The Age of Decadence by Simon Heffer

Author:Simon Heffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

III

The greatest and most visible change of all in the nineteenth century was to the landscape, as the suburban sprawl devouring the countryside around London was replicated in other towns and cities while their populations grew. Throughout the century architecture had often tried to evoke the past that the National Trust now sought to preserve. The Gothic Revival was visible in every British city, in the churches built for the new industrial working class, and in many secular buildings. But Gothic, for whom the great evangelist was John Ruskin, had peaked by the time of the death of perhaps its greatest practitioner, George Gilbert Scott, in 1878. That same year Ruskin had the first of a series of mental breakdowns that gradually disabled him until, between August 1889 and August 1890, he had such a long attack of madness – possibly paranoid schizophrenia – that his creative and public life came to an end. The decade until his death in 1900 was spent in seclusion and, increasingly, silence.

The great Gothic design, by Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of Sir George, that won the competition for the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool in 1903, showed the revival was not quite over. G. F. Bodley and Richard Norman Shaw were the assessors, and all five shortlisted designs of the 103 submitted were Gothic. Scott’s design – termed by Pevsner ‘the final flowering of the Gothic Revival as a vital, creative movement, and one of the great buildings of the twentieth century’, won easily. As he was only twenty-two at the time Scott’s work was overseen by Bodley for the first three years, until the latter’s death in 1907.21 Scott redrew his plans in 1909–10, wishing to replace the original two-tower plan with the great, brooding single tower that adorns the finished building. This resulted in much more redesigning below, but the Gothic ideal remained intact. Two world wars and Liverpool’s economic decline further held up construction: Scott made alterations until he died in 1960, but the building was not finished until 1978.

In domestic building architects strove to bring out the inner peasant in every Englishman, to reconnect him with an imaginary rural idyll where he could escape the modern world. This, albeit from a religious motivation, was what George Cadbury had sought to achieve in Bournville. However, the rusticated architecture that would symbolise the best late-Victorian and Edwardian building was far beyond the pocket of any peasant or artisan. It was ideal for the well-to-do middle class who aspired to gracious country living on a scale beneath the great landed estates, and could have it thanks to the spread of the railways. As the style developed it became more concerned with providing an ersatz Olde English cocoon in which its inhabitants could insulate themselves from the twentieth century.

In the 1850s Ruskin had deeply influenced William Morris, then an Oxford undergraduate and part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin’s political views more than his aesthetic underpinned his doctrine: he rejected factory-made objects as examples of servility,

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