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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
In Ornament and Crime Adolf Loos compared architectural decoration with the scriblings on lavatory walls; graffiti recently discovered on a basement wall in Cambridge provide a curious comment on one of the architectural controversies of Victorian England.
In 1976 Mr Christopher B. George of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, came across pencilled drawings behind old shelving on the plaster walls of a long disused basement storeroom in No. 22 Parkside, an Early Victorian house on the east side of Parker's Piece. As well as scribbled calculations and an unidentifiable rough plan, there were caricature drawings of a mongrel-styled building with a Classical portico and a Gothic tower, labelled ‘What Palmerston wants for the Foreign Office. Hardwick would have done it better, but he's dead’, and of a huge statue, labelled ‘Albert the Good, but he's dead too. G.G.S.’ (PI. 60).
1 I am very grateful to Mr George and to Edwin Foxton, then Domestic Bursar of Emmanuel College, for bringing these graffiti to my attention and for having them photographed. They are reproduced here by kind permission of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
2 British Architect (14 May 1897), p. 341.
3 The design is analysed in Scott's Essay on the History of English Church Architecture (1881), pp. 181–85.
4 Mr Foxton was told this by Mrs Wright, from whom the College bought the property. Oak panelling in a ground floor room is also said to have come from St John's.
5 For the history of the government offices designs, see scott's personal & professional recollections (1879), pp. 177–201, which was discussed in architectural history, xix (1976), pp. 57–58, and the note in the scott family volume of the RIBA Drawings Collection catalogue p. 58.,
6 Colvin, H., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (1978), p. 387 Google Scholar; Hermione Hobhouse in Seven Victorian Architects (1976), p. 40.
7 Scott filled a notebook with humorous stories and anecdotes which is now at the RIBA. When he was incarcerated in the Bethlem Hospital in 1883, the case notes record that he was ‘very jolly and amusing.’ His defence plea in the lunacy trial the following year was ‘alcoholic mania’.
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