First and Last Loves

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 space 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.

23 Charlemont House, Dublin, c. 1773, by Lord Charlemont and Sir William Chambers

24 “Wispers”, Midhurst, Sussex, 1875, by Norman Shaw

25 House in North Oxford, 1870, by Clapton C. Rolfe

Even greater was Shaw’s influence on the small house. Here is a pleasant enough artisan dwelling [25] by Clapton C. Rolfe in North Oxford, 1870. It is in the polychrome style of Butterfield. Compare it with Norman Shaw’s Hostelry [26] for that first garden suburb he laid out at Bedford Park, London (1878), and we are out of the Victorian era into a manner