But the Gothic Revival architects of the ’fifties and ’sixties who should be taken most seriously are those whom Professor Lethaby used 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
