Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
However, several churches of the mid sixties rivalled Elvethan Hall, if
not Harris’s ‘Victorian Terrace’. There was, for example, Teulon’s own
St Thomas’s, Wrotham Road, of 1864, piling up to its heavy central tower
among the railway yards of Camden Town in London; and there was also his
much more peculiar St Paul’s, Avenue Road, also of 1864, in the
approaches to Hampstead. This was purged early of its original internal
decoration but it long remained externally an almost unrecognizable
variant of the standard Victorian Gothic church. Both have been
demolished since the war. At St Mary’s in the London suburb of Ealing,
built in 1866-73, Teulon used iron columns for the nave arcade; a still
wilder Low Church architect, Bassett Keeling (1836-86), did the same in
two London churches, St Mark’s in St Mark’s Road, Notting Dale, and St
George’s on Campden Hill (where they have since been replaced), both
begun in 1864. Nor were Teulon and Keeling by any means the only
architects to revive the use of iron columns in the sixties; even Burges
introduced them once in a church, St Faith’s at Stoke Newington, now
largely demolished, and also in his Speech Room at Harrow School of
1872.
Of a quite different order is another London church, St Martin’s in
Vicars Road, Gospel Oak, also begun in 1864. This is by E. B. Lamb
(1805-69), an architect who had already begun to show rather High
Victorian tendencies in the thirties. There is no polychromy here, and
the inspiration from the past is neither Italian nor French but the
still heterodox English Perpendicular. The massive plasticity of Lamb’s
personal mode, with much large-scale chamfering and a consistent use of
segmental-pointed arches in several orders, is happier where it was
exploited more simply on the nearby rectory. The interior of his church,
which has a sort of central plan with wide transepts and only a slightly
prolonged nave, is a forest of timber-work ingeniously bracketed and
intersected in a fashion peculiar to Lamb. Only perhaps in an
international context, in relation to the contemporary American ‘Stick
Style’, is this sort of structural articulation intelligible (see
Chapter 15). But the solid, compactly planned, and simply detailed
rectory has virtues not unworthy of comparison with Clutton’s at
Leamington, if not perhaps with Webb’s more delicately scaled and
functionally articulated early houses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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