneys, which stand rather awkwardly at the sides like a pair of ears. Such a design, simpler or more elaborate, and varying a little according to local materials and methods of masonry and glazing, would look elegant anywhere and Georgian always. Now compare Norman Shaw’s “Wispers,” Midhurst, Sussex [24], 1875. This is no Gothic façade to a classic building nor stucco-Tudor of the late Georgian or early Victorian St. John’s Wood or Leamington variety. It is not even a classic structure with superb late Gothic adornment, like the Houses of Parliament. It is related to its uneven site, it is conceived in masses, the chimneys are made into features instead of appendages, it is built in a traditional domestic style, both modern and Tudor. It may be the great-aunt of much fake olde-worlde, but it is not built as a fake. The arrangement of chimneys and roofs Shaw learned from Street.