Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
previous Gothic periods. The columns in the nave arcade of Aberdeen granite have richly
carved capitals of alabaster, and an elaborate pattern fills in the spaces of the arch spandrils
above. In fact, the interior of the church has hardly an area left undecorated. To visit All
Saints and then to step outside into the present-day London of the surrounding streets is
to experience a curiously contradictory sensation, as the church seems to exist in another
dimension of time altogether.
The churches mentioned above are but a few of the many examples of nineteenth-cen-
tury Victorian Gothic in London. To them I add a few others as the basis of a romantic
tour: St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey (an entirely delightful 'tea garden' Gothic tower
of about 1830 in stucco); Holy Trinity, Sloane Street (1880-90), late Gothic Revival, a
highly personal Gothic crossed with a trace of
art nouveau
elements and a Morris-inspired
Arts and Crafts flavour thrown in, by Sedding; St Stephen, Hampstead, by S.S. Teulon
in 1869, coloured brick, apsidal chancel, central tower, French Gothic of a peculiarly un-
wieldy kind, very period; Catholic Apostolic Church, Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, next to
University College, on a cathedral scale, 1851-5, by R. Brandon, spire never completed.
Islington has a few churches by Barry. Perhaps the best is Holy Trinity in Cloudesley
Square, 1826. Lastly, St Augustine, Kilburn, High Victorian Gothic, 1870-80, very solid
and convincing, by Pearson.
London possesses a rich supply of Gothic villas of the sort that have been christened
'Wimbledon Gothic'. These villas naturally occur in all those areas of London built up
by the Victorians - Norwood and Wimbledon, for instance. Some of them are in a pleas-
ing state of decay. They were originally villas built for the newly prosperous middle class,
with Gothic ideas taken, very unfeelingly, from the writings of Ruskin - Venetian win-
dows, slippery porches of encaustic tile, and, what distressed Ruskin most of all, striped
and banded brickwork, the streaky bacon style. With these may be grouped those villas
with a surface of Gothic, that is a fashionable front tacked on to a house of a normal Lon-
don character. Two of these can be found in Westbridge Road, Battersea, a pair of semi-de-
tached villas with a façade of flint and stone. Each house has a statue in a canopied niche
in the gable, and the style is that of the late 1830s or early 1840s. Gothic tracery appears
in the windows on the ground floor, and the porches have narrow Gothic panels. Quite
characteristically, the backs of these houses are built of London stockbrick and have sash
windows of the common type. This is toy Gothic, of which the best domestic example in
London is perhaps Hunters Lodge, Hampstead, dating from 1825, in the ornamental cot-
tage style. St John's Wood is, of all London districts, the one offering most in the way of
toy or ornamental Gothic. It was the first part of London to be developed in this way, i.e.
with detached and semi-detached houses, and when the building rush started, in 1820-30,
the district was quickly built up. To this rapid building up in the early Victorian period, the
district owes its special quality. With these can be grouped the two Park Villages begun
