MUCH is made of originality in historical research. Yet much of what is published covers very familiar ground. The Nazis, the Tudors, Winston Churchill: go into any bookshop, and you will find that most of the history section is taken up with these well-known topics. Of course, there are always new ways of understanding old themes, and there are some brilliant books just out on the Nazis, the Tudors, and Winston Churchill. But truly original work is hard to find. Late-Georgian Churches is precisely that.
Largely ignored by previous scholars, the church buildings of England between about 1780 and 1840 have never before been the subject of a whole book. Yet Dr Peter Webster has devoted the best part of a lifetime to the study of them, and he makes a terrifically good case for their importance. It was, as he shows, an era of huge creativity and enormous change, as architects and their clients experimented with style and plan and much more besides. Webster’s book is, as a result, not only wholly original, but also enormously important.
The main reason for the neglect of this era is simply put. The Victorians looked at the Georgians with utter contempt. Writing of the 18th century, the Oxford academic Mark Pattison baldly declared that “the genuine Anglican omits that period from the history of the Church altogether.” The dislike that they felt for Georgian church buildings was even more extreme. Taught to sneer at them by the radical reformers known as Ecclesiologists, the Victorians came to believe that almost all the churches described in this book were “debased” or “ugly” or even “unchristian”.
As Webster observes, we have never really escaped that Victorian consensus. To this day, the churches of the late 18th and early 19th centuries tend to be written off because they are not like the ones that followed. They are sometimes Classical — which, to the Ecclesiologists, meant Pagan. They are often Gothic, but not the archaeological Gothic of the Victorians. Rather than seek to imitate, Late-Georgians used medieval forms to inspire something new — which to the Ecclesiologists, and many subsequent historians, means that they were just ignorant or simply wrong.
Geoff BrandwoodThe interior of St Luke’s, Chelsea (James Savage, 1820-24), in London, in a photo from the book
Through a multitude of examples and a profusion of stunning photographs, Webster successfully shows the real originality and interest of many of these projects. His text will open a whole new world to readers — one in which circular churches, octagonal churches, and churches supported by iron columns all seemed highly desirable. Not every experiment was equally exciting; but after this, no one could deny the real ambition of the architects and patrons who designed or paid for these buildings.
Just as importantly, Webster also uncovers the particular assumptions that drove church-building. Erected in response to unprecedented population growth and designed with their acoustic performance always uppermost in mind, these were monuments to a moment that soon passed and is now hard to recapture. By showing how architecture reflected the priorities of contemporary church life, Late-Georgian Churches recaptures it triumphantly.
The Revd Dr William Whyte is Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.
Late-Georgian Churches: Anglican architecture, patronage and churchgoing in England 1790-1840
Christopher Webster
John Hudson Publishing £80
(978-1-7398229-0-3)