Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
discipline. All was financed by the wealth of the British Empire and contin-
ued on into the Edwardian period, until cruelly terminated by the devastating
effects of the First World War.
It was through the early Gothic Revival movement that the craft of brick-
laying received its much-needed boost as the fashion for fair-faced brickwork
returned, and with it gauged work detailing. The Midland Hotel, St Pancras
Station (1868-74), by the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) presents
neatly cut-moulded voussoirs to the series of arches of gauged work.
The use of Gothic vaulting was also re-introduced and there is an excellent
example of gauged vaulting, with stone ribs, to be seen in one of the entrances
to the Law Courts on 'The Strand' in London (1882), designed by George
Edmund Street (1824-88).
To truly assess how gauged brickwork was developed and used in a more novel
manner during this period, one really has to look at buildings constructed in the
so-called Queen Anne style, which was suited to gauged enrichments. Within this
style proliferated all manners of arches, aprons, pilasters, columns, pediments,
and niches, and a use of carved work, to an extent not seen before or since.
Not everybody was at ease with this Victorian version of Stuart brickwork, or
fully understood the capabilities of rubbers to be perfect for post-fired working
to shape.
The Building News
of 27th October stated (1871, 311):
Much as we admire it, we cannot help considering rubbed brickwork to be false
in principle. There is no doubt that rubbing has been resorted to in some of the
most beautiful work we posses; and we must admit the new buildings at South
Kensington are most excellent examples of the judicious employment of red
bricks. But we are convinced that as bricks are necessarily moulded in the process
of manufacture, it is a mistake to tamper with and shape them after they leave the
kiln. It is really doing the work twice over to cut them into fantastic shapes, as has
been done in the window shown by Mr. Wm. Cawt, of Fareham, when they might
have received these forms in a quarter of the time while the clay was in the plastic
state. Besides, mortar joints are on no account to be despised, and 'improved'
down to the thickness of a mere sheet of paper, as we see here. We should say, by
all means use the brick with the natural surface it receives in firing, and give it
a plain, honest bed of mortar. This has been done in the Albert Hall and in the
new Exhibition buildings, and we venture to assert that the effect with gray mor-
tar is better than the rubbed work at the Museum, which looks as if the joints had
been ruled on with a drawing-pen.
Another aspect of this displeasure with gauged work can also be read in
The R.I.B.A. Journal
of 8th December 1892 (1892, 88) (this was repeated in
The
Builder
of 26th January 1895):
…much of the modern brickwork in imitation of the Queen Anne style fills me
with horror and detestation. When I see pilasters tacked on to a front which not
