The words ‘Victorian architecture’ will for most of us conjure up an image of a Gothic Revival building. Street’s Gothic Law Courts is on the cover of Dixon and Muthesius’ 1978 Victorian Architecture.Footnote 1 James Stevens Curl’s compendious 2007 Victorian Architecture: diversity and invention has Scott’s Albert Memorial.Footnote 2 The bibliography on Victorian architecture tilts towards the pointed arch.
This is not to say that these surveys, or others, overlook the other approaches to building design in the period, most of which draw on the classical tradition (in all its forms). Take, for example, Henry Russell-Hitchcock’s pioneering Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, which covered the whole spectrum of architectural design.Footnote 3 Three of the seven architects in Seven Victorian Architects were classicists.Footnote 4 The great tradition of architectural engineering in this country also always features prominently in the story: Paxton’s glasshouse at Kew, his Crystal Palace, Barlow’s train shed stuck on the back of Scott’s St Pancras Station.
Still, though, it is hard to break the hold of the Gothic Revival has on the historiography of English (and Welsh) architecture in the nineteenth century, and perhaps rightly so. No other European country’s architectural history relies so heavily on the Gothic Revival. This is a striking fact and one that we here in this country take for granted perhaps because our literature is insular. Anyway, someone from another planet, 1,000 years hence and with only books on Victorian architecture to go on, would imagine the whole of nineteenth-century England was covered with Gothic buildings and train sheds, leading them to conclude we were then a nation of church goers and engineers.
Why this fixation on the Revival? I can think of a few reasons.
First, architectural history, as a subset of art history, looks to chart innovation. The Gothic Revival was a radical break with received practice. At the start of the 1830s, the designs of our most important buildings were, generally, classically inspired. Yes, there was experiment, the Greek Revival, for example, or the Soane school, but those developments do not have the shock value of Pugin’s St Giles Cheadle or his writings, Contrasts or True Principles.Footnote 5 It helps, too, that we can link this innovation up with the process of rapid urbanisation, population growth, economic development and the modernisation of our institutions. The two ruptures, modernity and the Revival, have some sort of connection if only because they come about at more or less the same time, or, better, because the Revival comes slightly after the shock of modernity and so, we fairly conclude, is a response to change, making it palatable. The Revival is a fine irony, a Gothic for the steam age, as Gavin Stamp put it.Footnote 6
Second, in its own time, the Gothic Revival stimulated some great critical writing, an output that itself was the product of great advances in historical understanding. Over the space of about a generation, scholars and critics had the evidence to describe their society as part of a living historical narrative. And we forget, because of the dominance of a few really outstanding critics (Ruskin, say), that they were in effect soloists leading a large chorus of writers. It is fair to record that at no time before and since has architectural writing been so widely diffused.
Furthermore, the Gothic tradition developed an afterlife, providing the preconditions for at least two generations of architectural practitioners and writers, first the Arts and Crafts and then, somewhat surprisingly, the structural-functionalist tradition. That last turn of the historical wheel is expressed well in Alf Boe’s now little-read book, From Gothic Revival to Functional Form: A study in Victorian theories of design.Footnote 7 There is, then, a line from True Principles to the German Werkbund and Bauhaus (and of course Pevsner described that decades ago). We must remember the Victorians were no less obsessed about finding a modern style than the radical architects of the early twentieth century.
And this takes me to my third reason for the allure of the Gothic Revival as an historical topic: aesthetics. It must be said that writing about architectural aesthetics can be difficult because it is an applied art and so heavily mediated by finance, function, society and politics.
The Gothic Revival has, by contrast, express subject matter. It is mimetic. It resembles something else, and we can write about that resemblance however remote it may be.
Fourth, and there is no getting away from this last one, Gothic Revival buildings are eye catching, even provocative. They create a state of arousal, a heightened sensation, erratic pulse, visual fixation, strong affective responses (sometimes positive, sometimes not). This style was and remains sensational and spectacular. For this reason, there has always been a strong connection between Gothic Revival studies and architectural conservation, which is motivated by desires and passions too.
What is the trajectory of scholarship on this endlessly fascinating moment in cultural history?
An important event, marking the start of modern scholarship, is Phoebe Stanton’s Reference Stanton1971 book on Pugin.Footnote 8 I have mentioned already Dixon and Muthesius’ survey in 1978. Joe Crook’s superb study of William Burges of 1981 remains a milestone.Footnote 9 The list of these pioneering works is a long one, providing good coverage, although some of the greats have only recently been the subject of monographs (Michael Hall’s magisterial George Frederick Bodley Footnote 10 ). Since the 1990s, however, the historiography of the subject has changed, and here I have to thank Alex Bremner of the University of Edinburgh for sharing his thoughtful and comprehensive (unpublished) essay on the state of scholarship.
Approaches to the subject matter have moved on, or rather beyond, the architect-monograph, mirroring developments in cultural and social history. Students of the movement are also now more diverse. There is more focus on the history of technology and engineering, on the interaction of architecture with urban history, an interaction promoted by the Survey of London. Scholars have unpicked the interaction of buildings with political and social institutions and ideas, and with the hard facts of roads, railways and drainage. Architectural production in the British tradition outside the British Isles is now a well-established field of inquiry.
Building monographs provide another layer of contextual analysis, shifting the narrative away from architects (traditionally the stars of the historiographic show) to clients (single individuals or institutions), contractors, craftspeople, patrons. The transfer of Orientalist studies across from literature to architectural history has come and gone.
In short, the literature on Victorian architecture is now huge and varied. Few relevant and worthwhile topics remain unstudied.
These developments in historical practice beg the question whether there is any room at all anymore for the architect-monograph. Is the form irrelevant? Should the great series of architect-monographs not be seen themselves as historic, as evidence of attitudes to individual achievement and identity that have no relevance to current ways of conceptualising the past and, therefore, the present? The late Andrew Saint brilliantly captured Richard Norman Shaw in his social context, but through the lens of a life.Footnote 11 What more can a life and work study tell us?
The three books under review answer that question. Each in a different way demonstrates there is some life yet in the form. Peter Lindfield’s volume,Footnote 12 reprinting the diaries and letters of a now little-known architect-antiquarian, George Shaw (1810–76), illuminates an important tradition that sat close beside the work of the heavy-weight Goths working in a national context, designing major buildings. As a teenager, Shaw travelled around the country, twice a year, from his family’s woollen mills in Uppermill (yes, unbelievably), a small settlement east of Oldham. The diaries comprise an important social-historical document, evidencing, for example, the practical difficulty of getting from one place to another on business in the days before the railways.
This study also, more importantly, demonstrates the porosity of the architectural profession at a time of rapid social change. As Shaw made his way north and south he stopped to study historic buildings and artefacts, not just churches but country houses. He did not limit himself to buildings but took in old furniture, stained glass, arms and armour and heraldry. This was exactly the subject matter that the young Pugin explored, supported by his father. Like them, Shaw’s passion was for the whole, moody mis-en-scène. Shaw belongs to the tradition that Clive Wainwright documented in his ground-breaking 1989 The Romantic Interior.Footnote 13
The drawings Shaw made on these tours provided, Peter Lindfield explains, the foundation for his later practice in architecture and interiors. Shaw also came to deal in ‘antique’ furniture, pastiches in some cases, forgeries in others.
Lindfield’s thoughtful introduction to this wonderful archival trove explores what seems to us today a contradiction. Here was Shaw, the son of a middle-class manufacturer, engrossed by the trappings of the aristocracy. His way into what might have been socially or politically difficult subject matter was the literature of Sir Walter Scott and the experience of Abbotsford. Shaw eventually tried to emulate his literary hero by giving the family’s relatively modest home, a farmhouse, expanded in the late eighteenth century, a ‘Gothic makeover’ (the phrase used in the official list description on the national register of buildings of special architectural or historic interest).
The family woollen business was probably good preparation for a business in architecture and at a time when there were no legal entry requirements to the profession. Through private study and contacts Shaw had built up representing his family’s business, he created a successful regional practice designing and restoring buildings and interiors whilst dealing in furniture and decorative art. Shaw’s life should be read together with Pugin’s, and, if it is, then we get a deeper understanding of the social and economic bases of the passion for Gothic Revival.
Edmund Harris’ short but authoritative study revisits the idea of Victorian ‘Rogue architects’.Footnote 14 H S Goodhart-Rendell coined the term in the title of a lecture he gave to RIBA in 1949.Footnote 15 He could simply have used the word ‘eccentric’. ‘Rogue’ suggests something more assertive. Exiled from its herd, a rogue elephant is violent, powerful, marauding, destructive, and all to no purpose because the rogue individual has no issue, provides no leadership or direction. It is a catchy phrase and it feels so right for designs that still today can or may seem odd and wilful, lacking in decorum, even sense, and which have that spectacular quality discussed earlier.
The three rogues Dr Harris explores are known really only in specialist circles. The eldest, R L Roumieu (1814–77), was not really a rogue since he was for a time in partnership with A D Gough (from 1836–48) and he had a son who became an architect. Not a loner, then.
The partnership worked on the last phases of the Milner–Gibson estate development in Islington and was responsible for the design of Milner Square, one of the striking squares feeding the speculative housing market in late Georgian and early Victorian London and which survive in some number west of Upper Street. The classical detailing is strikingly inventive: an apparently giant pilaster is formed of two slender verticals. This and other works reflect the creative classicism that emerged from Soane’s office. There is also from this rogue a spindly Gothic church in Islington from this same period before the triumph of archaeologically correct Gothic (which we associate with Pugin or Scott). There are other commissions, veering towards the Italianate, and, whilst the detailing is sometimes peculiar, the overall output reflects the eclectic character of the times, as Harris explains in the introduction.
Roumieu’s rogue credentials rely heavily on a single building, 33–5 Eastcheap in the City of London, a spiky, nervously articulated Gothic invention in a prominent location. But here we have to look behind the façade to understand form and expression. This was not a speculative office building, as Harris explains. It was the London HQ of a vinegar maker based in Worcester. The style was an advertisement in a competitive and crowded market, maybe even seeking to represent the sourness of the product.
Was Roumieu really a rogue, then? His stylistic variety only seems wayward if one defines Victorian architectural practice with reference to the leading Gothic lights, who pursued stylistic purity. In fact, he appears to have been a competent and accomplished professional, and the variety of his output was not exceptional among regional practitioners who had to meet the diverse tastes of their smaller markets.
What about J J Peacock (1821–91), who had a strong line in church building and whose career therefore stands comparison with the archaeologically pure strain of the Revival? Harris has a good eye for architectural design, explaining that the peculiar characteristics of Peacock’s output were in fact the result of careful consideration, a feeling for scale and particularly for proportions, which the architect skilfully manipulated for expressive effects. The roguery here is in fact artistry, and the feeling for materials and colour that the interior of St Stephen’s Gloucester Road demonstrates is really a reflection of the move towards stylistic invention that characterises the 1860s and beyond. That invention directed the Gothic movement towards the Queen Anne Revival, and this is just where Peacock wound up in his St George’s National School, Bloomsbury of 1879–80.
E B Keeling (1837–86) was the youngest and, it must be said, the most consistently original of the three. His distinctive design approach is demonstrated by a small group of Anglican church designs; like Peacock, Keeling had establishment clients. Peacock also, however, worked for non-Conformists (unusual for architects, who tended a solid practice for the Church of England).
Harris’ study is important not so much because it redefines what it meant to be a rogue. His book demonstrates that normal Victorian practice was stylistically heterogeneous. This readable, well-illustrated and well-researched study provides us with a composite cross-section of Victorian practice. Lots of Gothic, yes, but not exclusively, and a lot of variety within each type: speculative and private housing, entertainment venues, churches, schools, commercial buildings.
The architects then, like architects today, are there to meet the needs, budgets and tastes of their clients. They were professionals competing in an open market for services. In that environment, stylistic purity was potentially commercial suicide except for a lucky, well connected and very talented few.
The leading lights who form the canon were, then, the odd ones out. They managed to work outside the open market for services by cultivating a particular client type and perfecting an approach that met their cultural requirements. The object lesson in that professional strategy was William Butterfield (1814–1900), who outlived most in his generation of architects.
Butterfield was the subject of one of those very early monographs charting the heroes of Victorian architecture, Paul Thompson’s Reference Thompson1971 study,Footnote 16 but to call it such, a monograph, is unfair. Thompson (who went on to explore other academic interests) adopted a creative approach to his subject, parsing Butterfield’s buildings into constitute elements.
Nicholas Olsberg’s new monograph on Butterfield is an astonishing achievement.Footnote 17 First, it sets the buildings in a social and cultural context, and it does this with flair and elegance. For example, in just a few sentences the author makes us appreciate how Butterfield’s Kirby Muxloe School of c 1860 intersects with centuries of history, describing how the new landowner, James Beaumont (who, we learn, was a friend of Auguste Comte), reformed the parish liturgy and then committed funds to a new school and teacher’s house to educate local children. We have always known that Butterfield, being a devout man of Tractarian cast, appealed to like-minded clients but what Olsberg does for the first time is open a window onto an ideology that was both progressive and traditional. The contrast with the self-interest we see in our own times’ wealthy classes is striking.
Olsberg also does well what few architectural historians do. His writing captures the beauty and interest of buildings and of Butterfield’s particular style. The chancel of one is a ‘rhapsody in shadows, shafts of light and plain masonry’. St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne is ‘geared to sharp sunlight and the shaping of cool space’. The language is compressed. You want to read every word. It is best to take it in parts because the history and building descriptions are so rich and enjoyable to read.
There are also copious illustrations, which include many specially commissioned from James Morris, a Sussex-based photographer. Mr Morris’ website explains that he ‘prioritises precision, atmosphere, and narrative … attention to detail, and a strong visual sensitivity that brings architectural concepts to life’.Footnote 18 This approach comes across in the photographs commissioned for this book. Taken together, they comprise the most beautiful and distinctive images of Victorian architecture that this reviewer has ever seen.
The vestry door at St Peter’s Church, Bont Goch (not a building you would otherwise be familiar with), captures Butterfield’s feeling for abstraction, for materials, for light and shade. It is a compelling image, cropped and framed with precision, and it is indeed rich in atmosphere.
The exposure used for these photographs creates a milky sky and the lighting is often flat. The paper is matt. The resulting images have an otherworldly quality. The technique is so very different from the one typically used to illustrate this kind of architecture: glossy, sharp, focusing on strident colour at the expense, often, of composition. Butterfield’s buildings appear, literally, in a new light, enabling us better to appreciate them as strikingly composed explorations of pure form somehow tethered to an ancient visual language.
Olsberg comes to the study of Victorian architecture through his work on modern architects, Scarpa and Herzog & de Meuron, and his literary style is that of a practised journalist who has an academic background. This book shows what can be achieved when careful, thoughtful historical work is combined with a feeling for architectural aesthetics and criticism, presented superbly. It is a triumph, and, if the architect’s monograph really is to move the study and appreciation of Victorian architecture, and the Gothic Revival in particular, forwards, then The Master Builder William Butterfield and His Times shows the way.
