Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a sort of fusion of Lombardic and German Gothic elements. Both these churches were
highly ritualistic: church and pub alike supplied warmth and colour in these drab London
districts.
Entering St James the Less is like walking into a Victorian chromo-lithograph. The in-
terior is a profusion of gilding, brick, tile, and marble. Almost every surface is carved
or decorated, and must be savoured slowly, like old claret. The coloured decoration - in
fact the whole interior - has become more harmonious with the passage of time. There
is a superb metal canopy over the font and (wonderfully Victorian) the illuminated words
'Flower Fund' in an Oxford frame. The church gives an overwhelming, intense feeling of
the 1860s - crinolined, bonneted figures would not be in the least surprising, for in enter-
ing the church one has left behind the world of sliced super loaves and electrically pro-
pelled milkmen. Phrases from
The Stones of Venice
or Street's own book spring to mind
all the time. There is a Christ in Glory faded and peeling above the chancel arch. What did
the Victorian working classes think of it all? One can only guess and return to the world
outside where the sunlight casts detailed shadows, like those in a Ruskin drawing done
long ago in Verona, on the London pavement and on the kids playing by the magnificent
corroding Gothic railings.
The Baroness Burdett Coutts, who appears later in this chapter in connexion with her
work in Bethnal Green, was one of the many architectural patrons who favoured Gothic. In
the middle of the century, parts of Westminster were distinctly slum, among them Vincent
Square. Here she built St Stephen's Church, designed by Benjamin Ferry in 1846. In this
case, the style was 'Decorated', and though the building has turned black in the London
atmosphere, it is a good example of the kind of Gothic which was to become de rigueur
- except in the case of the work of outstanding men like Butterfield, knowledgeable but
dull. Butterfield's church of All Saints, Margaret Street, must be visited by those in search
of London Gothic. Grouped round a small courtyard entered by an iron gate, the compos-
ition announces itself as the product of an original, wayward mind, and at the same time
has upon it the strange period flavour of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, with strongly
Puseyite overtones. As with Butterfield's church of St Alban, Holborn (recently restored
after war damage), All Saints was also in a poor district: High Church theology and the
architecture of ritualism, all marble, mosaic, and pattern seems to have been offered as
a specific in many rundown Metropolitan areas - a sublimated version, perhaps, of the
Victorian custom of pouring soup into elderly, indigent widows.
Probably the exterior of All Saints, with its soaring, green slated spire, is the most satis-
factory part of the design. The brick houses attached to the church are worth study as they
anticipate William Morris' and Webb's ideas, carried out much later at the Red House,
Bexley Heath. Inside, the wealth and variety of materials employed give an almost Byz-
antine colour effect, and it is all so wonderfully shiny, a characteristic never known in
