First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  Oundle. 1863. Grey limestone. It has the enormous pediment that became almost a hall mark of the mid-nineteenth-century chapel.

  The architecture of enthusiasm reflected the cultivated taste of a class which had not yet lost its authority. The difference from the Establishment was one of plan, and often that difference was slight.

  Where, in the country and in small towns, there was less wealthy patronage for the enthusiastic chapels, the buildings were unpretentious and what the Little Guides would call “barn-like” structures, an epithet which those guides apply to many a not dissimilar late eighteenth-century church. By “barn-like” I mean serviceable structures obeying the traditional rules of proportion and solid craftsmanship to be found in all Builders’ Assistants from The Builder’s Jewel, to Nicholson. The interiors were often wholly delightful: pale pink walls, Chippendale Gothic ceilings, high grained-oak pews, white gallery fronts and double rows of clear glass sash-windows round three sides of the building, and against the blank fourth wall a fine mahogany pulpit, sometimes inlaid and moulded. The town of Bridport, Dorset, has two little-spoiled chapels of the enthusiastic period comprising several of the features.

  Donhead, Wilts. Methodist c. 1860. Chilmark stone with paler dressings, Soane-ish door and Gothic glazing bars.

  At last we come to the most interesting phase of Nonconformist architecture, that which shows more surely than any Victorian Established church, whether high, low, broad, Gothic, Romanesque or Classic, what was the true architecture of the people. Not since medieval days had the people clubbed together to adorn a place of worship and this time it was not a shrine but a preaching house. In mining districts and lonely villages of Wales, among the gleaming granite and slate of Cornwall, down the brick-red streets of Leeds, Belfast, Liverpool and Manchester, in almost every city and corrugated suburb of Great Britain and the Six Counties Area, wedged in on the common land beside country houses and red and blue among the thatched roofs of southern villages or the stone roofs of northern ones, stand the chapels of the mid-nineteenth century. Despised by architects, ignored by guide books, too briefly mentioned by directories, these variagated conventicles are witnesses of the taste of industrial Britain. They try to ape nothing. They were anxious not to look like the church, which held them in contempt; nor like a house, for they were places of worship; nor like a theatre, for they were sacred piles. They succeeded in looking like what they are—chapels, so that the most unobservant traveller can tell a chapel from any other building in the street.3

  The nineteenth century was a period of great religious revivals and this is not the place to examine their causes. The chapels were built as the result of those revivals and they represent pennies saved which might otherwise have been spent on drink, or profits from tiny shops and lean farms and gardens where farm workers had toiled until sundown. They contain, more often than not, a social hall and school-room for the the many P.S.A. meetings, groups, Fellowships, prayers and study meetings which occur on every weekday in a thriving Nonconformist community. They are the public equivalent of the parlour mantelpiece. All sorts of people connected with the chapel contributed their bit; the local builder supplied the labour and the plan; the ironmonger the cast iron railings and the lamps; the timber merchant the wood; a builders’ merchant gave of his best in ridge tiles, stonecaps and dressings; another builder undertook to look out coloured glass and window frames; carpenters in the congregation fixed the pews; painters did the graining and the stencilling; the linen draper looked to the cushions and coverings; and when it was all finished the stationer at his own steam press produced the illustrated account of the opening ceremony. Those who had no trade or craft directly connected with the chapel subscribed all they could. Pitch pine pews, green walls, brass, Lombardic and handsomely-painted pulpit, lamp brackets, carpeted alleys, stencilled texts and homeliness—it was better than the best house in the circuit. And yet it was built more on the lines of a pre-Reformation Catholic church than the correctest Pugin or boldest Butterfield. These were indeed the thresholds of a better world than this, the brick and stone expression of individual conversion and acceptance, not the stilted copying of a religion based on Prayer Books and Missals and idol worship. This was the Liberal vote.

  Blaenconin, on the Cardigan–Narberth Road. c. 1830. This and the following illustrations belong to the Celtic tradition. There are far more chapels in Wales and Cornwall than in the rest of Britain. They are national emblems. The chief characteristics of Welsh chapels are a disregard of the established rules of proportion, very varied proportion for each building, though not much structural originality, and strong colour schemes.

  Belgelley, Pembrokeshire. 1866. Blue-grey walls with paler granite dressings; purple brown door; slate roof.

  Between Cardigan and Aberayron. Unusual composition for district. A reckless and effective use of simple shades. Pock-marked grey walls, mid-purple brown paint.

  Kilgelley, Pembrokeshire. 1869.

  It would be a pleasure to try to trace some individuality of style belonging to each of the denominations of Nonconformity. But this is possible only in the most general way. In England the five chief divisions are Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, Brethren and other denominations. Wales is a separate study and Scotland does not come within the scope of this article.

  Near Cardigan. Classical arrangement with duplicated door.

  The Methodist church today is a Union of various Methodist Societies which sprang up so soon as Wesley’s followers started to ordain their own ministers without the medium of a Bishop of the Church of England. The oldest were the Wesley an Methodists and on the whole they were the richest. Their buildings, when they are not of the chaste, enthusiastic period, were rebuilt quite late in the nineteenth century and in a solid style generally faintly echoing the ancient Gothic style of the Established Church, externally at any rate.

  The Primitive Methodists broke from the Wesleyans in 1810. They were humbler and more wildly enthusiastic people than the Wesleyans. They favoured camp meetings, female preachers, and the uttering of loud ejaculations during inspired prayers. By 1851 they had 3,000 chapels. Their architecture is very rarely Gothic; they are often tiny structures on waste spaces by the roadside in the country or high flimsy-looking Italianate barns in the towns. They employed architects more rarely than any other denomination.

  The United Methodists arose in 1850 and were an amalgamation of various offshoots from the original society. Their buildings were humbler than those of the Wesleyans and abound in Cornwall and Durham.

  Humbler too, but unclassifiable, are the buildings of the various other branches of Methodism, now united, except for Calvinistic, in the Methodist Church.

  Congregational churches are definitely more easily identified than others. These churches have each their own government but belong to a central Union whose headquarters are the freestone Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street (1874). They are a survival of the original Independent churches of the seventeenth century and have preserved a certain traditionalism in their architecture, even in their later nineteenth-century buildings. Congregational churches are more sedate and less home-made looking than those of any other denomination. Often an architect was employed. The earliest ones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Somerset are imposing classic buildings. That at Frome is famous. Until about 1860 most Congregational churches were built in a classic style, a public-worship variation of the middle class villa of the date, running through from Greek to Roman and Italianate. Possibly because there was something traditional and respectable about Gothic towards the latter half of the last century, later Congregational churches are Gothic, and Basil Champneys’ Mansfield College, Oxford (1889–90) is one of the best bits of Perpendicular Revival in that city.

  Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall. Methodist, c. 1830. Yellow-washed preaching house, pointed window and dark-grained oak door alone suggest a place of worship.

  Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall. Interior: Luxurious Lombardic Italiana
te woodwork. Table below the pulpit. Flowers are a twentieth-century innovation, herald of liturgical movement in much recent Nonconformity.

  The Baptists roused themselves in the late eighteenth century when they started their great missionary effort. The General Baptists (not to be confused with the Strict and Particular Baptists, who are small and Calvinistic) are the largest body of Nonconformists in the world and their largest following is in America. In England the Baptists made their greatest progress in the 1860’s, when Spurgeon was one of the most famous men in England. They increased threefold. Their new churches had some of the traditionalism of the Congregationals. They usually built large classic conventicles of which that at Newington Butts was, as it were, the cathedral. Their architecture has never been sufficiently studied and it would be a good thing if the Baptist Historical Society were to produce a record of their chapels as thorough as that produced by the Unitarians.

  Plymouth Brethren are one of the few Nonconformist bodies still increasing. They are divided among themselves, but their meeting places can be distinguished from others by the board which generally says

  THE LORD’S DAY.

  Breaking of Bread, 11 a.m.

  The Gospel will be preached here (God Willing) 6.30 p.m.

  The sect is of nineteenth-century origin and its buildings are a cross between the Quaker meeting house and the Primitive Methodist chapel.

  Tisbury, Wiltshire. Methodist. A Nonconformist’s answer to the Establishment’s Gothic revival. A mixture of all Gothic styles in Chilmark stone, battleship grey. The Georgian traditions survive in the two-storey window arrangement for galleries and in the Church of Ireland pinnacles.

  Louth, Lincolnshire. Congregational, c. 1885. Flamboyant solution of the gable problem, neither, Gothic nor Italianate, but English. Red brick with stone dressings.

  Other denominations in England, except the Quakers whose meeting houses remain resolutely unostentatious, are unclassifiable.4

  In Wales the chapel architecture of the nineteenth century is not denominational but racial. It is hardly ever architect-designed, but the product of a local contractor who has made the fullest use of an illustrated catalogue. The congregations are often, to this day, in debt to the contractor for his work. The buildings are essentially local and vary with the districts. They have the quality of good sign-writing and a vigorous style of their own. In one the designer will have concentrated on emphasising the windows, in another on bringing out the texture of the stone, in another on arranging ingeniously the doors and windows of the west front, in another on colouring the outside plaster. These buildings have beauty which is apart from date and akin to the naïveté of the Douanier Rousseau.

  Legbourne, Lincs. Pale yellow brick with purple-brown railings.

  Broad Town, Wilts. It looks as though it has been under water. Grey-green plaster, frosted glass with star-patterned borders and faded yellow plaster in the pediment of the porch, railings red-lead colour.

  Great Yarmouth. Methodist. Grandest native Baroque mixed-style unified by central arch which also modifies an otherwise top-heavy pediment.

  Since about 1910 there has been a liturgical movement in many Nonconformist churches and this has affected new building. Unitarian churches now have chancels; Holy Tables have bunches of flowers on them and the pulpit is losing its old position of predominance. Even Methodist churches have a sober look and may be mistaken, externally, for a mission church of the Church of England. The two styles usually adopted are either Perpendicular with a touch of art-nouveau and terra-cotta about it, or Christian Science Romanesque. Indeed the new buildings of Nonconformity lack the individuality and strong character of those scrubbed conventicles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or the gigantic preaching houses of the Victorian age.

  1 The Independents started in England in the mid-sixteenth century.

  2 It is interesting to notice Mr. F. Etchells’ observation that Wren seems to have been aware of the double nature of the Church of England, its Laudian and Puritan sides, for while St. Paul’s has space for a hundred altars and could be a Catholic place of worship, his City churches are often primarily preaching houses.

  3 I only know of one exception—the Circus Church, Portsmouth (if it still stands), which looks Nonconformist but is very low Church of England.

  4 I am not including the splendid buildings of the Catholic Apostolic Church under the heading of Nonconformist architecture.

  11

  1837–1937

  The Drift Towards Ugliness

  THE history of the last hundred years of taste in England is profoundly influenced by three things: increase in population, mass production, absence of any uniting faith. The development of Boggleton, a small English town which I have traced at set periods in the next pages, is symptomatic of all England. We can learn the character of the country from the scars and wrinkles on its face. Probably no other place in Europe was so beautiful as England in 1820, few are uglier than it is round its larger towns today. In 1820 there were high standards of craftsmanship and certain canons of taste. Today craftsmanship has gone, or is revived, without any appreciable influence, by escapists. Canons of taste are as uncertain as they are various.

  The history of Boggleton may help to show how this has come about and for those who prefer their art history in terms of generalisations, I have summarised each section with some general remarks.

  1837

  It is interesting to analyse, as one enters an English provincial town today, the statement that no error of taste was committed before 1840 and to consider how far it is true.

  A provincial town presents a complete history of nineteenth-century taste which is still traceable underneath the hoardings, neon signs and wires with which progress has strung every feature of urban and even rural landscape. And there is no doubt that architecture is the outward and visible form of inward and spiritual grace or disgrace. So it is with architecture I propose to start this account.

  The topographical dictionary (1837) describes Boggleton as a neat market-town standing in an elevated position on the slopes of the Bogdown hills. The subsoil is limestone. The population is 3,000. The chief industries are flint knapping, for flint-lock muskets, and agriculture. There is a decent town hall recently erected (1825); an ancient Parish Church situated not far from the centre of the town, an Independent Chapel and a Meeting House for the Society of Friends in Bowling Green Alley. Magnificent views are obtainable from the Common, a considerable expanse to the south to which freeholders have had the right of free pasturage since the time of King John.

  And what the topographical dictionary omits, the eye of the traveller will discern as he bowls through the main street in his coach and four, putting up at The Dolphin where there is adequate stabling for his horses.

  The main street of Boggleton is of even appearance. It is wide and well-proportioned and the Doric columns of the new Town Hall make a fine termination to the vista which the traveller sees as he approaches from London.

  On either side of the Town Hall are the more considerable shops, each with square-paned windows and a uniform style of lettering above them in gold. Plain Georgian houses rise above the shop fronts, the windows on the first floor being larger than those on the second and those on the second being larger than those on the top. The roofs are hidden by a low parapet. The material of the houses is mostly limestone, but the Town Hall and The Dolphin which are larger than any other buildings in the street, are of white brick from the recently opened brick-fields outside the town. They are plain but imposing edifices whose beauty depends on that subtlety of proportion which all architects of the late Georgian era had learned from the close study of Greek art and its adaptation to modern buildings, as expressed in the lectures of Sir John Soane. Breaking the uniform grey of these substantial buildings in limestone and plaster or white brick is a large, mellow red-brick mansion, the thick white glazing bars of whose windows, the subtle classical stone-carving of whose keystones, cornices and dre
ssings, the heavy solidity of whose panelled front door, coupled with the absence of any sign of commerce in the way of shop front or sign, betrays the presence of some wealthy person of private means. This is Adamsbec House, the town residence of the Adamsbecs, whose large country estate and house is some distance away. The family rarely comes to it now since the improved method of highway travel has brought the Metropolis within nearer reach.

  Except for this cluster of buildings round the centre of the town, Boggleton will not present much of architectural interest to the traveller of 1837.