Arts and Crafts Architecture E-Book

Julian Holder

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The Arts and Crafts Movement produced some of the country's most popular, loved and recognizable buildings. This book guides the general reader through its history from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Of equal interest to those with a more informed interest, it will open your eyes to the richness and beauty of one of the most important artistic movements the British Isles ever produced. This beautifully illustrated book includes a comprehensive thematic introduction; an up-to-date history of Arts and Crafts architecture, the key individual and the characteristics of the buildings. In-depth case-studies of all the major buildings are given, as well as those overlooked by the current literature. There is a useful accompanying guide to places to visit and, finally, a list of stunning Arts and Crafts buildings you can stay in.

Leseprobe

Arts and Crafts

ARCHITECTURE

'Beauty's Awakening'

Simply held together with a piece of rough string, this beautifully carved stone finial of wild roses greets visitors at the garden gate at Avon Tyrrell House, Hampshire.

Arts and Crafts

ARCHITECTURE

'Beauty's Awakening'

JULIAN HOLDER

First published in 2021 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

This e-book first published in 2020

© Julian Holder 2021

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 797 2

DedicationTo Holly and Jacob with love always

Cover imagesFront cover: Lupton Hall, Bedales, Steep; back cover: Pier Terrace, West Bay, Bridport; rear flap: (top) memorial to Detmar Blow carved by Eric Gill, St Swithun’s Church, Brookthorpe, (bottom) All Saints, Brockhampton.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1:Themes and VariationsChapter 2:In the Beginning . . .Chapter 3:Forming a MovementChapter 4:Building on Secure Foundations – the ‘Sons of Shaw’Chapter 5:When a Movement Becomes a StyleChapter 6:Arts and Crafts Spreads Its WingsChapter 7:The Garden City Movement – Arts and Crafts For All?

References

Suggestions for Further Reading

Places to Visit, Places to Stay

Index

Acknowledgements

AS WILLIAM MORRIS WROTE ‘FELLOWSHIP is life, and lack of fellowship is death’ so it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the many individuals and institutions that have helped me in one way or another including John Archer, Paul Barnwell, Sara Biscaya, Simon Blow, Geoff Brandwood, Abigail Brookes, Ian Campbell, Andrew Davison, Ian Douglas, Ian Dungavell, Stuart Evans, Andy Foster, Simon Green, Susan Halls, Alec Hamilton, Clare Hartwell, Elain Harwood, the late Richard Holder, Holly and Jacob Holder, Edward Holland, Vicky House, Jerry Hurst, Ian Johnson, Alison MacKenzie, Elizabeth McKellar, Andy Marshall, Dave Morris, Tara Murphy, Joanne O’Hara, Stephen Parissien, Jeremy Parrett, Alan Powers, Lou Rosenburg, Caroline Stanford, Neal Shasore, the late Gavin Stamp, Paul Stamper, Steve Stankiewicz, Mark Swenarton, Phil and Michael Thomas, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, the Twentieth Century Society, the Victorian Society, the Ashmolean, Blackwell, Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust, the Landmark Trust, the National Trust, New Walk Museum and Gallery, the Oxford Union, the Wilson, the Bodleian Library, Manchester Metropolitan University Library (Special Collections), Morrab Library, RIBA Library, Rewley House library, University of Sheffield Library, University of York Library (especially King’s Manor), West Dean College, my editors at The Crowood Press, and finally, as ever, the Poldhu Beach café.

Preface

IT CAN BE NO ACCIDENT THAT THE ARTS AND Crafts Movement appeared just as the size of the urban population began to overtake the rural for the first time. This book takes as its starting point the observation of C.R. Ashbee that ‘The proper place for the Arts and Crafts is in the country’. It is a particular point of view but one that Ashbee, amongst many, believed and one which I find increasingly persuasive. When Arts and Crafts architecture ‘went to town’ it changed into a very different kind of architecture. That is a separate story to the one told here. Urban life was the bogeyman of the Movement and it reacted to it in various ways. Chief amongst these was finding solace in an imaginary pre-industrial past. This refuge was sought not only to take comfort from but to set standards for improving contemporary life by looking back to a more humane architecture – and the type of society that produced it. This book follows Ashbee’s observation through to its ultimate realization in the Garden City Movement, early council housing, and a new form of urban life.

The story told here is an almost exclusively English one as I am acutely aware that Northern Ireland, Wales, and especially Scotland, have their own versions of this story. I am also aware that I write, for once, not purely as an architectural historian with a professional interest in this subject but passionately as one raised in the lee of the Movement. The happy accident of being the child of itinerant publicans in the West Country ensured I was unwittingly formed by the landscape and buildings of the Cotswolds. Its soft honey-coloured buildings, whose roofs are the same colour as its walls, seemed to have grown from the earth that supports them. Little wonder that the region and its traditions became a touchstone for the Movement. Only after moving away did I realize that not everyone felt as I did about the place they came from and I now recognize how lucky I was. Lucky also to have subsequently spent my early years as an academic working in some of this country’s great art colleges where the crafts still flourished. Gradually they became homogenized into larger institutions and their distinctive traditions sublimated. Urbanism continues to challenge us in various ways both here and across the globe, but the values, and sheer beauty, of Arts and Crafts architecture can still give us hope for a better life for all.

Chapter 1

Themes and Variations

THIS BOOK IS AN INTRODUCTION TO THE architecture of the Arts and Crafts Movement, one of the most exciting and influential artistic movements the British Isles has ever produced. The name was created by the lawyer turned bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922) who, in 1883, first coined the phrase ‘Arts and Crafts’. Little can he have imagined the influence the seemingly innocent joining together of these two words was to have. Yet the very fact that he, in common with many others, had abandoned a conventional and lucrative career in favour of ‘the simple life’ sought by pursuing the craft ideal of making beautiful and useful products with his hands that underpins the movement, is compelling evidence of that influence. Many people have heard of the Arts and Crafts Movement – most likely because of William Morris (1834–96) and his wallpaper designs. Some may even be aware of his famous saying, ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’1 The fact that he considered such a warning necessary was because in Victorian England the arts generally were in a state of turmoil as a new style for the century was sought.

Even a door can be a work of art – door handle and key escutcheon in Oxford University Museum.

William Morris, the leader of the movement, photographed by Edward Hollyer in 1888. When he died, his close friend Phillip Webb said, ‘I feel like I’ve lost a limb.’ (Scanned from J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 1899)

Front cover illustration by Henry Wilson for the programme of Beauty’s Awakening. It shows the knight, Trueheart, fighting with the dragon, Aschemon, over the sleeping Spirit of Beauty. (Author’s collection)

Beauty’s Awakening

Beauty’s Awakening, this book’s subtitle, refers to a type of fairy-story – a masque that was an elaborate and spectacular form of play with music. A mixture of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast and similar stories, it was performed by members of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1899 in London. This guild is arguably the key organization of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Founded in 1884, the vast majority of architects and craftsmen discussed in this book were at one time or another members of it and membership is at least one convenient way of defining the movement. Like the medieval guilds it based itself on, it was a form of secret society of like-minded individuals – part trade union, part freemasonry – who shared an interest in reviving the crafts that were dying out in industrial Britain. First noticed in the 1880s, the movement grew to prominence in the 1890s and succeeded in exerting its influence well into the 1920s and even the 1930s. Opposed to the idea of the arts being about style, they created a new approach based upon regenerating society.

‘We want no style. . .’

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, one of the world’s first conservation bodies and a key organization of the Arts and Crafts Movement, put this issue of style well in its Manifesto of 1877 claiming that, ‘. . . the civilized world of the nineteenth century has no style of its own amidst its wide knowledge of the styles of other centuries’.2. For many, the burning issue of the day was what was this style to be?

John Ruskin, the chief intellectual guide for the movement, painted in a vivid Pre-Raphaelite manner by John Everett Millais. (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

However, the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), the originator of so many Arts and Crafts ideals, argued against the whole idea of pursuing a style as the basis of architecture. ‘We want no style,’ he wrote, ‘. . . it does not matter one marble splinter whether we have an old or a new architecture, but it matters everything whether we have an architecture truly so called or not’.3 The architect E.S. Prior (1857–1932) was even more adamant: ‘Surely no style can help us,’ he wrote.4 To such men the search seemed pointless. Looking back shortly after the century ended, and to the succession of revivalist styles, another member of the movement, the architect Reginald Blomfield (1856–1942), lamented that, ‘Modern architecture seems incapable of progress except in a circle.’5

The Egyptian House, Penzance, demonstrates the extent of the British Empire and the wealth of styles available to copy.

An age of revivals

Architecture had reached the point that the only way it was thought of was as historicist, in other words copying the architecture of the past in an archaeologically accurate way. Archaeology, a relatively new discipline, was regularly accused of creating the conditions for revivalism by its desire to accurately record the remains of the past. The conflict, principally between the supporters of the Gothic Revival and those who favoured various forms of Classicism, came to the fore over the design of the new Foreign Office. George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) won in a Gothic Revival style – not dissimilar to the fantasy palace of railway hotels at St Pancras he built later – but the government, in the shape of Lord Palmerston, wanted Classical. Government won but not until a heated debate lasting many years gave the profession a bloody nose. We can perhaps get an insight into what it was like by reading the recollections of Charles Voysey (1857–1941), ironically the architect most associated in the public imagination with a recognizable Arts and Crafts ‘style’. Describing the average nineteenth-century architect, he recalled: ‘When a client called for a design the first questions asked were: What style do you want? Next: What period of that particular style? Given the style and the period, books were drawn from the library shelves and approved examples of details were chosen; a chimneypiece or chimney, an oriel, a door, or a window from several books. Such things as these were copied and welded together and like the ingredients of a Christmas pudding equally hard to digest.’6

The grand staircase of the Foreign Office by George Gilbert Scott. The key building in the ‘Battle of the Styles’, its Italianate appearance was a long way from his preferred Gothic. (Open Government Licence version 1.0, courtesy HM Foreign Office)

Accordingly, typical Victorian architecture might look Egyptian, medieval, Elizabethan, Italian, Greek, Spanish and so on but never modern, of its own age. Certain architects specialized in certain styles from the past; others were adept at moving from one to another without any sense of a style as something personal. Even architects who were supporters of the aims of the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as T.G. Jackson (1835–1924), built a career out of reviving past styles such as the Elizabethan and Jacobean.

The attractive gable end of Trinity College, Oxford, designed by T.G. Jackson. Looking every inch an old Jacobean building it was actually completed in 1885.

Situated in leafy Kensington, Webb’s London house for George Howard, the 9th Earl of Carlisle, and a great patron of the movement, was attacked for not conforming to a recognizable style. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Little wonder then that when Philip Webb (1831–1915) was designing No.1 Palace Gate, Kensington, for his wealthy patron George Howard (1843–1911), the 9th Earl of Carlisle, its design proved to be controversial as it was on Crown land and required special permission. Sir James Pennethorne (1801–71), the Crown’s advisor, sought advice from experts and was exasperated to find that none of them could tell what style the building was designed in! For Webb, the most important architect of the movement, that was a measure of success, and reminds us that our idea of originality is a very modern idea that would have not troubled most of our Victorian and Edwardian predecessors.

So it is important to state right at the start that the Arts and Crafts Movement, at its best, was not a style like others of the day, based on an archaeologically accurate understanding of their forms and decorative details and then copying them for modern buildings, but an approach, a collection of radical, progressive, utopian ideals that its followers – disciples even – adhered to.

In search of tradition . . . the timeless way of building

If these architects weren’t copying the famous styles of the past, how were they thinking of architecture? As a broadly based movement there was no agreed philosophy and no common document or manifesto that sets out its approach. Rather these ideals were concerned with creating a more humane, functional, simple, satisfying, and beautiful architecture based on examples found in the countryside built out of traditional materials by traditional methods. It was idealistic in seeing this as a way of combating the worst excesses of modern urban life in Victorian Britain, and maybe solving them by looking to a seemingly timeless vernacular architecture created by skilled local craftsmen – not professional architects.

Photograph of cottages at Chedworth, Gloucestershire taken from Old Cottages, Farm-houses, and other Stone Buildings in the Cotswold District by W. Galsworthy Davie and E. Guy Dawber, published in 1905 by Batsford. Batsford were one of the new wave of publishers successfully exploiting the use of photography to popularize traditional architecture such as these attractive cottages.

The critic Lawrence Weaver (1876–1930), describing Ernest Gimson’s Stoneywell Cottage, said of it that it was ‘Roughly, even rudely, built… no tool has been lifted to mark a false impression of age. If it has the air of being old, it is only because old ways have been followed not because the least effort has been made to impart a false air of antiquity.’7 When a local returned to the area after many years away he was confused, as he didn’t remember the building – it looked as if it had always been there. This was a further measure of success for an Arts and Crafts Movement architect. M.H. Baillie Scott (1865–1945) was another of the architects who designed ‘. . . in different places traditional houses and cottages which could not be distinguished externally from those that had been in the district for centuries.’8 Imbued with a deep sense of Romanticism he wrote that, ‘A man should make his own dwelling as the birds of the air, their nests.’9 As a sentiment this is not far from John Keats’ claims for Romantic poetry that, ‘. . . if it doesn’t come as naturally as the leaves on the trees it had better not come at all.’

The use of traditional building typology

In their determination to avoid historicism (or revivalism as it was also called) the architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement instead worked with a series of archetypes; that is building forms that were not, like style, subject to the vagaries of fashion. Instead of Classical or Gothic, Byzantine or Baroque styles, they thought rather of the cottage, the long house, the farmhouse, the manor house, the castle, the quad or cloister, and above all the barn. Morris, after he had moved into an old manor house at Kelmscott in Gloucestershire, was fond of taking visitors to see the former monastic barn at Great Coxwell and wrote of it as, ‘. . . the finest piece of architecture in England . . . unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder’s art.’ J.D. Sedding (1838–91) also acknowledged this approach in a lecture he gave at the Whitechapel Guild of Crafts in 1890, arguing that they all ‘. . . had the same kind of windows and doors, roofs and buttresses . . . the same vein of humour is tapped for secular or religious structure.’10 Within most of these typologies lay the traditional open hall house, a hark back to a communal way of living where a whole community would eat together in a large open space below an enormous sheltering roof warmed by a central fire. It is one of the oldest and the most essential of communal structures and found its way into a wide variety of Arts and Crafts buildings from the country house, the church, and the early twentieth-century council house.

Great Coxwell tithe barn – this building symbolized everything that was right about medieval architecture for Morris, who compared it to a great cathedral.

Teapot Hall, Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire. An illustration from C.F. Innocent’s The Development of English Building Construction. Published in 1916, despite its bland title, the book was a bible of traditional building materials and techniques aimed at helping young architects pass their exams. Teapot Hall became an instantly recognizable image of timeless building techniques for the next twenty years or more until it was lost to fire.

The image of shelter it epitomized was an important reference back to the origins of building – thereby validating Arts and Crafts architecture – and was symbolized in its most primitive state by the building known as Teapot Hall. Equally psychologically important for the sense of safety and protection it gave was another archetype used with some regularity, the courtyard, or quad – a harkening back to collegiate living which appears in buildings such as Waterlow Court by Baillie Scott in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

By studying the past in terms of these building types, rather than famous styles and their systems of ornament and decoration, the movement avoided the charge of being historicist, of perpetuating the ‘Battle of the Styles’. The architect Norman Jewson (1884–1975) expressed it well, writing that, ‘My own buildings I wanted to have the basic qualities of the best houses of their locality, built in the local traditional way in the local materials, but not copying the details which properly belonged to the period in which they were built.’11

Escapism with a purpose

In many respects the Arts and Crafts were but a part of the larger Romantic Movement and its view of nature as a ‘cure’ for modern life. It was escapist, but this was escapism with a purpose, imbued with a moral crusade to make life better. We need to remember that despite his subsequent reputation as the movement’s leader, and as an important designer in his own right, Morris was best known in his own lifetime as a poet writing modern folklore stories based on Chaucer and Scandinavian sagas. In the prologue to his epic poem The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) he unwittingly announced the movement’s poetic and artistic ideals with the invitation to:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,Forget the spreading of the hideous town;Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,And dream of London, small and white and clean,The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

Like the story of Sleeping Beauty, Morris and his followers saw it as their duty to open the country’s eyes, to awaken their sense of beauty, to the rapidly vanishing countryside as industry overwhelmed it. They saw the traditional building crafts dying out in favour of mass-production, and the craftsman becoming a factory-worker, an extension of the machine. In his most influential book for the development of the movement, The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin, also capable of writing fairy-stories for children, railed against factory production, arguing that, ‘Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.’12

Arnold Mitchell’s ‘Trevelloe’ nestles deep in a wooded clearing in the Lamorna Valley, its giant catslide roofs of local slate sweeping down to almost touch the ground. They must have big cats in Cornwall!

The architecture of fairyland

So not only is this the architecture of tradition but also of the fairy-story, filled with simple rustic dwellings more than palaces, many of its buildings being described as like Hansel and Gretel houses. It is one of the many ways in which the movement idealized the countryside and pre-industrial life to seem almost magical. The Prussian commentator, Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), whose book Das Englische Haus is one of the best guides to the movement’s architecture, saw many of the buildings as having ‘. . . stepped into the world of fantasy’. Another contemporary writer, thinking of the architecture of Voysey, wrote that:

When I was a child I was excited by fairy-tale houses having enormous roofs and practically no windows, by doorways to Wonderland having arches so low that an ordinary person would need to eat one of Alice’s reducing cakes in order to pass under them, by tables whose legs not only went down to the floor but sprouted upwards toward the ceiling, by patterns made of cockyolly birds inspecting with surprise square trees slightly smaller than themselves.13

And May Morris (1862–1938), William Morris’s youngest daughter, wrote of Melsetter House, designed by W.R. Lethaby (1857–1931), on the Isle of Hoy, as seeming ‘. . . like the embodiment of some of those fairy palaces of which my father wrote.’14

Politics and the Movement

That the movement was not escapist is ably demonstrated by its political stance. Socialism, and left-leaning politics generally, was then a new political position and informed much of the movement’s work. The posters and banners designed by Walter Crane (1845–1915) in support of radical politics shared in the fairy-tale imagery of Arthur Rackham and others. Both Morris and Webb, very much the founders of the movement, were devoted to the cause of socialism. When on holiday in Italy, Webb complained to a friend that his copies of the socialist weekly The Commonweal hadn’t been received. And in his first public lecture in 1877 Morris famously declared, ‘I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.’ Neither was he afraid to bite the hand that fed him, Lethaby recording that:

Sir Lowthian Bell told Mr Alfred Powell that one day he heard Morris talking and walking about in an excited way [in Webb’s Rounton Grange], and went to inquire if anything was wrong. He turned on me like a mad animal – ‘It is only that I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.’15

This outburst is regularly used as evidence to castigate Morris in particular, and the movement in general, as being hypocritical in designing houses and objects for the rich that the working classes couldn’t possibly afford. Rather, I would argue, it should be taken as evidence of his frustration at the state of society that restricted their products to those who could afford them. Idealistic, perhaps unrealistic, but Morris and his followers were sincere in their beliefs – and they hung on for some time. As the future poet laureate, John Betjeman (1906–84), when an assistant editor on The Architectural Review, recalled of the 1930s, ‘To be left was to be sincere. To be right was to be insincere. I think I believed this myself. We were sent thumbing through the early numbers of The Studio in search of our heritage of sincerity and socialism in the Arts and Crafts movement of 1890 onwards.’16 Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) had to reassure the parents of one of his pupils that although his chief assistant, Lethaby, was indeed a socialist, he was a socialist ‘. . . of the gentlest kind’.

Walter Crane’s ‘A Garland for May Day’ illustrated the front cover of the socialist magazine The Clarion. (Author’s collection)

Yet not all members of the Arts and Crafts community were on the left politically. Edward Prior, another of Shaw’s pupils, certainly was not and neither were some of the next, third generation of Arts and Crafts architects such as Voysey and Baillie Scott. Whilst good-quality state housing after the First World War may be seen as the ultimate realization of Morris’s beliefs, Baillie Scott railed against it and both he and Voysey placed individualism over collectivism. And if support for female emancipation and the Suffragettes were taken as evidence of left-wing politics then many fell foul of its claims. Arnold Mitchell (1863–1944) was one of many who opposed the RIBA allowing women to become members of the architectural profession. Not until Ethel Charles (1871–1962) was admitted to the RIBA in 1898 do we find a female architect. Other areas of the building crafts, such as wood carving, or embroidery, were considered more ‘appropriate’ for women even within the left-leaning politics of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Perhaps the movement was but a staging post on the road towards a craft-based society of equals rather than the solution to the problems created by industry they hoped for.

Architects and/or craftsmen?

Despite these inequalities one of the most noticeable features of the movement is that it was so broadly based whilst remaining centred on architecture. Although Morris abandoned his career as an architect after eight months he argued that, ‘. . . the existence of the other arts is bound up with that of Architecture’.17 It ranged across a variety of media from architecture to textiles, plasterwork to pottery, furniture to glass, ironwork to printing. Neither were these individual crafts practised in isolation by one person; each reaching a peak of perfection in their chosen specialist field. Ernest Gimson (1864–1919) – one of the most talented members of the movement – trained as an architect but is equally, if not better, known for his furniture, plasterwork, and metalwork.

Amateur or professional?

Such dexterity has left the movement open to the charge of amateurism – that they were dabblers rather than real craftsmen and often employed others to execute their designs rather than realizing them with their own hands. In many respects they would have been happy to accept the amateur label, of being ‘Jacks-of-all-trades’ but masters of none. Sedding argued, ‘There is hope in honest error, none in the perfections of the icy stylist’.18 Increasingly this view became something of a rallying cry in defence of the handicrafts. Yet at the same time as the movement was gaining force the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in a now highly regarded study, The Theory of the Leisure Class: AnEconomic Study of Institutions, published in 1899, stated the opposing view claiming that:

. . . the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which Ruskin and Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time.

A profession or an art?

At the time of its creation, architecture was becoming more technically demanding than ever before, also more professional as it responded to new ways of working and sizes and complexity of building. Accordingly, it was also in search of legal control of its membership to exclude the incompetent. However, this was also seen by many as excluding the more artistically inclined, the more experimental, and the more idealistic. In brief, architecture was becoming big business. As T.G. Jackson wrote in 1892 at the peak of the bitter debate over the issue, ‘Legislation has at last reached the domain of Art, and it has been seriously proposed to charge Parliament with the duty of providing the public with good architecture and properly qualified architects.’19

A new kind of architect is born

In response to this increasing professionalization, and much else besides, the Arts and Crafts Movement created a new kind of architect, perhaps of a kind that shouldn’t even be called architect in the modern sense of the word. Norman Jewson, an assistant to Gimson in their rural Gloucestershire workshop in Sapperton, wrote that:

The professional side of architecture had never appealed to me. I was aware that it was generally considered to be impossible to become a successful architect without living in a town, spending much of one’s time making social contacts whilst most of the actual work was done by one’s office staff, but for me it was architecture I was interested in, not making a large income as an architect.

Architecture, of the sort that Jewson described, was becoming a commercial undertaking rather than the hobby of ‘gentlemen-architects’, or part of a ‘living-tradition’ of vernacular building, and so seemed to demand that it became more professional to inspire confidence in its clients.

These clients were also changing to be companies, institutions and large public bodies, not aristocratic wealthy patrons. A successful professional architect, such as George Gilbert Scott, the architect best known for the Midland Hotel, St Pancras, and the Albert Memorial (amongst over 800 other buildings) and at the centre of the so-called ‘Battle of the Styles’, enjoyed a lucrative career during which at any one time his office employed in excess of ‘thirty draughtsmen in a back office’.20 For the movement, the fear was that this was the start of the total industrialization of the building process where artistically inclined architects were pushed out in favour of an easy repetitive architecture based on commerce, not art. In deliberate contrast, Arts and Crafts architects prided themselves on having small offices with very few assistants so they could be involved in every detail of the job. It is perhaps no accident that such a practice emerged in the same century that Karl Marx was identifying the bad effects of this increasing division of labour, of specialization, as resulting in workers’ alienation from society.

Back to nature

At the heart of the movement’s aesthetics lay a love of nature, the countryside, traditional craft skills, and a turning away from the ills of industrialization that were visibly destroying beauty before its very eyes. Gimson, when asked in a Manchester tea room what he wanted, replied, ‘Something made in the country please.’ Possibly just down the road from him in Manchester, one of its most famous architects, Edgar Wood (1860–1935), was arguing, ‘Nature in some form or other must of necessity have been the original source of all design’.21

George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras railway hotel. One of the greatest buildings of the Gothic Revival, this grand medieval palace of a railway station hotel gives an idea of what Scott’s Foreign Office buildings might have been like had the prime minister of the day liked Gothic architecture. (© User: Colin/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The example of the medieval guild

In many ways the architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement would view a book on its buildings with dismay, because it runs the risk of isolating them from the other ‘arts connected to building’ as they saw it. Architecture should be a collaborative, integrated occupation between craftsmen, under the direction – not dictatorship – of an experienced master. This, they believed, was how pre-industrial buildings – both great and small – were built. They argued that medieval buildings in particular were built by men working in guilds that regulated their working conditions fairly, who were trained by a master, and under a system that allowed individual freedom of expression. This freedom, they argued, could be seen in the beauty and variety of carving in a cathedral. It was a Romantic idea fostered of a fascination with the medieval Gothic world fed by writers such as Sir Walter Scott, and poets such as Shelley, Keats, and most of all the Arthurian romances of Tennyson.

St Edward the Confessor, Kempley

A little-known building that exemplifies many of the character traits of the Arts and Crafts Movement is St Edward the Confessor, Kempley, in Gloucestershire. Built with local materials in a traditional way, using local builders under the direction of experienced travelling masons, it deserves to be better known. Designed as a chapel of ease for the nearby twelfth-century church, its architect was Albert Randall Wells (1877–1942). No plans survive and it seems that Wells evolved the unusual design with his workmen as building progressed. He had recently acted as Lethaby’s clerk of works at All Saints’ Church in Brockhampton. Built just across the border in Herefordshire, All Saints’ was completed in 1902 and Wells brought much of what he had learnt on that job with him to Kempley. Trained in Hastings by his father, Arthur Wells, he was one of those architects called ‘Wandering Architects’ by Michael Drury in his book of the same name. Detmar Blow (1867–1939) was another example. These were the architects who believed in working out the design of a building more or less on site with their fellow craftsmen, adapting to local conditions, employing local craftsmen, materials and traditions so that the building was as grounded in the locality as it could be.

St Edward the Confessor, Kempley. Agricultural forms and early Christianity combined to create a hymn of praise to local materials and building traditions.

The largely windowless south wall in particular has an agricultural feel in its strength and simplicity, with short, sturdy buttresses blending seamlessly into the rest of the fabric.

The size of the large lattice window to the west end is an inventively powerful enlargement of a similar window in Lethaby’s church at nearby Brockhampton.

It seems Wells received the commission as a result of his brother, Linley Wells, knowing the client, William Lygon, the 7th Earl Beauchamp. The Earl had recently returned from being Governor of New South Wales and had already begun the building of the church, so Randall Wells inherited a building with some foundations already laid out. Beauchamp, the inheritor of nearby Madresfield Court, requested that the church be filled with light from the west, not the east end as was usual. This gives the building an unusual, and somewhat innovative, quality at the east end where the altar is cloaked in darkness, the west end lit magnificently by an enormous stone lattice window. This seems to be an enlarged version of one of the windows Wells had constructed for Lethaby at Brockhampton. Apart from the well-lit west end the client also requested that the building’s eaves should be kept low. They are. So low as to feel as if they scrape the ground to the rear elevation. Here the church has an agricultural feel in its simplicity: short, sturdy buttresses supporting the equally stocky-looking rubble wall.

For the basic structure, Wells brought to Kempley not only his experience at Brockhampton but some of the same team of masons who had worked with him, supplementing them with local labour and employing a local builder as foreman, a Mr R. James. The stone came from only seven miles away in the Forest of Dean and the oak was supplied from the nearby Beauchamp estate. The roof (now changed) was originally covered with stone tiles quarried and dressed by the workmen from a piece of land procured especially for the purpose in the Forest of Dean – a practice which had dried out in the district shortly before this. Thin slabs of stone are revealed internally in window splays to show how the building is constructed. The enormous scissor beams of the roof truss at the east end support a series of carved figures. The edges of the beam they sit on was simply ornamented by the village carpenters using their draw-knives and chisels whilst the decoration to the face of the beams was carved out and gouged by Randall and his brother Linley. It was then painted by the village painters with a thin coat of ivory black, grounded in white, and filled with the deep vibrant colours which lurk within the darkness of the east end.

The construction is honestly expressed by the architect here – the large wooden cruck wilfully bisecting the chancel window, the stone of the window jambs fanning out at the top with no attempt to disguise the individual stones.