Half a century earlier the prestige of a ranking novelist, Sir Walter Scott, had helped to launch one of the most popular Picturesque modes, the Scottish Baronial, when he asked Blore to imitate the old Border castles in designing his house at Abbotsford. Now in 1861 Thackeray, a novelist many of whose novels were set, not in the Middle Ages, but in early eighteenth-century England and Virginia, designed for himself a house in Palace Green in London opposite Kensington Palace, much of which is more or less of that particular period. This house echoes the modest red-brick manor houses of the time of Queen Anne on both sides of the Atlantic, but it could hardly be less plausible. At the same time Wellington College by John Shaw (1803-70), which was begun in 1856, was reaching completion in a much richer, almost Second Empire, version of the Wren style of 1700.
The serious adumbration of a Queen Anne mode really began a few years later with a small public commission of Nesfield’s. His lodge at Kew Gardens, designed in 1866 and built in 1867, though simple, is already almost an archaeological exercise in early eighteenth-century[[266]] brickwork (Figure [18]). This Kew lodge he followed up a few years later with a big but remote country house, Kinmel Park near Abergele in Wales, built in 1871-4 though possibly designed a bit earlier. To this we will be returning shortly. Shaw had nothing to do with Kinmel Park, since his partnership with Nesfield came to an end in 1868; that was just after the completion of Cloverley Hall on which he certainly collaborated even if his personal contribution there cannot now be readily distinguished. Already in 1866, before Shaw parted from Nesfield, however, his own career had opened with the designing of the Bingley church (Plate [94A]) and of Glen Andred, near Withyham in Sussex, a house of great originality of character (Plate [102B]).
Figure 18. W. Eden Nesfield: Kew Gardens, Lodge, 1867, elevation
Glen Andred is little more related to the new Queen Anne mode of the Kew lodge than it is to the Gothic of the Bingley church. It does, however, seem to derive somewhat from earlier Nesfield work, or possibly from Devey. Where the High Victorian Gothic had rejected English precedent in favour of Italian and French models, this first Sussex house of Shaw’s is resolutely regional in character. The tile-hung walls above a red-brick ground storey, the white-painted wooden casements, almost as extensive as the ‘window-walls’ of Cloverley, the loose asymmetrical organization of the massing are all related to a local Sussex and Surrey vernacular of no particular period (Plate [102B]). The entrance front is more formal, carefully balanced if not precisely symmetrical, and here the pargetting in the central gable is of Jacobethan character. But the great stair-window and the graceful massing of the tiled roofs, quite in the finest tradition of the Picturesque but handled with a new ease and casualness, are more important elements of Shaw’s first manner, which can be called ‘Shavian Manorial’. The hall across the front between the two projecting wings is modest in size, with the principal living rooms loosely grouped round it. Thus this may be considered an early example of what I have rather clumsily called the ‘agglutinative plan’, but as it was never published the extent of its actual influence must remain uncertain.
There was little logic to Shaw’s regionalism. Already in 1868 he was applying his Sussex vocabulary of materials and forms to the Cookridge Convalescent Hospital at Horsforth near Leeds in stony Yorkshire. In general, however, he kept this manner for work near London, using it even as late as 1894 for a house called The Hallams near Bramley in Surrey. He also introduced tile-hanging on some of his houses in London such as West House, at 118 Campden Hill Road, of 1877 and Walton House in Walton Street of 1885 as well as—rather more appropriately—on the suburban Hampstead house that he built in the same year for Kate Greenaway at 39 Frognal.
Shaw’s first client had been a painter, J. C. Horsley, R.A., for whom he made some alterations in the early sixties and whose son later entered his office. Glen Andred was for another painter, E. W. Cooke, later R.A., and West House was for George Boughton, R.A. Kate Greenaway, better known today than these forgotten academicians, was an illustrator of children’s books much patronized by Ruskin. F. W. Goodall, R.A. (1870), Marcus Stone, R.A. (1876), Luke Fildes, R.A. (1877), Edwin Long, R.A. (1878, and again in 1888), Frank Holl, R.A. (1881), are other successful painters and fellow academicians—Shaw became an A.R.A. himself in 1872 and an R.A. in 1877—for whom he built houses (with the dates of the commissions). All but Goodall’s house at Harrow Weald were either in Melbury Road in Kensington in London or else in Fitzjohn’s Avenue near his own Hampstead house of 1875 at 6 Ellerdale Road. Where the prosperous artists, themselves presumably aping the aristocracy, led, magnates and City men were now quick to follow. The Newcastle steelmaster Sir William Armstrong had Shaw build Cragside near Rothbury in Northumberland for him as early as 1870.
Leyswood, near Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1868 at the same time as the Cookridge Hospital, was one of Shaw’s most influential works (Plate [123]). More archaeologically manorial than Glen Andred, it provided a mass of suggestions that English and American architects borrowed again and again over the next twenty years and more. Because of Shaw’s later leadership, it is natural for posterity to note what was new here; contemporaries, used to the wild vagaries of the High Victorian Gothic, saw Leyswood rather as a reaction against the ‘modernism’ of the fifties and earlier sixties. Tile-hung upper storeys and barge-boarded gables, richly half-timbered—the half-timbering a mere sham applied over solid brickwork!—long banks of casements that approach the twentieth-century ‘ribbon-window’ and great mullioned bays providing ‘window-walls’ as extensive as Nesfield’s at Cloverley clothed an interior that was not at all medieval but a more developed example than Glen Andred of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure [19]). The main reception rooms were grouped about a central hall, from one side of which rose elaborate stairs arranged in several flights about an open well. Webb had already essayed this sort of planning in a more orderly way at Arisaig begun in 1863 (Figure [23]); but it was Shaw’s version, not Webb’s, that was generally imitated (see Chapter [15]).
Figure 19. Norman Shaw: Leyswood, Sussex, 1868, plan