All Saints, Margaret Street
William Butterfield
1859
London W1W 8JG
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Photograph (1967) and caption by George P. Landow
"The High Victorian Gothic opened with the building of a London church. All Saints', Margaret Street, designed in 1849, largely completed externally by 1852, and consecrated in 1859, was the result of no imperial fiat, like the Votivkirche in Vienna or the big churches of the sixties in Paris, nor did it occupy like them an isolated site approached by wide new boulevards. Intended as a 'model' church by its sponsors, the Ecclesiological Society, and financed by private individuals, All Saints' is set in a minor West End street at the rear of a restricted court flanked by a clergy house and a school. But for its tower, the tallest feature of the mid-century London skyline, it would
have been hard to find; but once found, it could never be ignored. The architect of All Saints', Butterfield, had been for some years, together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of the Pugin-like 'correctness' of his revived fourteenth-century English Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths. As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in London, and that red brick
is banded and patterned with black brick, a theme varied on the tower by
the insertion of broad bands of stone. 'Permanent polychrome', achieved with a variety of materials, thus made its debut here. In the interior, moreover,'the polychromatic effect was even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to spak of the onyx and gilding in the
chancel itself." — Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1963)
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References
Crook, J. Mordaunt. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Architecture Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963.
Thompson, Paul. William Butterfield, Victorian Architect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Last modified 15 January 2007