Of the same date, 1856, is perhaps the most successful of Butterfield’s extant churches, that at Baldersby St James near Beverley in Yorkshire, with its contiguous group of vicarage, schools, and cottages. All of stone externally, the polychromy here is rather a sort of ‘poly-texture’ most effectively handled in the banding of the tall pyramidal spire above the plain square tower (Plate [87]). Internally a delicate harmony of pink and grey-blue bricks, with accents of creamy stone, replaces the acid chords of All Saints’ in London, a harmony rivalled in the Welsh church of St Augustine’s at Penarth near Cardiff built a decade later in 1866. At the same time, Teulon at St Andrew’s in Coin Street off Stamford Street south of the Thames in London was using the boldest of brick-and-stone banding externally and, inside, elaborate patterns of light-coloured brickwork. Moreover, the rather Germanic planning of this church, demolished since the Second World War, was highly unorthodox by ecclesiological standards. Already it was evident that within the High Victorian Gothic there were to be two streams, one High Church in its patronage and led by architects of considerable learning and sophistication like Butterfield and Street, another more characteristically Low Church and often quite secular; this was generally coarser and more philistine, not to say outright illiterate.

Yet not all the best work of the High Church architects was ecclesiastical. By 1857 J. L. Pearson (1817-97) had already built some respectable if not very interesting churches distinguished chiefly by their very fine spires; but his first work of positive High Victorian character was Quar Wood, a country house he built in Gloucestershire in that year. The skilful asymmetrical massing around the stair tower here, the plastic variety provided by several different types of steep roofs, the crisp precision of the detailing, all combine to produce a modest mansion that is as different in effect from Teulon’s mountainous Tortworth as both are characteristic of the beginnings of the High Victorian Gothic.

Two houses begun soon after Quar Wood, both within the broad frame of reference of the maturing High Victorian Gothic, could hardly differ more from one another. In remodelling Eatington Park in Warwickshire in 1858 John Prichard (1818-86) attempted to mask an underlying Georgian mansion with a profusion of bold innovations in the detailing. Stone polychromy, applied sculpture, bold plastic membering of wall, roof, and chimneys, all are used here more abundantly than ever before. The Red House at Bexley Heath in Kent, on the other hand, which Philip Webb (1831-1915), who had been a fellow pupil with Morris in Street’s office, built for Morris in 1859-60, is notable for its extreme simplicity. So also is the house now known as Benfleet Hall that he built in 1861 at Cobham in Surrey for Spencer Stanhope, another of the young artists who had collaborated on the murals of the Oxford Union. This has a rather better plan than the Red House.

These houses have no external polychromy, only plain red brick beautifully laid; there is no sculptured detail at all; and the few breaks in the loose massing of the walls and roof are closely related to the informal ease of the rather novel plans. Only the high roofs of red tile are similar to those of Pearson’s Quar Wood. But in the plain, very ‘real’, detailing and the segmental-headed white-painted window-sash of an early eighteenth-century sort, set under pointed relieving arches, the relationship is close to the secular work of somewhat older men—to Butterfield’s vicarages of the forties (Plate [122B]) and more notably to his clergy house and school at All Saints’, Margaret Street (Plate [86A]). Webb had himself worked on some of the latest of the rather similar vicarages and schools that Street had been building for a decade. His first big country house, Arisaig, built of local stone in the remote Scottish Highlands forty miles beyond Fort William in Inverness-shire beginning in 1863, may properly be considered High Victorian Gothic also (Figure [23]). It is especially interesting, like Benfleet Hall, for its plan (see Chapter [15]).

Down to about 1860 the development of the High Victorian Gothic was on the whole convergent. Henceforth, ambitious young architects tried harder to have personal modes of their own like Butterfield; yet, conversely, many formed loose stylistic alliances in which individual expression became merged in some sort of group expression. The boldest and the most unruly were no longer likely to be of the High Church party, but rather of the Low. St Simon Zelotes of 1859 in Moore Street in London by Joseph Peacock (1821-93) hardly compares with the work of Butterfield and Street in distinction; but its internal polychromy of white and black brick outbids that of their best London churches, also built at the end of this decade.

Butterfield’s St Alban’s in Baldwin’s Gardens off Holborn in London, erected 1858-61, is all rebuilt now. But something of its splendidly tall proportions, if not the rich brick and tile marquetry of the wall over the chancel arch, can still be apprehended. The contrast in quality with Peacock’s work was once amazing. Street’s St James the Less in Thorndike Street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London also of 1858-61, is less fine but still much superior to Peacock’s work (Plate [94B]). The tall square tower, set apart like a campanile, has a curiously gawky roof based on French models and the interior is somewhat cavernous. But in the richness of its red and black brick patterns, used both inside and out, and in the naturalistic carving of the nave capitals this church of Street’s rivals Butterfield’s All Saints’ and St Alban’s and is, unlike the latter, still completely intact.

Various younger men of Webb’s generation were beginning to make important contributions in church design also. G. F. Bodley (1827-1907), trained in his kinsman Scott’s office rather than in Street’s, built St Michael’s, Brighton, in 1859-62. This must have been very striking for the boldness of its scale and for the vigour of its structural expression before it was overshadowed by the tall later nave beside it added by William Burges (1827-81).[[224]] But it is not the parody of ‘Early French’ detailing in the square archivolts and spreading capitals of the nave arcade, so soon to be abjured by Bodley, that is significant here but the fact that this was the first church to receive an over-all decorative treatment, including stained glass, at the hands of Morris and his associates, who included the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones.

There is still finer glass of this period designed by Burne-Jones in the east window of Waltham Abbey in Essex, where the rear wall was rebuilt in the heaviest ‘Early French’ taste by Burges in 1860-1. As a painter Burne-Jones is hardly to be compared with Ingres; yet as a designer of stained glass the superiority of such early windows of his as these at Waltham Abbey to the ones by Ingres at Dreux and at Neuilly is amazing. It is not the least claim to distinction of the High Victorian Gothic that it nurtured this brilliant revival of decorative art led by Morris. Many churches of the sixties and seventies are worth visiting solely for their windows by Morris, Brown, and Burne-Jones to which there are apparently no worthy Continental parallels.

A quite different sort of contemporary church is White’s Holy Saviour, Aberdeen Park, in London, of 1859. Externally this is quiet and rather shapeless; but inside the red brick of the exterior gives way to a subtle harmony of patterned brickwork in beiges, browns, and mauves—assisted in the chancel by some additional decorative painting—that is unequalled in High Victorian polychromy. Also rather different from standard High Church Anglican work of the day is the Catholic church of St Peter in Leamington of 1861-5 (Plate [89A]) by Henry Clutton (1819-93). He had won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France in 1855 with a design prepared in collaboration with Burges, but was not allowed to supervise the construction because he was a Protestant; English Roman Catholics were not so bigoted. Internally the characteristic articulation of Puginian planning was given up; nave and apse form one continuous vessel, almost basilican in effect, under a barrel roof that ends in a half dome. Unfortunately, the painted decoration of the walls and the ceiling here has all been destroyed; the effect must once have been much less barren than it is today. Externally, plain red brick is most happily combined with stone trim treated with great simplicity and yet with extreme subtlety. The inspiration is Early French, perhaps influenced by Viollet-le-Duc,[[225]] although Clutton knew old French work at first hand; but the smooth concavities and the delicately varied chamfers are handled with the greatest originality and justness of scaling. The fine tower, at once sturdy in its detailing and svelte in its shape, has lost the original pyramidal roof.

Not unworthy of the church, and vastly superior to Clutton’s rather dull country houses, is the contiguous rectory here, a rectangle in plan with the long gable broken only by elegantly chamfered pairs of brick chimneys (Plate [89A]). The expanses of plain brick wall are regularly but not symmetrically pierced by coupled windows divided by colonnette mullions of stone. In simplicity of massing this rectory surpassed the Red House and Webb’s other—and in some ways better—early house for Spencer Stanhope, Benfleet Hall. In their simple dignity such things contrast sharply with the more ambitious secular work of the day, by this time reaching peaks of elaboration almost exceeding Prichard’s Eatington Park.