sign in sign up
<<
Home , Charles Barry, Italianate architecture, Matthew Digby Wyatt, The Victorian Society, Victorian architecture

in Registered Charity No. 1081435 Registered Charity No.1081435 Summer Newsletter 2014

EDITORIAL has, indeed, been the subject for in other comments on the question of monographic books by Ian he clearly distinguished between the Toplis (1987) and Bernard Porter ‘Greek’ idiom of the ancient world THE BATTLE OF THE STYLES (2011) – as well as of a number of and the ‘Italian’ of the . CONTINUED? scholarly articles, beginning with What he surely meant was a building David Brownlee’s ‘That regular in the Victorian Italianate style which, Anyone with more than a passing mongrel affair’ in 1985. Brownlee by the end of the 1850s, had become interest in will conceptualized the contretemps as the expressive idiom for a far greater know about the ‘battle of the styles’ the moment when the High Victorian proportion of British architecture than that began at the start of the Queen’s movement in architecture was derailed was encompassed by neo-Gothic reign and reached its climax with by an elderly survivor (Palmerston was churches, educational buildings and the commission for new government 76 in 1860) of the earlier nineteenth- the like. It was an idiom that had just offices on between 1856 and century Reform movement, whose as much right as the Gothic Revival 1860. The three-section competition, architectural ideas were retrogressively to claim to represent ‘the modern launched during Lord Palmerston’s late Georgian. Although more school of English architecture’, as first administration, resulted in victories nuanced interpretations have emerged W.H. Leeds called it in the title of for little-known architects peddling subsequently, that idea has basically his 1839 monograph on Charles versions of contemporary Parisian stuck. architecture. The block-plan section was even won by a Beaux-Arts-trained architect, Alphonse Crépinet. The ensuing debate about British national identity, which centred on the appropriateness of neo-Gothic precedents for secular as well as for sacred buildings, resulted in the insertion of George Gilbert Scott as architect for the government offices in 1858, during the brief Tory administration of Lord Derby.

On his return to the premiership in 1859, however, Palmerston would have nothing to do with Scott’s Gothic Revival designs. Scott declined to take Gladstone’s advice that he should resign the commission. Instead, he attempted to retain his neo-medieval principles by switching the style of his design from Gothic to ‘Italo-Byzantine’. In 1860 Palmerston’s patience ran Mechanics Institute (1854-55) architect James Green out and he ordered the architect to abandon that ‘regular mongrel affair’ It is not, however, Palmerston’s remark Barry’s pioneering Travellers’ Club and make ‘a design in the ordinary on Scott’s ‘regular mongrel affair’ in Pall Mall. Joint stock and private Italian’ - or face the sack. Swallowing that catches my eye, but rather his banks, insurance buildings, clubs his pride, Scott (with the assistance of subsequent instruction to the architect and mechanics’ institutes, and the East Company’s architect, to make ‘a design in the ordinary suburban are all building types ) went on to Italian’. What did the Prime Minister in which the Italianate predominated, produce the magnificent neo- mean by this? Not, of course, that at least up to the 1860s (much later Renaissance building that is today’s he wanted a mundane building and outside ). The warehouses Foreign and Commonwealth Office. not, I believe, that he wanted an old- of Charlotte Street in Manchester fashioned building. Neither did he exemplify it, as they do in The story is very well known and mean a generically classical building, and . There is also good 1 Courts Act of 1846, responsibility for the erection of new buildings for hearing small debt cases was handed by the Home Office to the Metropolitan Police architect, Charles Reeves. From his London base he designed over sixty County Courts across and Wales. Almost all of them were Italianate palazzi and the finest examples are found in the growing towns of south and west Yorkshire, where they evidently became representative of civic rivalry and pride. ’s handsome County Court dates from c.1865 and was thus probably designed by Reeves’ assistant and successor, Thomas Charles Sorby. The strong commitment to the Italianate in the north-west can be seen further in buildings like Burnley’s Mechanics’ Institute, erected in 1854-55. Its architect, James Green Heywood's Bank, Manchester (1849-50): architect John Gregan of , had evidently been studying John Gregan’s bank for Sir representation in public architecture - medieval and vernacular in nineteenth- Benjamin Heywood in St Ann Street, with Edward Walters’ Free Trade Hall century architectural design. There Manchester, completed in 1849/50. in Peter Street and Blackburn Town are really no equivalents for the No history of banking architecture in Hall as prime examples. Indeed, the ‘ordinary’ Italian. The source books Britain would be complete without this outcome of the government offices for Italian stellar Mancunian example, although competition set Whitehall on a path of used by Victorian architects were the building has not yet been fully neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque French, not English. More than half understood. Only the basement and architecture that would only come to of the non-French subscribers to ground floor of the stone section an end with William Whitfield’s retiring Paul-Marie Letarouilly’s Edifices de housed banking activities. The neo-Elizabethan building opposite for moderne in 1840 were British two upper floors provided palatial the Department of Health of 1987. – including Manchester’s own Edward accommodation for the Manager and Walters. The copy of Letarouilly now his servants, whilst the brick section The Italianate has been forced to play in the Deansgate Library belonged in to the south, generally referred to second fiddle to the Gothic Revival for 1855 to James Stevens, an architect as the Manager’s House, in fact too long in our understanding of early who lived and worked in Macclesfield contained service quarters above a and mid-Victorian architecture. Even but kept an office at 32 Princess pair of ground-floor reception rooms in James Stevens Curl’s magisterial Street (and was later, in 1882-83, for the use of Sir Benjamin and Lady 2007 history 'Victorian Architecture: President of the Manchester Society of Heywood. Diversity and Invention' it is largely Architects). Then there are the lacunae bundled up within a single chapter in the secondary literature: for Walters Most of the buildings mentioned so (among twelve), significantly titled we have never had a monographic far have been versions of the astylar ‘Some Styles other than Gothic’! study, and the same is true for most ‘palazzo’ manner pioneered by There are many reasons for this, of of the other greatest exponents of the at the Travellers’ Club in course. Even now we are still engaged Italianate in Victorian Britain, such as 1830 and reiterated at the Athenaeum in a process of reclaiming the validity and David Rhind, both in on Princess Street in 1837. It must of Victorian architecture from a , Charles Lanyon in , be recognized, however, that this twentieth-century view that, insofar as Yeoville Thomason in Birmingham, the represents only one genre within the it recognized the nineteenth century London City architect James Bunstone overall idiom that can be defined as at all, chose to see the Gothic Revival Bunning, and even Sir Charles Barry. ‘Italianate’ in Victorian Britain. Indeed and its Arts and Crafts progeny as the the term itself seems first to have antecedents of its own Modernism As these examples indicate, the been associated with those earlier (though members of Victorian Italianate story is a truly nationwide nineteenth-century villas, also astylar Societies tend to take a more catholic one and we lose essential aspects but given belvedere towers, of which view!). Then there are the texts, of it if we view Victorian architecture the Queen’s own was from Pugin to Ruskin to Eastlake to centrifugally, from the capital outwards. to become the most iconic example. Morris, that make powerful polemical Indeed, northern England is – along At Ellel, near Lancaster, the Liverpool arguments – so attractive to scholars with – probably the major whisky merchant and Mayor William and journalists – for the role of the region for the idiom. With the County 2 Preston built himself one of the best In an essentially pluralistic age like remarkable, as John Booker pointed Osbornes-in-miniature in 1857-59, that of Victoria’s Britain, it would out in his 1990 study 'Temples but there are many others nationwide, be perverse to claim that Italianate of Mammon: The Architecture of especially when one includes the architecture can be conceived as Banking', that so many hundreds middle-class suburban . a clearly defined and ‘pure’ stylistic of banks across the country were alternative to the logic of the Gothic erected in the Italianate idiom, often Other genres of ‘Italianate’ Revival. Hardly any architect worked as the most prominent and distinctive architecture in Victorian Britain must solely in the Italianate style; the buildings in town centres, without any include derivatives of Florentine or exclusive use of a single architectural indication at all in directors’ minutes Venetian Quattrocento architecture, style is only found among some Gothic of stylistic debate or uncertainty at such as J.A. Picton’s Hargreaves revivalists. Moreover, the Gothic the point of commission. That’s just Buildings of 1859 in Chapel Street, and Italianate idioms both became what the image of a bank was to the Liverpool - a good reinterpretation submerged in the neo-vernacular and average Victorian in 1860 – a building of what Ruskin called ‘Early eclectic approaches of late Victorian in what even the Prime Minister recognized as ‘the ordinary Italian’ style.

Dr Frank Salmon

Frank Salmon is Senior Lecturer in at the University of and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1989 to 2002, initially under the guidance of John Archer. One legacy of that time is the book he is currently working on about in Victorian Britain.

County Courts, Encombe Place, Salford (c.1865).

Renaissance’ in 'The Stones of architects – although Robert J. Venice'. It should be recalled that Johnson’s Hodgkin, Barnett, Pease Ruskin did not despise this type of and Spence Bank on Collingwood architecture, reserving his famous Street in Newcastle shows that the comment on the ‘foul torrent of the palazzo genre was still alive and Renaissance’ for what we would healthy into the 1890s. Nevertheless, recognize as the later developments there is a case for re-conceptualizing of Mannerism and the Baroque. None Italianate architecture – not as the the less, both Mannerist and Baroque conservative choice of a Liberal Prime buildings in Italy did come to serve Minister foisted onto an unwilling as models for Victorian architects, nation, but as a new approach to as did the richly sculptured ‘High the classical tradition originating in Renaissance’ work of Sansovino in the early 1830s that, by the end of Venice (which the Victorians rather the 1850s, had become more or confusingly tended to call ‘Palladian’). less ubiquitous and was deemed As Richard Jenkyns has observed, symbolically appropriate for the when we consider William Gingell’s burgeoning Victorian nation. We see fabulous West of England and South this most clearly in the architecture of Wales District Bank, begun on banking, effectively a new industry in Bristol’s Corn Street in 1854, the year the nineteenth century with the advent after the third volume of The Stones of Joint Stock and Savings Banks, but of Venice appeared, ‘it is as though with roots stretching back to Medicean [Ruskin] had never written’. and maritime Venice. It is

3