The Georgian Parish Church: 'Monuments to Posterity': M.H. Port welcomes a fundamental contribution to the study of Georgian church architecture

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by M.H. Port

The Georgian Parish Church: 'Monuments to Posterity' Terry Friedman Spire Books, Reading, 33.95 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 94536 15 3 9

Of late years an abundant shower of articles illuminating Anglican church-building in the once-condemned eighteenth century has fallen from Terry Friedman's pen. Now he weaves a continuous weft incorporating six exemplary churches. He focusses first on the main course of architectural development of the church, 'invariably the most important and conspicuous public architecture'--though this is less true later in the century, when county court houses tended to cost as much as a church, and gaols much more. But the concept of church building as public architecture is often neglected.

Contrasting advice by Wren and Vanbrugh to the Queen Anne commission for building fifty new churches opens the theme. Wren laid stress on practical aspects, such as the appropriate size for performance of the Anglican liturgy, whereas Vanbrugh emphasised the significance of the church as a townscape feature; a basic polarity in Georgian church design. By modifying Hawksmoor's design for St Alphege, Greenwich, Vanbrugh also contributed fundamentally to adapting Graeco-Roman temple design for Christian worship.

Several architectural currents were flowing simultaneously. Baroque was displaced by Palladian classicism, influenced by Inigo Jones's St Paul, Covent Garden, and sustained by Thomas Hardwick into the nineteenth century. Gothic revival is seen in William Dickinson's 'commitment to a Gothic free of stylistic impurities' in the north transept of Westminster Abbey (1719-23), although classical features emerge in many later gothic designs. Neoclassicism offered, notably, Bonomi's Greek Doric at Great Packington, and Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762, 1787, 1794), providing 'the most unlikely pagan temples as models for Anglican churches'.

We then come to specific church studies. Archer's symmetrical St John, Westminster, most baroque of English churches, raises many issues. 'Why four towers?' is a basic question, leading to an investigation of the quality of the site. Queen Anne's commissioners were seriously concerned about foundations in Millbank's quicksands, calling repeatedly for reports from architects, surveyors and master tradesmen. Archer's towers were abandoned half finished in 1718, to be modified nine years later by Hawksmoor and John James. Friedman observes that they look as if they will slide off the slope of the portico pediments. The central aedicule in the pediment was to have taken one of the fifty statues of Queen Anne ordered by the commission, but cancelled on 29 June 1714 (not, as here, after the queen's death), in favour of a single statue in the Strand. Archer's inadequately-recorded interior had intersecting semi-elliptical barrel vaults, leaving the corner bays with flat ceilings. After a catastrophic fire in 1742 the church was reconstructed with a flat ceiling, 'radically changing Archer's complex spaces'. The 'daringly original, indeed unique' feature of Archer's church was 'the way in which the logical, structural and potentially iconographic elements were drawn together to produce a building of obsessively strict mirror symmetry'.

St John's was built under an act of parliament; St Paul, Sheffield, encapsulates the problems of providing additional church-room without an act. In 1718, a Sheffield goldsmith gave 1,000 [pounds sterling] towards a new church, together with an endowment. Built between 1720 and 1725, St Paul, Sheffield, was Roman Doric, with baroque features. Who the architect was is uncertain: John Platt II (1728-1810), who built the upper stages of the tower in 1769-72, recorded that it had been built by 'Mr Tunnicliffe and my Uncle John Platt'. The elder Platt, however, practised only as a builder; but Ralph Tunnicliffe (c. 1688-1736) had had some involvement with church design, and later replicated a broken scrolled door pediment, found at the east end of St Paul's, in his east front of Wentworth Woodhouse for Thomas (Watson) Wentworth, Lord Mahon from 1728--who must surely be the 'Thomas Wentworth Jr' on St Paul's building committee in 1719. Friedman bewails the fate of this 'eccentric' building, 'wantonly' demolished in 1938 for a municipal garden.

St Margaret, Westminster, nestling in the shade of the abbey, and parish church of the money-voting House of Commons, illustrates the gothic revival. In 1734, John James, 'a knowledgeable Gothicist', took down (as an appendix makes clear) the greater part of the crumbling tower and rebuilt it, with some odd classically-derived touches, such as a single Doric drop to alternate quatrefoils in his frieze. A quarter-century later, Kenton Couse of the King's Works changed the east end from a square to a semi-octagon, for an east window containing glass originally given by the magistrates of Dort in the Netherlands to Henry VII for his new chapel, with representations of the king and queen (Elizabeth, not, as here, Catherine), that, arriving after his death, had somehow been diverted. Its insertion in 1758 provoked a controversy about the ornamentation of Anglican churches. Extensive repairs from 1798 by the versatile S.P. Cockerell included stabilising the chancel, and simplifying Couse's decorative work: 'typical of a growing awareness ... of the importance of employing a more authentic medieval vocabulary'.