Geoffrey Tyack - George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) and his architecture in Oxford

So, very nice to see so many of you here. I was expecting a handful, I didn't think Gilbert Scott would draw the crowds, but there you are, he has. So, the first question really is why am I talking about Gilbert Scott and why am I talking about him in Oxford? The answer to the first is that ever since I was a boy I've been fascinated with the Gothic Revival and I pursued it on and off through my academic career and I'm a fellow of Kellogg College and I've done a lot of teaching in this building over the years. A few years ago there was a centenary of Scott's birth, he was born in 1812, and we held a weekend conference here with papers from various people on aspects of Scott's achievement. And I decided to talk about Scott in Oxford, I'd already written about his chapel at Exeter College, which I think is one of the great buildings of Oxford, which I'll say quite a bit about, and eventually the proceedings of the conference were published as a book which you can only buy online actually nowadays, but anyway, if you want to have a look at it, come and have a look at it afterwards. I've got a very nice picture on the front of what is probably his most famous building, which is the Albert Memorial in London. And I think before we look at Scott's achievement in Oxford, we want to look a little bit at why he's such an interesting architect. And I think the answer to that can be expressed in two words, which are modern Gothic. Could you speak up a tiny bit? Yes, I'll try to. What did you just say? I said modern Gothic. Oh, thank you. Yes, modern Gothic. The idea that Gothic is a style which can be used in any period. We tend to think that Gothic architecture is something limited to the Middle Ages, not surprisingly, and to churches, again, not surprisingly. But in fact, we're looking at two buildings here built in the 19th century that are not churches and are Gothic. The Albert Memorial, pretty obviously, is taking its inspiration from some of the tombs you see in Italian towns, especially if you go to Verona, you will see monuments like that. The St Pancras Hotel, which I've always regarded as one of the great buildings in London, I still feel inspired when I walk up that approach from the Euston Road and past that entryway there. This was, of course, intended as the public face of the Midland Railway when it extended its line from Derby down to London and was competing with the adjacent Great Northern at King's Cross for traffic. So it wanted to make a real show of its presence, and that's what it does. And it does so in the Gothic style. Now, that again was by no means an inevitable thing in the 1860s. The middle of the 19th century was a period rather like today, actually, of stylistic confusion. There is no one architectural style today. You can see almost anything. And in today, the mid-19th century is similar. And you chose a style partly for the message that it gave you. It's not purely an inevitable thing. Architecture can say something. And what that is saying is not only that the Midland is a great railway, and this is a very nice comfortable hotel to stay in when you come down from Sheffield for business, but also that there is a link between the civic grandeur of medieval civic buildings in Italy and Germany. Think of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Think of the Siena. And think of Venice. And there's a link between the grandeur of modern London and that of the great Italian citizen. We know that because, just like today, people liked writing and pontificating about architecture. And when they did so, they often drew that very comparison. So, what about Oxford? Well, Oxford is very different. We need to take ourselves back to Oxford in the middle of the 19th century, when it was a very small town in comparison to today. The North Oxford had hardly begun. It didn't really get started until the 1860s. There was nothing virtually on the south side of the river or to the west, and they hadn't started expanding out along the Cowley Road to the east either. So basically, Oxford was still largely confined within its medieval boundaries, which go back to the 10th century. And over the years, of course, the buildings had been repaired and rebuilt, and they were in many ways in a rather ramshackle state, as we can see from this picture of the bottom of St Giles. Remember, the countryside virtually started at St Giles in those days. They had herds of sheep coming down there, and so on. So this would be really the first you would see if you came into the centre of the town. And what do we have? Well, we have two church towns. There's St Michael at the north gate there, and here is St Mary Magdalene's, and here is a row of Tudor or Elizabethan houses built right next to St Mary Magdalene's Church. It's all very rustic and rather old-fashioned. So the idea then arose to pull those buildings down and to erect a monument to the Protestant martyrs who had been killed by Queen Mary in the 1550s. Sorry, my mind is firmly set in the 19th century at the moment. And this was, in a sense, a gesture in the religious battles being fought at the time. Remember that this was the Oxford of Newman and the Oxford movement, which had stressed the Catholic origins of the Church of England. So what are people doing erecting a monument to Protestant martyrs who were killed under the Catholic Queen Mary? Well, the answer is that, in a way, the Oxford movement provoked a kind of reaction and people felt that the Protestant element in the Church of England should be emphasised too. And so a man called Charles Goliathring, who was a former pupil of Newman, as it happened, got together a group of people to build a monument. Now remember, as you walk down Broad Street, you can see a cross inscribed in the roadway which marks the site of the actual burning of the stake of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer. They couldn't build the monument there, they built it at the closest available site. And the committee for the new monument laid down a fairly strict guideline as to what was going to be built. It had to be modelled on the Eleanor Cross at Waltham Abbey in Hertfordshire. Remember that when Queen Eleanor, the widow of Edward I, died, her coffin came down from Northamptonshire and at the spots where it stopped overnight, a commemorative cross was put up. And of course the one closest to Westminster was at Charing Cross in London, where a copy of it is still there in front of Charing Cross Railway Station. So on the left we see the original Eleanor Cross, and then in the middle a design by a rather obscure architect who did a little bit of work in Oxford called J.M. Derrick. And then finally Scott's Monument, which is what we see today, and we can see that that has taken the place of those ramshackle houses. And as I'll show you in a second, it provides a focal point as you enter the city from St Giles. So what do we know about Scott at this time? Well Scott started off, he was a vicar's son, from a place called Gorkut in Buckinghamshire. And he went to London to train as an architect in the 1830s, and designed a number of perfectly competent, but not particularly inspiring buildings. He specialised, as it happened, with his partner who was called Moffat, in workhouses, which at best are not the most exciting buildings. But then his eyes were opened to Gothic, like those of many other people, through reading A. W. N. Pugin's books. Pugin, you may know, probably a lot of you do know, was probably the most vocal and certainly the most persuasive champion of Gothic architecture in the 1830s and 40s. He was converted to Roman Catholicism and developed a very strong rapport with the Middle Ages as an age of faith, which he saw and which he believed needed to be revived as against the utilitarian philosophy and the ugliness of the factories and so on of early 19th century England. In other words, Pugin saw himself as a kind of prophet and rebel. And he wrote his two most important books, which were called Contrasts, in which he contrasted drawings of modern buildings and modern cities against what he believed the same buildings would have looked like in the Middle Ages. So, for instance, he has a picture of the entrance to Christchurch, which of course is Tudor Gothic, just before the Reformation, next to the entrance to King's College London, which was an extremely utilitarian building, put up with virtually no money at all, on the south side of the Strand. In a way it's a little bit crude, but it makes its point that the Middle Ages were not, you know, even today we say something is medieval, meaning that it's in some ways no good, it's not well done, etc. etc. For Pugin, the opposite was true. The modern age was the one where things were bad, the medieval age was better. And contrast makes that point very well. And it does make also the point that buildings tell us something. The second book he wrote was called True Principles of Pointed Old Christian Architecture. It came out in 1841, and that book endeavoured to explain why Gothic architecture was so good. And basically what he said was that Gothic cathedrals and churches were built on the principles of what he called ornamented construction. So when you go into a Gothic cathedral, you see the construction of the vault. When you look at the outside of it, you see the buttresses which are supporting the vault. But when you look at them more closely, you will see that they are ornamented with all kinds of beautiful details and grotesque carvings and so on and so forth. Now by contrast to that, Pugin thought that classical buildings just simply loaded the ornaments onto a building. It had no kind of fundamental relationship to the construction of the building. Now you can argue with that. I would argue with that actually. I think it was simplistic and exaggerated. But nevertheless, it was a message that people wanted to listen to. And Scott, when he read Pugin, having developed his practice designing workhouses and not very interesting churches, suddenly said, and felt that it was like awakening from a dream. It was a classic conversion experience, if we think in those terms, of evangelicals who were converted by reading a biblical passage or hearing an inspiring sermon. It was a little bit like that. And thereafter, he felt he had to develop his career in a different way and he started designing buildings like this, which at least at first sight can almost be mistaken for genuine Gothic buildings, especially given the fact that the genuine Gothic buildings had often been restored by this period. So half the time they looked like 19th century ones anyway. But that's slightly beside the point. Anyway, I think you can see what we're getting at here with the design of the Martyr's Memorial and its close derivation from an actual English Gothic building of the most approved period, which was what Pugin and others called middle-pointed, which we tend to call decorated Gothic, as a kind of story of Gothic, which starts with a rather simple style, evolving out of Romanesque in the late 12th century, which was dubbed early English. It then becomes more highly ornamented and more confident, that's decorated, that's the style of, for instance, the ancient choir of Lincoln Cathedral, if you know it, or Exeter Cathedral. And then it all goes decadent with the style which we now call perpendicular Gothic, or late Gothic, where the detailing all becomes rather mechanical. So the argument goes. Again, I don't buy that argument myself. I think each of the periods of Gothic has wonderful buildings. But Pugin did. Pugin liked dogmatism, and he very dogmatically said middle-pointed is the best, if it's the best, that's what you've got to do. So that's what Scott did here. He also added a North Isle church, and if you know St Mary Mags, you'll actually realise that it's very, very difficult to distinguish it from the genuinely medieval part of the church. In other words, Scott has really done his homework. He's looked at decorated Gothic window tracery, such as we see up here, and all the details are correct. There's a slight kind of irony to this, just as an aside, which is that the restoration of St Mary Mags was done partly in connection with this monument to the Protestant martyrs, and the vicar at the time was very much a traditional low church anchor. Well, if you walk into St Mary Mags today, you walk into a church which has the full panoply of modern Anglo-Catholicism, with images of saints and candles and a pervasive smell of incense, you name it. If you go along to High Mass at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, you can see it for yourself. So that is not intended by Scott, but that's the church as it looks today. And here we have the martyrs' memorial as it would have been seen by people coming into town along St Charles, with the church tower and the new porch behind it. So this is a Scott ensemble. And then on the right, looking the other way, interestingly enough, and making the point about the stylistic diversity of this period, the Taylor Institute and Ashmolean Museum are exactly the same date as the martyrs' memorial, designed by an equally talented architect, C. R. Cockerell, who had travelled in Greece, had excavated the temple of Apollo Bassi in Sardinia, and who believed that the classical tradition was as appropriate for modern use as the Gothic tradition. So you place your monument, you take your choice, and here we have both of them right next to each other. A general point to make here, of course, is that we're at the beginning of a period when Oxford gets comprehensively rebuilt. We like to think of Oxford as a medieval city. In fact, it's a medieval city with a heavy overlay of the 19th and early 20th centuries. So let's now get on, and let's focus on two other buildings, firstly, Exeter College Chapel, and secondly, the restoration of Christ Church Cathedral. But I'll look very briefly at a couple of the other ones as well. So let's get on to Exeter Chapel. So, Exeter College is a complicated set of buildings, even by Oxford standards. The college actually goes back to 1314, it's one of the oldest colleges in Oxford, but hardly anything survives of its medieval buildings, except for a tower, which you can hardly see in this picture, it's actually up here, which is late medieval. What happened was that the college gradually extended in the 17th and early 18th centuries to have a quadrangle, which we see here, and a new chapel, the interior of which we're looking at on the right. This was part of a scheme and a way to revive the college. A lot of colleges fall into kind of, I wouldn't say disuse, but they need a kind of second foundation, and that's what happened in the 17th century, when the numbers of students in Oxford were going up a lot. So Exeter decided to attract a lot of them by building new buildings, which we see here, and giving them a new hall, and a very splendid new hall in fact, which is on the right here, and a new chapel. The new chapel, had it lasted, would now be regarded as one of the really attractive buildings of the 17th century in Oxford. It was a two-aisled building on quite a cramped site, just inside the old city wall, and this is a picture that was done just before it was pulled down and replaced by Scott's chapel, in which the artist gives a little contemporary staffage of 17th century people wearing contemporary costumes there. Interestingly enough, a lot of the panelling survived demolition. Some of it is in the house just to the north of Abingdon, some of it is in the basement of Oxford Town Hall, where the City Council can't work out what to do with it, and other bits of it have turned up all over the place actually, in churches in Oxfordshire. So the sort of eccentric thing to do is to trace the panelling of the old chapel. Anyway, it wasn't good enough for the fellows in the 1850s, because by the 1850s the Oxford movement was having a big effect on all the Oxford colleges. They wanted to have more dignified worship, and Exeter, which was always a large college, always needed to have lots of students, because it didn't have a very big endowment. It's not like, say, New College of Old Souls, to take an extreme example. It needed to have lots of students. So the fellows felt that the chapel wasn't big enough. It was also in the despised late Gothic perpendicular style, which was no good. So they instead had a competition, which is what you usually did for buildings in this period, for new buildings. This is what Scott came up with in his first design in 1847. What he was going to do was build a chapel exactly on the site of the old one, only three or four days wide, not very big. The reason it wasn't bigger was that the grounds of the lodgings were there. We'll see what happened to them in a minute. But this was again going to be an example of English middle-pointed or decorated architecture. If we look at the east window there, you can see that Scott probably went and had a look at the east window of Merton Chapel, built in the 1290s, before doing it. Architecture has always been very good at borrowing from the work of other architects. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It was going to have a wooden roof, elaborate stalls, carvings and all that sort of thing. And they put a miniature cross for the bell at the west end. But the money didn't accrue and so the designs gathered dust. By the 1850s the fellows got moving again and said we must have a new chapel. Let's put it somewhere else where we can build a bigger one. So this is what Scott came up with. If you walk into Exeter College underneath Gate Tower, you look in front of you and find a range of 17th century buildings. To the right you've got the Hall. Scott's idea for his second design was to put the chapel in the middle of that range of buildings. So the first thing you would see when you came into the college would be the west gable of the chapel. It's rather a splendid idea. Now by now a very important thing had happened to Scott. His early work was very much English Gothic but by this time he'd travelled abroad and realised that Gothic of course didn't start in England, it started in France. And so he got very excited, like a lot of other architects in the 1850s, by early French Gothic. And the result of it we see here. And a possible source for this design, I only say possible because there's no evidence that Scott ever even went there, is the chapel of a monastery at a place called Chalis, northeast of Paris. And I only got this because somebody wrote an article in the college magazine making a very good case for this as a source of the intended chapel on the west range, I'm sorry east range, and the present chapel. And you'll see the kind of window tracery is basically the same, the pitch of the roof is the same, there are prominent buttresses etc. So again Scott is borrowing but he's not borrowing from English examples, he's not building in the tradition of Oxford, he's building in a tradition that he finds more dignified, perhaps more attractive for his own originality. And so that became the source of the chapel that we see now. But the chapel that we see now is not on the site that was first intended. And that is because of course building the chapel there was projected right into the college garden and that wouldn't have been a very good idea either. So we go back to square one and say let's build it on the site of the existing chapel. So here we have the gateway, this is where the chapel would have gone into the garden and this is where the chapel now is on the site of the old one. So what you may ask happened to the rest of the lodging? Easy, Scott built another one and that's there. In fact incorporating the medieval town which is the only surviving bit of the medieval college. And so here we see the chapel as it is today, it towers over the rest of the courtyard and it dominates it. People have criticised it for that reason, they criticised it at the time because it wasn't enough like a traditional Oxford building. That's what people always say by the way, they say it today. And it is quite a magnificent building and I want to show you why I think it is so magnificent. So first of all when you go in, you go into a wonderful vaulted interior in which the construction is very clearly seen but it is ornamented in accordance with Hugin's principles. The ornament comes partly from the introduction of colour. Colour became very very important in Victorian architecture of the 1850s and 60s. Just think of Keeble College as an extreme example but also think of the University Museum in Plants Road which is almost contemporary with this. The colour is very interesting, Exeter is in Devon and so the stone for the uprights here came from Devon and you'll notice there are bands of different colour stone in the web of the vaults. So this is French Gothic but with a kind of English tinged feel you might say. So that's one reason why I think this is such an impressive building. But another reason is the quality of the craftsmanship. People still I think often underestimate how good a lot of Victorian craftsmanship was and this is because in this case Scott made it his business to choose people who he could trust. He didn't design every single detail of the building himself. He basically gave an indication of what he wanted and left it to the carvers. So we have Bernie Phillip here. Just look at this hauble for instance supporting one of the uprights inside the chapel. He interestingly enough had an assistant whose name was John Lockwood Kipling who later went to India to work on some of the wonderful Victorian buildings in Bombay and of course has been totally overshadowed by his son. If any of you went to the V&A last year you could see some of his carving. He actually worked under Bernie Phillip at Exeter Chapel. So the carving is first class and again it's following in the tradition of the Victorian building of the medieval buildings that inspired it. So too is the ironwork. There was a really big efflorescence of ornamental ironwork in Victorian England and the most important person was Francis Skidmore who came from Coventry and did the roof and the supports of the University Museum in Parkes Road. His work crops up all over the place. Finally mosaic which had not been used at all of course in the Middle Ages in England. This was a foreign importation. The English did not do mosaics. So this is actually an eclectic building as you can see and they had to go to an Italian to do it. And then superb stained glass. This is another aspect of Victorian artistic culture which I feel is often underestimated. Everybody knows about Burne-Jones and Morris. They don't know about the people for them without whose work Burne-Jones and Morris couldn't have done what they did. Clayton and Bell were among the best of them. They looked very very closely at medieval glass. I was in Canterbury only a few days ago and looked at the 12th century glass there and it's remarkably similar in its colouring, design etc to what we see here. In other words they looked very closely at medieval examples just as Scott did for the architecture. Scott went on to design a library which is the present college library where the chapel had been intended for between the college garden and the rector's garden. And he also, much less memorably I have to say, finished off the frontage to Broad Street which is not one of his architectural masterpieces so we can move on from that fairly quickly. Now just before I get on to Christchurch I want to look at some other projects very briefly and I'm just going to show you rather than say anything at all. A library at University College which hardly anybody ever sees because the public isn't really allowed to go there but I think it's a rather impressive building actually. It's basically a medieval hall adapted to the purpose of a library as we can see here. He also did the chapel but I won't say that. Secondly he did a lot of work at New College including the rather ponderous and I think not very attractive building along Holywell Street. Although before condemning him too much for that you have to remember that architects can only do what they want to do if the clients let them and the client in this case insisted on extra rooms so he had to add an extra story to these buildings which of course made them more overwhelming and oppressive. That's because by the way New College had relaxed its statutes by then. Formerly the only people who could go there were Wiccanists. Now Warren Sandry put up and so they had to provide accommodation. That's why those buildings are there. Thirdly, Merton. Merton, he did what I think is an extremely successful and sensitive remodelling of the medieval hall. You may say why did he do that? What's he doing with meddling with this beautiful medieval building? Well the answer is that like most college chapels it had been meddled with piecemeal over the previous four or five hundred years. The last meddler was James Wyatt who put in a false plaster ceiling there and what Scott wanted to do was to basically restore something of the character of the 13th century hall and bits of it actually survived. The west wall survives, the doorway which you can't see through there survives and he gave an approximation to what he thought the original building might look like. You might think that's a good idea or not a good idea. William Morris would have hated it because he said you shouldn't interfere with old buildings at all, absolutely nothing, leave them as they are and Scott became his bet noire towards the end of Scott's life, much to the chagrin of Scott who had restored buildings very sensitively in many cases as I would argue he did here and also at All Souls where the chapel again had been meddled with as you can see in the left hand slide and to the extent that there had been a baroque painting put in front of it, you can actually see bits of it if you go into the antechapel at All Souls today, they put them high on the south wall and Scott restored the original character there including this rather wonderful readox and again lots of good craftsmanship in tiles and so on and so forth. But the big Scott restoration which I think is the most successful and the most interesting in Oxford is the Cathedral. Now here we have a most peculiar building and it's still peculiar, it's very difficult to make sense of partly because of course the nave of the original Augustinian Priory Church of St Friday had been locked off when Wolsey decided to build Tom Quad in 1525 and of course Wolsey's intention was to pull the cathedral down completely and build a very grand new chapel, even grander than that of King's College Cambridge which he obviously wanted to surpass being the kind of man he was and that would have gone on the north range. Anyway he fell from power in 1529, Henry kept the existing church, turned it into the Cathedral of the New Diocese of Oxford which you'll remember was originally going to be at Osney Abbey, that's why Osney Abbey is no longer there. The only thing from Osney Abbey that survives is Great Tom, the bell in the bell tower designed by Ray. And so you're left with this agglomeration of different bits of a medieval building which again had been intensely meddled with over the centuries. Here again we've got Hackerman's drawing of the interior in about 1810 where you can see, you can still see the building, the window, that's not the window we have there now is it? The woodwork is not the woodwork we have now etc etc. So Scott was brought in basically to restore, to do away with the effects of some rather unfortunate restorations in the past and to make the building more appropriate for the kind of worship that went on there which of course is this extraordinary mixture of being a college chapel and a diocesan cathedral and the largest diocese in England in the smallest cathedral incidentally. So how did he do that? First of all we really need to understand what was there before. So here's another picture of the inside looking east from the entrance towards the chancel and here we have a very early photograph showing the east window as it was in the 1850s. Now the most important thing and I think the most successful thing that Scott did was to rebuild the east end of the cathedral. You may throw up your hands and say what's he doing getting rid of a late medieval window? That was not a late medieval window, it had been put in later. So it's a replacement of the original window and Scott was something of an archaeologist but he was interested in building's archaeology and earlier on John Buckler who was a topographer and architect based in Oxford discovered that in the east wall of the cathedral there were remnants of the original Romanesque east wall dating from probably about the 1160s or 70s. So Scott took that as his cue and hypothesised that under there there would have been two round headed windows. Remember the original building is a Romanesque building and then a wheel window above there and you may say where did he get that idea from? Again when I went to Canterbury a few days ago I went to a church called Bathurston just outside Dover which is one of the most complete Romanesque parish churches in England. Look at the east window of that, that's what we see there and then he keeps the late Gothic vault and so on and you can see the effect from the outside here as seen from the garden. It does a lot of stabilisation work as restorers of buildings have to do and hey presto we have a remodelled interior. Now the interior as it was in Scott's time is not exactly as it is now. For a start taste tended to go against the Victorians in the 20th century so for instance the Bishop's Throne which is an amazing piece of woodwork was pulled down and some of the woodwork went too but that is a valuable historical photograph showing what the interior looked like after Scott's restoration which really began in the 1860s and finished after Scott's death in fact. So here we have the floor and I hadn't discovered who actually designed the figures on the floor but I always admire them when I go into the cathedral. The people who designed the woodwork were a firm who specialised in church woodwork and Skidmore again does the ironwork there. So rather like Exeter Chapel it's a superb example of Victorian craftsmanship as well as Victorian architecture and this time as an overlay over an earlier building. Again we always tend to give William Morris the credit for starting the arts and crafts movement. I would argue actually the arts and crafts movement goes back early enough So that leaves us with the cathedral as it is today and with memory of Scott as a person who has taken everything together I think added to the, not only helped preserve the building spots but for us today added to them and enhanced them. Thank you very much.