Shortly after Leyswood, and following fairly closely its manner although with fewer Late Gothic elements of detail, came the house later called Grim’s Dyke built at Harrow Weald in 1870-2 for F. W. Goodall, afterwards the country house of the composer W. S. Gilbert, and Preen Manor in Shropshire also designed in 1870. Then followed Hopedene, near Holmbury in Surrey, and Boldre Grange, near Lymington in Hampshire, in 1873; Wispers, Midhurst, in Sussex, in 1875; Chigwell Hall in Essex, and Pierrepoint, near Farnham in Surrey, in 1876; Merrist Wood near Guildford in Surrey, and Denham at Totteridge in Hertfordshire, in 1877; and so on down into the nineties.
After their showing each year at the Royal Academy Exhibition Shaw’s brilliant pen-and-ink perspectives of these houses were published photo-lithographically in the professional press; moreover, from 1874 the plans were usually given as well, the first published being that of Hopedene. Not surprisingly these were the most influential of Shaw’s works abroad, providing in the late seventies and early eighties one of the most important sources of the American ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter [15]). Beside them, moreover, Webb’s more prominent London works of the late sixties, the house for George Howard, later Earl of Carlisle, built in 1868 near Thackeray’s in Palace Green, Kensington, and the small office building at 19 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, also of 1868, appear somewhat cranky and overstudied, still rather too Gothic in detail and lacking the comfortable air of his country-house work. However, the modest London studio-house at 14 Holland Park Road, Kensington, which was designed in 1864 and built in 1865 for Val Prinsep, like Morris and Spencer Stanhope one of the crew of artists who worked on the decoration of the Oxford Union, must have been more like the Red House and Benfleet Hall before it was recurrently enlarged by Webb in the following decades. Another London studio-house for the water-colour painter G. B. Boyce at 35 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which was begun in 1869, is in rather better condition today and quite exemplary in its quiet way despite some changes by Webb and others.
At this point came Nesfield’s Kinmel Park. Shaw and other advanced architects must have been aware of the character of the designs for this house from 1870 or 71, even though it was neither shown at the Royal Academy nor published then, and took some four years to complete. Kinmel is much more complicated stylistically than Nesfield’s Kew lodge of 1866-7, but it offers the next step in the development of the new Queen Anne mode. At first sight it might appear to be related rather to Second Empire work, for the main block on the entrance side is symmetrical, high-roofed, and dominated by a bold central pavilion. Moreover, the detailing of the red-brick façades with their profuse light-coloured stone trim is almost as French of Louis XIII’s time as it is English of Queen Anne’s day. The garden front, which is carefully ordered but not symmetrical, and the service wing to the south, much more loosely composed and with a profusion of small-paned double-hung sash-windows and dormers, are more definitely English and also more original.
Webb had been using such windows and even approaching the Late Stuart vernacular in his houses for a year or two before Kinmel was begun. This was most evident at Trevor Hall (Figure [25]), built at Oakleigh Park near Barnet in Hertfordshire in 1868-70, for that modest country house was quite symmetrical in design although almost devoid of any sort of ‘period’ detail, whether Gothic or Late Stuart. To more acclaim, Webb had also been responsible for designing with William Morris a little earlier, in 1866 and in 1867, the Armoury in St James’s Palace and the Refreshment Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former, particularly, is a very original masterpiece of nineteenth-century decoration, hardly at all related to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic, yet reflecting the eighteenth century only as regards the treatment of the wainscoting and the door and window casings (which may be of eighteenth-century date). The Refreshment Room is also very fine and now accessible to the public (Plate [97B]).
Just after 1870, while Kinmel was still in construction, the main line of development moved from the country into London. The Education Act of 1870 required the building of innumerable new schools, particularly by the London School Board. Among the architects successful in the first competitions that were held for designs for these schools were E. R. Robson (1835-1917) and J. J. Stevenson (1831-1908); they used a non-Gothic vocabulary in London stock bricks trimmed with red bricks cut or moulded along seventeenth-century vernacular lines.[[267]] This mode was not unrelated to the more definitely Queen Anne models provided by the Kew lodge and by Kinmel, but the new London schools were more irregular in composition and naturally much more cheaply built. Robson, appointed architect to the London School Board in 1871, soon made this mode the official one for schools in London County and this, of course, before long influenced Board School design nationally.
In 1871 Stevenson, like Shaw a Scot out to make a London reputation, built a new house for himself in what is now Bayswater Road. This he named the Red House, like Morris’s at Bexley Heath of a decade earlier, in order to call attention to the fact that its brickwork was not covered with stucco but exposed like that of the Thackeray and Howard houses in Palace Green. In fact, however, it was built like the Board Schools of brownish stock bricks with red-brick detail elaborately moulded, gauged, and cut in the Late Stuart way. Although Stevenson’s house had little of the real elegance of Kinmel or the natural ease of Shaw’s manors, its novelty and its fairly conspicuous location would have attracted attention in any case. But Stevenson, a very accomplished publicist, saw the advantage of proclaiming for this hybrid mode a name, ‘Queen Anne’, which was evidently no less applicable to Nesfield’s Kew lodge and Kinmel or even to his friend Robson’s schools. Thus was a revival formally launched.
Two new buildings in London by Shaw, begun in 1872 and in 1873, were definitely in the new mode. Only at this point, indeed, does the term Queen Anne begin to make any sense as applied to Shaw’s work. Despite the valid claim to priority that Stevenson made for his Red House in a paper read in 1874 at the Architects’ Conference ‘On the recent reaction of taste in architecture’ in which he claimed the Queen Anne mode was a ‘Re-Renaissance’ (sic), and his own relative success from this time on as a fashionable London house-architect, the Queen Anne became Shaw’s from the moment that he first turned his hand to it in 1872. Whether the original idea came to him from Devey or from Nesfield—he had probably worked himself on the drawings for the Kew lodge—or was merely an attempt to outbid a rival Scotsman on the London scene makes no real difference.
New Zealand Chambers, the office building which Shaw erected in 1872-3 in Leadenhall Street in the City, was certainly totally unlike anything the Age of Anne ever saw except for the cut-brick detailing of the pedimented entrance. Boldly projecting red brick piers divided the tall façade into three bays, while between them rose oriel windows broken by ornately sculptured spandrels imitated from the mid-seventeenth-century ones on Sparrow’s House at Ipswich. The small panes and thick white sash-bars of these windows made the scale surprisingly domestic in contrast to the usual boldness of High Victorian commercial work, and the whole composition was effectively tied together by an ornately pargeted cove cornice that ran straight across the top (see Chapter 14). Above this the rather simple range of continuous dormers in the roof was very much in the spirit of the ‘ribbon-window’ bands on his country houses.
So dazzled were contemporaries by the lush exuberance of Shaw’s ornament on the spandrels and the cove that they hardly noticed the way in which the bold articulation of this façade by the brick piers, with the areas between nearly all window, frankly reflecting the internal iron construction, provided most satisfactory lighting for the offices; nor that Shaw, while keeping his scale intimate in all the detailing, was not afraid to stress the verticality of his façade by avoiding emphasis on the storey lines. Only the weaker features of the design—the arbitrary asymmetry of the entrance, the profuse ornamentation, and the underscaling—were generally imitated.
Lowther Lodge, built in 1873-4, a large free-standing mansion in Kensington Gore, still survives—it is now the home of the Royal Geographical Society—as New Zealand Chambers does not. Here the vocabulary of cut and moulded brick is more consistently Late Stuart, although the general composition, with many gables, two tall polygonal bay-windows, quantities of dormers, and tall fluted chimney stacks, is as romantically complex as that of Shaw’s manors in Sussex and Surrey. However, both the front and the rear façades, when studied, will be found to approximate symmetry in their principal portions as does the front of Glen Andred; and the main rooms inside, the hall at the front and the drawing-room behind, are quite symmetrical and have recognizably Early Georgian (rather than specifically Queen Anne) fireplaces and door and window casings, although their grouping is still, so to say, agglutinative.