Here it will be well to consider two exceptional Gothic monuments, designed in the late thirties and built in the forties, one very large, the other rather small, which did not follow the new Puginian standards, even though in the case of one of them Pugin collaborated on the design from the first. The most Picturesque addition to the Romantic Classical scene in Edinburgh, curiously effective by contrast with the big-scaled and very cold Grecian structures near by, is the Sir Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens (Plate [51]). This was designed in 1836 and executed in 1840-6 by G. Meikle Kemp[[124]] (1795-1844). His project had originally been placed below both Fowler’s and Rickman’s in a competition; as the local contender, however, he had eventually obtained the commission in 1838. The lacy elaboration of this florid shrine, if less appropriate to Sir Walter’s own brand of medievalism than Abbotsford, is certainly in the richest Late Georgian tradition of the Picturesque.
Picturesque also are certain aspects of the Houses of Parliament, notably the contrast in shape and placing of the two towers at the ends and, above all, the silhouette of the Clock Tower, almost certainly one of Pugin’s personal contributions to the design (Plate [54]). But essentially the Houses of Parliament, as might be expected of Barry, their architect, are one of the grandest academic productions of the nineteenth century. Summerson has suggested a relationship to Fonthill Abbey in the way the plan is organized round a central octagon; there may also be an echo of Wyatville’s east front of Windsor in the composition of the river front. But except for the incorporation of the medieval Westminster Hall, the Crypt Chapel, and the Cloister Court, which necessitated irregularity along the landward side, the plan is almost as regular and as classically logical in its balanced provision for multiple functions as a pupil[[125]] of Durand might have developed. Equally regular are the façades and, in the case of the principal front towards the river, elaborately symmetrical as well.
The rich Late Gothic detail was provided in incredible profusion by Pugin, who worked under Barry against his own developing taste for earlier and less lacy Gothic forms. Doubtless, like the towers, this detailing reflects the Picturesque, but the extreme regularity of the façades provides also the characteristic reiterations of Romantic Classicism. Pugin is supposed to have said that the river front was ‘all Greek’, a considerable exaggeration. But just as Highclere shows what Barry’s basic principles of design could produce when expressed in the revived Jacobethan mode, so without too great a strain one can imagine this front executed with some sort of Renaissance detailing, if hardly in columnar Grecian guise.
Commissioned in 1836, the Houses of Parliament rose slowly. The House of Lords was opened in 1847; the House of Commons only in 1852, the year of Pugin’s early death. Even at the time of Barry’s death in 1860 the whole group was still not finished, although his eldest son (Edward Middleton, 1830-80) made but few personal contributions when he took over control and finally completed the job later in the decade. During this extended period of about thirty years the Puginian phase of the Gothic Revival had been initiated and run its entire course; even the succeeding High Victorian Gothic was more than half-way over by the mid sixties. Like the Napoleonic monuments of Paris, which were also a generation a-building, the Houses of Parliament belong historically to the period of their beginning. They are not quite pre-Victorian, since construction above ground began only in 1840 after considerable revision of the competition design, but they are definitely Early Victorian.
Not all of Pugin’s own work is as remote in character from the Houses of Parliament as his mature principles would lead one to expect. His first church of any consequence, St Marie’s, Derby, of 1838-9, is Perpendicular in style and very crisp and flat in treatment. Nevertheless, both in its detailed ‘correctness’ and in Pugin’s real command of the national Late Gothic idiom, this church marks a great advance over the work of Rickman and the other Gothic architects of the older generation who were still in practice. Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, a remodelling, is confused by the retention of earlier elements and also by a considerable addition made by Pugin’s son (Edward Welby, 1834-75) in the sixties. But the portions carried out in 1837-52 are quite consonant with Pugin’s work done in association with Barry. The great hall is a definitely archaeological feature of the plan yet also a feature that would be of great significance in the later development of the nineteenth-century house (see Chapter [15]).
If Scarisbrick is not exactly anti-Picturesque, comparison with such a great house as Harlaxton near Grantham, first designed by Salvin in the Jacobethan mode in 1831 and rising under Burn’s supervision from 1838 on, reveals how little the Picturesque really influenced Pugin even at the beginning of his career. However, Neo-Tudor Lonsdale Square in London, begun by R. C. Carpenter (1812-55) in 1838, is still less Picturesque than Scarisbrick because of its extreme regularity. This example makes evident how far other young architects—and Carpenter was precisely Pugin’s contemporary—were behind him in understanding and exploiting even Late Gothic forms; yet within a very few years Carpenter became the most ‘correct’ of Anglican church architects by following Pugin’s lead.
In 1839 and 1840 Pugin designed two modest churches that provided favourite paradigms for Anglo-American church-building for a generation and more. St Oswald’s, Old Swan, Liverpool, built in 1840-2, adopts the fourteenth-century English parish-church plan with central western tower broach-spired, aisles, deep chancel, and south porch, each element being quite clearly expressed in the external composition. Internally the effect is low and dark, since Pugin provided no clerestory, roofed the nave with much exposed timber, and filled the traceried windows with stained glass. More original is St Wilfred’s, Hulme, Manchester, built in 1839-42, in that the tower—never completed, alas—was set at the north-west corner. The detail of St Oswald’s is fairly elaborate, including a rather rich east window. St Wilfred’s is simpler, with lancet windows to avoid the expense of fourteenth-century tracery.
A larger, more complete, and more expensively decorated example of the Old Swan model was St Giles’s, Cheadle, of 1841-6 (Plate [52A]). This has a quite magnificent, if hardly very original, spired tower and interior walls all patterned in colour. Here Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s most important patron, provided sufficient funds to furnish the church as the architect intended. Pugin’s largest churches, unfortunately, never received the carved work, stained glass, and painted decoration that he planned for them. At St Barnabas’s, Nottingham, now the Catholic Cathedral there, of 1842-4 he achieved externally a rather fine piling up of related masses at the rear, the whole crowned by a central tower. For lack of any decoration, however, this is grim without and barren within, despite all the spatial interest of the very complex east end.
Pugin, always his own severest critic, was most nearly satisfied with the church that he built for himself next door to his own house, the Grange, at Ramsgate.[[126]] The house dates from 1841-3, the church from 1846-51. Externally of Kentish knapped flint and internally of Caen stone with a very heavy roof of dark oak, this edifice is worthy of his highest standards of revived medieval construction. But it is rather less original and interesting in external massing and internal spatial development than such a big bare church as St Barnabas’s. To the house we will be returning later (see Chapter [15]).
Pugin’s production is largely concentrated in the years 1837-44, between the two periods of his employment by Barry on the Houses of Parliament. By 1844 other architects, Anglican and not Roman Catholic, were accepting his principles and rivalling his success. G. G. Scott, for example, never a really great architect but a notable self-publicist, after modest beginnings designed the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford in 1841 in the form of a fourteenth-century Eleanor Cross and followed up that prominent commission by building the large suburban London church of St Giles’s, Camberwell, in 1842-4. At that time he was still in partnership with Moffatt. Then, in 1844, he signalized the international standing of the English Gothic Revival by winning alone the competition for the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he carried to completion over the years 1845-63.