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‘A Room Nearly Semi-circular’: Aspects of the Theatre and the Church from Harrison to Pugin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Christopher Wakeling
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Extract

The great urban churches that were built for Protestant worship in the three or four centuries after the Reformation have often been compared to theatres. With their common need to seat a large number of people within sight and earshot of a central point, theatres and churches have often adopted similar arrangements: galleried auditoria with carefully contrived patterns of seats and a minimum of columns. Floors were sometimes sloped to improve sight-lines, and private boxes might be provided in either type of building. During the later decades of the eighteenth century the idea of the semicircular auditorium was taken up by leading neo-classicists who went beyond Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico to Roman and Greek models for inspiration. Gondoin’s anatomy theatre (of 1769–74) for the Ecole de Chirurgie in Paris is the most celebrated example, providing a clear view of the proceedings for an audience of some 1,200. It was followed by a number of buildings for drama and opera, in which, as Pevsner noted, there was an associated move away from the provision of tiers of boxes. One might expect this enthusiasm for the practical values of the semicircular theatre to have had its counterpart in church building. To what extent it did is the subject of this essay.

Type
Section 6: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Churches and Chapels
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 265 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 To give but one example, Marcus Whiffen wrote of the ‘theatre-like naves’ of late Georgian churches and, by extension, their Lutheran counterparts, in Stuart and Georgian Churches (London, 1947-48), p. 54.

2 Sloping floors are especially common in nineteenth-century churches, such as Alexander Thomson’s Queens Park Church (1868-69) in Glasgow. Boxes were most common in eighteenth-century Lutheran churches, such as the Christianskirke in Copenhagen (begun in 1755 to the designs of Niels Eigtved). The Frauenkirche in Dresden (1722-43, by Georg Bahr) had forty-eight boxes or Betstiibchen, a word which Drummond misread as little bedrooms rather than prayer chambers ( Drummond, A. L., The Church Architecture of Protestantism (Edinburgh, 1934), p. 31)Google Scholar.

3 Pevsner, N., A History of Building Types (London, 1976), pp. 80–83 Google Scholar.

4 For the Amsterdam church see e.g. C. A., van Swigchem, Brouwer, T. and van Os, W., Een huis voor het Woord: Het protestantse kerkinterieur in Nederland tot 1900 (The Hague, 1984) pp. 72–73 Google Scholar.

5 The translation is by the present author, based on K. E. O., Fritsch, Der Kirchenbau des Protestantismus von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1893), p. 83 Google Scholar.

6 Sturm, L. C., Architectonisches Bedencken von protestantischen kleinen Kirchen Figur und Einrichtung (Hamburg, 1712)Google Scholar; enlarged as Vollständige Anweisung aller Art von Kirchen wohl anzugehen (1718).

7 Sopwith, T., A Historical and Descriptive Account of All Saints’ Church in Newcastle upon Tyne (Newcastle, 1826) p.47 Google Scholar.

8 Sopwith, op. cit., pp. 70-71.

9 Ibid., p. 47.

10 The drawing, formerly 1959.79(h), is now numbered 1959.79.8. It was included in The Modest Genius, an exhibition of Harrison’s work in 1977 at the Grosvenor Museum, and was illustrated on p. 16 of the exhibition catalogue as a ‘design for the West front of an unidentified church, circa 1790’. I understand that Dr Terry Friedman has independently suggested a possible connexion between the drawing and the All Saints’ competition, and that some years ago Professor J. M. Crook saw a drawing in Chester which he thought may have been for All Saints. I am grateful to Peter Boughton, of the Grosvenor Museum, and Dr Moira Rudolf for help with my enquiries.

11 See Picton, J. A., Memorials of Liverpool, 2 vols (London, 1873-75), 11, p. 423 Google Scholar, and Fleetwood-Hesketh, P., Murray’s Lancashire Architectural Guide (London, 1955), p. 154 Google Scholar. The chapel, in Moss Street, has been demolished since 1955.

12 See Bingham, N., C.A. Busby: The Regency Architect of Brighton and Hove (London, 1991), pp. 48, 53-54Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 74. Bingham convincingly argues that the design is likely to have been at least a joint work of Busby and his partner, A. H. Wilds, if not solely attributable to Busby.

14 The Builder, 31 October 1863, p. 776; Country Life, 14 April 1988, pp. 138-39.

15 An early watercolour view of the interior, by W. H. Brooke, is reproduced in Beevers, D., Marks, R. and Roles, J., Sussex Churches and Chapels (Brighton, 1989), p. 59 Google Scholar and as Fig. 3b in the present article. I am grateful to Richard Morrice for drawing my attention to number of other drawings by Brooke of St Mary-in-the-Castle, and for generously allowing me to see a draft of his forthcoming article about the development of Pelham Crescent and the church.

16 For Stier’s project, see Fritsch, Kirchenbau, pp. 191-94.

17 Ibid., pp. 189-90.

18. An extract from a letter ‘On the Construction of Chapels’ by Philip Sambell junior of Truro, dated 12 May 1841, Baptist Magazine, XXXIII (1841), p. 355.

19 Illustrated London News, 25 October 1845, p. 268. Hansom’s chapel in Belvoir Street was used as a retail warehouse during the 1940s, and opened as an adult education college in 1950-51.

20 Pugin, A. W., The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (London, 1843), p. 31 Google Scholar.

21 See e.g. The Builder, 26 March 1859, pp. 219-21 and Cadile, J. C., C. H. Spurgeon: An Interpretative Biography (London, 1933), p. 155 Google Scholar. The issues are further discussed in Wakeling, C. G., The Architecture of the Nonconformist Churches During the Victorian and Edwardian Years, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia, 1983 Google Scholar.

22 For Pugin’s association with the stage see Lambourne, L., ‘Pugin and the Theatre’, in Atterbury, P. and Wainwright, C., Pugin: A Gothic Passion (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 35–41 Google Scholar. On lecture theatres in Britain, see Markus, T. A., Buildings and Power (London and New York, 1993), pp. 229-44Google Scholar.

23 The first extract is from ‘a Protestant’ writing in the Salisbury and Wiltshire Herald, 8 October 1836, and the second from Simpson, R., ‘Recollections of Pugin’, in The Rambler, 3rd series, September 1861, p. 400 Google Scholar; both quoted in L. Lambourne, p. 41.

24 In Die Ockonomisch-technologische Encyclopädie von Krünitz, quoted in Fritsch, Kirchenbau, p. 152.

25 For examples see Fritsch, Kirchenbau, esp. pp. 237-406 and 516–30.

26 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 (London, 1841), p. 31 Google Scholar: Pugin encourages his readerto associate pews with the Protestant world by arguing that they were not ‘generally introduced as early as Edward VI’.