The Battle of the Styles

Society, Culture and the Design of a New Foreign Office, 1855-1861

Bernard Porter

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781441167392
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441174734
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This title explores the controversy surrounding the design of the new Foreign Office in London during Britain's Imperial heyday. In 1855 it was decided to build a new block of government offices in London, starting with the Foreign and War Offices. The government offices competition came at what was probably - looking back on it - the zenith of Britain's confidence as a nation and international power. One would expect the mid-Victorians to have felt, firstly, pride in their current national situation; and secondly, the urge to commemorate this in the most important national building to be projected in twenty years. Porter uses the debates surrounding the building of these important new monuments to interrogate the very fabric of British society, culture and nation building. The discussion on so many issues - religion, nationality, empire, history, modernism, truth, morality, gender - quite apart from considerations of 'pure' aesthetics, offers an unusual, perhaps even unique, insight into the relationship between these matters and the 'culture' of the time.

1

The Battle Joined

During the nineteenth century three great national buildings were erected in London: the Houses of Parliament in Westminster (1840–c. 1860), the Government Offices in Whitehall (1863–74) and the Law Courts in the Strand (1874–82). Each evoked public interest and controversy, much of it surrounding the style to be employed, in a period – embracing almost the entire century – when there was no consensus over this, and a huge gulf in particular between those who advocated the ‘Classical’ (or Italianate, or Greek, or Renaissance) style, or styles, and those who championed the ‘Gothic’ (or ‘pointed’), and variants of it. All three buildings were affected by this controversy to some degree, but none of the others half so much as the middle one of them, the Whitehall buildings, where the row that erupted was popularly dubbed the ‘Battle of the Styles’. It may not have been the most important or decisive battle in the more general architectural war it was an episode in; but it was the most public and spectacular. For that reason we shall begin with a straightforward account of it here – that is, of the ‘Battle’ as it was fought on the front lines, between 1855 and 1861, mainly in and around parliament – before moving back, in the following chapter, to place it in its historical context; and then going on to consider the various cultural, social and political discourses that informed it while it raged.

The original motive for rebuilding the Government Offices was the simple one of need. The business of the Victorian state was expanding.¹ The premises in which it was carried on were quite obviously unsatisfactory. Benjamin Hall, the First Commissioner of Works in 1857, thought that ‘no public offices in the world’ were ‘so inconvenient or in so ruinous a state as our own’. He called them ‘wretched abortions’.² Many were rented: ‘the government’, commented The Times, ‘lives in lodgings’.³ The worst was reputed to be the Foreign Office, an old house on Downing Street that was far too small for its purpose, and actually physically dangerous. If the government held any kind of reception there attended by more than a few foreign dignitaries, the floors had to be propped up from underneath with beams. The favourite story, repeated many times, was of how Lord Malmesbury had once narrowly escaped injury or even death when a ceiling fell in on the desk he had been sitting at just a moment previously.⁴ This, as The Times pointed out, held the whole nation up to ‘ridicule’⁵ – especially when compared with the situation in Paris, which, as we shall see, it often was. The problem with the War Office – the second department prioritized originally – was slightly different. This was that its various sub-departments were scattered all over London, making coordination difficult.⁶ That could be serious in times of war. (Maybe it helps explain the British Army’s notorious shortcomings during the Crimean conflict.)

The first official government report recommending a substantial rebuilding came in 1839, followed by another in 1854.⁷ Architects, anticipating a great commission, started sharpening their pencils. As early as about 1844 Thomas Wyatt produced a design which would have used Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall as its basis, extending it on one side and adding two towers.⁸ The Banqueting Hall is of course only a small part of Jones’s original scheme for a ‘Palace of Whitehall’, whose plans were apparently still extant. A number of people in the 1850s, including the great civil service reformer Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought they might be placed at the disposal of likely architects of any new building.⁹ This seems so superficially attractive an idea as to make one wonder why it was not taken up more seriously. Much later Gilbert Scott complained that while his Government Offices were under way ‘I had always thrown in my teeth … the magnificence of Inigo Jones’s building’; but by then of course it was too late.¹⁰ Following the 1854 report the government’s official architect, James Pennethorne, was asked to draw up plans and elevations for a new building, with costs;¹¹ and one John Tarring, whom the Saturday Review described as ‘a minor architect of obscure fame’, also offered a design, apparently on his own initiative.¹² All these were in the Classical style; which may explain the Saturday Review’s put-down of Tarring: the Review was uncompromisingly pro-Gothic. (But we can see from this how the tone of the ‘Battle’ was already developing.) Both also followed the government line that if these new offices were to be replaced, they should also be brought together in a single block, near to the Houses of Parliament, for convenience. That would have the added advantage of removing many unsightly – typically London, poor, higgledy-piggledy – buildings from the area.¹³ It was at this point that the idea of using the project to beautify the capital, make it at least comparable with some of the great cities of the Continent, also took hold – to Palmerston’s alarm. (‘I see in the Times today a flourishing account of an advertisement by Benjⁿ Hall to all Europe for Plans of new Buildings to cover half of Westminster. When was he authorized to invite competition for such plans …?’)¹⁴ If it was to be on anything like that scale, of course, the question of ‘style’ was all the more important.

First, however, ministers and bureaucrats had to get their political masters to agree to any rebuilding at all. To do that they had to pass the obstacle of the ‘Radicals’ in parliament, the low-tax party, who objected in particular to any government buildings that could be used for entertainment, as of course Foreign Offices in particular often are. Why should the taxpayer be expected to provide ‘great rooms’ where ministers could ‘gossip and flirt’, as the critics put it; did they not all have great houses of their own they could use for that?¹⁵ (It was left to The Times to point out the very undemocratic implications of this: certainly up till then the post of foreign secretary had been virtually restricted to men who could afford large London houses, but did the Radicals want it to stay like that for good?)¹⁶ There was also a ‘wartime’ consideration. During the period of this debate Britain fought two major wars, in the Crimea (1853–6) and India (1857–8), which were followed by a huge invasion scare, centring on Napoleon III’s France. (Napoleon objected to Britain’s giving refuge to terrorists, one of whom had just thrown a bomb at him.)¹⁷ Was this the best moment to be squandering great sums on ‘ornamental architecture’, when they might be needed to repair the country’s defences? Even Lord Palmerston argued this at one point.¹⁸ At length, however, the Commons granted a miserly amount (£90,000) for the purchase of some of the land necessary, and the government could go ahead.¹⁹

It might have gone ahead with Pennethorne’s design. He was after all the government’s official architect, and clearly expected the contract to come his way. He was also a pretty good architect, judging by the few designs of his that actually materialized, and the many more that were thwarted.²⁰ He suffered, however, from several disadvantages. By the 1850s his position – formally ‘Architect for Metropolitan Improvements’ at the Office of Works – had been progressively weakened; partly due to the mid-nineteenth century’s dislike of ‘jobbery’, which his post was supposed to represent.²¹ This may also have damaged his professional reputation, which appears to have been unfairly low at this time; even among Classicists, but especially at the hands of the thrusting new Gothicists, who regarded him as the very symbol of the fusty old conservatism in architecture they so much deplored.²² This was despite the fact that he did occasionally design in Gothic; but then ‘true’ Goths always disapproved of those who only did it as a sideline, as we shall see.²³ He may also not have had the talent for self-advertisement that was coming to be so important in this new, pushy age. As a result, he cuts one of the sorriest of the figures in the drama that was about to unfold. In May 1856 Pennethorne wrote to the Office of Works to ask what had become of the designs and elevations for the new Public Offices he had submitted many months before, and had been working on – under instructions from a previous commissioner – for at least three years.²⁴ It was only then he learned that the job had been taken away from him. Sir Benjamin Hall, the current commissioner, who had a particularly low opinion of Pennethorne,²⁵ had decided that the contract was to be put out to open tender, by public competition. Competitions, of course, were part of the new spirit of this capitalist age. Hall was ideologically in favour of them.²⁶ Architects were divided – their trade press was constantly debating the principle – but with a strong section favouring them, or at least preferring them to the old way of government patronage.²⁷ ‘Competition is the great struggle for life’, proclaimed the Building News in March 1860. Spurn it, and architects ‘will lose their manly tone and vigour, their self-reliance and enterprise, and fall into a condition as helpless as that of the unprotected female.’ (We shall be discussing the ‘gender’ aspects of this whole affair later.)²⁸ In August 1855 the Builder came out in favour of one for the Government Offices project specifically.²⁹ That was the course recommended by a report submitted to the House of Commons in July 1856, and accepted by the government, with the terms of the competition announced in October.³⁰ Of course Pennethorne could have entered for that if he had wanted, but he chose not to.³¹

Perhaps it was just as well. In fact the Government Offices competition was thoroughly mismanaged. For a start, its terms were odd.³² It was divided into three parts: one for a ‘block plan’ for the whole, within certain but not rigid limits (some took this as a licence to redesign almost the whole of west London; one even proposed draining the Thames and turning its bed into a flower garden);³³ a second for Foreign Office elevations; and a third for the War Office. Later on the judges introduced a new rule of their own, which was that no one entrant, even if he had competed in more than one category, could win more than one prize, or ‘premium’.³⁴ (These ranged from £500 to £100.) This meant that the three main prizewinners might – indeed, were almost bound to – produce designs that were mutually incompatible: buildings that would clash with one another, and would not fit on the premiated ground plan. Luckily the government also made it clear that they would not necessarily be committed by the results of the competition, and certainly were not bound to give the contract to the competitors who came first in each class.³⁵ One of the reasons for this was that the entries were all supposed to be anonymous (though for many this was a fiction), and they did not want to have to engage an architect who, when they learned his name,³⁶ turned out to be ‘of poor character’.³⁷ That was useful later in getting them off th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1: The Battle Joined
• 2: A Hybrid Society
• 3: Early Skirmishes
• 4: A Grand and National Work
• 5: Worthy of our Imperial City
• 6: The Lamp of Morality
• 7: An Architecture for our Age
• 8: Not the Most Interesting Public Question of the Day
• 9: A Change for the Worse
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• eCopyright