Godwin in two rather modest town halls, one at Northampton of 1861-4, which is very rich in sculptural detail, the other at Congleton, Cheshire, of 1864-7, which is more severe and ‘Early French’ in character, produced two further High Victorian Gothic[234] works of the highest quality (Plate 92A). Unfortunately by the time the taste of the authorities in the larger English cities caught up in the late sixties with the advanced position of the High Church architectural leaders, those leaders had left that position far behind. As a result, many of the biggest and most conspicuous public edifices are very retardataire. Gothic designs won only low premiums in the Government Offices competition in 1857, although both Street’s and Deane & Woodward’s—on which Ruskin advised—were of considerable distinction. When Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905) two years later won the competition for the Manchester Assize Courts he elaborated the design of this large public structure along the rather unimaginative lines of Deane & Woodward’s earlier Oxford Museum, then just reaching completion. At best Waterhouse had a rather heavy hand and an uncertain sort of eclectic taste somewhat like G. G. Scott’s. He lacked the cranky boldness of a Butterfield, the sophistication of a Street, and the sense of craftsmanship of such men as Webb and Godwin who were his own contemporaries. But he did have real capacity as a planner of large and complex buildings, something at which most of the leading church architects had little or no experience. Thus his Manchester Town Hall, begun ten years later than the Assize Courts in 1869, while lacking all the refinement of Godwin’s smaller and earlier ones, is a large-scale exercise in High Victorian Gothic of some interest. But inevitably the High Victorian Gothic was a mode less well suited to this kind of monumental exploitation than the contemporary Second Empire mode as naturalized in England and America. For all the skill of Waterhouse in the organization of plan and general composition and in the bold detailing of materials inside and out, the Manchester Town Hall is a late and inferior work—late, that is, in the phase of style which it represents, though not so late in the highly successful career of its architect. It may properly be compared, and to its own manifest advantage, moreover, with Schmidt’s Rathaus in Vienna.