George Gilbert Scott

English architect

• Born: July 13, 1811
• Birthplace: Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, England
• Died: March 27, 1878
• Place of death: London, England

Because of his designs for the Foreign Office, St. Pancras Hotel, and the Albert Memorial, as well as his restoration of many important medieval buildings throughout Great Britain, Scott became one of the most highly regarded architects in nineteenth century England.

Early Life

George Gilbert Scott was the fourth son of Thomas and Euphemia (née Lynch) Scott. Both his father, a curate at the church in Gawcott, England, and his mother, from a family with strong Wesleyan connections, held severe religious views and reared their large family in a strict and pious manner. Because of their mistrust of local High Church schools, Scott never received a formal education. Until the age of fifteen, he was taught at home by his father. Scott then demonstrated an interest in architecture, so his father sent him to an uncle for a year of preparatory schooling. In 1827, Scott was apprenticed to James Edmeston, a local architect with religious views similar to those of the Scott family. Scott always considered himself uneducated and regretted this lack of formal schooling throughout his life.

Scott’s interest in medieval churches surfaced during this period under Edmeston, but the latter attempted to redirect his energies toward more practical designs and condemned Gothic architecture as too expensive and wasteful of building materials. In fact, Edmeston went so far as to write to Scott’s father several times complaining that the young man wasted too much time sketching medieval buildings. In any case, Scott successfully completed his apprenticeship in 1831 and, after a two-month visit home, he moved to London and joined the firm of Grissell and Peto.

The next year, 1832, he moved to the firm of Henry Roberts, where he worked under the direction of Sir Robert Smirke. Scott would later look back at this period as unproductive and barren, years in which the emphasis on practical designs stifled his natural inclinations and originality. In 1834, following the death of his father, he associated himself with an architect who was drawing designs for workhouses that would be constructed under the New Poor Law. Scott saw this as an opportunity to break free from the various practical masters who had thus far controlled the content of his work, and, in violation of certain rules of professional etiquette, he personally visited Poor Law boards throughout the country and pushed his own plans for the new workhouses. As a result, he obtained four contracts for workhouse construction, and, to handle this new work, he formed a partnership with W. B. Moffat, another former apprentice of Edmeston. Scott was finally on his own, and the famous firm of Scott and Moffat had been born.

On June 5, 1838, Scott was married to Caroline Oldrid, his second cousin. During their long marriage, they produced five sons, two of whom would later also pursue careers in architecture. Balding and stocky, Scott affected the long, bushy sideburns that were popular among Victorian men. Acquaintances noted that he was careless about his appearance and often arrived at important business meetings in rumpled and mismatched suits. However, behind this slightly eccentric facade lurked the clear, intelligent eyes and determined mouth of a young man who knew what he wanted and how to get it.

Life’s Work

The partnership of Scott and Moffat endured until 1845, and, during its existence, the two men produced nearly fifty workhouses and orphanages. Scott also accepted commissions to construct churches in the towns of Birmingham, Shaftesbury, Hanwell, Turnham, Bridlington Quay, and Norbiton. Although church architecture would later become Scott’s specialty, these early designs suffered from his concentration on workhouse construction and were generally undistinguished and rather clumsy.

During the early 1840’s, Scott’s latent talent for Gothic architecture was stimulated through his friendship with Augustus Northmore Pugin, a noted architect and a pioneer in the nineteenth century Gothic revival. Responding to Pugin’s encouragement, Scott designed his first Gothic building, St. Giles in Camberwell, in 1840. Public response to this church was favorable and persuaded Scott to abandon his “practical” work in favor of more imaginative and romantic Gothic designs.

Scott’s growing reputation as a Gothic architect received a tremendous boost in 1844 when he won an open competition to design the Lutheran Church of St. Nicholas in Hamburg, Germany. The success of this mock-fourteenth century structure led, in 1847, to an important commission to restore the Anglican cathedral in Ely. In preparation for this assignment, Scott visited France in order to observe the Gothic cathedrals at Amiens, Chartres, and elsewhere. This habit of visiting Gothic monuments on the Continent for inspiration for his work in Great Britain would become a regular feature of Scott’s career.

Between 1845 and 1862, commissions literally poured into Scott’s office. The design of new, and the restoration of old, churches constituted the vast majority of these assignments and included such excellent examples of neo-Gothic architecture as his creation of the cathedral of St. John in Newfoundland, Canada, and his restorations of cathedrals in Ripon, Salisbury, Lichfield, and Hereford. Perhaps his most famous work during this period was his restoration of the chapter house and monuments of Westminster Abbey in 1849. His careful research for this important project would later be incorporated into a book, Gleanings from Westminster Abbey , which Scott published in 1861. As a result of his growing fame, Scott was made an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1855 and was promoted to full membership in 1861.

In 1856, Scott entered a competition for the contract to rebuild the Foreign Office buildings. He proposed a French-inspired Gothic design for the buildings, and, in 1858, he was awarded the position of chief architect for the reconstruction project. Proponents of classical architecture, however, opposed his Gothic design and received support from such notable parliamentary leaders as Lord Palmerston. As a result, the House of Commons, after heated debates between supporters of the two architectural schools, ordered that an Italian classical design also be drawn up so that it could be compared with Scott’s original Gothic proposal. Scott tried his best to maneuver around the order, but in 1861 he was forced to submit an Italian influenced design that satisfied both Palmerston and the House of Commons. Advocates of the Gothic school accused Scott of treason for this compromise, but the finished buildings nevertheless proved to be among the best in his career.

Scott’s most prestigious commission came in 1864, when he won a court-sponsored competition to design a monument in memory of Queen Victoria’s recently deceased husband, Prince Albert. The success of this memorial, a shrine containing a seated statue of the prince consort, led to other royal commissions, such as the restoration of Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey’s chapel in Windsor Castle in 1869. In 1872, Scott was knighted as a reward for all of his work for the royal family.

A year after the Albert Memorial commission, in 1865, Scott designed perhaps his best work, St. Pancras Station in London. He regarded the completed building as the culmination of his search to achieve a Gothic style that would serve modern structural and aesthetic purposes. The station still stands as a monument to the Victorian Gothic revival that Scott did so much to launch and promote.

Although Scott worked busily until the end of his life, none of his work after 1865 equaled the quality of that of the 1850’s and early 1860’s. As befit his status as one of Great Britain’s best-known architects, he spent much of his time during the late 1860’s and 1870’s engaging in honorary and educational activities. From 1873 to 1876, he served as president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He also occupied the prestigious post of professor of architecture at the Royal Academy from 1868 to 1878. His lectures were published in 1879 as a two-volume work entitled Lectures on the Rise and Development of Medieval Architecture . In addition to these activities, Scott also devoted much time and energy to promoting the establishment of an Architectural Museum in London, a project that was realized shortly after his death. He died of a heart attack on March 27, 1878, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Significance

Sir George Gilbert Scott had a prolific career. From 1847 until his death in 1878 he completed 732 projects, including twenty-nine cathedrals, 476 churches, twenty-five schools, twenty-three parsonages, fifty-eight monuments of varying size, twenty-five college chapels, twenty-six public buildings, forty-three mansions, and assorted other designs. He was the best known and most successful British architect during the mid-nineteenth century, and much of his work remains standing in the twenty-first century.

Even before Scott’s death, a growing number of critics questioned both Scott’s neo-Gothic style and the manner in which he conducted his restorations. His Gothic designs, as exemplified by his work on Westminster Abbey, are often eclectic and overblown. Scott all too frequently took the unique traits of medieval French, Italian, and German architecture and mixed them together in an apparently random fashion to produce his own “Gothic” designs. The result of this practice struck some contemporaries, and most modern students, as a rather gaudy and incoherent jumble, one that critics claim typified the Victorian Gothic revival.

Scott also remodeled buildings as he restored them. Rather than trying to recapture the original design, he frequently altered structural components, added ornamentation, and even changed the building materials. In many ways, he did not restore buildings at all; instead, he reconstructed them to conform with his vision of what Gothic architecture should be like. This practice, in fact, led to the formation in 1878 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, an organization dedicated to preserving old structures from the revisionism of architects such as Scott.

Scott’s reputation has suffered a tremendous decline since his death. He will always be recognized as one of the foremost advocates of the Gothic architectural revival of the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, as the aesthetic quality and the historical integrity of this revival has been severely questioned by successive generations, Scott’s place in the history of British architecture has steadily diminished.

Bibliography

Bergdoll, Barry. European Architecture, 1750-1890. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This general survey of European architecture contains information about Scott, including his designs for the Law Courts and the Midland Grand Hotel at St. Pancras railway station.

Brooks, Chris, ed. The Albert Memorial: Its History, Contexts, and Conservation. New Haven, Conn.: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2000. Lavishly illustrated history of the memorial, including essays about Scott’s conception, design, and construction.

Clarke, B. F. L. Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Scott figures prominently in this generally positive assessment of the British Gothic revival.

Cole, David. The Work of Sir George Gilbert Scott. London: Architectural Press, 1980. The most complete work in print on Scott and his contribution to British architecture. The author’s approach is generally sympathetic, and he stresses that an accurate appreciation of Scott’s work can only be obtained by comparing it with that of his contemporaries, not by judging it by modern standards.

Ferriday, Peter, ed. Victorian Architecture. London: Jonathan Cape, 1963. A collection of essays, most written by the editor. The essay on the Gothic revival correctly emphasizes Scott’s contribution but provides little in the way of biographical information.

Goodhart-Rendel, H. S. English Architecture Since the Regency: An Interpretation. London: Constable, 1953. This book includes only a few pages on Scott and his work, but it does provide an excellent summary of the various objections to the architect and the Gothic revival in general.

Hitchcock, Henry Russell. Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958. This book includes a section on the British Gothic revival of the mid-Victorian period and provides a concise, though negative, interpretation of Scott’s contribution to it.

Jordan, W. J. “Sir George Gilbert Scott, R.A.: Surveyor to Westminster Abbey, 1849-1878.” Architectural History 23 (1980): 60-85. An excellent summary of Scott’s career from midcentury until his death. In spite of the article’s title, it goes beyond his work on Westminster Abbey and discusses his general role in the Gothic revival.

Scott, Sir George Gilbert. Personal and Professional Recollections. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879. A long, rambling autobiography that includes some insights into Scott’s personal beliefs and an explanation of what he was trying to achieve. This book is also full of biographical details that are not available elsewhere.