LILLE CATHEDRAL
Cuthbert Brodrick, 1855
The Ultimate Gothic Cathedral?
In 1854, an architectural competition was announced in Lille, northern France. The town invited architects to submit designs for a new cathedral, and stipulated in some detail what they wanted: ‘The style of the monument must recall the beautiful edifices, at once simple and imposing, of the first half of the thirteenth century. The church, of which the length is to be from 100 to 110m… must have one or two towers, surmounted by spires, three deeply recessed portals, a nave and two aisles, single transepts, a choir, a sanctuary, and apsidal chapels…’
Eighteen months later, a panel of judges met in Lille to consider the forty-one competition entries. The plans had come from all over Europe, with France and Britain (fifteen entries each) fielding the largest number of competitors. Among these were drawings by the British architect Cuthbert Brodrick, a little-known man from Hull, Yorkshire. Brodrick had risen to fame in 1852, when he won the competition to design Leeds town hall, a building nearing completion when the judges assembled in Lille. Leeds town hall is a Classical building of staggering monumentality, surrounded by an arcade of tall columns, with a tower ringed by more columns and topped with a dome; the masonry is tough northern British millstone grit.
The Lille design is very different from Leeds town hall, but also monumental and distinctive. Brodrick chose to have a single tower, topped with a spire that tapers to a height of 300ft (91m). The tower has a series of very tall, narrowly pointed windows and niches separated by slender shafts that recall the columns of the Leeds Tower – except of course that the style is totally different: where Leeds was Classical, Lille is Gothic. However, it was not quite the Gothic specified in the competition announcement: Brodrick chose to design the building in a slightly later form of the style, making the whole building more ornate – it was almost as if he was throwing a daring and rather arrogant challenge to the judges – my kind of Gothic architecture is better than yours.
The idea of a cathedral with a single tower and spire was also rather against the grain in France. Most of the great French cathedrals (Nôtre Dame in Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Laon, Rouen, Reims) have a pair of western towers. But a single-towered design is more at home in Belgium and the Netherlands, which are not far from Lille, set as it is in the far northern part of France. The required material – brick with stone dressings – is also fitting for the flatlands of northern Europe, although for the crypt Brodrick was allowed gritstone, a material with which, after Leeds, he would have felt at home.
Brodrick’s competition entry is now known mainly from two drawings: one of the west front and spire; and one of the building from the east, showing the rounded or apsidal east end required by the competition. It is certainly an impressive design. Everything about it, from the trio of pointed portals to the dozens of openings and niches, leads the eye upwards to the tower and spire. The proportions of the tower make it look rather slender – again sending the viewer’s gaze heavenward – and the spire itself is highly ornate, with rings of niches circling it like crowns. It is a very assured design.
However, the judges gave the first prize to another British architect, William Burges, and Brodrick had to be content with one of the silver medals. The designs were submitted pseudonymously, and still bore their pseudonyms when they were exhibited in Lille after the results were announced. Brodrick’s designs, identified with the word Spes (Latin for hope, anticipation, but also chance), caught the eye of many visitors to the exhibition. One of these visitors was a writer for the British magazine The Ecclesiologist, who reported on what he saw:
So far as a popular verdict would decide the question, this design – apparently an English one – would be chosen for the first prize by the people of Lille; of whom an admiring crowd was always to be seen around it. And as usual the popular verdict would be unfair; for the author of this showy plan, though by no means a contemptible artist, has made his drawings ad captandum, and not in honest accordance with the conditions under which he was allowed to compete… the style – developed Pointed – is not that prescribed by the regulations.
By using the words ad captandum, The Ecclesiologist is alluding to the Latin phrase ad captandum vulgus, to ensnare the masses. The magazine is accusing Brodrick of being a kind of architectural demagogue, giving the masses what they want. This is almost certainly wrong. Brodrick was more likely to be trying to persuade the judges to think again, using his entry to convince them that his ‘developed Pointed’ style was better than the one required by their competition rules. It was an arrogant approach, and doomed to failure.
Brodrick’s design for the east end of the cathedral is a forest of flying buttresses and upward-pointing pinnacles, all of which draw the eye towards the slender tower and spire.
Although Burges won the competition, his cathedral was never built either. It seems that a design by an Englishman and a Protestant was too much for the authorities at Lille. They chose the plan by the highest placed Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Lassus, an architect well known for his commitment to thirteenth-century French Gothic and for his close knowledge of French cathedrals, many of which he had restored. Lassus’s design had been criticized strongly for being derivative, and being, as The Ecclesiologist puts it: ‘a mere dead reproduction of the French style of 1200–1250’. But its very closeness to the old style made it attractive to the judges.
However, fate twisted again, and Lassus died in 1857. His design was modified by Charles Leroy, the local architect who took over after his death. Leroy designed by cribbing details from this cathedral and that, and adding them together in a hotchpotch. This, and slow progress on the work, meant that building remained incomplete for decades and lacked a west front until a final push was made in the 1990s, after which the church finally got cathedral status. By that time, Brodrick’s design was known only to architectural historians.
Brodrick became a serial enterer of architectural competitions for high-profile buildings. In Leeds he did well, following the town hall with the unique oval Corn Exchange and the Mechanics Institute. The three buildings transformed the centre of the city. But he entered countless other competitions – for Preston, Bolton and Manchester town halls, for Liverpool and Manchester Exchanges, for the National Gallery and Whitehall government offices in London – and won none of them. Outside Leeds, he had to be content with minor architectural commissions. He was not so content and eventually retired to France where he is said to have painted, although little evidence has survived of any of his paintings.
Brodrick remains one of the great might-have-beens of architecture. His major buildings were Classical, and were designed on his own assertive terms. The designs for Lille Cathedral show that he could also produce work in the Gothic style, also on his own terms. It was a loss to architecture and to France that he was not given the chance to prove this and to please the people of Lille.
