Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

The great Exhibition of 1851 gave, naturally, much impetus to the enlargement, as well as the architecture, of London. And though the English school of architects became somewhat more catholic in taste, yet the Gothic style still held the public favour. Butterfield's severe church of All Saints, Margaret Street, delighted the public taste, and initiated the fashion for "Butterfield" spires; Scott's church of St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington, was also popular. Would not either of these be noticed, if "planted out" in an Italian valley? And Street's well-known New Law Courts, in the Strand, built 1879-83, are the latest expression of modern Gothic. Opinion is divided on the subject of their merits, but undoubtedly they form, viewed from the Strand, a fine pile of buildings.

What is called the "Queen Anne" building craze has set in strongly of late years, its chief pioneers being the two architects,—Norman Shaw, who built the picturesque mansion of Lowther Lodge, solidly fine in its darkened red-brick, close to the Albert Hall,—and Bodley, who designed the fine offices of the London School Board on the Thames Embankment. Lowther Lodge is said to "exhibit very well the merits of the best order of "Queen Anne" design of the domestic class"; its successors are much more efflorescent. Everywhere now spring up so-called "Queen Anne" mansions, streets, houses, public offices; and red-brick, terra-cotta, nooks, ingles, casement windows are multiplying ad libitum all over the metropolis. Different styles prevail at different times, and the "Queen Anne" wave just now threatens to overwhelm us. Flats, stores, police-stations, hotels, all are becoming "Queen Anne." Even if walls are still thin, even if the jerry-builder is still to the fore, new streets are, none the less, built in the "Queen Anne" manner; and the last stage of every craze is worse than the first.

What, then, is the prevailing architecture of London? We have perused its history; we have wandered through its streets, and have gazed on all and every style of building. Decision ought to be easy. Yet it is not so easy as it looks. In the Forum at Rome, you have to dig to find out all the different strata of buildings—republican, monarchical, imperial. In London, it is even more puzzling, for here you see them all together, above ground, in close juxtaposition—Tudor, Stuart, Hanoverian—it needs more than a magician's wand to relegate each to its proper period in history. Wren's St. Paul's, the enormous Hotel Cecil, the Whitehall Government Offices, the old timbered mansions in Bishopsgate Street, Pennethorne's new Tudor Record office, the Railway Architecture of Charing Cross and of Liverpool Street, the Aquarium hung gaily with posters, the Savoy Hotel in white and gold—you have them all, side by side. You pass through the prevailing stucco and heavy porticoes of Belgrave Square,—the new red-brick and terra-cotta of the Cadogan and Grosvenor Estates,—the stone dignity of Broad Sanctuary,—the dull brick uniformity of Bloomsbury;—which style, think you, suits your ideal London best?

But, while it may reasonably be matter for conjecture as to what architectural style really suits London best,—or if, indeed, a wholesome mixture of all styles be not a desideratum,—it seems, perhaps, safe to say that it is the "dark house," in the "long, unlovely street" of Tennyson's condemnation, of Madame de Staël's vituperation,—that, in its dull uniformity, really occupies most of the area of London. There are, of course, minor differences. In West London, the "unlovely street" may flower into questionable stucco; in East London, it may become lower, dingier, and meaner: but in original intent all are the same. So monotonous, indeed, are they, that, in secluded squares or corners, one welcomes joyfully an original door-knocker, even such a door-canopy as that described in Little Dorrit, "a projecting canopy in carved work, of festooned jack-towels, and children's heads with water-on-the-brain, designed after a once-popular monumental pattern." In interiors, these same monotonous houses may all differ widely, though even here no universal rule of taste can be laid down; and the little School Board boy who said, naïvely, "Rich people's houses ain't nice inside; there is books all round, and no washin'" unconsciously testified to the wide differences entailed by "the point of view." In Mayfair, Westminster, or Belgravia,—yes, even in Bloomsbury, one dull brick or stucco house-front may present the same external gloom as another, and yet, internally, may differ much from that other in glory. And this fact is typical of poor as well as of rich London. An Englishman's house is his castle, and Englishmen's tastes, as we know, are seldom much in evidence. "Adam" ceilings, "Morris" tapestries, Pompeian courts, leafy vistas, mediæval halls, "Queen Anne", "ingleneuks," all these may surprise the visitor, when once the "Open sesame" has revealed to him all that lies behind that magic front door that guards the Briton's household gods from the vulgar glare of the street.

Even some of the treasure-houses of England's magnates, merchant-princes, and collectors are curiously unsuggestive externally. In this connection I may quote Mr. Moncure Conway's description of the late Mr. Alfred Morrison's house in Carlton House Terrace, adorned by the genius of Mr. Owen Jones:

"The house" (he says) "is one of those large, square, lead-coloured buildings, of which so many thousands exist in London, that any one passing by would pronounce characteristically characterless. It repeats the apparent determination of ages that there shall be no external architectural beauty in London. Height, breadth, massiveness of portal, all declare that he who resides here has not dispensed with architecture because he could not command it. In other climes this gentleman is dwelling behind carved porticoes of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here the cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress and find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pass through this heavy doorway, and in an instant every fair clime surrounds you, every region lavishes its sentiment; you are the heir of all the ages."

The street that Tennyson really designed in In Memoriam was Wimpole Street, surely not as ugly or as pretentious a street as many others of the West End. Gower Street, too, was called unkindly by Mr. Ruskin "the nec plus ultra of ugliness in British architecture"; yet, indeed, Bloomsbury houses, unfashionable as they are, seem by their very plainness and want of adornment to maintain a certain dignity that is unknown to those long rows of stucco catafalques of Kensington and Belgravia, where, standing beneath the endless vista of projecting porches, one's mind naturally turns to tombs and whited sepulchres.

The Bloomsbury houses are, at any rate, simple and inoffensive. Mr. Moncure Conway, in a further passage, pleads the cause of London's ugly residential streets:

"Much is said from time to time about the ugliness of London street architecture ... the miles and miles of yellow-gray and sooty brick houses, each as much like the other as if so many miles of hollow block were chopped at regular intervals. And yet there is something so pleasant to think of in these interminable rows of brick blocks, that they are not altogether unpleasant to the eye. For they are houses of good size, comfortable houses; and their sameness, only noticeable through their vast number, means that the average of well-to-do-people in London is also vast. It implies a distribution of wealth, an equality of conditions, which make the best feature of a solid civilisation. There is much beauty inside these orange-tawny walls. Before any house in that league of sooty brick you may pause and say with fair security: In that house are industrious, educated people ... they have made there, within their mass of burnt clay, a true cosmos, where love and thought dwell with them: and between all that and a fine outside they have chosen the better part."

But, according to Edward Gibbon, the historian, the excuse for London's ugly "exteriors" is not so much because the inhabitants have "chosen the better part," as because the average Englishman mostly keeps his show and his magnificence for his country seat. Comparing London and Paris, Gibbon said (in 1763):