Photographs 2009 by George P. Landow [You may use any of these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your web document to this URL or mention the appropriate URL in your print document.]
All Saints, Margaret Street — the (almost) hidden treasure
Left: the first sight of the church as one walks East on Margaret Street (away from Cavendish Square). Middle left: A view of the steeple from the space between two buildings on a street perpendicular to Margaret Street. Middle right: a view of All Saints looking west down Margaret Street. Right: the hidden church: school and rectory appear but not the church itself in this view. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]
William Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street, as Henry-Russell Hitchcock pointed out more than 40 years ago, initiated High Victorian Gothic, a virtually postmodern style that combines traditional gothic forms with untraditional ones and then adds unusual ground plans with often exciting, occasionally abrasive, effect. Unlike seminal churches on the continent, this one received neither major government support nor an important site on which it could dominate surrounding buildings: "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." Sponsored by the Ecclesiological Society and funded privately, this path-setting church, perhaps paradoxically, was tucked in, almost hidden, in London W1. "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."
Gothic Embellishment
Left and right: Various gothic elements, including ogee arches. Middle: Base of the pinnacle with a bas relief of the Annunciation. Middle right: Top of pinnacle. Right: windows. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]
Embarking on new paths — red and black brick
Left: Note how buildings associated with the Church contrast with the plain red brick of the butresss supporting the steeple. Middle: Black diamonds on the façade and sunbursts over the windows. Right: Entrance to the church and church wall: light colored stone contrasts with red and black brick. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]
One reason contemporaries could hardly ignore All Saints, Margaret Street, lay in its radical departure from Butterfield's own earlier, more conventional Gothic Revivalism.
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 speak of the onyx and gilding in the chancel itself.
Related Web Resource
- All Saints Margaret Street's own site
- Victorian Rogue Architecture
- John Keble and the Oxford Movement
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 22 September 2009