In a Surrey house of the same date, 1873, like Trevor Hall unhappily demolished, Webb moved rather farther in a similar direction. Joldwynds near Dorking was quite as symmetrical as Trevor Hall but even less Gothic. The vocabulary of tile-hanging on the upper storeys, with weather-boarding in the gables, was as authentically regional as that of Shaw’s nearby houses, but the vaguely eighteenth-century vernacular of the detailing was much simpler than Shaw’s repertory of moulded and cut brickwork at Lowther Lodge.

Nesfield, in designing what is now Barclays Bank in the Market Square of Saffron Walden in Essex, remained more eclectic, staying closer to the manorial mode of Cloverley Hall yet using again various Japanese motifs in the rich decoration. This was built in 1874. Godwin, who had just moved to London with the actress Ellen Terry and was now largely occupied with designing stage sets, developed further in the rooms of their rented house in Taviton Street in 1873-4 the Anglo-Japanese mode of his interiors of ten years earlier in Bristol. In 1874 he also arranged an exhibition of paintings in a similar spirit for his friend the painter Whistler at the new Grosvenor Galleries.[[268]]

In the mid seventies, however, it was Shaw, not Nesfield or Godwin, who occupied the centre of the architectural stage. In the Convent of the Sisters of Bethany of 1874 in St Clements Road at Boscombe near Bournemouth he disguised his use of concrete, then a relatively new building material, with his familiar Sussex vernacular. He did the same in a slightly later series of designs for cottages made of patented prefabricated concrete slabs.[[269]] It is worth noting, moreover, that the internal iron skeleton above the bold cantilever on the front of his Old Swan House (Plate [103]) of 1876 at 17 Chelsea Embankment in London provides in effect an example of what would later be called ‘skyscraper construction’, since it carries completely the weight of the brickwork of the upper walls; this was a decade before the ‘invention’ of this sort of construction in Chicago (see Chapter [14]). Shaw’s interest in technical developments and his enthusiasm for new materials and methods was evidently very great, always provided that he could bend them to his particular sort of retroactive pictorial vision. When he built the Jury House for the Paris Exhibition of 1878 of patent cement bricks, for example, he designed the façade very elegantly in his Late Stuart manner just as if it were of cut and moulded clay bricks. Godwin and Whistler, however, were showing at this same exhibition an Anglo-Japanese room of highly original character in association with Watt the furniture manufacturer.

Shaw’s excellent church of this period at Bournemouth, St Michael’s and All Angels, Poole Hill, begun in 1873, is Late Victorian in the crispness and clarity of its design but less archaeological than those of this date by Bodley. It seems to indicate that he could have made a great reputation as a church builder had he not been absorbed with secular work. But by the seventies secular work once again provided the field of major prestige in England, as it had hardly done since 1840, and so Shaw concentrated on it. Having revolutionized country-house design, he now turned, more definitely than at Lowther Lodge—by its size and open siting more a country house set in the city—to urban and suburban domestic work. In these his conquest was even more complete, at least in England and, as regards the suburbs, in America.

The Old Swan House and its neighbour Cheyne House at the outer end of the Chelsea Embankment, respectively of 1876 and 1875, are both mansions rather than ordinary terrace houses. They also represent a considerably further advance along the road towards a formal eighteenth-century revival than Lowther Lodge. Old Swan House is completely symmetrical, and the upper storeys are also quite regularly fenestrated in the early eighteenth-century way (Plate [103]). However, the total effect is still highly Picturesque because of the way these upper storeys are cantilevered forward; from the cantilever depend, moreover, elaborate oriels of much earlier character very similar to those Shaw had introduced at New Zealand Chambers. Such oriels he long continued to employ; they are not only a principal feature of his own house in Hampstead, built in this same year, but also of the much later Holl and Long houses. Cheyne House occupies an irregular curving plot with the entrance in Royal Hospital Road; but Shaw used all his considerable ingenuity to give it symmetrical façades, even though the plan actually has little of the orderliness of that of Lowther Lodge.

If these two Chelsea houses seem to presage an early return to the serenity of Georgian street architecture, Shaw’s J. P. Heseltine house of 1875 at 196 Queen’s Gate in South Kensington unleashed a flood of the most individualistic house-design London had ever seen. Stucco-fronted houses of builders’ Renaissance design were still being erected on contiguous sites when this tall gabled façade rose, totally oblivious of old and new neighbours. Cut brick, moulded brick, terracotta, all of the brightest red, surround very large mullioned windows in a composition that is gratuitously asymmetrical at the base but symmetrical in the upper storeys below the crowning gable. For fifteen years such houses proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of western London. The best are by Shaw himself, such as those at 68, 62, and 72 Cadogan Square—the first of 1879, the others of 1882—and those at 8-11 and 15 Chelsea Embankment of 1878-9; but more are by other architects, and the vast majority by builders. In the Chelsea Embankment range River House at No. 3 is by Bodley; Nos 4-6 are by Godwin; and No. 7 is by R. Phéné Spiers (1838-1916), an architect whose Parisian training did not restrain him from following Shaw.

Collingham Gardens of 1881-7 by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and his then partner Harold A. Peto (?-1890), a sort of square with variously designed houses, all gabled, opening on to a lawn in the centre, provides a still more complete illustration of what may be called Neo-Picturesque urbanism. Not at all Shavian, the detailing of many of these houses is very similar to that of Cuijpers’s Rijksmuseum and none of it Queen Anne. The contiguous mansions that George & Peto built in 1882 near by in Harrington Gardens, one for W. S. Gilbert at No. 19 (Plate [104B]), the other for Sir Ernest Cassel, the banker, are the most elaborate single London examples of their domestic work. The house of the composer of the Savoy Operas approaches very closely the German Meistersinger mode of the period, but the touch is much lighter—intentionally whimsical perhaps?—and both the organization of the whole and the execution of the profuse detail is very superior to what one finds in most contemporary German work (see Chapter 9).

Stevenson’s best and most Shavian houses in London are two that he built in 1878 in partnership with A. J. Adams in Lowther Gardens behind Lowther Lodge; however, those he built at 40-42 Pont Street have a certain interest because the mode that he exploited here is often called ‘Pont Street Dutch’, so ubiquitous is it in this part of Chelsea. This name also emphasizes the characteristic tendency of the late seventies and eighties towards varying the English late seventeenth-century vernacular mode by the introduction of Dutch and Flemish elements of detail, usually executed in terracotta, as George & Peto did in most of the Earls Court houses mentioned above. Thus, by the late seventies, the long-established London tradition of coherent terrace design came to an end. That was, on the whole, a real urbanistic misfortune, however excellent some of the best individual houses by the above-mentioned architects may be.

Shaw’s venture into the suburbs initiated a new domestic tradition of positive value and also a tradition of ‘planning’ that has continued with some modification down to the present, both in England and abroad. At Bedford Park, Turnham Green, then well beyond the western edges of built-up London, Shaw laid out in 1876 and largely designed an early ‘Garden Suburb’ (see Chapter [24]), in fact, almost a ‘new town’, similar in some ways to the New Towns of the present post-war period, but without any industries of its own. Small houses, mostly semi-detached, i.e., in pairs, stand in their own gardens, simply and casually built of good red brick with a certain amount of modest Queen Anne detailing. The scheme is very complete, including a church by Shaw that is most ingeniously styled to harmonize with the domesticity of the houses, a club, a tavern, shops, and so forth.[[270]] Godwin’s assistant Maurice B. Adams (1849-1933) and E. J. May (1853-1941) also worked here, as well as Godwin himself; indeed, some of the best houses are not by Shaw but by Godwin.

With characteristic versatility, while the construction of Bedford Park was proceeding in this simplified version of his middle manner, Picturesque but distinctly anti-Gothic, Shaw was also erecting at Adcote in Shropshire in 1877 a large Tudor manor house in reddish stone. This is notable for its restrained, almost ‘abstract’, detailing and for the tall mullioned window-wall of the hall bay, more than rivalling that of Cloverley Hall. Flete, a still larger house in Devon begun the year after Adcote, is also Tudor. Dawpool in Cheshire, demolished in 1926, was begun in 1882 in much the same mode but was even more extensive and elaborate than Flete. J. F. Doyle (1840-1913) of Liverpool collaborated on this.