Anti-Ugly by Gavin Stamp

Author:Gavin Stamp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Gothic Revival

Obituaries are sometimes written too soon. Seventy years ago, Harry Goodhart-Rendel dated the death of the Gothic Revival – that vital national artistic movement he admired and understood so well – to the years in which the great central tower of Giles Scott’s Liverpool Cathedral was beginning to rise. He was (for once) wrong, just as he was mistaken in stating that ‘any hope for its future must be based upon its possible reappearance in a form so changed to suit changed methods of construction’. Proof of that is the completion of another Gothic cathedral tower, one that is rather smaller and less original than Scott’s in Liverpool but which is nevertheless an extraordinary triumph – a triumph of traditional values and methods of construction as well as of resolution in the face of adversity, hostility and indifference.

Suffolk has been the unlikely setting for this architectural drama. The scaffolding is now coming down at Bury St Edmunds Cathedral to expose gilded weathervanes and crocketted pinnacles, flint flushwork battlements and stepped buttresses on a tall tower which might well have been designed by John Wastell, the architect who, in the early 16th century, built the nave of the former parish church of St James, behind which once stood the huge abbey church containing the shrine of St Edmund. Built of Barnack stone using methods little different in essence from those Wastell must have employed, this new tower may well soon look as if it has been there for centuries. But its timeless serenity was only achieved after a struggle and because of the bloody-minded determination of two little-known architects who continued to believe in the pointed arch. The first was the late Stephen Dykes Bower, who was so unfashionable and out of his time in the zeitgeist-conscious 20th century that, despite having been Surveyor to Westminster Abbey, he has been largely written out of architectural history; the second is his sometime assistant, Warwick Pethers, whose name is conspicuous by its absence in all the literature about the Cathedral.

Dykes Bower was appointed cathedral architect in 1943, an inauspicious year. He was then already antipathetic to a modernist approach to church design, and as a student at the Architectural Association in the 1920s he had been unusual for his sympathy for the Gothic Revival as a living movement, even confessing an unlikely admiration for the work of Sir Gilbert Scott. Ironically, at Bury, he was obliged to demolish the chancel designed by Scott which had replaced an 18th century structure. Dykes Bower’s task was to convert the Mediaeval parish church into a visibly convincing cathedral (its status had been elevated in 1914) by adding transepts and a much larger chancel (choir) as well as a new cloister and porch. And one day a tower might rise over the new crossing… Construction finally began in 1959. The new transepts and choir are all in a Late Gothic style, harmonious with the nave, but in a flat, spare manner, enlivened with flushwork, that is

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