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George Gilbert Scott: A Pioneer of Constructional Polychromy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2016

Aidan Whelan
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Extract

The dominant historical account of constructional polychromy in Britain describes its emergence in the fifteenth century as a by-product of the introduction of brick-making under Flemish influence. Blue bricks, over-fired or possibly deliberately vitrified, were put to use creating patterns and colour contrasts in load-bearing walls. This constructional polychromy passed from fashion in the late Renaissance period before returning to popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, prompted, it is said, by John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53), and landmark buildings, notably William Butterfield’s All Saints, Margaret Street in London, designed in 1849.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 57 , 2014 , pp. 217 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2014

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References

Notes

1 Dixon, Roger and Muthesius, Stefan, Victorian Architecture (London, 1978), p. 201.Google Scholar

2 Jackson, Neil, ‘Christ Church Streatham and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), pp. 218–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Jackson, Neil, ‘Clarity or Camouflage? The Development of Constructional Polychromy in the 1850s and early 1860s’, Architectural History, 47 (2004), pp. 201–26.Google Scholar

4 Bradley, Simon, St Pancras Station (London, 2007), p. 41.Google Scholar

5 Pevsner, Nikolaus, Staffordshire: The Buildings of England (London, 1974), p. 261.Google Scholar

6 SirScott, George Gilbert, Personal and Professional Recollections, (1879), ed. Stamp, Gavin (Stamford, 1995).Google Scholar

7 Scott, , Recollections, p. 51.Google ScholarPubMed

8 Ibid., p. 59.

9 Ibid., p. 62.

10 Ibid., p. 48.

11 Ibid., p. 59

12 Ibid., p. 59.

13 At Knotting, Wellingborough, Irchester, Strixton and Famish.

14 Scott, , Recollections, p. 59.Google ScholarPubMed

15 Ibid., p. 250.

16 Ibid., p. 74.

17 Ibid., p. 109.

18 Ibid., p. 110–11.

19 Ibid., pp. 24–25.

20 Ibid., p. 58.

21 Ibid., p. 59.

22 Ibid., p. 111.

23 Morrison, Kathryn A., ‘The New Poor-Law Workhouses of George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt’, Architectural History, 40 (1997), pp. 184–203 (p. 195).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 At Thrapston, Northamptonshire; Downham Market, Norfolk; Freebridge Lynn, Norfolk; Swaffham, Norfolk; and Uppingham, Rutland.

25 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 188.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 190.

27 I am heavily indebted to two major sources of information, Morrison’s, ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, pp.199–200 Google Scholar, cited above, and Higginbotham’s, Peter website www.workhouses.org.uk (accessed on 3 September 2013).Google Scholar

28 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 200.Google Scholar

29 Higginbotham, Peter, ‘Lichfield Staffordshire’, www.workhouses.org.uk/Lichfield (accessed on 3 September 2013)Google Scholar.

30 Scott, , Recollections, p. 100.Google ScholarPubMed

31 His partnership with Moffatt dates from after his marriage in June 1838. See ibid., p. 100.

32 We may compare Scott and Moffatt’s Chesterfield Poor Law Institution of 1838–39 for a Classical elevation facing a virtually identical floor plan. The horizontals are emphasized and no functional hierarchy can be read externally.

33 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 190.Google Scholar

34 Thaxted and Saffron Waldon are within a few miles.

35 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 200.Google Scholar

36 Scott, , Recollections, p. 100.Google ScholarPubMed

37 Richard Wildman’s claim that Scott ‘preferred to forget his work on the unions’ in Longmate, Norman, The Workhouse (London, 1974), p. 287 Google Scholar, does not take account of this evidence of Scott’s pride in at least the later institutions.

38 Scott, , Recollections, p. 95.Google ScholarPubMed

39 Ibid., p. 86.

40 As Flaunden is claimed wholly by Scott as a family commission with no input from Moffatt, it confirms that the use of constructional polychromy within the partnership originated with Scott.

41 Augustus Pugin had used blue brick headers to create letters and numbers in the walls of his St Marie’s Grange, Alderbury, Wiltshire, 1835–37. As Scott details his sketchy knowledge of the younger Pugin prior to 1841 in Recollections, p. 88, we can be certain he did not know of this innovation.

42 Scott, , Recollections, p. 108.Google ScholarPubMed

43 Cambridge Camden Society, A Few Words to Church-builders, 1st edn (Cambridge, 1841).Google Scholar

44 Scott was pained by its deviations from Ecclesiological norms, but that is a late nineteenth-century concern and should not cloud our assessment of it.

45 St Nicholas, Lincoln; St Mark, Birmingham; Christchurch, Bridlington; and St Mary, Hanwell, Middlesex.

46 Scott may also have been influenced to adopt flinted Romanesque by Augustus Pugin’s recently completed St James Church, Reading of 1837–40. This surprisingly assured Romanesque chapel afforded no precedent for Scott and Moffatt’s use of constructional polychromy.

47 Church House, Bingham, Nottingham, of 1846 and Astbury School House, Cheshire, of 1848.

48 Scott, , Recollections, p. 82.Google ScholarPubMed

49 Ibid., p. 72.

50 Scott felt himself ‘bound in a great degree to the arrangements laid down by the published plans of the commissioners …’. Ibid., p. 81.

51 Ibid., p. 77.

52 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 190.Google Scholar

53 Scott, , Recollections, p. 100.Google ScholarPubMed

54 Morrison, , ‘New Poor Law Workhouses’, p. 190.Google Scholar

55 Scott, , Recollections, p. 87–88.Google ScholarPubMed

56 This despite Pugin having previously constructed a Jacobean lodge at Clarendon Park, Alderbury, Wiltshire in 1837 in plain yellow brick and stone dressings.

57 London, House of Lords Record Office, PUG /3 /110, Lord Shrewsbury to A.W.N. Pugin, quoted in Fisher, Michael, Perfect Cheadle: St Giles Catholic Church, Cheadle, Staffordshire (Stafford, 2004).Google Scholar

58 Cambridge Camden Society, A Few Words, p. 9.Google ScholarPubMed

59 The partial exception to this is Holy Trinity Church, Halstead, Essex of 1843–44, which used a far from miserable pale yellow brick for the nave arcades and external dressings, but was faced in flint.

60 Scott, , Recollections, p. 89 Google ScholarPubMed. The ‘new man’ had not, in practice, completely morally regenerated. His St Mary’s Church, Wimbledon of 1843 had iron piers covered in plaster to mimic stone shafting.

61 Pugin, A.W.N., Contrasts: or A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day, 2nd edn (1841; reprinted Leicester, 1969).Google Scholar

62 For example, St Mary’s Church, Flaxley, Gloucestershire of 1856; the Vaughan Library, Harrow, Middlesex, of 1861–63; and St Michael’s Church, Welshampton, Shropshire of 1863.

63 Here Jackson states:‘… in the 1840s Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin gave constructional polychromy a moral quality — an expression of honesty in construction — at the Grange and St Augustine’s Church, at Ramsgate (1845–50).’ See Jackson, , ‘Clarity or Camouflage?’, p. 201.Google ScholarPubMed By 1847 Scott had started work on Christchurch, Ramsgate, and will have known St Augustine’s. A direct influence here is possible.

64 This group included School Field House, Rugby, Warwickshire of 1852; the Church of the Resurrection, Dresden, Staffordshire, of 1853; the Hartshill cottages, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, of 1857; the Sandbach Literary Institute of 1857; Brownsover Hall, Rugby, Warwickshire, of 1857; and St Michael and All Angels, Crewe Green, Cheshire, of 1857–58.

65 Also associated with these characteristic are the slightly later Great Barr Hall Chapel, West Midlands, of 1863 and St Andrew, Leicester, of 1860–62. Parallel experiments were Scott’s St Barnabas, Woolwich Dockyard, London, of 1857–59, which applied English brick polychromy to French architectural forms, and St Andrew’s Hospital Chapel, Northampton, which resurrected the stripy polychromy of the county’s medieval churches.

66 Other examples of this St Pancras-related group include the Vaughan Library, Harrow, Middlesex, of 1861–63; Hafodunos House, Llangernyw, Conwy, of 1861–68; the Fitzroy Library, Lewes, East Sussex, of 1862; Leeds Infirmary, West Yorkshire, of 1863–68; Beckett’s Bank, Leeds, West Yorkshire, of 1867; Brill’s Baths, Brighton, East Sussex, of 1869; and Holy Trinity, Shanghai, China, of 1869.

67 An exception may be the Sir William Petre Almshouses, Ingatestone, Essex, of 1840 to the north-west of Billericay. These show strong similarity to Scott’s recently constructed workhouse nearby.