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- Herausgeber: Crowood
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Edward Schroder Prior designed the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement (St Andrew's Church, Roker), perfected the popular butterfly plan in his houses, and published what is still the seminal work on medieval gothic art in England in 1900. Highly regarded by critics such as Ian Nairn, Prior is sometimes considered to have narrowly missed out on a place in the architectural pantheon of his age, alongside contemporaries such as Charles Voysey and William Lethaby. The result of extensive archival and field research, Edward Prior - Arts and Crafts Architect sheds new light on Prior's architecture, life and scholarship. Extensively illustrated, it showcases Prior's work in colour, including many of his architectural drawings and photographs of most of his extant buildings. Prior is the missing link of the Arts and Crafts Movement, in both a theoretical and a practical sense, as he was possibly the only practitioner who genuinely translated the artistic theories of Ruskin and Morris into architectural reality. He went on to found the School of Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 1912. Extensively illustrated with 200 colour illustrations including many of his architectural drawings and photographs of most of his extant buildings.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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EDWARD PRIOR
Arts and Crafts Architect
Martin Godfrey Cook
THE CROWOOD PRESS
First published in 2015 by
The Crowood Press Ltd
Ramsbury, Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2015
© Martin Godfrey Cook 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78500 012 6
Frontispiece: The Barn, Exmouth, Devon, 1896, detail of sketch of the entrance elevation.
(© RIBA Library Books & Periodicals Collection)
Dedication
For BM
Acknowledgements
The author and publisher would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University for their support.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 Prelude
Chapter 2 Overture
Chapter 3 Young Gentleman and Pupil, 1852–78
Chapter 4 Young Architect, 1879–94
Chapter 5 Mature Architect: Experimentation, 1895–1904
Chapter 6 Mature Architect: Masterpieces, 1903–08
Chapter 7 Interlude: A Tale of Two Cities, 1885–1900
Chapter 8 Scholar and Professor, 1909–32
Chapter 9 Variations on a Theme, 1900–10
Chapter 10 Adagio
References and Notes
Appendix A: Abbreviations and Glossary
Appendix B: Chronology
Appendix C: List of Architectural Works
Appendix D: Sublimity and Beauty
Index
St Andrew’s Church, Roker, 1904–07, view of the tower and lady chapel in 1979.
(© Nicholas Breach / RIBA Library Photographs Collection)
Foreword by Julian Harrap
WHAT A JOY TO RECEIVE A COPY OF Martin Godfrey Cook’s new study on one of the founding members of the Art Workers Guild, Edward Schroder Prior. It enriches the current debate within the profession about the whole meaning of Architecture. Prior was intensely impatient with what we call today ‘the brand’. He championed the artist, craftsman, and the architect, while denigrating the so-called designer who dictated his purpose to the executant. He also had little time for paper-architecture or architectural competitions – preferring three-dimensional model making and direct building site experience to mould his ideal of the artist-builder.
So many commissions today leave the architect divorced from the inventive process that creates a true work of architecture. The working drawings are seen as some technically coded means of translating meaning into reality, rather than as the pursuit and development of the design process. Like Soane and Mackintosh, Prior vanquished the contractor – to engage directly with the individual craftsmen whose hands and minds understood the workability and character of every constructional material.
Prior came to the end of his days in 1932, a world away from much of his finest and best known work in the Edwardian era. He is principally remembered for brilliant architectural essays and employing traditional building materials in an inventive and sometimes radical way. If only he had succeeded in realizing his radical and clever design for the Club Promenade Baths at West Bay, near Bridport, in the 1880s – we might have seen a truly twentieth century essay in the language of the Moderne.
St Andrews Church, Roker, 1905 (© RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections)
At St Andrew’s Church, Roker, we see a subtle and informed use of reinforced concrete. One might note, particularly, the great Gothicized parabolic arches of the fifty-two feet wide nave, shown in the pre-construction perspective. Here they are depicted as stone clad concrete elements supporting concrete purlins while the newel of the tower stair is expressed with the board pattern within which the concrete was cast. This contrasts with Mackintosh falsely representing softwood ship ballast timber as oak by the use of thin oak facings in the Glasgow School of Art Library. Both Prior and Peter Behrens, the latter in his dye-works administration building for Hoechst AG, express the form of a parabolic concrete arch, as the structural forces naturally demand, while concealing them behind masonry claddings – which reinforces the strength they decently conceal.
Technical Administration Building for Hoechst AG, 1920–4
(© Photograph: Eva Kröcher)
Richard Norman Shaw’s office provided a unique architectural practice within which Edward Prior, William Lethaby and others developed their architectural skills. At the time of the ‘Battle of the Styles’, a competence in classicism and the neo-Gothic was an essential necessity for every aspiring architect. But Shaw’s best pupils were inspired by traditional buildings and new materials to meld universal symbols and practical construction into what they called ‘rational building’.
The study of vernacular buildings and the constructional methods of each trade provided a vocabulary for inventive architectural designs to suit the needs of late nineteenth century society. Inspired by William Morris and his devotion to building construction and decoration, as an art form, time was available to work with individual master-craftsmen in a proto-mediaeval fashion.
Equipped with this repertoire of skills Prior’s work for Harrow School, in a radical vernacular style, is viewed alongside his neo-Classical and Gothic essays in Cambridge, invariably commissioned through his brothers’ agency. Such a depth of architectural appreciation would challenge any architect training today. If we then add the assumption of responsibility, as principal contractor and quantity surveyor, we can appreciate more clearly the art of architecture practised by senior members of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
The profession is profoundly in debt to Martin Godfrey Cook for such a splendid book, which should be in the library of every contemporary architect.
Julian Harrap DIPARCH RIBA FRSA ARB
London, July 2015
Julian Harrap set up his award-winning architectural practice after studying in London and working in the office of Sir James Stirling. Kenneth Powell of The Architects’ Journal describes his practice as ‘… an unusual phenomenon: an architect working exclusively on old buildings who is not just a repairer, but cares about design and dares to practise it’. Julian continues to develop his particular interest in design, technology and materials, especially as applied to historic buildings and their relationship with contemporary architecture. As a Stirling Prize finalist, he works internationally with the leading architects of today, and was part of the debate advising on the conservation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, after the recent tragic fire.
Preface
‘Some architects…have not run in the professional ruts …but given their attention to the quality of their work as a personal obligation which could not be delegated to a staff…[and] have felt in themselves that they were artists in building and nothing besides.’
The Ghosts of the Profession
Edward S. Prior, 1892
EDWARD SCHRODER PRIOR WAS NOT ALLUDing to himself, but the quotation above certainly applies to his career as an artist-builder, with the emphasis on quality rather than quantity. Prior’s Ghosts essay was part of the reaction to the increasing professionalization of architectural practice. The artists had certainly lost long before the Architects Registration Act of 1931 was passed, by which time Edward Prior was close to death, dying of cancer the year after at the age of eighty. He continued his life tenure as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1912 until his dying day, twenty years later.
Consequently, he became known more for his role as an educator, scholar and author; particularly after the Arts and Crafts Movement, inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris, was reduced to an idiosyncratic reaction to industrialization and a precursor of Modernism by most art critics. However, that fact remains that British domestic architecture reached an apogee around the fin de siècle. A fact well documented by Hermann Muthesius in his three-volume work Das Englische Haus, first published in Berlin in 1904. In time to include Prior’s first and extraordinary butterfly-plan house, The Barn at Exmouth. But too early to include his domestic masterpiece at Voewood in Norfolk.
Edward Prior’s architectural practice was ‘restricted but always fascinating,’ to quote Andrew Saint’s assessment. It is the very restriction, sometimes by choice, that helped to make it fascinating. And the fascination is in the process as well as the product. As Prior’s rejection of the ‘main contractor’ and other ‘middle-men’ invariably ensured that his architecture included the best materials and craftsmanship, while remaining economical to build. His architectural office was similarly streamlined and included the employment of an assistant or two, to whom he usually delegated only the supervision of work on site. Most famously, and generously, in his employment of Randall Wells as ‘site architect’ at his ecclesiastical masterpiece of St Andrew’s at Roker. This cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement is rooted in Saxon architecture, but includes a revolutionary new system of reinforced concrete, patented in the USA only a year before St Andrew’s was designed.
The primary source of research for this book was Edward Prior’s surviving, demolished and unexecuted architecture, as his architecture provides the best evidence of his design intentions and artistic philosophy. However, architecture is necessarily a compromise between art, function and the realities of clients’ briefs and their purses. As Prior was a prolific writer and journalist, who invariably penned an opinion on most of the architectural polemics of his day, there is sometimes a distance between his rhetoric and architectural evidence. This is inevitable in the work of all architects. The sheer quality and originality of his best architecture makes Edward Prior the missing link of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and a comprehensive account of his life and work is long overdue in print.
Consequently, I am extremely grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, whose generous financial support made this book possible in its present form. I am also grateful to all of the owners of Edward Prior’s architecture who allowed access and photography; the archivists and academics who helped with sources; my colleagues at the Architectural Association; Julian Harrap RIBA for his practical and poetic insights; and finally, Professor Mark Swenarton for introducing me to the work of Edward Schroder Prior so long ago.
Martin Godfrey Cook
Cheltenham
March 2015
Chapter 1
PRELUDE
EDWARD SCHRODER PRIOR (1852–1932) IS worthy of more consideration than currently afforded to him in the annals of architectural history, which usually only includes passing mentions of his most strikingly original buildings. These invariably focus on his ecclesiastical masterpiece at St Andrew’s in Sunderland (1906), described as the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and on his innovative butterfly-plan houses, The Barn at Exmouth in Devon (1896) and Voewood at Holt in Norfolk (1903).1 Comparatively little is known of his wider body of work, despite the emergence of some studies and publications over the years. Prior’s overall architectural output was not as prolific as the more commercial architects of his era. He clearly sought quality rather than quantity, and pursued originality with a rugged individualism. This invariably resulted in idiosyncrasy, innovation and ingenuity in the design and construction process as well as the architectural product.
Edward Schroder Prior’s visiting card portrait, c. 1910.
(© National Portrait Gallery)
The architectural historian Andrew Saint speculated that Edward Prior’s relative marginalization was ‘either out of generosity or from difficulties of temperament’. In spite of ‘a series of daunting books and lectures on medieval art … and a handful of designs of striking concentration and originality’, Saint goes on to postulate that ‘He perhaps failed to be the Webb of his generation because Lethaby and Voysey managed to split and share the mantle, and he could or would not spoil the award’.2 If true, this reflects a gentlemanly approach that concurs with Prior’s romantic idealism, and his legacy certainly warrants reconsideration. A redressing of this historic imbalance is now long overdue, and it is now time to place Edward Prior in his rightful place – in the pantheon of his architectural generation, and even that of architectural history in general.
St Andrew’s Church, Roker, Sunderland, 1904–07, view from the nave to the chancel.
The Barn, Exmouth, Devon, 1896, viewed from the south, showing the suntrap terrace.
Voewood, High Kelling, Norfolk, 1903–05, viewed from the south, over the croquet lawns.
The fact that the vast majority of Prior’s buildings have survived, in one form or another, is a solid testament to his architectural talent. Only about a tenth of his buildings have been demolished and two thirds of his remaining architecture benefits from legislative conservation protection – several of these are Grade I listed. However, he did not confine himself to architectural practice, but continued his scholarly study of Gothic art and architecture throughout his life, resulting in four books. He also wrote many articles, for publications such as the Architectural Review, The Studio and other journals – topics were wide-ranging, from garden design to architectural modelmaking. However, he was always uneasy with the inappropriateness of his classical education as a basis for architectural practice. Such misgivings may have sparked his interest in architectural education and his foundation of the School of Architecture at Cambridge University in 1912, including a proposed curriculum which presaged Walter Gropius’ 1919 Bauhaus manifesto in many respects.
Edward Prior was a seminal figure in the Arts and Craft Movement who produced some highly original works of architecture and carefully controlled his output to achieve the highest quality, both in design and materials. He largely succeeded in applying the artistic philosophies of Ruskin and Morris to architecture, and ultimately transcended them. Around half of Prior’s buildings were houses, in many cases late Victorian or Edwardian country houses, which have survived through changes of use to various forms of multi-residential type, such as hotels and student accommodation. Despite many Grade II and II* listings, this has often entailed considerable alterations to interiors to meet modern and fire safety requirements. Although much of the original interior spirit is often lost with these changes, the fact remains that the buildings are still in use a century or more after their construction – and satisfactorily serving very different purposes. This serves as evidence of the quality of their construction and flexibility of design, at the very least. This is borne out by most of Prior’s architecture, as he invariably sought the best local materials and building techniques, and usually innovated in one way or another.3
Portrait of Edward Prior by William Strang, 1907.
Possibly the main reason for the relative neglect of the wider body of Prior’s architecture is the perception that the thread he pursued led to a cul-de-sac. However, this bears reappraisal when viewed in the context of the architectural transitional phase of the two decades hinged around the fin de siècle. Prior’s domestic work must have inspired Dutch domestic Expressionism in the 1920s, and his large churches were forerunners of much German Expressionism of the same period.4 In this sense, Prior is viewed, by Nikolaus Pevsner, as a herald of the Modern Movement, spanning and inspiring a transition between medieval revivalism and early Modernism. However, Prior’s enigmatic quality of architectural expression is rarely conveniently categorized, and it is unlikely that Prior would have regarded such categorization in a flattering light. His early flirtation with literal historicism and vernacular revivalism, self-acknowledged homage to Norman Shaw and George Devey, was soon replaced by quirky attempts to forge a contemporary architecture. Prior is best likened to his almost exact contemporary, Antoni Gaudi, in his continuous exploration of eclecticism through to its inexorable outcome – originality.
As a young architect Prior became friendly with Reginald Blomfield, who referred to him as ‘a man of considerable ability, and of a thoughtful and original turn of mind’. Both men were independently minded, and from similar educational backgrounds. These two seemingly stereotypical establishment figures eventually went in opposing directions, with Blomfield becoming increasingly architecturally conservative, while Prior constantly sought originality. The picture of Edward Prior wearing homespun tweeds, on a bicycle with a saddle of his own design, conjures up the image of the Edwardian, intellectual eccentric – a Sherlock Holmes character, even. It is hardly surprising that Prior ended up a professor, like so many Edwardian ‘heroes’, such as the celebrated Professor J. Norman Collie, whom crowds flocked to see on a mountaineering trip to Norway; they were under the impression that he actually was Sherlock Holmes!
Prior’s originality extended to his leisure pursuits: his bicycle had an unconventional saddle – a leather sling between two uprights – which according to Prior was far healthier, and safer. Conventional bicyclists at this time were regarded as cranks – ‘cads on casters’ – so the figure that Prior struck must have sealed his eccentricity to most observers.
Prior’s negative sentiments regarding his establishment, classical education were to some extent exaggerated and possibly affected, particularly when his solid, five-year pupillage with Richard Norman Shaw is taken into account. However, he was always unhappy with his self-confessed modest drawing talent, which often led him to the medium of architectural modelmaking instead, a sculptural approach, in the round, that he recommended to others in a paper. In fact, his exhibition of an architectural model at the Royal Academy in 1895 caused quite a stir and revived the medium. His unease with drawings may also have led him to reject the conventional contracts of the day, in favour of looser arrangements, which allowed flexibility for the design to grow organically and prosaically.
The inspiration provided by English vernacular buildings enabled George Devey (1820–86) to build a successful practice, working almost exclusively for the aristocracy and wealthy landowners. Devey originally trained as a watercolourist under J.S. Cotman, which established his eye for the picturesque. He often contrived to give the impression of several centuries of change in a vernacular idiom, through such devices as changes in material, such as a brick upper storey built on a seemingly old stone base. Devey was undoubtedly Charles Voysey’s primary inspiration, and Voysey was Prior’s neighbour in St Johns Wood for a while in the late nineteenth century.
Antoni Gaudi’s (1852–1926) sources were Moroccan, Moorish and Gothic, while Prior’s were English vernacular, Gothic and Flemish. Prior undertook a seminal trip to Belgium in May 1877, with a fellow pupil from Shaw’s office, Ernest Newton. They visited Bruges and Antwerp where Prior was very impressed by the town-houses, public buildings and, of course, the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture. There is much evidence of Dutch and Flemish influence in Prior’s early works. Prior probably read Ruskin as a pupil at Harrow and a student at Cambridge, and Shaw gave him Viollet-le-Duc’s publications to read.
The fact that Prior was influenced by and studied vernacular and grander historic architecture is well illustrated by his many sketching tours in Britain and on the Continent. One amusing anecdote relates to a walking holiday that he took in the Lake District with a fellow pupil in Shaw’s office, probably Ernest Newton again. They arrived unannounced at the front door of Sizergh Castle near Kendal, hoping for an impromptu tour of the house. As they were dressed in rough tweeds they were mistaken for labourers, who were expected to repair the lead work on the roof of the tower, and were directed to the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear of the house. Cannily keeping quiet, they played along and thus enjoyed an unfettered tour of the castle, including the roof, castellated parapet walls and pele tower. This last was the ancient defendable feature for shelter against Scottish raiders and Border reivers that formed the genesis for the Elizabethan wings and other later embellishments.
Reginald Blomfield (1856–1942) went to Haileybury and read Greats at Exeter College, Oxford before an architectural pupillage with his uncle, Sir Arthur William Blomfield (1829–99).
J. Norman Collie (1859–1942) was another ostensibly establishment figure (Charterhouse and University College Bristol, followed by a PhD at Wurzburg University, Germany) with a deep intellect and original turn of mind, to the point of eccentricity. He was Professor of Organic Chemistry at University College London, where he discovered the inert gas neon, took the first X-ray photographs for surgical purposes, and pioneered colour photography. While cycling was Prior’s outdoor passion, mountaineering was Collie’s, particularly the new sport of rock climbing, and he made many first ascents in the English Lake District, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Canadian Rockies, and in the Black Cuillin range on Skye (where a peak is named after him – Sgurr Thormaid, Norman’s Peak). Prior also made trips to the French Alps, but these were largely for the purposes of collecting Alpine plants for his garden designs.
Sherlock Holmes, as the archetypal, fictional Edwardian hero, could have been modelled on this description of Collie, which bears many similarities to Prior: ‘… distinguished in half a dozen different fields, who brought to everything he handled a certain personal touch of distinction … a man of powerful intellect… the valued member of many learned societies, widely read especially in the classics, a painter of talent, a collector of great taste – Chinese porcelain, jewels, Indian embroidery – and a connoisseur of food and wine and fine cigars. He wore neat and comfortable tweeds, and smoked a meerschaum’.5
Compare and Contrast
The Victorian-cum-Edwardian era was a period of almost unimaginably rapid social, legislative and technological change, which laid the foundations for the modern world. As such it represented an extensive market for architectural commissions, but in the domestic field architects increasingly competed with speculative builders and developers. And in Prior’s case, he was sometimes obliged to undertake mundane commissions for such prestigious clients as Cambridge colleges, but one senses his heart was not always in it, although his approach was consistently professional. It is useful to assess Prior’s career in comparison with the career of another contemporary architect who was also a resident of Harrow, that of Arnold Bidlake Mitchell (1863–1944).
They executed very similar architectural commissions, including domestic work in Harrow, as well as college, university and suburban houses in Cambridge. Mitchell was more commercially successful, and able to compromise his ideals to an extent that Prior seemed incapable of. The contrast in their pecuniary fortunes is illustrated by Mitchell’s ability to build extensive houses for himself, both in Harrow and a retirement house in Lyme Regis,6 which Prior did not achieve, despite ambitious plans for his own house at Harrow-on-the-Hill, called Byron Cross. This scheme was on a difficult, sloping site between his elder brother’s Red House and the Harrow School cricket ground – it did not get beyond the stage of sketch plans.
Sketch elevations for Edward Prior’s own house, Byron Cross, Harrow-on-the-Hill.
(© RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections)
The career of yet another contemporary architect, Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924), provides an interesting triangulation. Jackson certainly cultivated the patronage of the ‘intellectual elite’ more successfully than either Mitchell or Prior, to the extent that Jackson acquired the sobriquet of ‘Oxford Jackson’ such was the patronage of his varsity alma mater, not to mention his public school, and other public schools, such as Radley College – where his Perpendicular Gothic red brick and stone chapel, dormitory, cloister and hall forged a counterpoint to the existing, unassuming Georgian pile, Radley Hall. This transformation into an architectural Oxford college, notwithstanding the unrealized ‘towered gateway’ and huge ‘Great Hall’, symbolically enabled Radley to quickly become an established major public school, although only founded in 1847. However, this could possibly have been at the expense of the School’s founder, William Sewell, whose conception was that ‘the idea of Radley was a family in which noblemen’s sons might live as in their own father’s house’.7 However, Jackson was rapidly to become yesterday’s stylistic man, prompting Prior to write, by 1914, that ‘Poor Jackson is much better than his work’.8
Sketch elevations for Edward Prior’s own house, Byron Cross, Harrow-on-the-Hill.
(© RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections)
Heritage Legacy
One of the main themes which threads through this exploration of Edward Prior’s life and work, from the stance that he was a major exponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, is that his remaining buildings should benefit from more legislative protection. The value of his buildings is thrown into sharp relief retrospectively, particularly in the light of the current reappraisal, and renewed appreciation, of Victorian and Edwardian architecture in general. Prior, along with many other architects of this era, seems to have consciously followed the aesthetic precepts of Ruskin and Morris to achieve the sublime, rather than the beautiful or the ugly. And Prior’s alleged pursuit of the latter is asserted by at least one critic.9 In Prior’s case, this heritable value is enhanced by his incessant pursuit of novel technology and original expression. Prior also occasionally turned his hand to other design subjects.
Any exploration of the cultural context of architecture serendipitously touches upon many recurrent historical themes, in this case of late Victorian and Edwardian history. Tracing the work of an architect such as Prior involves ranging across the social spectrum, from prestigious educational bastions to missionary work in the squalor of a rapidly urbanized London. But both Prior and Mitchell were predominantly suburban architects, who gave exuberant rein to their talents when given the opportunity of lavish rural commissions. Prior was certainly no urbanist. By contrast, the transference of Charles Robert Ashbee’s ‘Guild of Handicraft’ from London’s East End to rural Chipping Campden was a bold social and artistic experiment, although this ultimately entailed a subdued approach to architecture. The latter approach presaged the modern, environmental conservation movement, not to mention the Garden City Movement.
Design for a book cover for the Quarto Imperial Club, London, 1895.
(© RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections)
A century or so after the pinnacle of its achievements, the architecture of the Arts and Crafts Movement serves as a reflection of the state of society at the time of its conception, as the architecture of any period ultimately must. The Arts and Crafts Movement was a broad church, to say the least, and the fact that it could embrace such a wide continuum of philosophical and practical approaches remains one of its main strengths. The charge that it led to an architectural dead end is overplayed, and Nikolaus Pevsner’s conclusion that it created a catalyst for the emergence of the Modern Movement is now viewed as overly simplistic. What really timelessly remains is the simple fact that the Arts and Crafts Movement led to the apogee of English domestic architecture, as celebrated in the smaller country house of the decades around the fin de siècle, which was extensively, if modestly, imitated in the acres of suburban housing that subsequently flourished, like the tentacles of an octopus, until reined in by modern town planning legislation. This legacy was recently reincarnated by the publication of the first complete English translation of Hermann Muthesius’ Das Englische Haus, just over a century after its original publication in German.10
Edward Prior, as a major proponent in the formation of this legacy, is also due for a translation of the wider body of his work, so that his architecture may benefit from a more extensive, coherent and consistent appraisal – which may lead to the increased protection of his remaining legacy. It is with this end in mind that I have attempted to intertwine the three major themes of his artistic life:
1. ARCHITECT – He was articled to Richard Norman Shaw, in whose office he met William Lethaby and others. Shaw gave him his first independent commission, a house in Yorkshire, from which he started his idiosyncratic architectural practice. Many of his subsequent commissions were gained through social and family connections that centred on Harrow, Cambridge and the West Country.
2. SCHOLAR – He unreservedly qualifies, despite his third-class degree in the Cambridge classics tripos, which he put down to final-year distractions such as cycling around Cambridgeshire sketching architecture, once his future vocation was decided upon. ‘Scholar’ was a sobriquet more than confirmed by his subsequent publications and appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge.
3. GENTLEMAN – He certainly qualifies, by the standards of the day, and the way he conducted himself throughout his life concurs with contemporary definitions of the term.
Chapter 2
OVERTURE
Social Context
EDWARD PRIOR’S CAREER AS A PRACTISING architect spanned the halcyon days of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The empire upon which ‘the sun never set’ was at the height of its power. The population explosion started by the Agrarian Revolution in the late 1700s was compounded by the Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century. The population of England quadrupled from ten million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to forty million at its end. This historically unprecedented growth was made possible by the prosperity of advanced industrialization, but with this came inherent social penalties wrought by rapid urbanization: eighty per cent of England’s population lived in cities on the eve of the First World War. Agricultural decline, exacerbated by policies of free trade with consequent cheap imports of prairie wheat, caused a rural exodus to the cities – with a corresponding effect on social hierarchies. Noblesse oblige became ‘beleaguered noblesse’, particularly after the aristocratic carnage of the Great War.11 The coming of the railways enabled a working-class rural exodus to urban centres of employment, with attendant overcrowding and squalor. Systematic suburbanization allowed the emergent middle classes to escape the city centres, contrary to trends in continental Europe. Education became a touchstone for all classes, with public schools increasing in popularity over ancient universities among the middle and upper classes, and universal elementary education finally beginning with the 1870 Education Act.
Although we alternately admonish and admire the Victorians, their virtues were their vices; their strengths were their weaknesses – the reasons for their rising trajectory also traced the symmetrical path of their decline. These contradictory strands permeate virtually all cultural expressions of the Victorian age: one can identify diametrically opposite extremes in most aspects of their social, economic and political history, not to mention artistic, technological and spiritual developments. These incessant dichotomies are thrown into sharp relief by the dramatic, rapid and far-reaching social changes that are characteristic of all areas of Victorian life.
Political Context
Political emancipation for men began with the first Reform Act of 1832 and was then compounded by subsequent Acts, while women had to wait for nearly another century to achieve suffrage. Continental socialism was gradually imported, but at first in an idealistic guise when compared to the bloodshed in mainland Europe. Violent revolution in Britain was avoided by practical, if timid, Liberalism. But utopian leftism proved a strong cultural and artistic catalyst amongst the artists and architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The rise of the middle classes, coupled with economically competitive education, spurred on the rise of the professions, culminating, in architecture, in closed professionalism by the early 1900s. The gulf between the rich and the poor widened – Disraeli’s ‘two nations’. He also coined the phrase ‘one nation’ to encapsulate Conservative aspirations, and proceeded to outline his radical riposte to decades of Liberal domination on an agenda of public health reform. This brought the Conservatives out of opposition dramatically, during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
Conservative political reaction to the consolidated success of the Liberals found cogent form in two speeches by Disraeli, who, by 1872, was the undisputed leader of the Conservative party. These tellingly concentrated on social health legislation and the first compared the biblical quotation ‘Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas’ with his contemporary adage ‘Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas’.12 And again, ‘Pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations, the adulteration of food – these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the legislature … the first consideration of a minister should be the health of the people.’ This Latin analogy heralded the political acceptance of the new ‘religion’ of sanitation and the gradual recognition of the dire social consequences of laissez-faire capitalism. Although a Public Health Act was passed in 1848, allowing the creation of local by-laws, the legislation was relatively ineffective compared with later consolidating acts, such as Disraeli’s 1875 Public Health Act. The political importance of sanitation was symbolically emphasized by ‘The Great Stink’ of 1858, during which the stench of the open sewer that the River Thames had become emptied the House of Commons, not to mention deaths from widespread diseases such as cholera which peaked mid-century.13 John Snow’s evidence for the water-borne transmissions of disease was reinforced when Prince Albert died of typhus in 1861, attributed to ‘bad drains’ – a fact which undoubtedly helped to stimulate concentration on improved sanitary legislation.
The miasma theory of air-borne spread of contagious diseases was still predominant in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, which blamed epidemics such as the Black Death and the Plague of London on ‘bad air’. Louis Pasteur did not advance the germ theory of disease spread until 1861. The rapid urbanization of Victorian Britain and consequently unsanitary and over-crowded conditions caused a number of cholera epidemics.
The cholera outbreak in Broad Street in London’s Soho in 1854 is well known because of Dr John Snow’s seminal study which began to overturn the miasma theory and establish that the spread of cholera was water-borne rather than air-borne. Dr John Snow (1813–58) graduated MD from London University in 1844. He was a pioneer anaesthetist and administered chloroform to Queen Victoria for the birth of two of her children. He first advanced his theory in 1849. The site of the water pump, near his surgery off Carnaby Street, where he studied the spread of cholera-infected water, is now marked by a granite stone. And ironically, given his teetotalism, by a public house called The John Snow.
Economic Context
National wealth increased sixfold throughout the nineteenth century, but by 1900 Britain’s policy of free trade, complementing her laissez-faire economics, was beginning to turn against her as nascent foreign industries, protected by tariff barriers, reached maturity – with the effect that British industry was overtaken by America and Germany by 1914.14 But middle-class wealth was always comparatively modest; rented accommodation was the norm, preceded by significant investment in their children’s education.15 The terrifying social price of Britain’s earlier industrial domination was all too tangibly evident in the streets of her capital and other industrialized cities by the last decades of the nineteenth century.16 This was aptly illustrated by the simple statistic that average working-class individuals were several inches shorter than their counterparts higher up the social strata.
Social philanthropy came of age with sound intellectual underpinnings, as exemplified by Thomas Hill Green at Oxford, an early pioneer of the welfare state; and was continued by those who came immediately under his influence, including William Morris, by association with Charles Faulkner, with whom he later founded Morris, Faulkner and Company. Despite a general economic boom during the Victorian era, established on the early industrialization of Britain and trade with the expanding empire, there were also depressions, notably the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1830s and others towards the end of the century.
The dawning of ‘Manchester capitalism’ brought many architectural opportunities, with the need for new building types such as factories, offices and railway buildings, while the burgeoning population ostensibly needed complementary building types such as housing, churches, schools and workhouses. The recently enfranchised middle classes demanded houses, educational institutions and other public and private buildings. The number of houses in England and Wales rose several-fold over the course of the nineteenth century, although by no means all of these new six million homes involved architects. Most of the dwellings were little more than unsanitary slums housing the new urban workforce – largely built by contractors, funded by speculators, and then sold on to landlords. The vast majority of the population, about nine out of ten, rented their homes from these private landlords, including many of the middle and professional classes.
In an age when rigid definitions of social class determined opportunities, Prior hailed from the upper-middle class. But this was an era when even the professional classes were often a short step from destitution, and material wealth was highly concentrated in the hands of a small elite. It was also the age of Benthamism, self-help, individualism and laissez-faire. Revolution was in the air on the Continent and a constant threat in Britain.17 Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator who edited Das Kapital after his death in 1883, describes the English bourgeois in 1845:
All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense … Supply and demand are the formulas according to which … all human life is judged. Hence free competition in every respect, hence the regime of laissez-faire, laissez-allez in government, in medicine, in education .…18
William Morris described himself as ‘not a capitalist, I am a hanger on of that class like all professional men’. Morris aptly expressed the confidence of the age, to the point of hubris: ‘may I say without fear of contradiction that we English middle classes are the most powerful body of men that the world has yet seen, and that anything that we have set our heart on we will have …’.19
Social Class and Nepotism
Edward Prior was able to exploit his family, educational and social connections throughout his career, and was at various times architect to Harrow School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as well as winning ecclesiastical commissions through the agency of one of his brothers. Prior, as the son of a London barrister, was above Summerson’s social ‘high-water mark’ of the architectural profession:20
The architectural profession in the sixties was a gentleman’s profession – but only just. The RIBA upheld the tradition of the gentleman architect inherited from Sir William Chambers and maintained through the years by an irreproachable élite. But the recruitment in the 30s, 40s and 50s had a decidedly ‘lower middle’ tone. Never do we find sons of the gentry entering architecture as they did the Church or the Law, or even the fine arts … sons of the clergy, like Scott, or of small solicitors, like Street, represent the social high-water mark.21
Later in the century recruitment to the professions rose exponentially until there was a higher proportion of the labour force trying to earn a living by such means than ever before. Many people without capital were substituting material wealth with intellectual capital as an initial resource, cultivated by higher education. The number of doctors in Britain rose from 15,000 to 22,000, and of architects from 7,000 to 11,000, between 1881 and 1901.
William Morris and the associated Arts and Crafts Movement were influential more for their ideology, and the fusion of artistic and social rejuvenation, than necessarily for their gifts as artists and designers. The Arts and Crafts Movement attempted to restore the links between art and craftsmen, and to revolutionize the everyday environment of the middle classes, rather than restrict themselves to the rarefied culture of the leisurely rich. Their inspiration was essentially egalitarian and idealized medievalism. But the lasting testament to Morris is a set of wallpapers and textiles still commercially available today, rather than a social and artistic revolution.
The Poor Law of 1831 created demand for the new building type of the workhouse (preceded by almshouses, to an extent) upon which one of the pre-eminent Victorian architect’s early career was founded – namely, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s firm of Scott and Moffat. Gilbert Scott and his pupil George Edmund Street were champions of the Gothic Revival style of architecture, and battled with neoclassicists such as William Wilkins (architect of the National Galley and University College London) for public commissions in their favoured style of architecture. The recently revived St Pancras Station and Hotel was Scott’s Gothic masterpiece, although he compromised his principles to complete the Foreign Office in Whitehall in an Italianate neoclassical style. The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand was Street’s Gothic magnum opus – his design was the prizewinner in the 1866 competition and the structure was opened by Queen Victoria in 1882, shortly after Scott’s death in 1881.
Classical Revival Foreign Office stairwell by Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1875. (© Richard Ingle/RIBA Library Photographs Collection)
Gothic Revival coffee room design for St Pancras Station by Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1874. (© RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections)
While the battle of the styles continued in major public buildings, legislation was slow to improve the quality of mass housing. The London Building Act of 1774 was largely part of a response to the Great Fire of 1666, and involved prescriptions for recessing windows behind brick reveals to prevent spread of fire, as well as wall thicknesses and maximum heights. The year of 1848 saw the first Public Health Act, but it was not until 1871 when the Prince of Wales caught typhus, attributed to bad drains, that public awareness of hygiene was heightened. This royal calamity was quickly responded to with the highly effective Public Health Act of 1875, which introduced legislation on WCs, sewers, water supplies and so on. The Addison Act of 1919 introduced publicly funded housing for the working classes.
The craft guilds of masons and carpenters of medieval times mark the beginning of an organized construction industry. Master masons and journeymen comprised the embryonic building professions. Master craftsmen were latter-day contractors, responsible to the client for organizing labour and materials. Early designs were vernacular and hence oft repeated, possibly with embellishments by master craftsmen. This simple system prevailed, under socio-economic stability, until the sixteenth century, when master masons began to design. The title ‘architect’ was in use by this time, as the expansive aspirations of Elizabethan clients, followed by ‘grand tours’ to the ancient civilizations, cultivated specialized design expertise. The forerunner of the traditional system, in which an architect supervises the work of individual trades, was the prevalent procurement system in the eighteenth century. With industrialization in the nineteenth century, larger and more complex building types emerged which required specialist experts such as quantity surveyors and specialist engineers.
Bowley records the strong flavour of social class distinctions that the system (relationships between building owners, professionals and builders) had acquired just before the First World War. It also contains some interesting descriptions of the perceived social status of other professions in the construction industry of the time:
The architects were members of a profession concerned with a major art, they were confidants of gentlemen and to a considerable extent arbiters of taste. Successful architects at least were members of the upper middle-class élite. They were gentlemen or regarded themselves as such. Engineers on the other hand … were not really regarded as gentlemen … Surveyors of all sorts were even more definitely socially inferior. Builders, however wealthy or successful… were ‘cap-in-hand builders’ as they are sometimes termed. In the architects’ view the system was hierarchical both socially and in terms of working organisations. The builders and their workmen formed the lowest ranks, the architects the highest; the other professions came in between.22
