Presbytery of the Cathedral Church of St. Marie (1903). Norfolk Street, Sheffield, by Charles and C. M. E. Hadfield. Left: Looking past the Presbytery, one sees the beautiful slender steeple of the cathedral church. Right: A perspective view from the opposite angle. [Click on these images and the one below to enlarge them.]
The Virgin Mary by Frank Tory.
Ruth Harman and John Minnis, authors of the Pevsner guide to Sheffield, find that “the stone Gothic details . . . sit oddly with its sash windows” (120), and they may very well be right, but such juxtapositions are found widely in Tudor-revival buildings in England and America. One such example is Maddingly Hall, near Cambridge. If one takes the Ruskinian notion that one must create one's own style appropriate to time and place, which will probably have Gothic elements, one would expect sash windows and other unexpected elements. Whereas the Cathedral Church of St. Marie exemplifies archeological Gothic Gevival work following the precepts of Pugin, the presbytery designed half a century later clearly represents a different style, and the fact it uses brick rather than stone for its walls makes the divergence clear. It's also possible that to some extent the Hadfields have absorbed the influence of Norman Shaw.
Photographs 2011 by George P. Landow You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.it]
Related Material
- The Cathedral Church of St. Marie, Sheffield (exterior)
- The Gothic Revival (sitemap)
- Augustus Welby Pugin (sitemap)
Bibliography
Crook, J. Mordaunt. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Harman, Ruth, and John Minnis. Sheffield. Pevsner Architectural Guides. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2004.
Last modified 16 January 2020