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),
