Interior, All Saints, Margaret Street
William Butterfield
1859
London W1W 8JG
From Eastlake's A History of the Gothic Revival
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Scanned image and caption material by Jacqueline Banerjee
"The High Victorian Gothic opened with the building of a London church. All Saints', Margaret Street, designed in 1849, largely completed externally by 1852, and consecrated in 1859, was the result of no imperial fiat, like the Votivkirche in Vienna or the big churches of the sixties in Paris, nor did it occupy like them an isolated site approached by wide new boulevards. Intended as a 'model' church by its sponsors, the Ecclesiological Society, and financed by private individuals, All Saints' is set in a minor West End street at the rear of a restricted court flanked by a clergy house and a school. But for its tower, the tallest feature of the mid-century London skyline, it would have been hard to find; but once found, it could never be ignored. The architect of All Saints', Butterfield, had been for some years, together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of the Pugin-like 'correctness' of his revived fourteenth-century English Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths. As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in London, and that red brick is banded and patterned with black brick, a theme varied on the tower by the insertion of broad bands of stone. 'Permanent polychrome,' achieved with a variety of materials, thus made its debut here. In the interior, moreover,'the polychromatic effect was even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to spak of the onyx and gilding in the chancel itself." — Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1963)
The east end of the church in a photograph of 2012, by John Salmon, doing more justice to its colourful geometrical decoration, almost Islamic in its abstraction, and making such a contrast with the dark interiors of many other Victorian churches. — Kenneth Lynn
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Bibliogrpahy
Crook, J. Mordaunt. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Eastlake, Charles Locke. A History of the Gothic Revival. London: Longmans, 1872 (republished as a Victorian Library edition by Leicester University Press, 1970). Appendix, Plate 18.
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Architecture Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963.
Thompson, Paul. William Butterfield, Victorian Architect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Created 15 January 2007
Last modified 15 July 2024 (photogrpah and comment added)