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Gothic for the Steam Age An
Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott
Gavin Stamp
London:
Aurum Press, 2015 Hardcover.
208 pages. ISBN 978-1781311240. £30
Reviewed
by William Whyte St John’s
College, Oxford
George Gilbert Scott was probably the
most important architect in Victorian Britain. His list of works was legion –
indeed, he built and restored so much that we simply do not know quite how many
buildings he touched. At a rough estimate, in a career which spanned fifty
years, he oversaw around 800 projects, restoring more than a dozen cathedrals
and scores of churches, building country houses and workhouses, prisons and
schools, offices, banks, and hotels. Go to Mumbai – and there he is: the author
of the university building. Go to Newfoundland – and there he is again, the
architect of St John’s Cathedral. Visitors to London may recognise his Albert
Memorial or his Foreign Office. Many visitors from France will be greeted by
another, remarkable Scott building, for his recently-restored Midland Grand
Hotel at St Pancras Station now forms the gateway to England for those who take
the Eurostar train. Nor did Scott’s influence end there. He
was a notable author, writing works of great scholarship as well as campaigning
arguments for the Gothic Revival. He was
a public figure and a leading advocate for design reform, not least through his
role as champion of the Architectural Museum, now part of the V&A. He was a
Royal Academician and professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, where his
talks – later published as Lectures on the Rise and Development of Mediaeval
Architecture – were
attended by a generation of embryo architects. Still more importantly, because
more immediately, Scott trained many – perhaps most – of the leading figures in
nineteenth-century architecture. Through his office in the years between 1838
and 1878 passed such luminaries as George Edmund Street, George Frederick
Bodley, E.R. Robson, T.G. Jackson, and perhaps as many as ninety others. That
Street would go on to build the Royal Courts of Justice, Bodley design the
cathedral in Washington DC, Robson erect Board Schools all across London, and
Jackson transform the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge – and that all these
men and Scott’s other pupils built very much more besides – is just another
index of his importance. Scott’s significance was acknowledged
by his contemporaries and by posterity. He was knighted and awarded the Royal
Institute of British Architects’ gold medal. At Queen Victoria’s insistence, he
features on the Albert Memorial. She also sent a carriage to join the thirty-seven
others which comprised Scott’s funeral cortège when he was interred – as part
of a state funeral in all but name – at Westminster Abbey. Moreover, as the
founder of a dynasty of architects, his name was perpetuated by his sons John
Oldrid and George Gilbert Scott, junior. The latter, who died, drunk, mad, and
– still worse for his career – a convert to Roman Catholicism, left
architectural sons of his own, Adrian and Giles Gilbert Scott. Giles – later
Sir Giles – designed Liverpool Cathedral, Bankside Power Station (now Tate
Modern), and the original red telephone box. Scott’s great niece Elisabeth
Scott was the architect of the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, and
his great- and great-great-grandsons still work in the profession. Surprisingly, however, these
remarkable achievements and this extraordinary legacy have not spawned a
substantial bibliography. There is just one – very brief – biography; a volume
of collected essay; and a handful of scholarly articles about Scott. This is partly
because of the scale of his accomplishments is so off-putting. It is much
easier – and I write as one who did just this – to pick off one of the lesser
or, any rate, less prolific Victorian architects. Thus we possess brilliant
biographies of figures like William Burges, William Butterfield, and G.F.
Bodley, but still lack a sustained monograph on Scott. He is, it seems, just
too big a job to take on. And the scale of Scott’s output is not
the only bar to a big biography. There is, it seems, something a little unlovable
about the man. His autobiography – typically, for such a colossus, the first
ever autobiography by a British architect ever published – unhelpfully combines
paragraphs of agonised self-rebuke with many pages of offputtingly self-serving
celebration or justification. Given the scale of the enterprise, his
architectural output was inevitably uneven in quality. Contemporaries came to
condemn much of it, especially his restoration practice, and twentieth-century critics
have, on the whole, tended to side with his opponents. Above all, historians
and architects alike have seen Scott as the quintessential operator – a mercenary
man, willing to toe the line, to change his style, to follow a trend: and to do
all this just to make money. This does not fit well with heroic myth of the lone
artist, nor attract writers like the passionate, idiosyncratic, even eccentric
figures who have so often been the subject of architectural biography. Gothic for
the Steam Age is
not the full-scale study that its subject so richly deserves. It is, however,
written by one of the very few people who are capable of writing just such a
book. Gavin Stamp has been researching modern British architecture for nearly
as long as George Gilbert Scott was building it. Moreover, he is the
acknowledged expert on Scott and the dynasty he created. He has written about
Giles Gilbert Scott and published an important book on George Gilbert Scott
junior. He was part of the team which produced the invaluable catalogue of
Scott family drawings and he himself wrote the entries on George Gilbert junior
and senior, Giles and Elisabeth Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A stalwart of the
Victorian society, Stamp has visited – and lectured on – almost everything that
George Gilbert Scott ever built. The result of this long-term immersion
in Scott’s life and work is a wonderful introduction to the subject. A brisk
but informative and sympathetic biographical essay is followed by a
beautifully-illustrated gazetteer, exploring in turn the ecclesiastical
buildings and monuments, public buildings, schools and colleges, commercial
projects, domestic commissions, and the restorations. The book will, as a
result, be of value to all those who have encountered Scott’s work – and few in
Britain can have escaped it. It is also invaluable as a teaching aid, not least
because of the wonderfully well-selected and often very beautifully composed
images the author has deployed throughout. Above all, one must hope that this
marvellous entrée is the foretaste of still greater delights to come. Gothic in the Steam Age further confirms
the importance of Scott and need for more work on his career. >> Illustrated version on the Victorian Web Cercles © 2016 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
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