St George’s Hall in Liverpool, the latest of the major Romantic Classical monuments of England, was finished like the Fitzwilliam by C. R. Cockerell long after its original designer’s death. It displays much less bombast and much more true grandeur of scale. The young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-49) won two successive competitions, for a Hall and for Law Courts, in 1839 and 1840 respectively. Then, when it was decided to combine the two in one structure, he paid a visit to Berlin to study the work of Schinkel. Schinkelesque, indeed, is the long colonnade facing Lime Street Station, and even more so the curious square piers, free-standing in their upper half, that Elmes used elsewhere on the building (Plate [34A]).
The temple portico at the south end is conventional enough, but with its steps boldly raised above a massively plain foundation wall; the rounded end to the north is much more original and also rather French in feeling. French surely, but of the Empire rather than the contemporary July Monarchy, is the tremendous scale of the whole and the stately axial planning of the sort to be seen in many Prix de Rome projects of the preceding fifty years. The great hall is slightly larger than its prototype in the Baths of Caracalla.[[80]] As completed by Cockerell in the early fifties, the interior lost all the Grecian severity of the exterior. Together with the elegant elliptical concert hall, planned by Elmes but entirely executed by Cockerell, the great hall belongs to the next period of architectural development as much by its rich decoration as by its date.
It was in Scotland, not in England, that the Greek Revival had its greatest success and lasted longest. There seems to have been some special congruity of sentiment between Northern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ancient world. Edinburgh, which considered itself for intellectual reasons the ‘Athens of the North’, set out after 1810 to continue in a more Athenian mode the extension and embellishment of her New Town begun in the 1760s. The result rivals Petersburg as well as Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. Indeed, in Edinburgh, what was built between 1760 and 1860 provides still the most extensive example of a Romantic Classical city in the world.
If the architecture of Edinburgh is largely Classical—the most conspicuous exceptions are the inherited medieval Castle on its rock at the head of the Old Town and the Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens—the setting is extremely Picturesque. The fullest scenic advantage was taken of the castle-crowned hill, above the filled-in and landscaped North Loch, and of the two heights to the east and the south-east, Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. The latter was kept quite clear of buildings, the former gradually turned into a sort of Scottish Akropolis. Perhaps fortunately, the largest structure there, the National Monument, a copy of the Parthenon by C. R. Cockerell and the local architect W. H. Playfair (1789-1857), was never finished; thus it appears to be a ruin and adds to the Picturesque effect of this terminus to the eastward view along Prince’s Street.
Calton Hill is approached, and the view of it framed, by Waterloo Place, the buildings of which were erected by Archibald Elliott (1763-1823) in 1815-19. This is no unworthy rival of the homonymous square in London, despite the lack of a central column. The view had to remain open to the hill beyond, where Playfair’s Observatory was rising in 1814-18 and later, in 1830, the Choragic Monument by Thomas Hamilton (1785-1858) dedicated to that very un-Grecian poet Robert Burns, as well as various other objects of visual interest. In St Andrew’s Square in the New Town, however, is the Melville Column. This was built by William Burn (1789-1870) in 1821-2 and based, like the Colonne Vendôme in Paris, on that of Trajan.
These Scottish architects were perhaps more fortunate than Dobson in the material available to them; Edinburgh’s Craigleith stone becomes with time a rather deep grey, but not so black as that in Newcastle when left uncleaned. Seen in Playfair’s terraces, executed gradually from 1820 to 1860, which run around the base of Calton Hill on the south, east, and north, the effect may be rather dour; but the dignity and solidity of these Grecian ranges, rivalled in the contemporary circuses on the slopes to the north of the eighteenth-century New Town, are undeniably impressive.
From the completion of his Observatory in 1814 to the completion of the Scottish National Gallery forty years later Playfair continued to ornament Edinburgh with Classical (and on occasion with non-Classical) structures. Looking south along the cross-axis of the new Town, one sees just beyond Prince’s Street his Royal Scottish Institution begun in 1822, its rather massive Doric bulk happily crowned just after its completion in 1836 by the seated figure of the young Queen Victoria (Plate [34B]). Behind this lies his Ionic National Gallery of 1850-4, which is not unworthy of comparison with Smirke’s British Museum begun more than a quarter of a century earlier. High to the rear, on the slopes of the Old Town, rise the two towers of the Free Church College, also by Playfair and begun in 1846, framing with their crisp Tudorish forms the richer and more graceful spire (sometimes attributed to Pugin) of Tolbooth St John’s, which was built by James Gillespie Graham in 1843.
Finer than any individual work of Playfair’s, and splendidly sited on the south side of Calton Hill, is the High School by Thomas Hamilton (1784-1858). Begun in 1825, this complex Grecian composition shows how well the lessons of the Athenian Propylaea were learned by Scottish architects. More original, but still essentially Grecian, is Hamilton’s Hall of Physicians in Queen Street of 1844-5.
Banking was not far behind State and Church as a patron of monumental architecture in Scotland. Before the astylar palazzo mode took over the financial scene, two banks grander than any in London had been erected in the Edinburgh New Town. The Commercial Bank of Scotland of 1846 in George Street by David Rhind (1808-83), despite its pedimented portico, is no longer Greek in detail; the British Linen Bank of 1852 in St Andrew’s Square by David Bryce (1803-76), more plastically Roman still, has giant detached columns upholding bold entablature blocks, an idea deriving from C. R. Cockerell’s rejected competition design for the Royal Exchange in London.
As the earlier mention of Thomson’s churches in Glasgow will have indicated, the Greek Revival lasted even longer there than in Edinburgh. But such edifices as the Royal Exchange of 1829-30 by David Hamilton (1768-1843) or Clarke & Bell’s Municipal and County Buildings of 1844 do not rival the work of Playfair and of the other Hamilton in the capital; nor is there in Glasgow much good urbanism of this period. In his domestic work Thomson remained closer to the conventional norms of the Greek Revival than in his churches. However, in Moray Place, Strathbungo, of 1859, where he lived himself, he produced the finest of all Grecian terraces (Plate [35A]) and, still later, in Great Western Terrace an ampler if less original composition.