Beside the Albert Memorial most of Scott’s other work of this period lacks interest. His churches, particularly, are likely to be dull and respectable, reflecting the new eclectic tastes of the day only in a rather inconspicuous way. His Exeter College Chapel at Oxford of 1856-8 is a sort of Sainte-Chapelle; St John’s College Chapel at Cambridge of 1863-9 is equally monumental but somewhat less French in character and also more original in its proportions. His secular work at Oxford and Cambridge is also dull, lacking the Ruskinian touches that give a certain vitality to the Meadow Buildings built for Christ Church in 1863 by Sir Thomas Deane and his son Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-99).
Far finer, however, is their Kildare Street Club in Dublin, facing the Trinity College Museum across an expanse of lawn; for this continues the best Ruskinian tradition of the work that they did earlier with Woodward.[[230]]
A very striking example of the Gothic of the early sixties in England, superior to anything at Oxford or Cambridge, is the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum of 1861 by G. Somers Clark (1825-82), now the Wanstead Hospital, in a suburb north-east of London. This is actually more what is supposed to be ‘Ruskinian’, because of its Venetian detailing, than the very original Dublin clubhouse with its consistent theme of segmental arches and its bold naturalistic carving; but, like that, the Wanstead building is generically High Victorian in the asymmetrical massing, the strong colours of the black-banded red brickwork, and the surprising richness of the decoration Clark lavished on a utilitarian structure.
In the early sixties several younger men, most of them trained in Street’s office, were already turning away from the stridency of the work of the High Victorian leaders towards a simpler and suaver mode. Webb’s houses of this period have been mentioned, and will be again (see Chapter [15]). Here the plain row of small London shops that he built at 91-101 Worship Street, Finsbury, in 1861 might be described. In them the material is not even red brick, but London stocks excellently laid. Almost nothing is overtly Gothic, yet a sense of medieval craftsmanship controls the handling of both the wide shop-windows below and the sash-windows in the upper storeys. Above all, the general composition is quiet and regular, more like Clutton’s Leamington rectory than the asymmetrical articulation that is characteristic of Webb’s own houses of these years.
A similar quietness controls the design of the wing that W. Eden Nesfield (1835-88), son of Barry’s collaborator on Italian gardens, William A. Nesfield (1793-1881), and a pupil not of Street but of Burn and Salvin, was adding to the Earl of Craven’s seat, Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, beginning in 1863. This was Nesfield’s earliest work. Despite his own studies of French Gothic,[[231]] which he had published the previous year with a dedication to Lord Craven, and the tracings he is supposed to have made from the illustrations of Gothic detail in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire, the arches at Combe Abbey are round, not pointed, and the major architectural theme is the English late medieval ‘window-wall’ of many lights divided by stone mullions and transoms.
In a completely new house, Cloverley Hall, that Nesfield began in 1865 together with his partner Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), the great window-bays and the other ranges of stone-mullioned windows in the beautifully laid salmon-pink brick walls were even more the principal theme of the design. But in the decorations, delicate in scale and elegant in craftsmanship, a new sort of eclecticism made its appearance. Basically the house derives from those manor houses of the sixteenth century that were uninfluenced by Renaissance ideas; but in the detailing of Cloverley there were Japanese motifs, notably the sunflower disks that Nesfield called his ‘pies’, reflecting the new interest in oriental art that such painters as Whistler and Rossetti were taking. Except for its relatively early date, Cloverley Hall has no place in a discussion of High Victorian Gothic, for it is characteristically Late Victorian (see Chapter [15]).
Nesfield’s partner Shaw, however, built in the sixties two churches that were still High Victorian in style, one in Yorkshire, the other at Lyons in France. Holy Trinity at Bingley of 1866-7 is one of the finest examples of the ‘Early French’ phase of the Victorian Gothic (Plate [94A]). Externally it builds up to a very tall central tower, superbly proportioned and very simply detailed, that more than rivals in quality Street’s at Oxford. Internally the fine random-ashlar stonework—there is no polychromy—the very bold and structural detailing of the square archivolts and the simply carved capitals illustrate even better than does Webb’s domestic work in brick the new and more sophisticated attitude towards the building crafts. The principles involved go back to Pugin; but now for the first time in Webb’s and Nesfield’s and Shaw’s work of the sixties one senses a real respect, at once intelligent and intuitive, for the differing nature of different materials. Such a respect would continue to give special virtue to the work of the most distinguished English and American architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapters [12], [13], [15], and [19]).
The Lyons church, which Shaw began in 1868, is perhaps the finest of the many Victorian churches built on the Continent for local English colonies, but very different indeed from that at Bingley. A city church set between tall blocks of flats, this is also very tall in its proportions and has a more urban character than that of the Yorkshire church. French freestone does not lend itself to the particular type of semi-rustic craftsmanship that was now rising to favour with the younger English architects; hence the Lyons church is less significant than the Bingley one in that respect. But Shaw was not primarily a church architect, nor did he long remain a High Victorian (see Chapter [12]).
More characteristic of the various new directions that the Victorian Gothic was taking in the mid sixties, directions that soon also led quite away from the High Victorian, are two new churches both designed well before Shaw’s at Bingley and Lyons were begun. At All Saints’ in Jesus Lane, Cambridge, begun in 1863, the spikiness of the Italianizing Victorian Gothic and the rugged structuralism of the ‘Early French’—rarely carried farther than in Bodley’s own early work—gave way to something much more English in inspiration. There is, for example, a very deep chancel and only one aisle, not to speak of a battlemented tower at one side, out of which rises a small stone spire. In fact, Bodley returned here to the fourteenth-century Decorated models preferred by Pugin, some so ‘late’ as to suggest the still forbidden Perpendicular.
Bodley now made even more use of the decorative talents of Morris and his associates than at St Michael’s, Brighton. His St Martin’s-on-the-Cliff, Scarborough, completed in 1863, is a finer church than either St Michael’s or All Saints’. Falling between them in style as well as in date, this has less historical importance, but it also was richly decorated by the Morris firm. At All Saints’ painted polychromy, but of a rather subtle order much superior to most of that of the forties, entirely replaced permanent polychrome. The brocade patterns stencilled on the walls seem almost to be designs of Pugin strengthened in their outlines and their colours by Morris. Although Bodley’s mature career as one of the two principal Late Victorian church architects did not really get under way until 1870, Victorian Gothic was evidently coming full circle at All Saints’, and the High Victorian phase was nearly over.