Barry, the head of the profession, did not enter the competition; but unofficially—for he was still an employee of the Government at the Houses of Parliament—he prepared at this time a comprehensive scheme for the development of the whole length of Whitehall from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square. In this project he crowned all his façades—including that of his already executed Treasury—with mansards, introduced stepped-back courts like that of the New Louvre, and marked the corners and the centres of the court façades in the most Louvre-like way with pavilions crowned by still taller mansards. Had this project of Barry’s been followed, London would rival Paris and Vienna in the extent, the consistency, and the boldness of her public buildings of this period. In fact, practically nothing ever came of it nor, indeed, of the official competition; for by this period earlier traditions of urbanism had all but completely died out and architectural initiative was largely in private hands.
When the competition was judged in 1857, the designs that received the top prizes both for the War Office and for the Foreign Office were in the pavilioned and mansarded manner; they derived, however, at least as much from the Tuileries as from the New Louvre. It was the rising prestige of Napoleon III, of course, that called public attention at this time to the Tuileries which was his residence—as it had been, for that matter, the residence of earlier nineteenth-century French monarchs. Otherwise no one in England would probably have thought of reviving any of the various periods, covering some four centuries, represented in its conglomerate mass or of emulating its pavilioned and mansarded composition.
Since neither of these projects for ministries was ever executed, and their respective architects—Henry B. Garling (1821-1909), on the one hand, and H. E. Coe (1826-85) and his partner Hofland, on the other—never built much else of consequence, it is not necessary to linger over them. However, their designs and other Second Empire ones that received minor premiums were extensively illustrated in professional and general periodicals, and they provided favourite models in the sixties both in England and in the United States. The Paris originals, on which graphic data was not only scarcer but also less readily accessible, were not on the whole so influential. This helps to explain why French influence appears to have been stronger in the Anglo-Saxon world than on the Continent, even though there was probably less direct contact with Paris.
There was also in England at this time a general tendency, even more notable than in Austria or Germany, to enrich and elaborate plastically the long-established Renaissance Revival mode. This is less specifically inspired by Paris. An excellent example is provided by the extensive range of terraces, designed by Sancton Wood (1814-86) in 1857, that flank Lancaster Gate in the Bayswater Road in London with their boldly projecting bay windows linked by tiers of colonnades. In other examples, such as the National Discount Company’s offices at 65 Cornhill built by the Francis Brothers in 1857, the capping of the whole block with a boldly dormered mansard[[206]] is more obviously of Second Empire inspiration, though the façades below are merely of a much enriched palazzo order.
When the Moseley Brothers designed in 1858 the vast Westminster Palace Hotel near Westminster Abbey at the foot of Victoria Street, a caravanserai intended to exceed the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel of 1850-2 in international luxury, they took over its pavilioned and mansarded design. To judge from the relative dignity and sobriety of their detailing, they would seem to have studied contemporary Parisian work—not the New Louvre but the quieter maisons de rapport along the boulevards—rather than merely basing themselves on the prize-winning Government Offices projects as so many others were content to do at this time. This hotel, which proved a failure, now serves as a block of offices, and has been remodelled almost beyond recognition.
The next year Barry designed the Halifax Town Hall, his last work. He did not himself propose to cap this, like the Government Offices in his Whitehall scheme, with French mansards; those that were executed are an emendation by his son, E. M. Barry, who carried the building to completion in 1862 after his father’s death in 1860. But the richly arcaded articulation of the walls and the emphatic forward breaks of the great tower and of the more modest pavilion at the other end clearly emulate, without directly imitating, the sumptuous plasticity of the New Louvre. Nevertheless, the boldly asymmetrical composition, dominated by a single corner tower, is more in the Italian Villa vein (Plate [78B]).
This tower—but not the site—was lined up with the axis of Prince’s Street, which enters Crossley Street at this point. The assured quality of its design and above all that of its tremendous spire, more than worthy of Wren in the ingenuity with which the silhouette of a Gothic steeple was built up out of Renaissance elements, makes the Halifax Town Hall thoroughly English and one of the masterpieces of the High Victorian period. Totally devoid of Gothic elements, it has more Gothic vitality than Barry’s Houses of Parliament, at this time just approaching completion nearly thirty years after they were first designed.
E. M. Barry went on to crown two London station hotels, that at Charing Cross in 1863-4 and that at Cannon Street in 1865-6, with mansards; but these were far from being masterpieces, and that at Charing Cross has lately been much modified. The Grosvenor Hotel, built beside the new Victoria Station in 1859-60 by Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), is far more original. He covered the whole enormous mass with a very tall convex mansard, giving further emphasis to the broad pavilions at the ends by carrying their roofs still higher and capping them with lanterns. Beyond this nothing was French. The detail indeed, defined by its architect as ‘Tuscan’, i.e. Rundbogenstil, is highly individual, partaking of the coarse gusto and even somewhat of the naturalism of the most advanced Victorian Gothic foliage carving of the period (see Chapter [10]).
Similar mansards, but flat-sided not bulbous, and similar detail characterize a pair of tall terraces that Knowles built in 1860 on the north side of Clapham Common, south of London. These constituted a subtle suburban attack on Early Victorian traditions of terrace-design that soon had metropolitan repercussions. His Thatched House Club in St James’s Street in London of 1865 has a great deal of very rich carving by J. Daymond in the naturalistic vein, but is less interesting in general composition.
Knowles’s Grosvenor was still new when John Giles outbid it with the Langham Hotel, begun in 1864. Given a much finer site than Knowles’s at the base of the broad avenue of Portland Place across from Nash’s All Souls’, Langham Place, Giles rose boldly—most people now think too boldly—to the occasion (Plate [80A]). Certainly he overwhelmed Nash’s delicate and ingenious steeple by the rounded projection and the tall square corner tower—now bombed away at the top—with which he faced it. Equally certainly his massive north façade, with its boldly modelled flanking pavilions and its profusion of lively animal carvings, would overwhelm the urbane refinement of the nearby Adam terraces flanking Portland Place had these not by now been replaced by far inferior buildings. For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the ‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced), the Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel, but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc.