SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE has many attractive and some important features; not least, it can boast of being the Cambridge twin of St John’s College, Oxford. But it is fair to say that its chapel does not attract the hordes of tourists that King’s gets.

Originally built in the 1770s and restored in Gothic Revival style six decades later, Sidney Sussex chapel was doubled in size and radically reordered in the 1920s. What confronts the visitor today is a piece of 20th-century Baroque revival: a symphony of wood and marble; an Anglo-Catholic shrine in the midst of what had once been a staunchly puritan college.

This book, by the prolific historian of Anglo-Catholicism Michael Yelton, may not manage to put this chapel on the tourist map. It does, however, very successfully achieve another, almost equally difficult end: rediscovering and reinterpreting the architect of that remarkable space. Thomas Henry Lyon is not a household name and did not have an extensive practice; nor did he leave behind voluminous papers. Frustratingly, a memoir has somehow disappeared. Using all his forensic skills as a former judge, Yelton has managed to produce what will surely be the standard work on this elusive figure.

Even in his own life, Lyon was not an easy man to know — or, one suspects, to like. His brother-in-law, the writer John Cooper Powys, described a thinly veiled version of him in one novel as “an egoist of inflexible temper”. Another contemporary thought him “an insect with a poisonous tail”. The gay, misogynist, Anglo-Catholic son of a fiercely Protestant and philoprogenitive father, Lyon posed as a wealthy landowner while surviving for most of his career on mortgages, an insubstantial stipend, and free board and rent at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — an institution that housed him, employed him, but never went so far as to make him a Fellow.

© Michael YeltonThe interior of Sidney Sussex College chapel, Cambridge

Yet, however disagreeable he now may seem, Lyon clearly had some charm. Beyond the houses that he built himself near his home on Dartmoor, his small body of work — a church in Australia, another in London, a third in Sheffield, as well as a score or more of projects in Cambridge — were almost all in the gift of friends and relations. Not everything he did was substantial; nor was it always all that good. His single most ambitious project, the London church, was demolished before it collapsed.

Yelton succeeds, none the less, in showing how Lyon and his work were the products of a world. Sometimes sexually ambiguous, often religiously adventurous, invariably close-knit, his clients were utterly distinctive. It is certainly worth a trip to Sidney Sussex chapel to encounter them and the architect who gave form to their ideals.

The Revd Dr William Whyte is a Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.

Thomas Henry Lyon: Architect and aesthete — his life and work
Michael Yelton
Sacristy Press £60
(978-1-78959-325-9)
Church Times Bookshop £54