*
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, Bodley, 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.
15Drawing 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),
