Gothic revival: later this month, the scaffolding comes down from the new crossing tower of Bury St Edmunds cathedral. It triumphantly proves that gothic architecture is alive

Apollo, May, 2005 by Gavin Stamp

Obituaries are sometimes written too soon. Seventy years ago, the architect and critic Harry Goodhart-Rendel dated the death of the gothic revival--that vital national artistic movement he admired and understood so well--to the years in which the great central tower of Giles Scott's Liverpool Cathedral was beginning to rise. He was (for once) wrong, just as he was mistaken in stating that 'any hope for its future must be based upon its possible reappearance in a form so changed to suit changed methods of construction'. Proof of that is the completion of another gothic cathedral tower, one that is rather smaller and less original than Scott's in Liverpool but which is nevertheless an extraordinary triumph--a triumph of traditional values and methods of construction as well as of resolution in the face of adversity, hostility and indifference.

Suffolk has been the unlikely setting for this architectural drama. The scaffolding is now coming down at Bury St Edmunds Cathedral to expose gilded weathervanes and crocketted pinnacles, flint flushwork battlements and stepped buttresses on a tall tower that might well have been designed by John Wastell, the architect who, in the early sixteenth century, built the nave of the former parish church of St James, behind which once stood the huge abbey church containing the shrine of St Edmund. Built of Barnack stone using methods little different in essence from those Wastell must have employed, this new tower may well soon look as if it has been there for centuries. But its timeless serenity was achieved only after a struggle and because of the bloody-minded determination of two little-known architects who continued to believe in the pointed arch. The first was the late Stephen Dykes Bower, who was so unfashionable and out of his time in the zeitgeist-conscious twentieth century that, despite having been Surveyor to Westminster Abbey, he has been largely written out of architectural history; the second is his sometime assistant, Warwick Pethers, whose name is conspicuous by its absence in all the literature about the cathedral.

Dykes Bower was appointed cathedral architect in 1943, an inauspicious year. He was then already antipathetic to a modernist approach to church design, and as a student at the Architectural Association in the 1920s he had been unusual for his sympathy for the gothic revival as a living movement, even confessing an unlikely admiration for the work of Sir Gilbert Scott. Ironically, at Bury, he was obliged to demolish the chancel designed by Scott that had replaced an eighteenth-century structure. Dykes Bower's task was to convert the medieval parish church into a visibly convincing cathedral (its status had been elevated in 1914) by adding transepts and a much larger chancel as well as a new cloister and porch. And one day a tower might rise over the new crossing ...

Construction finally began in 1959. The new transepts and choir are all in a late gothic style, harmonious with the nave, but in a flat, spare manner, enlivened with flushwork, that is reminiscent of the work of some of Dykes Bower's late-Victorian heroes: Temple Moore and Walter Tapper. What is very much in his own style is the bright colouring of the ceilings, for he was an artist who (unusually again) continued to believe in artistic unity and had no patience with antiquarian sentimentality or conservationist restraint.

Work stopped in 1970, leaving blocked arches in the incomplete north transept, only a few bays of the intended cloister, and reinforcement rods protruding vainly from the stump of the crossing tower. The architectural climate could not have been more inimical to Dykes Bower's vision and a new Provost was hostile to money being spent on building. But Dykes Bower never gave up, and continued to dream, and design. Somehow, in 1990, a cathedral centre was completed--faced in brick rather than stone--to the north of the choir, with Dykes Bower as consultant. But what really got the building project going again was his own death in 1994 at the age of 91, for it emerged that in his will he had left 2.5 million [pounds sterling] to the cathedral (a fortune not made from architecture: he was one of four bachelor brothers, and the last to go). Now the cathedral authorities certainly did not want to continue building, but money is always worth having and a bequest like that is not to be sniffed at ... And then the National Lottery and Millennium Commission came into existence and it became clear that more necessary millions could be raised. A momentum slowly built up.

First, however, it had to be decided what was to be built, and who was going to be the architect in charge. Before he died, Dykes Bower had set up a trust for Bury and indicated that he wanted Warwick Pethers to continue his work. Pethers had also been a student at the Architectural Association, but in a less tolerant decade, and he became disillusioned with the modernism he had been taught. After spending time in America, he had asked to work for Dykes Bower so that he could learn about alternative, traditional approaches to design. The problem at Bury was that he was not only unknown but also inexperienced. But Pethers had the political skills necessary for successful practice, so he brought in a well-established firm of conservation architects with whom he thought he could work. And then he had to fight to make sure Dykes Bower's intentions were not betrayed.