Grand Designs
At the end of the 19th century britain indulged in a rare fit of collective madness, and we’re still living with the architectural results. It went wild for the empire. half a century earlier, at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, charles barry and AWN Pugin succeeded in building the houses of Parliament with almost no reference to britain’s overseas possessions – the themes were chivalry and Saxon liberties. but that changed when free trade went sour (the other european countries did not want to play by our rules) and britain began to lose its industrial advantage in the 1880s. Then britain put out the flags, and the empire was promoted as a popular cultural force, through exhibitions, jubilees and pageants, mighty building schemes and (a new thing for britain) formal town planning. Anything might be dubbed imperial, from the empire Swimming Pool at Wembley to the empire music hall at hackney. The nation was standing to attention, puffing out its chest, proud to be ruled by a Queen who had also, at her own request, been made empress in 1877.
Not everyone got on board the imperial train: the rural aesthetic of the Arts and crafts movement did not lend itself to grand gestures. but it’s noticeable that few people attacked the idea of empire – and even some rather surprising figures (John ruskin, the prime movers of the Fabian Society) thought that a world run by britain was to the general good, because britain did such things best. Architects responded to the public’s enthusiasm, devising a new, gutsy style for buildings that were sometimes brobdingnagian in scale. Swagger, opulent materials, sculpture – they were all part of the Neo-baroque mix. Above all there were domes. Anathema to the gothic revival, they were now to be seen above town halls, insurance offices, innumerable theatres, the Old Bailey, the War Office… Britain was domed up.
The change was particularly marked in London. Foggy and soot-blackened, it looked dowdy – almost provincial – beside Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Brussels, those other imperial capitals whose glittering boulevards were lined with exuberant buildings, as rich as an escoffier sauce. There were few new streets, even though the scale of life – seen in bigger shops, bigger offices, more civil servants, immense ceremonial processions with imperial troops – was increasing. conscious of being the metropolis of empire, London applied itself, for the first time, to improvement, in the grand, formal style of the Ecole des beaux-Arts. Throughout Britain, new civic institutions were given town halls whose flamboyant domes and allegorical sculpture evoked both empire and local pride.
The transformation of London’s ceremonial heart was achieved by several initiatives. The newly formed London county council wanted to provide decent housing for the hard-working poor. The Strand Improvement Scheme not only widened the important thoroughfare that linked government at Westminster and society in the West end with commerce in the city of London, but eliminated some noxious slums. A new bow of a street was created in Aldwych, with an arrow shooting north from it in Kingsway. These were modern (Kingsway was served by an underground tram); they were also self-consciously imperial, as can be seen from the names of the buildings that arose on them (Imperial buildings, Africa house).
This scheme had not been completed before the Queen Victoria memorial got underway. The sculptural part of the memorial took the form of an immense monument, on which Queen Victoria sits beside Truth and charity, beneath a golden figure of Peace (possibly Victory) surrounded by nautical imagery on the theme of britain’s naval might. The architectural dimension, entrusted to the competent Sir Aston Webb, would, in the end, stretch from the east front of Buckingham Palace (with famous balcony), down a reordered mall, through Admiralty Arch and, via a new entrance, into Trafalgar Square. here it joined hands with the Strand Improvement Scheme, the result being a new ceremonial route from the seat of royalty to the seat of commerce. This route would become home to the governments of South Africa (on Trafalgar Square), India and Australia (on Aldwych). When George V unveiled the monument to Queen Victoria in 1911, the Illustrated london News captioned its illustration of the event: ‘George the imperialist at the memorial to Victoria the Good.’
Around the country, new town halls proclaimed the effort that britain was making to improve its cities and take control, for their own sake, of the lives of the poor. These buildings – at Deptford, Battersea, Lambeth, Cardiff, Lancaster, Belfast – had pediments and often domes, rather than (as at Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester Town hall of a generation earlier) gables and crockets. Appropriately for a young institution, the london county council was housed, at county hall, on the south bank of the river Thames, by an exceptionally young architect: ralph Knott was still in his 20s when he won the competition to design it in 1908.
Improved communications needed appropriate expression. This could be seen in the stylish decor of liners such as the Orient Line’s Orion steaming to Australia and the Canadian Pacific’s Empress Of Britain on the transatlantic run. Passengers returning to Liverpool – in hot competition with Southampton for passenger shipping – were greeted with an extraordinary architectural declaration as they approached the waterfront: the Three graces – buildings of stupendous elan and self-confidence – that were the dock Offices, beneath a welter of domes; the fantastic, mannerist royal liver building, and between them the renaissance magnificence of the cunard building. ‘The port is not merely the port of the city of Liverpool, nor merely one of the leading ports of the kingdom,’ declared the Liverpool Daily Post in 1907; ‘it is far more – it is a link, and an important link in the chain of empire.’ The name of Imperial Airways, launched with government support, declared the importance that air travel would have in knitting the empire together, and a new building type was born in the airport: stolidly classical at the first, croydon, then appropriately moderne at Heston, Shoreham, Ramsgate, Birmingham and Jersey.
In the bigger cities, travellers could stay in cosmopolitan hotels, the pace for which had been set by Richard D’Oyly Carte at the Savoy. César Ritz opened the establishment; the most famous chef in the world, Auguste Escoffier, presided over the kitchen, and guests rose to their rooms in hydraulic lifts from the American elevation company. The starch of Victorian social conventions was softening, and by the 1890s it was possible for respectable ladies to eat in restaurants without compromising their reputations, and amid decor (at the criterion, for example) that was as sumptuous as their frocks. A boom in theatre-building – between 1879 and 1912, the theatre specialist Frank ‘Matchless’ Matcham built 150 of them – provided patriotism with, quite literally, its stage. gW hunt’s celebrated jingo song, performed by The great macdermott – ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, 'We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too’ – gave a new word to the language: jingoism. And ‘wild enthusiasm’ greeted Arthur Sullivan’s setting of Kipling’s imperialistic The Absent-Minded Beggar, first performed in 1899.
Alas, the exuberance could not last; the Edwardian balloon was punctured, four years after george the imperialist came to the throne, by an assassin’s revolver in Sarajevo. Afterwards, a last, sad hurrah was raised for the figurative tradition in sculpture by the commissioning of war memorials, a far cry from the swagger years of Edwardian baroque. It’s believed that there are 100,000 war memorials in Britain: the Empire is an inescapable part of the landscape of our lives.
The Age Of Empire: Britain’s Imperial Architecture From 1880-1930, by Clive Aslet, is published by Aurum Press, priced £35.
Not everyone got on board the imperial train: the rural aesthetic of the Arts and crafts movement did not lend itself to grand gestures. but it’s noticeable that few people attacked the idea of empire – and even some rather surprising figures (John ruskin, the prime movers of the Fabian Society) thought that a world run by britain was to the general good, because britain did such things best. Architects responded to the public’s enthusiasm, devising a new, gutsy style for buildings that were sometimes brobdingnagian in scale. Swagger, opulent materials, sculpture – they were all part of the Neo-baroque mix. Above all there were domes. Anathema to the gothic revival, they were now to be seen above town halls, insurance offices, innumerable theatres, the Old Bailey, the War Office… Britain was domed up.
The change was particularly marked in London. Foggy and soot-blackened, it looked dowdy – almost provincial – beside Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Brussels, those other imperial capitals whose glittering boulevards were lined with exuberant buildings, as rich as an escoffier sauce. There were few new streets, even though the scale of life – seen in bigger shops, bigger offices, more civil servants, immense ceremonial processions with imperial troops – was increasing. conscious of being the metropolis of empire, London applied itself, for the first time, to improvement, in the grand, formal style of the Ecole des beaux-Arts. Throughout Britain, new civic institutions were given town halls whose flamboyant domes and allegorical sculpture evoked both empire and local pride.
The transformation of London’s ceremonial heart was achieved by several initiatives. The newly formed London county council wanted to provide decent housing for the hard-working poor. The Strand Improvement Scheme not only widened the important thoroughfare that linked government at Westminster and society in the West end with commerce in the city of London, but eliminated some noxious slums. A new bow of a street was created in Aldwych, with an arrow shooting north from it in Kingsway. These were modern (Kingsway was served by an underground tram); they were also self-consciously imperial, as can be seen from the names of the buildings that arose on them (Imperial buildings, Africa house).
This scheme had not been completed before the Queen Victoria memorial got underway. The sculptural part of the memorial took the form of an immense monument, on which Queen Victoria sits beside Truth and charity, beneath a golden figure of Peace (possibly Victory) surrounded by nautical imagery on the theme of britain’s naval might. The architectural dimension, entrusted to the competent Sir Aston Webb, would, in the end, stretch from the east front of Buckingham Palace (with famous balcony), down a reordered mall, through Admiralty Arch and, via a new entrance, into Trafalgar Square. here it joined hands with the Strand Improvement Scheme, the result being a new ceremonial route from the seat of royalty to the seat of commerce. This route would become home to the governments of South Africa (on Trafalgar Square), India and Australia (on Aldwych). When George V unveiled the monument to Queen Victoria in 1911, the Illustrated london News captioned its illustration of the event: ‘George the imperialist at the memorial to Victoria the Good.’
Around the country, new town halls proclaimed the effort that britain was making to improve its cities and take control, for their own sake, of the lives of the poor. These buildings – at Deptford, Battersea, Lambeth, Cardiff, Lancaster, Belfast – had pediments and often domes, rather than (as at Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester Town hall of a generation earlier) gables and crockets. Appropriately for a young institution, the london county council was housed, at county hall, on the south bank of the river Thames, by an exceptionally young architect: ralph Knott was still in his 20s when he won the competition to design it in 1908.
Improved communications needed appropriate expression. This could be seen in the stylish decor of liners such as the Orient Line’s Orion steaming to Australia and the Canadian Pacific’s Empress Of Britain on the transatlantic run. Passengers returning to Liverpool – in hot competition with Southampton for passenger shipping – were greeted with an extraordinary architectural declaration as they approached the waterfront: the Three graces – buildings of stupendous elan and self-confidence – that were the dock Offices, beneath a welter of domes; the fantastic, mannerist royal liver building, and between them the renaissance magnificence of the cunard building. ‘The port is not merely the port of the city of Liverpool, nor merely one of the leading ports of the kingdom,’ declared the Liverpool Daily Post in 1907; ‘it is far more – it is a link, and an important link in the chain of empire.’ The name of Imperial Airways, launched with government support, declared the importance that air travel would have in knitting the empire together, and a new building type was born in the airport: stolidly classical at the first, croydon, then appropriately moderne at Heston, Shoreham, Ramsgate, Birmingham and Jersey.
In the bigger cities, travellers could stay in cosmopolitan hotels, the pace for which had been set by Richard D’Oyly Carte at the Savoy. César Ritz opened the establishment; the most famous chef in the world, Auguste Escoffier, presided over the kitchen, and guests rose to their rooms in hydraulic lifts from the American elevation company. The starch of Victorian social conventions was softening, and by the 1890s it was possible for respectable ladies to eat in restaurants without compromising their reputations, and amid decor (at the criterion, for example) that was as sumptuous as their frocks. A boom in theatre-building – between 1879 and 1912, the theatre specialist Frank ‘Matchless’ Matcham built 150 of them – provided patriotism with, quite literally, its stage. gW hunt’s celebrated jingo song, performed by The great macdermott – ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, 'We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too’ – gave a new word to the language: jingoism. And ‘wild enthusiasm’ greeted Arthur Sullivan’s setting of Kipling’s imperialistic The Absent-Minded Beggar, first performed in 1899.
Alas, the exuberance could not last; the Edwardian balloon was punctured, four years after george the imperialist came to the throne, by an assassin’s revolver in Sarajevo. Afterwards, a last, sad hurrah was raised for the figurative tradition in sculpture by the commissioning of war memorials, a far cry from the swagger years of Edwardian baroque. It’s believed that there are 100,000 war memorials in Britain: the Empire is an inescapable part of the landscape of our lives.
The Age Of Empire: Britain’s Imperial Architecture From 1880-1930, by Clive Aslet, is published by Aurum Press, priced £35.