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 followers 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.
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.
