Rogue Gothic is Victorian architecture at its most flamboyant, eccentric and colourful, and London is one of the best places to see it.
We're so used to having buildings with pointed arches around that we forget what a revelation it was when people first started putting up imitations of medieval buildings. It first happened in the 1760s-70s at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. That was a Romantic fancy, but then came the Victorian Age, and the Gothic Revival got very serious, not least because it went hand in hand with religious revivals. By the 1840s, faithfulness to historical prototypes was the benchmark of success.
But copying the Middle Ages got boring after a while and soon the movement began to run out of steam. Critics, scholars and architects began to look beyond these shores for fresh influences to revitalise Gothic architecture. They found it in France, Italy and further afield. They started to ask why architects living in a world shaped by the Industrial Revolution were putting up buildings meant to look like they belonged in medieval England. Shouldn't they innovate? Shouldn't they make use of new technology like cast iron construction?
The result was an aesthetic every bit as uncompromising for the 1860s as brutalism was for the 1960s. The architects who played fastest and loosest with medieval sources came to be dubbed 'The Rogues'. This term was devised by a 20th century architect and historian called Harry Goodhart-Rendel (he designed St Olaf House near London Bridge, among many other buildings in the capital), but it's clear from the Victorian press that the Rogues' contemporaries also viewed them as having pushed the boundaries of the style as far as they could go. Here are six places where you can sample Rogue Gothic architecture at its finest.
1. Nos 33-35 Eastcheap, 1868 by Robert Lewis Roumieu (1814-77)
Nairn's London described this as "truly demoniac, an Edgar Allan Poe of a building", and "the scream you wake on at the end of a nightmare". One look is enough to explain why. Yet that is a 20th-century way of seeing, which owes everything to film directors and nothing to the intentions of the architect. This façade was not conceived as a backdrop for horror, but as a showpiece for a business — Hill, Evans & Co., vinegar brewers in Worcester — that wanted to make a statement with its new London office (its old premises had had to be demolished for the construction of the District line). The architect had married into the Crosse and Blackwell family, whose company probably procured an important raw material from the firm. Storage space for their wares extended downwards across two basement storeys.
If the building was deliberately intended to bring to mind any associations, they were Shakespearian rather than Hitchcockian, since the site was reputed to be that occupied by Mistress Quickly's Boar's Head Tavern in Henry IV, Part 1 (hence the carved roundel of a boar's head under the arch of the central window of the second floor). If one had to choose a single word to sum it up, it would have to be abundance — of colour, texture, ornament, relief, different types of craftsmanship (brick-laying, stone-carving, ceramics, ironwork). Rogue Gothic is always about never using one word where 10 will do.
2. The Brick Lane Music Hall, 1860-2 by Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812-73)
Today this building houses an entertainment venue, but its origins are clearly ecclesiastical. Until 1974, it was the parish church of St Mark, Silvertown and its architect was one of the most prolific and versatile of the Rogue Goths. His commissions, which run into the hundreds, were executed all over England in places as far apart as Gloucestershire and County Durham, and it was this punishing workload that caused his early death. They include not only numerous churches, but also vicarages, schools, country houses, public monuments, almshouses and estate buildings, even entire villages. Teulon (who like Roumieu came from a Huguenot family – the two men almost certainly knew each other) grew up in Greenwich. He trained at the Royal Academy and with two London surveyors, one of whom he assisted with the Royal Watermen's Almshouses in Penge.
Teulon's architectural talent revealed itself very quickly, but it is not until the mid-1850s that a really personal style appears. Eclectic and omnivorous, he absorbed all kinds of influences. He picked up a lot on three tours of northern France, Belgium and Germany. But at Silvertown there are details that look like they might have been inspired by Moorish architecture in Spain or North Africa. Cultural appropriation? Maybe, but everything Teulon borrowed he made his own. Though St Mark's was a cheap church for a poor area, its architect showed huge inventiveness on a tight budget. The multi-coloured brickwork is a tour de force and is combined with terracotta facing.
3. Nos 45-9 High Street, Harrow-on-the-Hill, 1868 by William Henry Woodman (1821/2-79)
The buildings that caused the biggest stir in the Gothic Revival tended to be high status and on a grand scale — cathedrals, museums, country houses, town halls and universities. But these were expensive one-offs. London was growing at a furious pace in the 19th century and boutique architecture could not really show the way to housing and catering for a mass society. The Rogues had an important role to play reinterpreting for developers the work of the trendsetters as a kind of 'pop' Gothic which could give some flare to pubs, blocks of flats, music halls and other commissions, with which the big names didn't bother themselves.
That's exemplified by Nos 45-9 High Street, which were the first phase in a parade of shops and housing. The use of banding and striping in blue brick — a popular Victorian technique called constructional polychromy — was popularised by John Ruskin, who had encountered it in the medieval buildings of northern Italy. Victorian architecture fell out of fashion in a big way in the 20th century and has been very vulnerable to unsympathetic alteration. But a wealth of period detail survives here, traceried sash windows, bargeboards, ironwork and, most unusually of all, the prow-like shopfronts. The architect was the Reading borough surveyor. From 1853 to 1863, he was in a professional partnership with William Ford Poulton (c. 1820-1900), and the pair designed some very quirky cemetery and nonconformist chapels. No 49 on the far right was designed by one William Woodbridge and the rest of the parade out of sight to the left is by different architects again, though cut from the same cloth.
4. Rockmount, Upper Norwood, No. 128 Church Road, Upper Norwood, 1873-4 by Sextus Dyball (c. 1832-98)
Sextus Hexagon Dyball is a name that sticks in the memory, and Rockmount is a building that, once seen, isn't easily forgotten. This is to villas what Roumieu's Nos 33-35 Eastcheap is to office buildings. Until development began in the first half of the 19th century, Norwood was open countryside. Three factors ensured it would be an affluent neighbourhood. Firstly, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the main landowners, released for development only large plots, which pretty much guaranteed they'd be used for mansions. Secondly, being raised high up and away from the centre, it became desirable for wealthy Londoners looking to escape the smog for fresher air. Thirdly, the relocation here of Crystal Palace in 1854 made it more than just another suburb.
Most of the first wave of development consisted of placid villas finished in white stucco. This one, by contrast, cuts a dash. It was built for James Franks, a local tea and coffee merchant. We've seen how abundance is a Roguish quality; so are restlessness and busyness, and Rockmount exemplifies that. Wherever you look, there's something going on. It's almost impossible for the eye to rest on anything and to take it all in. We still don't know much about the career of Dyball, who was perhaps as much a builder as an architect. He was involved in the development of Norwood, designing Nos 73 and 75 Belvedere Road, St Valery on Beulah Hill and the White Hart pub on Church Road. They don't quite reach the same level of inspiration, but they're all worth a look. What else is waiting to be discovered? Rockmount is excellently preserved, but bushes and trees in front make it almost impossible to photograph, so above is an illustration from The Architect of 1875, published just after it was completed.
5. St Simon Zelotes, Moore Street, Chelsea, 1858-9 by Joseph Peacock (1821-93)
It can sometimes feel like Victorian churches are ten a penny, but this one is worth a special look. Some unusual features stand out immediately: the extraordinary piling up of forms above the main entrance, surrounded by lots of intricate and fiddly ornament; lots of angular outlines, such as the bellcote; bizarre, slit-like windows. It's a building completely at odds with its surroundings. The interior is even more startling. The riot of banding and striping in red and black brick on a background of yellow is just the start — it is an Alice in Wonderland-like world of bizarre forms, where what would usually be monumentally scaled is pocket-sized and small details are blown up big. One of the most original touches is the tracery of the east window, filled not with glass but rich carving. "Never can there have been more architecture in less space", said Goodhart-Rendel.
The architect, Joseph Peacock, is an obscure figure and almost nothing was known about his life and career until recently. His great uncle was a wealthy merchant who invested in land in Bloomsbury, Battersea and Deptford, and Peacock probably was as much a surveyor — in charge of managing and developing land for his family and other clients — as architect. He died a rich man, but did not build very much, concentrating on schools and Anglican churches, and hit his stride in the 1860s. His masterpiece from that decade — St Jude's, Gray's Inn Road — unfortunately was demolished in 1936. But St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, though altered in the 20th century, is enjoyable for all the same reasons as St Simon's.
6. The Buxton Memorial Fountain, Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster, 1865-6 by Charles Buxton (1822-71)
This tiny but exuberant structure was put up to commemorate Sir Thomas Buxton (1786-1845), the brewing magnate, MP and humanitarian campaigner who championed a number of important causes in the early 19th century. He promoted prison reform, was a founding member of what later became the RSPCA and was the ally of and successor to William Wilberforce, leader of the abolitionists in the House of Commons. Thomas's son, Charles, followed in the footsteps of his father's parliamentary and business careers, but with one exception — he was an amateur architect. He designed all the buildings on his country estate, Foxwarren Park near the Wisley interchange on the M25, and unsuccessfully took part in the competition of 1857 to find a design for the Foreign Office.
Charles Buxton also designed this fountain. He had no formal training, so was reliant on professionals to deal with the technical side — here, S.S. Teulon (see no.2, above), who also worked on some of the Buxton family's country houses. Just who contributed what is hard to say without a bit more study, and with amateur architects it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether the individuality of their designs is conscious or the result of a lack of experience. The fountain teems with invention and the painted metal roof is particularly delightful. But Foxwarren Park is eccentric to the point of looking by turns sinister and brash, which may be why it was used as a location for A Tale of Two Hamlets in Midsomer Murders, and was also illustrator E.H. Shepard's model for Toad Hall in Wind in the Willows.
Edmund Harris is an architectural historian with a special interest in Victorian architecture, which he blogs about at Less Eminent Victorians. You can also follow him on Instagram @buildings.and.places
The Rogue Goths: R L. Roumieu, Joseph Peacock and Bassett Keeling by Edmund Harris, published by Liverpool University Press
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