A Short History of British Architecture by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins [Jenkins, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405961493
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2025-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

15.

Fit for Empire (1900–1920)

As the new century arrived, the aesthetic movement was in retreat. The Pre-Raphaelites were long gone. Morris was dead. Waterhouse, Bodley and Shaw were the grand old men of their profession. Even Shaw had moved on from Queen Anne to immerse himself in neoclassicism. The heavy windows and beefy columns of his Piccadilly Hotel (1905) are unequivocally baroque. Meanwhile French influence, so long kept at bay across the Channel, made a brief foray into British design.

This movement arose from the 1800s neoclassicism of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. From 1830 it was to influence architecture across much of Europe and an America eager to retain cultural ties with its European past. Half of America’s state capitols, universities and railway termini were to be designed in a Beaux Arts style. Its appeal to the grandeur of power seemed limitless. Its lack of warmth or the intimacy of individualism seemed to enthral twentieth-century autocrats and modernists alike.

In Britain the Beaux Arts had been ignored, at least since the Greek revival of the 1830s. This ended with the international success of the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Imitations of its Grand and Petit Palais were to spring up everywhere. Britain’s Prince of Wales, soon to be Edward VII (r.1901–10), had long admired France and was to play a part in the signing of the Anglo-French entente of 1904. The result was that Britain saw something rare in its history, a bout of Francophilia. The new Ritz Hotel (1903) was emphatically French. Designed by the Anglo-French partnership of Arthur Davis and Charles Mewès, it was the first non-industrial building to be constructed on a steel frame. The same pair went on to produce the RAC Club in Pall Mall (1908), supposedly modelled on the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris’s Place de la Concorde.

Elsewhere, civic and institutional buildings were not so much French as British imperial. The ageing Queen Victoria had complained that there was little of the empire about the streets of her capital. She noted how poorly they compared to the grand avenues of Paris, Berlin and Vienna. The times called for what was termed the Grand Manner, which meant yet another classical revival. The question was whether, as before, this meant a straight-laced Palladianism or whether Britain might at last see what previous revivals had largely ignored: a departure from neoclassicism into baroque and its variants.

A foretaste was given by an extraordinary work of 1888 by a former Arts and Crafts enthusiast, John Belcher (1841–1913), for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the City. It was almost a baroque cartoon, heavy with rustication and elaborate windows, restless with pilasters and relief panels. The front doorway was not so much baroque as all-in wrestling. Belcher was an architect of panache and shamelessly attributed much of his building style to Michelangelo. The sculptor Hamo Thorneycroft supplied a frieze of the arts and sciences that is sadly too high up to read.

Belcher and his partner John Joass went on to design town halls, institutional headquarters and department stores.

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