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An Architecture of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Jr and the Late Gothic Revival

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

The man between

His father built St Pancras station, his son designed the red telephone box. But who was George Gilbert Scott Jr?

Jonathan Glancey
Monday December 9, 2002
The Guardian

Norwich's medieval cathedral is festive as a Christmas tree. With its vigorous spire, vibrant stone carving, contemplative cloister, variety of historic styles and bright setting in a Georgian close, it is acclaimed by historians and loved by congregation and visitors. But there is another cathedral in Norwich - and this one is severe, chaste and forbidding. The Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to St John the Baptist sits just outside the old city walls, on the site of a former prison. It was realised between 1884 and 1910 in a strict Early English idiom, its tall, narrow lancet windows like a suit of armour in stone, but stripped of all colour and adornment. Formal where its medieval sibling is informal, the cathedral is rather frightening - perhaps one of the scariest buildings in England.

What makes St John's, now the Catholic cathedral of East Anglia, especially sad is that it ought to have been the crowning glory of the career of George Gilbert Scott Jr (1839-1897). An innovator, Scott Jr occupied a key role in the development of English architecture between 1870 and the first world war. But he was also an alcoholic who, at the age of 45, was certified insane. He is one of England's most unfairly forgotten architects, his work now eclipsed by that of his father and son.

His father was Sir George Gilbert Scott, that tireless Victorian goth whose most celebrated buildings include the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station in London and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. Scott Sr was, I suppose, the Norman Foster of Victorian England; forever busy, an inveterate traveller, he ran the biggest and most prolific architectural practice of his day. Scott Jr's early years (Eton, Cambridge, a fellowship at Jesus College) were cosseted by his father's self-made fortune, and he lived the rest of his life in the imposing gothic shadow of Great Scott.

Unlike his father, Scott Jr got to build a great church that became a cathedral - but even that was to be overshadowed by the mighty Anglican cathedral Giles Gilbert Scott designed for Liverpool. Giles was one of Scott Jr's six children - and one of the 20th century's greatest architects. With Waterloo Bridge, the red telephone box and those magnificent power stations at Battersea and Bankside (now Tate Modern), his reputation soared.

Sandwiched between these two hugely successful and knighted professionals, Scott Jr's life was perhaps inevitably squeezed between the pages of history. Now, though, he has been thrown a lifeline by Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian, whose compelling new biography of "Middle Scott" attempts to redeem a misunderstood artist, and in the process explain why it would be unfair to judge Scott Jr's career on the disturbing experience of St John's.

After all, the whole drive of Scott Jr's aesthetic was against the rigorous early gothic style pursued, for the most part, by his father. Far from being a chip off the old block, Scott Jr was a kind of revolutionary. Not only was he one of the pioneers of an imaginative revival of perpendicular gothic - that very English style of the 14th and 15th centuries represented by the Somerset parish churches and the airy chapels at Windsor and King's College Cambridge - but he helped give rise to a new form of English domestic architecture. This was the "Queen Anne" style, which allowed the late-19th century house to escape the strictures of ecclesiastical gothic propagated by the Scott Sr generation. In doing so, Middle Scott was the creative missing link between the Victorian gothic revival and the arts and crafts movement, between Pugin and William Morris.

In his 1870s heyday, Scott Jr designed two radical churches, the Vicarage St Agnes Kennington and All Hallows Southwark, plus a trio of fine, unpretentious churches in Yorkshire. The tiny church of St Mary Magdalene at Eastmoors is a particular gem, with all the life and warmth St John's so singularly lacks. Sadly, his masterpiece - St Agnes - was badly damaged in the blitz and demolished after the war; so too All Hallows. In fact all too many of Scott Jr's buildings have vanished into dust, including his one shot at a country house, Garboldisham Manor in Norfolk.

But the handsome Queen Anne-style rectories that survive in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire and Pevensey, Sussex, demonstrate what a fine designer and builder Scott Jr was. He was a brilliant decorator, too, and loved to design furniture, wallpapers, carpets, metalwork and needlework; he even designed a bidet. In 1874 he joined with fellow architects to set up Watts and Co, a decorating business to rival the hugely influential Morris and Co. He had a passion for collecting antiques, refusing to limit himself to any one style of architecture, furniture or decoration. "I yield to no one," he wrote, "in my love of medieval art, but I recognise the merits of the really good work of all schools."

Unlike his purposeful father, he wanted to keep churches in their original condition. He was a great admirer of Wren, and sympathetically restored Pembroke Chapel, Cambridge. He even won praise from the prickly Society For the Protection of Ancient Buildings, established by William Morris in 1877 to put a halt to the overzealous restoration work of the many disciples of Scott Sr.

Scott Jr's life began to change in 1880, when he converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglo-Catholicism. This new faith brought him a wealthy client: Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk. The duke commissioned Scott Jr to build a church in Norwich - but what he wanted was nothing less than an Early English building, the favoured style of Scott Sr. Like all architects, then and now, Scott Jr found it hard to turn a job down. So he built St John the Baptist (raised to cathedral status in 1976) as if his father's hand was guiding him. The morbidity of the cathedral (Stamp describes its "sombre interior" as "melancholy and unloved") suggests this was not a happy experience.

Was it this curb to his creativity that ruined Scott Jr? Here was a sensitive, imaginative, skilled and wealthy Victorian, an apparently content husband and father of six children, four of whom survived into adulthood. But following his conversion to Rome and the Norwich commission he turned to drink; then in 1884 he was certified insane.

The great church was completed by his brother, the anti-Catholic John Oldrid Scott. Separated from his wife and children, Scott Jr began to spend time in Rouen with a mistress between spells in Bedlam and St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton - where the gothic chapel had been built by his father. Scott Jr attempted to set the asylum on fire, brandished knives and smoked pieces of cheese in his pipe. He was convinced that the US had invaded Canada and that Gladstone was dead. He was to die, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, in one of the bedrooms of the Midland Grand: his father held him in his architectural arms until the last.

Remarkably, Scott Jr's practice continued to evolve under his brilliant protege, Temple Lushington Moore (1856-1920), one of England's most original and, until the blitz, influential church architects.

Was Scott's depressive psychosis, as Stamp suggests, hereditary? Perhaps. Giles Gilbert Scott once said: "Grandfather was the successful practical man, and a phenomenal scholar in gothic precedent, but father was the artist." An artist, yes, but how tragic that the Norwich cathedral, Scott Jr's biggest commission, was to prove a denial of his innovative artistry, a return to his father's pedantic form. How strange that he finally died in the Midland Grand, deep in the clutch of Scott Sr's particular and forceful genius. How intriguing that his finest works - St Agnes and All Hallows - were designed before his conversion to Rome. How very sad they have gone.

· Gavin Stamp's An Architecture of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Jr and the Late Gothic Revival is published by Shaun Tyas, price £49.50.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

(posted 7780 days ago)

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