In this same year 1849 Wild[[219]] was building on an even more obscure London site in Soho his St Martin’s Northern Schools with pointed arcades of brick definitely derived from Italian models. Moreover, he was being acclaimed for doing this by the very ecclesiological leaders who had ten years before condemned his Christ Church, Streatham, as ‘Saracenic’. With the publication of the first volume of Ruskin’s next book, The Stones of Venice, in 1851 (the two less important later volumes came out in 1853) and the appearance of Brick and Marble Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy by G. E. Street (1824-81) in 1855, Italian influence increased. Street’s name, moreover, introduces the third of the three men most responsible for the sharp turn that English architecture was taking in the fifties.
Without depending on polychromy, Butterfield designed in 1850 and built in 1851-2 St Matthias’s off Howard Road in Stoke Newington, a London suburb, another church of novel character. Unconfined by a closed-in urban site, this also showed in its great scale and the bold silhouette of the gable-roofed tower—still standing today above the bombed ruin of the church—how the timid Early Victorian Gothic of the forties could be invigorated. Moreover, at St Bartholomew’s at Yealmpton in Devonshire, built in 1850, Butterfield introduced in a country church striped piers of two different tones of marble and considerable coloured marquetry work. A former fellow assistant of Street in G. G. Scott’s office, William H. White (1826-90), at All Saints’ in Talbot Road, Kensington, in London, begun in 1850, also used the new polychromy that soon became the principal, though by no means the only, hallmark of High Victorian Gothic.
A large country house of stone by S. S. Teulon (1812-73), Tortworth Court in Gloucestershire, built in 1849-53, has no polychromy, although its architect was soon to be the most unrestrained of all in its exploitation. His patrons, moreover, would be notably ‘lower’ in their churchmanship than the members of the Ecclesiological Society who employed Butterfield. But in the boldly plastic massing of Tortworth, leading up to a tall central tower of the most complex silhouette, Teulon exemplified the new architectural ambitions, ambitions that would soon be finding as striking expression in secular work as in ecclesiastical building whether ‘high’ or ‘low’.
Street had been a favourite of the High Church party since he first began building small churches and schools of a most ‘correct’ sort in Cornwall on leaving Scott’s office.[[220]] He was also the author of several critical articles published in The Ecclesiologist, notable for their cogency. In these he commented, for example, on the applicability of the arcades of Wild’s school to commercial building; he also attacked the curious habit of the forties, most prevalent with the ecclesiologists, of designing urban churches on confined sites as if they were to sprawl over ample village greens. Street began his first important church with associated school buildings, All Saints’, Boyn Hill, at Maidenhead, in 1853. Here he employed red brick and almost as much permanent polychrome as Butterfield at All Saints’, Margaret Street. He also handled the detail, particularly on the schools, with something of the same sort of brutal ‘realism’ (to use the catchword of the period) that Butterfield used on his subsidiary buildings.
In the same year in London Street’s former employer Scott, long established as the most successful, if hardly the most ‘correct’, of Early Victorian Gothic practitioners, and since 1849 Architect to Westminster Abbey, built in Broad Sanctuary contiguous to the façade of the Abbey a Gothic terrace. That the use of Gothic should have been encouraged here by the Abbey authorities is not surprising. But they themselves may well have been surprised at what their architect produced; for this is no flat range of Neo-Tudor fronts in stock brick, but a plastic mass of stonework bristling with oriels and turrets and capped with a broken skyline of stepped gables. Nothing here recalls the rather French thirteenth-century Gothic of the Abbey itself; instead the effect is Germanic, recalling the medieval houses of the Hansa cities. The work was executed with a boldness of detail doubtless less personal in character than Butterfield’s or Street’s, but quite as striking to the casual observer.
Scott’s houses had little influence, however. Gothic terraces were no more popular in the fifties and sixties in England than in the preceding decades. In residential districts the flood of more-or-less Renaissance stucco continued to spread, little affected by the High Victorian Gothic. As we have seen, the Second Empire mode also had only a very limited success in this field of construction, a field dominated not by architects but by builders.
In 1853 also Scott provided for the Camden Church in the Peckham Road in South London—Ruskin’s own family church—a new east end in a round-arched and banded medievalizing mode; Ruskin himself collaborated on the window design, or so it is said. There is sufficient Gothic ‘realism’ in the detail here to justify considering this a round-arched variant of the High Victorian Gothic; but it is definitely of Italian inspiration. It seems also to be related to the later Rundbogenstil of this decade in Germany and Austria; nor is it altogether without resemblance to such a contemporary French church as Vaudoyer’s Byzantinesque cathedral of Marseilles.
Several far more important and better publicized interventions in architecture on the part of Ruskin followed immediately. In considerable part because of his personal influence with Oxford friends, the Gothic design of the Irish architects Sir Thomas Deane[[221]] (1792-1871) and Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) was accepted for the University Museum at Oxford in 1855. Woodward had already proved himself a would-be Ruskinian in detailing their design of 1853 for the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin, in a Venetian (though largely quattrocento) way. As the Oxford Museum rose to completion in the next four years, Ruskin was in continuous contact with Woodward, providing himself the design for at least one window as well as encouraging the delegation to the Irish carvers of much of the responsibility for the ornamental decoration—of which only a small part was, in fact, ever executed. The work of the O’Sheas is better appreciated in Dublin, where the decoration both of the Trinity College building and of the Kildare Street Club of 1861 was carried out by them in a very free and yet boldly naturalistic vein.
The most interesting feature of the University Museum—and one that it is surprising to find Ruskin, who hated iron and all it stood for in the nineteenth-century world, involved with—is the court, with its roof of iron and glass (Plate [86B]). How different this is, however, from what iron-founders without architectural control were providing at the same time in the Brompton Boilers! Yet it is even more different from Hopper’s or Rickman’s iron Gothic of fifty years earlier (Plate [60B]). For all the elaboration of the ornament, which is very metallic in character but also very aware of Early Gothic precedent, what is most notable is the highly articulated character of the structure, as if the architects had asked themselves: ‘How would medieval builders have used structural iron had it been readily available to them?’ Is this, perhaps, the first echo in England of the theories of Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect who was to exercise an international influence equal to Ruskin’s over the next generation? Probably not, as his own enthusiasm for iron began only rather later (see Chapter [16]). Whether or not there is specific influence from Viollet-le-Duc here, his great archaeological publication, the Dictionnaire raisonné,[[222]] had begun to appear the year before. Very soon the structural expressiveness of ‘Early French’ detailing, studied by English architects at first hand as well as in the woodcuts of the Dictionnaire, began to supplant Italian polychromy as the hallmark of advanced fashion in the higher aesthetic circles.
A more modest Oxford building by Deane & Woodward, the Union Debating Hall of 1856-7, has more vigour on the whole than does the Museum, particularly in its characteristically notched brick detailing. It also has the advantage of murals by the young Pre-Raphaelites. One of these, who had just left Street’s architectural office to turn briefly to painting, was William Morris (1834-96).[[223]] His ceiling here initiated the most distinguished career of architectural decoration of the second half of the century. Morris as a critical writer was destined, moreover, to be at least as influential on later architecture as Ruskin or Viollet-le-Duc.