By 1955, modern architecture had reached such widespread acceptance that it had become the prevailing mode of design for many building types, from housing and schools to offices. There were also several notable modernist church buildings: on the Lansbury Estate at Poplar in east London, Trinity Congregational church by Cecil Handisyde and D. Rogers Stark had been completed as a showpiece of the Festival of Britain’s architecture programme in 1951 (Figure 2.1), and that year Basil Spence won the competition for Coventry Cathedral, arousing enormous public interest in modern architecture. Roman Catholics in Britain would eventually also accede to this movement; yet at first, their predominant reactions were compromise or stoic resistance in defence of a perceived tradition of church architecture.
A short walk from the strikingly modern concrete Congregational church, at the heart of the experimental housing estate of Lansbury, planned by Frederick Gibberd, stands the huge brick bulk of the Catholic church of Sts Mary and Joseph, Poplar, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott (Figure 2.2). This church’s foundations were just being laid while visitors to the Festival of Britain toured the estate in 1951, and the church was eventually completed in 1954. Its exterior is a strange mixture of parabolic arches in squat brick walls with patterned parapets and a copper-roofed central tower. It was seen – and intended – as a rejection of the modernity of its surroundings in favour of an expression of a lasting Catholic tradition. Architectural critic Ian Nairn derided its ‘sprawling, lumpish mass’ and dominating scale, its aggressively but superficially ‘traditional’ approach insensitive to real historical precedent, and its antagonism towards its surroundings.1 While Scott claimed that he had designed the church to complement the neighbouring houses, also of brick, he deliberately eschewed Lansbury’s progressive modernism for an architecture that declared a conception of the parish church as a bastion of enduring values in a transient world. Scott had ‘intended’, he stated, ‘to follow the Catholic tradition of ecclesiastical architecture’.2 Architects, he later wrote, had to respect ‘the general demand that our churches should look like churches’; the Congregational church, ‘locally known as the laundry’, showed that modernism was unsuitable for sacred use.3 Many Catholic architects and clergy agreed.
2.1 Trinity Congregational church, Lansbury Estate, London, by Cecil Handisyde and D. Rogers Stark, 1949–51. Photo: John Pantlin. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Following the controversy over this building, the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal William Godfrey, wrote several pieces for the Catholic Building Review addressed to architects and clergy promoting tradition in church architecture in balance with the needs of modern times, advising against an excessive modernism:
There is a happy mean. Our aim ought to be to preserve all that is precious in traditional art while keeping in mind the needs of the age in which we live. … It would seem that some of the buildings today have departed too much from the traditional style of architecture.4
Churches, he insisted, had to maintain an ‘ecclesiastical character’:
One would not like to see the spire, campanile, belfry or tower disappear from the landscape. For centuries these have told us of the sacred character of our buildings and have led us to the house of God. A church should be recognisable as a church by the wayfarer, even from afar.5
As the tide began to turn towards modernism even amongst his own clergy and architects in 1960, he maintained his position:
2.2 Sts Mary and Joseph, Poplar, London, by Adrian Gilbert Scott, 1951–54. Photo: Stewart Bale Ltd, 1956. Source: parish archive
It is said that we must build for our own time. True: but our own time can accept a lack of decorum which is not according to the mind of the Church. The old should not be set aside simply because it is old. The heritage of sacred art bequeathed by our forbears is precious. The barn-like church has nothing sacred or symbolic to commend it. It does not lift the mind to God.6
In arguing for a tradition-minded church architecture, Godfrey articulated the official position of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican repeatedly reinforced the importance of ‘tradition’ in sacred art and architecture. Canon law stated that bishops ‘are to take care that in the building or repair of churches the forms received from Christian tradition are preserved’.7 Joseph O’Connell, a parish priest and writer on canon law and liturgy, summarised the Church’s position in a widely distributed and popular book, Church Building and Furnishing: The Church’s Way of 1955. The Church, he said, did permit modern art and architecture, but only when tempered by tradition and remaining recognisably sacred. O’Connell cited the Council of Trent: ‘that nothing disordered may meet the eye, nothing distorted and confused in execution, nothing profane and unbecoming, since sanctity befits the house of God’.8 Pius XII’s encyclical letter of 1947, Mediator Dei, advised that ‘these modern arts, architecture, sculpture, painting, steer a middle course between an excessive naturalism on the one hand and an exaggerated symbolism on the other’, interpreted as a balance between historicism and modernism in architecture.9 In 1952, in reaction to a controversy over modern church art and architecture in France after the completion of the church of Notre Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy, filled with modern art, the Vatican issued a widely published ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’ reinforcing the appeal to tradition in canon law, insisting that church architecture ‘must not in any way be equated with profane building’.10 Equating modern architecture with secular building types was exactly how Adrian Gilbert Scott defended his preference for tradition at Poplar: modern architecture, many felt, was intrinsically profane.
O’Connell, like Scott and Godfrey, evoked a tradition of church architecture:
There is a certain traditional idea of a church, based on its purpose and its needs, which has gradually taken shape and been handed down. It is quite a general idea – a broad concept – of certain fundamental features or characteristics which are common to all Catholic churches, whatever the material or style in which they are built.11
It was an idea that had potential to justify modern architecture as the style of the twentieth century, yet in the 1950s the majority of architects of British Catholic parishes sought more literally to build this ‘traditional idea of a church’ through familiar forms of Catholic architecture.
Continuity of form underlying variable local appearances was also seen as a quality of the institutional Church: the Church, universal and divine, had stable doctrinal principles, but over time it showed gradual development in their expression, an argument that originated with nineteenth-century British theologian and later cardinal, John Henry Newman.12 The concept of tradition therefore permitted change and adaptation to modern circumstances. Unlike modernism in architecture, however, this change was incremental rather than revolutionary. It was only because of the threat of revolution posed by modern architecture that the idea of tradition in church architecture had to be articulated at all. As Eric Hobsbawm argues, the concept of tradition presupposes a break in continuity against which its proponents set themselves.13 Modernism’s defining characteristic was its rejection of tradition as an objective authority. Catholic church architects in the 1950s, meanwhile, invented and sustained an idea of tradition in opposition to modernism while accepting some aspects of modernity.14
Scott’s church at Poplar has been described as ‘Jazz-Modern Byzantine’ in style, with its centralised Greek-cross plan and ascending volumes, zig-zag patterns in its internal stonework and Scott’s characteristic parabolic arches mixing Byzantine elements with motifs from pre-war art deco and expressionist church architecture.15 The church was also described as ‘Romanesque’, its plain brick walls and ‘Lombard band’ parapet detailing distantly reminiscent of early medieval churches in Italy.16 Byzantine and Romanesque styles of architecture were often conflated in architects’ interpretations: the eastern Byzantine was thought to have led directly to the western Romanesque, especially at the point where they met in Ravenna. In the nineteenth century, when this chronology originated, the two terms had been used entirely interchangeably. In the later nineteenth century, early Christian, Byzantine and Romanesque revival architecture began to be identified with Roman Catholicism, as Protestants viewed its art as primitive and idolatrous and its architecture as European rather than English.17 The culmination of the Victorian Byzantine revival was the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Westminster in London, designed around 1895 by J. F. Bentley and opened, still incomplete, in 1903 (Figure 2.3). It was the most important Catholic building project of its age and had a long-lasting effect on subsequent Catholic church architecture throughout Britain. At Poplar 50 years later, its influence can still be seen in Scott’s monumental ciborium, with its columns of the same yellow marble.
In the first half of the twentieth century, an amalgam of Byzantine and Romanesque styles gradually became fashionable for Roman Catholic churches. There were several reasons why the Byzantine-Romanesque appealed. At Westminster, Bentley had argued that the churches of Constantinople, Ravenna and Venice represented the ‘first phase’ of Christian architecture, and this style was therefore viewed as a more primitive and authentic tradition of church architecture than the Gothic.18 By the twentieth century, it began to be seen as a style that could effectively combine tradition with modernity. Westminster Cathedral was vaulted in concrete, but perhaps its most endearing quality to twentieth-century architects was its incompleteness: its vast wall surfaces of brick were intended to be covered in marble and mosaic like St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, a programme that was only beginning in the 1950s, but the sublimity of Bentley’s brickwork had its own aesthetic merit. In the 1920s, Charles Reilly, head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, wrote that Westminster’s ‘lofty plain wall surfaces, even of common stock brick, were more important in giving the idea of remoteness and seclusion from the world than the richest clustered Gothic columns’, an enthusiasm that he instilled in his students – amongst them Francis Xavier Velarde, who would become one of the most thoughtful exponents of Byzantine-Romanesque Catholic church architecture in Britain.19
In the simplicity and structural honesty of plain brick walls lay the potential for this style to reconcile tradition and modernity: it did not need ornament to look good and complete, though it could be ornamented later. Because it was an architecture of brick it was cheaper than the stone-built Gothic, while still ‘rational’ in expressing its cheaper construction ‘in the frankest and fullest manner’, as William Lethaby wrote in a classic study of Hagia Sophia.20 Byzantine-Romanesque was also seen as an appropriate style to accommodate more innovative forms of structure, particularly in reinforced concrete.
2.3 Westminster Cathedral, London, by J. F. Bentley, 1895–1903. Nave photographed in 1953 before addition of marble cladding. Photo: Reginald Hugo de Burgh Galwey. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Most of the architects who embraced tradition in the 1950s belonged to the generation that entered practice before the Second World War. Velarde and Scott had both acquired Catholic church commissions in the 1930s. So, too, had Reynolds & Scott of Manchester, one of the most prolific of post-war church architecture practices, and the related firm of Sandy & Norris in Stoke-on-Trent. Francis Reynolds and William Scott had trained at the Manchester University School of Architecture in the 1920s, and both obtained travel scholarships to Italy in 1929.21 Reynolds went to work for the Manchester firm of Hill, Sandy & Norris, designing a small number of basilican churches in the 1930s in a Byzantine-Romanesque style that his employers had developed in the previous decade, adding modern touches in the form of art deco ornament, most notably at St Bernadette, Liverpool.22 After the war, Reynolds took over the office in Manchester, joined by Scott, while Sandy & Norris, of whom Ernest Bower Norris was principal designer, moved to Stafford to cater for the firm’s largely Catholic clients in the Midlands. Reynolds & Scott became the more successful practice with dozens of church commissions, besides many schools and colleges, in Manchester, the Wirral, the East Midlands and London.
Both firms maintained continuity with their earlier practice. Indeed some of their churches were so similar that they must have derived from churches they had already built together: Norris’s churches of St Joseph the Worker at Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, ‘in the style of modern Romanesque’, and of the Blessed Sacrament at Braunstone in Leicester were almost identical to Reynolds & Scott’s church of St Patrick, Leicester (Figure 2.4); St Patrick, in turn, was a variation on its architects’ church of St Joseph at Wembley in London (Figure 2.5, Plan 1a); their church of St Bernard at Burnage in Manchester was a further variant (Figure 2.6, Plan 1c), while Norris’s St John Vianney, Blackpool, resembled St Joseph, Wembley.23 Between them these architects not only sustained a tradition of English Catholic Byzantine-Romanesque church architecture, but also developed an architectural kit to be assembled according to each parish’s needs, creating buildings with a family resemblance but with enough variety to allow the architects some creative freedom and the parishes a sense of individuality. All were built in brick (rusty red in Leicester, honey brown in London, grey-brown and red in Manchester). Most had the same simplified Romanesque columns in cast stone screening passage aisles, omitted in cheaper versions. St Patrick and St Joseph had plaster saucer domes suspended from steel roofs, imitating Westminster Cathedral, while St Bernard had a handsomely proportioned barrel vault. Gabled transepts projected more or less deeply to accommodate side chapels.24 St Joseph had a neo-Georgian west front; St Patrick had a more Italianate Romanesque appearance with campanile; St Bernard had a gabled front with deep arched portal.
Reynolds & Scott and many other architects who saw themselves as traditional wrote little to explain these churches. The architects’ statement in the souvenir opening booklet for St Bernard, Burnage, was typical in giving more attention to the sanctuary’s marble cladding (itself an aspect of the Byzantine revival) than to any explanation of the church’s architecture. One theme was continuity between exterior and interior: the exterior revealed the interior form, external columns repeated those inside. Another important theme was the view to the sanctuary: passage aisles meant that sightlines were unobstructed and the repeated arches drew attention to the altar, ‘the focus of the whole church’. The exterior had the ‘character of dignity and solidity’, the interior one of ‘spaciousness’.25 Reynolds & Scott did not need to explain or defend tradition since they had no shortage of clients who wanted their brand of church. Indeed they were equally prepared to build modern Gothic revival churches when asked to do so: their priority was to give clients what they wanted and to do it well.
Though Norris’s churches were often indistinguishable from those of Reynolds & Scott, he was especially fascinated by the Byzantine domed Greek-cross form of church. He had first explored this type in the 1920s at St John the Baptist in Rochdale, modelled after Hagia Sophia and later decorated with sumptuous mosaics by the firm of Ludwig Oppenheimer. Even then Norris had been interested in the potential of the Byzantine style to accommodate aspects of modern architecture, since this building was constructed largely of reinforced concrete.26 After the war he had several opportunities to explore this version of the Byzantine revival further. His first was for Ratcliffe College, Leicester, where he designed a new chapel around 1957 (Figure 2.7). Norris travelled with the college’s president to northern France to look at contemporary church buildings there, but remained seemingly more influenced by his previous work in Rochdale than by anything he saw abroad.27 Like his church at Rochdale, the Ratcliffe College chapel, ‘in the modern trend with a basic Byzantine feeling’, as Norris put it, was constructed in reinforced concrete clad in brick, a dome floating over a clerestory, while vertical slot windows in the transepts gave it a modern look.28 A few years later, Norris designed St John Fisher at West Heath in Birmingham, a simple brick building described by the architect as ‘a modern interpretation of the Romanesque style’ with a Greek cross plan, though it was intended to extend the nave at a later date (Figure 2.8).29 Without the budget for a dome, this church was economically roofed in timber with an octagonal clerestoried tower.
In both churches, a modern innovation in church architecture was interpreted as Byzantine in order to reconcile it with tradition. Artist Jonah Jones was commissioned for decorative work at Leicester and West Heath, and for their windows he chose a technique that had been developed in France in the 1930s known as dalle de verre (‘glass slab’), in which the glazing was made of small thick chunks of coloured glass set in heavy, often concrete, frames, forming rough, stylised images with dazzling colours. Norris undoubtedly saw this technique in France. It was described as ‘transparent mosaic’ by Eugène Auguste Roulin, a French Benedictine monk who had settled at Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire, who illustrated distinctly Byzantine figures in windows by Jean Gaudin in his book Modern Church Architecture of 1947.30 Jones described his own windows at West Heath as ‘a sort of compound of Byzantine, Romanesque, and possibly early French mediaeval influences’, claiming to have revived ‘the spirit, if not the actual style, of Byzantine Christianity’ and citing the mosaics of Ravenna as an inspiration. The abstraction of the figures that resulted from this technique was, he thought, a modern parallel of a Byzantine rejection of sentimental imagery. Norris’s plain but expansive architecture was a suitably ‘unproclaiming and noble frame’ for his work.31 The disconcerting modern appearance of Jones’s windows, his figures fragmented into vivid patches of colour, was therefore justified as a development within an existing tradition.
2.4 St Patrick, Leicester, by Reynolds & Scott, 1957–59. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
2.5 St Joseph, Wembley, London, by Reynolds & Scott, 1956–58. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
2.6 St Bernard, Burnage, Manchester, by Reynolds & Scott, 1957–59. Photo: Entwistle, Thorpe & Co. Ltd, c.1959
2.7 Ratcliffe College Chapel, Leicester, by Ernest Bower Norris, 1957–59. Sculpture and dalle de verre windows by Jonah Jones. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
2.8 St John Fisher, West Heath, Birmingham, by Sandy & Norris, 1963–64. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
So, too, was another feature of these two churches’ interiors, the ciborium, made popular by Westminster Cathedral’s revival of this substantial element of sanctuary furnishing. At both Leicester and West Heath, Norris reinterpreted the conventional columned canopy in modern forms and metal structures: at Ratcliffe College with pencil-like shafts and a wavy canopy like a fragment of the Festival of Britain; at St John Fisher, in a sleek and entirely modern design, hinting perhaps at the local car industry (Plate 1).32 While the ciborium was an ancient feature revived in twentieth-century Catholic church architecture, it was reinterpreted here through modern means. At Leicester, however, Jones decorated the canopy with an allegorical scene based on Byzantine mosaics, accentuating an allegiance to the past.
Historical allusions were reassuring. Priest and bishop could be sure that the building would demonstrate continuity with the historical Church while also conveying a distinctive image identified in modern British cities with twentieth-century Catholicism. The Romanesque was also practically reassuring, suggesting the solidity of traditional construction and the economies of a plain architecture. In many cases architects were specifically asked to design in Romanesque by their clerical clients.33 Yet the Romanesque and Byzantine styles could easily be given a more modern appearance, built with modern techniques, decorated with modern artworks and furnishings, and adapted to new kinds of plan. It was an enormously successful approach. Reynolds & Scott built all over England, and many other architects built in a similar manner: Harrison & Cox in Birmingham, Archard & Partners in London, Wilfrid Mangan in Preston and London, R. S. Ronchetti and Arthur Farebrother in Yorkshire, to name only the largest firms. St Teresa in Filton, Bristol by O’Brien, Morris & McCullough combined Byzantine and Romanesque associations with reference to early Christian basilicas: a ‘traditional style’ but, like modernist architecture, ‘strictly functional’ and with ‘little or no decoration’, as its architects wrote.34
The Byzantine was such a prevalent style that even modernist architects could be drawn to it. St Raphael’s, Stalybridge, designed by Edward J. Massey of Warrington and opened in 1963, was entirely modern in style, with a reinforced concrete frame combining cylindrical piers and segmental vaults, perhaps following Chamberlin, Powell & Bon’s Golden Lane housing in London (Figure 2.9). This gave a lightness and openness at odds with the Byzantine architecture of walls and volumes: here walls were merely infill panels of brick. Yet a Byzantine allegiance at Stalybridge was signalled by a low reinforced concrete dome over the sanctuary with a clerestory around its base. The dome was off-centre from the rectangular plan, so that most of the seating occupied a nave, though the transepts were broad to accommodate congregational seating, arranged on three sides of the sanctuary in response to the developing understanding of the liturgy in the 1960s. Galleries at each side could be used by a choir, suggestive of Byzantine church galleries.35
Perhaps the most striking feature of this church was a frieze of stained-glass across the ground floor in dalle de verre, made by Pierre Fourmaintraux of Whitefriars Studios in London.36 Fourmaintraux pioneered the technique in Britain and made many windows in both Catholic and non-Catholic churches throughout the country, as well as undertaking secular commissions.37 His windows at St Raphael give a figurative, narrative depiction of the Old Testament story of Tobias and Raphael using this chunky technique that imposed a degree of abstraction. If Jones could appeal to the Byzantine in his use of dalle de verre, its use to create a broad enclosing surface at St Raphael’s made it even more evocative of mosaic. Yet this technique also had Gothic associations: the architect intended this panel to be visible outside when the church’s lights were on, and elsewhere – at St Richard, Chichester, for example, where Fourmaintraux’s windows filled the spaces in a reinforced concrete frame – this method was also interpreted as a modern version of medieval stained glass.38 At St Raphael’s, Stalybridge, however, Massey seems to have used it as part of a coherent reworking of twentieth-century (and particularly perhaps Lancastrian) Catholic Byzantine architecture into a more progressive and liturgically innovative church architecture. It may have been an exceptional building, but, like its more conservative counterparts, it represented a dual allegiance both to modern conditions and to a conception of a continuing tradition.
2.9 St Raphael, Stalybridge, by Massey & Massey, 1960–63. Dalle de verre by Pierre Fourmaintraux of Whitefriars Studios; Stations of the Cross in ceramic by Alan Boyson and Neal French. By permission of Alan Boyson and Neal French. Photo: Richard Brook, c.2000
While Reynolds & Scott and Sandy & Norris produced churches that met their clerical clients’ expectations, drawing on stock features they had established before the Second World War, several architects took a more original and personal approach to an explicitly anti-modern church design, also based on the Romanesque. Francis Xavier Velarde and Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel both wrote in opposition to the modern movement; indeed Goodhart-Rendel had been forced to resign from his position as Director of Education at the Architectural Association in 1938 because of his anti-modern stance. In a booklet on church architecture published shortly after the war, Goodhart-Rendel presented his ideas on ‘commonsense churchplanning’. Churches, he insisted, had to be permanent, and so he argued against untested modern materials such as steel and reinforced concrete. In a clear rejection of modernism, he wrote that the architect had to suppress his ego, avoiding anything ‘sensational, revolutionary, or pretentious’.39 Goodhart-Rendel instead studied and admired Victorian architects including William Butterfield, Temple Moore and Bentley, seeing his own work as continuing in their path.40 Following Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, he saw the architect as an intellectual, an inspired artist, whose intense application to design through the creative exploration of the rules and techniques of his art would combine with his personal devotion to imbue his work with a Christian spirit.41
Velarde, also influenced by Maritain, wrote that tradition had to be accepted but modified through the artist’s creativity:
If art somehow cuts itself off from tradition, if somehow it fails to give expression to it, then it cuts itself off from life and ceases to be human; it does not even begin to be great art. … The true artist … must be in some degree a creator; he can never be a mere copyist, plagiarist, or skilful selector from the creative work of the past. It is his function to combine tradition and creativeness, which are not opposed but, rightly understood, are complementary and even integral to each other.42
Creativity would lead the artist forward, inspiring a modern church architecture in continuity with the past; but it should also look inwards, drawing on familiar memories of churches to inspire an emotional sympathy in the viewer. It was important for the architect to emphasise ‘the specifically Catholic character’ of the church building, and perhaps for that reason Velarde’s post-war churches were personal reinterpretations of the Byzantine and Romanesque.43
Goodhart-Rendel’s most important post-war Roman Catholic churches in London, Holy Trinity, Dockhead, and Our Lady of the Rosary, Marylebone, were both Romanesque in inspiration, and each was an original take on the style. Holy Trinity’s monumental symmetry, sheer brown brick walls patterned with coloured brickwork and twin thick-set towers connected by a high arch over the severe west window, followed German Romanesque rather than Italian precedent, especially the influential early twentieth-century church at Ulm by Theodor Fischer.44 Dockhead’s vaulted nave had passage aisles running through internal buttresses, a system that had interested Victorian architects (Plan 1b). Goodhart-Rendel’s polychrome brickwork and the ungainly character of this church owed much to his interest in Butterfield, on whom he had lectured in 1934, and who was then also being popularised by John Summerson, who praised the intelligent ‘ugliness’ of Butterfield’s church architecture.45 At Dockhead, Goodhart-Rendel applied a contemporary analysis of the Victorian architect’s approach to materials and composition to the Catholic twentieth-century neo-Romanesque tradition in church architecture (Plate 2).
2.10 Our Lady of the Rosary, Marylebone, London, by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and D. A. Reid of F. G. Broadbent & Partners, 1958–64. Main entrance facade. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
Our Lady of the Rosary, completed after the architect’s death by his practice, has a family resemblance to Holy Trinity, with a similar interest in broad brick surfaces and polychrome decoration (Figure 2.10). ‘Romanesque in feeling’, though of no particular style, as Goodhart-Rendel’s practice partner Francis Broadbent wrote, with more influence this time from both southern French and Italian Romanesque precedent, this church was altogether lighter, with a pink and red brick bell tower over the entrance and pointed transverse arches over the nave conferring more delicacy than sublimity (Figure 2.11).46 The differences between these two London churches, similar in conception but of varied characters, might be explained in part by their architect’s emphasis on ‘good manners’ in architecture, the notion that buildings should look in keeping with their neighbours.47 Holy Trinity’s dark cragginess suited the surrounding warehouses of London’s East End and its imposing towers confronted a major traffic route, while the Rosary church in affluent Marylebone huddled amongst residential and commercial blocks and stepped back from its terraced neighbours alongside the main road. The architect’s individualism in his approach to precedent was a means of producing the most fitting building for its purpose and place.
For Goodhart-Rendel, style was a starting point rather than an aim, and he transformed the Romanesque through personal vision rather than by accommodating modern circumstances. Modernity was evidently not important beyond the acceptance of contemporary requirements of worship; for economic reasons, however, he did accept reinforced concrete, commissioning engineer Felix Samuely for the vaults at Dockhead and using this necessity as a spur to further creativity.48 Velarde, too, developed a distinctive language of church architecture broadly based on the Romanesque and accommodating new techniques with only limited effects on form: modern techniques, he argued, had to be ‘traditionalized’.49 His pre-war Catholic churches in Liverpool, St Matthew, Clubmoor, and St Monica, Bootle, combined art deco design with the Byzantine, inspired especially by German church architecture of the 1920s.50 By the 1950s, Velarde’s churches became simpler reinventions of the Byzantine and Romanesque. St Teresa, Upholland, was plain and barn-like in red brick articulated with groups of Romanesque windows. Two round chancel arches defined the deep sanctuary, and its single aisle was framed with thick-set columns covered in golden mosaic supporting round arches. Its tower was topped with open round-headed arches and a big copper pyramid.51 Velarde’s architecture relied on broad masses, exposed brick and simple repeated motifs. English Martyrs, Wallasey, and Holy Cross, Birkenhead, had stark brick exteriors giving way to colourful interiors with vivid painted ceilings and mosaic-clad aisle piers, a pairing of austere Romanesque forms with modern decoration that characterised his post-war churches (Figure 2.12). St Alexander, Bootle, was a similarly large church with a twin-towered west front (Figure 2.13). Its forms were reduced to essential cubic masses pierced by rounded openings for the three great doors and open towers, like a child’s drawing of a church.
2.11 Our Lady of the Rosary, Marylebone, London, by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and D. A. Reid of F. G. Broadbent & Partners, 1958–64. Interior. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
2.12 Holy Cross, Birkenhead, by F. X. Velarde, 1959. Photo: Stewart Bale Ltd., c.1959. Source: Shrewsbury Diocesan Archives, Birkenhead
By the 1950s, Velarde began to receive commissions in London, and there his assistants, including Richard O’Mahony and Janet Gnosspelius and his son Julian Velarde took his architecture some way towards modernism. At St Luke, Pinner, historical references were abstracted further: the cut-out forms of St Alexander remained, but the aisle windows were made with precast concrete frames in a simple pattern, and the small square clerestory windows gave this church some affinity with contemporary Scandinavian-influenced modernism (Figure 2.14, Plan 1d).52 The interior was spartan, enlivened with highlights of rich decoration: the ceiling was formed with blue-painted timber coffers, forming a strip over the nave and descending to a reredos with a large crucifixion sculpture by David John (Plate 3). The nave columns were covered in gold mosaic and given simple alternating capitals, a memory of the Byzantine style. St Luke was Byzantine and Romanesque in spirit, if no longer in style, and modern in design and detail.53 Smaller and similar churches in London followed, including St Theresa of Lisieux, Borehamwood, where Velarde’s assistants completed the church with segmental arches and an especially severe exterior.54 In this post-war period, Velarde’s reinterpretation of Romanesque architecture can be viewed as the result of his own hermetic development as an architect: some stylistic aspects from contemporary architecture were worked into his approach, partly through the involvement of younger assistants; yet, while his churches frequently incorporated modern stylistic elements, the radical new approaches of modern architects were rejected in favour of incremental changes to traditional forms.
2.13 St Alexander, Bootle, Liverpool by F. X. Velarde, 1957. Photographer unknown, c.1960. Source: Bryan Little, Catholic Churches Since 1623 (London: Robert Hale, 1966), pl. 37
2.14 St Luke, Pinner, London, by F. X. Velarde, 1958. Main facade with relief sculpture of the Virgin and St Luke by David John. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
While Byzantine and Romanesque were the most popular historical references in Catholic church architecture after the Second World War, the memory of the nineteenth-century Gothic revival and A. W. N. Pugin’s campaign to associate it with Catholicism remained strong. While neo-Romanesque architecture could lead to a simplification that approached a modern style and adopted some elements of modern architecture, Gothic had potential to lead more directly to modernism through its supposedly rational expression of structure – an interpretation that Pugin himself had made and which became especially important in French architecture through Viollet-le-Duc, taken up in modern church architecture most famously by Auguste Perret at Le Raincy. Yet many architects of post-war churches in Britain ignored this potential in favour of a continuing development of a Gothic revival tradition in church architecture adapted to the more limited means of the mid-twentieth century.
The distant successor of Pugin’s own firm even remained in practice in the 1950s, when Charles Purcell led the firm of Pugin & Pugin, then based in Liverpool. He had taken over the firm from his cousin, Pugin’s grandson Sebastian Pugin Powell, in 1949.55 The firm had been popular in Glasgow under Archbishop Charles Eyre in the late nineteenth century and continued to build there after the Second World War. Purcell’s church of St Ninian in Knightswood (completed after his death by S. Stevenson-Jones in 1958) was a modest building of brick with precise Early English tracery in stone, simplified mouldings and a deep apse behind a chancel arch, hardly distinguishable from a church of the nineteenth century, though as Purcell had had to resort to concealing a steel structure by disguising it as timber, there was little left but the image of the Gothic.56 Purcell had no reason to change with the times, since he continued to receive commissions for a Puginian style of church.
Meanwhile, many of the post-war Roman Catholic churches of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Adrian’s brother, were also Gothic, following his work for the Church of England at Liverpool Cathedral, designed in 1903 and still far from complete at the time of his death in 1960. Scott’s Catholic churches included the Carmelite priory church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Simon Stock in Kensington, London, and Christ the King, Plymouth, completed by his practice in 1962.57 While these churches were designed in different forms of Gothic, neither could be mistaken for anything but the work of a twentieth-century architect. Kensington, a replacement for a bombed church, had an affinity with the work of Goodhart-Rendel, a wide nave roofed with transverse arches supporting a high clerestory, passage aisles cut through at ground level, the Gothic represented rather than recreated through the pointed forms of the arches and an elaborate reredos (Figure 2.15). Partly for economy and partly for a modernised aesthetic, complex mouldings were eliminated, while the exterior employed plain brick surfaces with stone detailing confined to windows and doorways. The absence of more complex features made the building austere – a form of Gothic without medieval precedent, a personal development of the Gothic revival in parallel with Goodhart-Rendel’s development of the Romanesque. Scott’s church in Plymouth was less innovative, with masonry piers forming arcaded aisles and a deep chancel, yet the piers, diagonal in section, had no mouldings or capitals, and the exterior was a plain brick box and tower (Figure 2.16). Scott’s original design made use of parabolic arches, but the parish priest had pressed him for a more conventional Gothic church: selected because of his reputation for this style, Scott could hardly move towards modernism; but he nevertheless designed in a decidedly contemporary form of the Gothic revival.58
A decade before, this approach to church architecture had been summarised by John Summerson, with Edward Maufe’s Anglican Cathedral at Guildford in mind:
The obvious, elementary way [of designing churches] is to grab at the disappearing tail of the Gothic Revival. … This means leaving out all the expensive and technically difficult parts of Gothic, streamlining the silhouette, keeping everything plain (say two cusps for every twenty in a 14th century equivalent) and relying on charming materials and a little sculpture on the safe side of Eric Gill. That way has the very substantial merit of being instantly acceptable to the majority of church-goers. Well done, it is completely unobjectionable; modesty and orthodoxy commend it.59
This was faint praise from a critic promoting modern architecture, but accurately conveyed the intentions of architects such as Scott: to accept the limitations of cost that made archaeologically accurate Gothic impossible and therefore to build modestly, adapting the Gothic for modern conditions while accepting an obligation to satisfy the client’s desire for a recognisable church. It was an approach that was especially employed for the restorations and extensions of earlier Gothic revival churches of this period, including Scott’s continuing work at Ampleforth Abbey church, the reconstruction after bombing of Pugin’s St George’s Cathedral at Southwark in London by Romilly Craze and the reconstruction and extension by Stanley Kerr Bate of the Benedictine Abbey church at Ealing in London, a bombed late-Victorian church by F. A. Walters.60
Other architects attempted to achieve the impression of Gothic with less concern for authenticity and a more hybrid and pragmatic approach open to the expressive use of new materials. Reynolds & Scott, though better known for the Romanesque, frequently turned their hands to this mode of design in the 1950s and early 1960s, explicitly attempting to reconcile aspects of modern architecture with traditional conceptions of the church. At the Sacred Heart, Moreton, near Preston, a west tower in red brick and red sandstone looked convincingly like that of a medieval village church, but the windows were simple cheap lancets punched into the plain brick walls without tracery or mouldings. The interior was essentially similar to their Romanesque churches in form, with pointed transverse arches and a timber reredos merely suggestive of a Gothic style. This building perhaps confirms that, though it may have been desired in certain cases, Gothic architecture was normally impossible to build by then.
2.15 Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Simon Stock, Kensington, London, by Giles Gilbert Scott, 1960. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
2.16 Christ the King, Plymouth, by Giles Gilbert Scott, 1960–62. Photo: Steve Cadman, 2011
2.17 Our Lady of Lourdes, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield, by Reynolds & Scott, 1957. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
Our Lady of Lourdes at Hackenthorpe in Sheffield was built at the same time, but veered further towards modernism: ‘this church’, the architects wrote, ‘whilst modern in general has nevertheless an echo of tradition of the Perpendicular style’.61 Externally it gave little indication of any style: it was a brick box with tall slot windows and a west tower, more art deco than Gothic, based loosely on the influential 1930s church of St Saviour at Eltham in London by Welch & Lander and N. F. Cachemaille-Day. Hackenthorpe’s windows were tall rectangular slots in stone surrounds, suggestive of late Gothic verticality but evading literal comparisons. In many other modern churches of this kind, including Reynolds & Scott’s Holy Cross in Hucknall, Nottingham, such slot windows were given triangular heads, allowing them to retain enough of the style to ensure its recognisability. The interior at Hackenthorpe was a conventional passage-aisle plan, but was constructed with reinforced concrete portal frames tapered inwards towards the top forming shallow pointed arches (Figure 2.17). The nave may have been suggestive of Perpendicular Gothic, but it was achieved in a construction method derived from warehouses and aircraft hangars.62 It was clearly important that this modern method should be visible in itself: the tapering of the concrete arches, the plain purlins supporting the ceiling, and the absence of any kind of decorative treatment belonged to the architectural vocabulary of the portal frame. Yet it was equally important that the historical reference should be perceived: the nave arches ‘recall vault construction’, wrote the architects, the half-frames forming the apse ‘giving interesting architectural effect and emphasising the altar and sanctuary’.63
2.18 Our Lady and St Joseph, Hanwell, London, by Reynolds & Scott, 1962–67. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
Many architects began to minimise overt Gothic characteristics further, leaving only the expression of structure to imply medieval precedent and the conventional basilican plan to provide a reassurance of continuity, a route that could end in forms of modernism. Reynolds & Scott took this direction in the 1960s: at Our Lady and St Joseph in Hanwell, London, concrete portal frames with V-shaped arms suggested vaulting ribs, the concrete treated and coloured as a modern equivalent of Gothic mouldings, while a broad tower marked the entrance: yet though traditional forms were suggested, there was nothing left of historical style (Figures 2.18, 2.19).64 By then, however, this architecture was criticised as not radical enough. If it was a modern church architecture, it was not the revolutionary modernism of the younger generation but an approach to architecture that emerged out of an explicit concern with tradition. Because Reynolds & Scott accepted the Church’s demand that tradition be maintained, and did so by catering to the preconceptions of clergy and faithful rather than challenging them, they became the most prolific firm of Roman Catholic church architects in Britain.
2.19 Our Lady and St Joseph, Hanwell, London, by Reynolds & Scott, 1962–67. View towards choir gallery. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
The Romanesque and Byzantine revival styles were viewed by architects and clergy as a continuing tradition of twentieth-century Catholic church architecture, while the Gothic was sometimes favoured as a more generic tradition of Christianity in Britain. Such a notion of what constituted tradition was invented anew by each architect on every occasion these forms were used. The word arose frequently in architects’ statements about their buildings: ‘it was felt that the Church should be traditional in character, and its design is based upon the Romanesque style’, wrote Arthur Farebrother on St Catherine, Didsbury; Norris’s church of the Assumption in Blackpool was ‘in the style of the traditional “Romanesque” with the elimination of all unnecessary trimmings’.65 Meanwhile the church of Our Lady of Lourdes at Birkdale by Lionel Prichard, a simplified neo-Romanesque with the addition of a steel-columned porch, could be described as ‘a building which, though relying to some extent on traditional forms and construction, is thoroughly modern in essence’.66 Architects sometimes defended themselves by ascribing their approach to the preferences of the clergy: Archard & Partners’ rebuilt church of St John, Hackney, in London, for example, was ‘traditional in character in accordance with the wishes of the Ecclesiastical Authorities, but contemporary techniques have been employed which are expressed in the elevational treatment’.67 Just as often, however, architects articulated a defence of tradition, as another Catholic church architect, J. S. Comper, explained: ‘I don’t believe for a moment that traditional building – particularly as regards religious buildings – is played out. Real architecture has always been a matter of very slow development through the centuries’.68 Architects worked alongside clergy to construct a distinctive image of the Church, through each new church building: as a beacon of stability and continuity, linked to the universal Church of the past, refusing to accept all the values of the modern world while at the same time claiming a place within it.
If the traditional approach could incorporate some aspects of modern conditions, it was by definition ‘anti-modernism’: it existed in parallel with modernism, which it rejected, not simply before it.69 Goodhart-Rendel, for example, thought modern European church architecture ‘queer’, ‘experimental’, ‘ferocious’ or ‘whimsical’ and praised the work of Velarde; Velarde objected to the ‘repellant’, ‘odd’ or ‘inscrutable’ in church art.70 Tradition was advocated predominantly by the generation that began in practice before the Second World War, architects who had grown up with modern materials and techniques and witnessed the rise of modern architecture. As this generation gave way to younger architects, modernism gained ground in church architecture. Goodhart-Rendel died in 1959, his practice taken up by his assistants to become Broadbent, Hastings, Reid & Todd, designing in a soft Scandinavian modernism in the 1960s. Velarde died in 1960 and was succeeded by Richard O’Mahony, who accepted all the implications of the modern movement in a series of important churches in the new decade. Giles Gilbert Scott died that year and Adrian Gilbert Scott in 1963, their practices inherited by Giles’s son Richard Gilbert Scott, who designed several decidedly modern churches. Reynolds died in 1967, his assistant Brian Mooney then partnering Scott to give even this firm a wholly modern approach. The elder architects’ insistences on tradition were a direct challenge to modern architects, who were about to transform the image of the church as a building, and therefore also as an institution, far beyond familiar forms.
1 Ian Nairn, ‘Criticism: Lansbury Centrepiece’, Architectural Review (Oct. 1954), 263–4; Hermione Hobhouse and Stephen Porter (eds.) Survey of London, vol. 43: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (London: Athlone, 1994), 223–39, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46491 (accessed 3 May 2013).
2 ‘Lansbury Neighbourhood’, Architects’ Journal (15 June 1950), 737–51 (749); Little, Catholic Churches, 135.
3 Adrian Gilbert Scott, letter to the editor, The Tablet (4 Dec. 1954), 558.
4 William Godfrey, foreword to CBRS (1957), 33.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Canon 1164, quoted in J. B. O’Connell, Church Building and Furnishing: The Church’s Way (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), 28.
8 Council of Trent, Session XXV, ibid. 32–3.
9 Pius XII, ‘Mediator Dei: On the Sacred Liturgy’ (1947), 195, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-dei_en.html (accessed 19 July 2012).
10 ‘Instruction of the Holy Office on Sacred Art’, 1952, in O’Connell, Church Building and Furnishing, 41.
11 Ibid.
12 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845).
13 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14 (7–8).
14 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, ‘Coda: Reconceptualizing the Modern’, in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 301–23 (303, 317–18).
15 Gavin Stamp, ‘Adrian Gilbert Scott’, in Geoffrey Fisher, Gavin Stamp and Joanna Heseltine, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol. 14: The Scott Family (Amersham: Gregg, 1981), 185.
16 ‘The New Church at Poplar’, The Tablet (31 July 1954), 118.
17 J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered: The Byzantine Revival in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon, 2003), 158–60, 163.
18 Peter Howell, ‘Letters from J. F. Bentley to Charles Hadfield: Part II’, Architectural History 25 (1982), 65–97, 156–61 (80–81); J. A. Hilton, The Artifice of Eternity: The Byzantine-Romanesque Revival in Catholic Lancashire (Wigan: North West Catholic History Society, 2008), 28–9.
19 C. H. Reilly, Some Architectural Problems of To-Day (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924), 39, cited in Ward, ‘Merseyside Churches’, 95–6.
20 W. R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building (London: Macmillan, 1894), 198–9, cited in Hilton, The Artifice of Eternity, 25.
21 Royal Institute of British Architects nomination papers for Francis Maurice Reynolds (fellowship, 1946) and William Scott (fellowship, 1947) (Royal Institute of British Architects Library, London [RIBA], Manuscripts Collection).
22 Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner and Joseph Sharples, Lancashire: Liverpool and the South West (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 387.
23 CBRS (1956), 44–5 (Wembley), 98–9 (Braunstone); (1957), 116–17 (Leicester); (1958), 46–7 (Wembley); (1959), 166–9 (Sutton-in-Ashfield), 173–5 (Leicester); (1961), 172–3 (Sutton-in-Ashfield); CBRN (1957), 94–5; (1959), 73–8 (Burnage); (1958), 141–2 (Blackpool). A likely candidate for the combined firm’s original church might be St Dunstan, Manchester, 1937 (Clare Hartwell, Matthew Hyde and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East [London: Yale University Press, 2004], 88).
24 Pre-war precedents for these features include Reynolds & Scott’s St Willibrord, Clayton, Manchester, and Walter Tapper’s Our Lady and St Thomas, Gorton, Manchester, of 1927 (see Hartwell, Hyde and Pevsner, Lancashire, 363, 371–2; Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: The Industrial and Commercial South, Buildings of England [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], 337; on passage aisles, see Little, Catholic Churches, 160–62).
25 St Bernard’s, Burnage, Souvenir Book of the Opening of the New Church (Manchester: n.p., 1959) (parish archive).
26 ‘The New Church of St. John, Rochdale, Lancs.’, Architects’ Journal (29 July 1925), 162–9; Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 329–30.
27 [Claude Leetham], ‘The Genesis of the New Chapel’, Ratcliffian 30 (1961–62), 144 (Ratcliffe College Archive, Leicester); CBRS (1958), 148. They may have been especially interested in Jean-Baptiste Hourlier’s church of Saint-Louis, Lorient, Brittany, which had a similar plan and dome, though with more overt use of concrete (Franck Pilloton [ed.], Églises de France reconstruites [Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1956], 47–8).
28 CBRS (1961), 170; [Leetham], ‘The Genesis of the New Chapel’, 144; CBRS (1957), 109–11; (1958), 148–9; (1960), 162–3; (1962), 213.
29 CBRS (1964), 114; Philip Smith (parish priest, St John Fisher, West Heath) to Francis Grimshaw (archbishop of Birmingham) (n.d.) (Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham [ARCAB], P55/T); CBRS (1963), 132–4.
30 E. Roulin, Modern Church Architecture, trans. C. Cornelia Craigie and John A. Southwell (St Louis and London: B. Herder, 1947), 487–9.
31 The Church of St John Fisher, West Heath, Souvenir Brochure (Birmingham: n.p., 1964) (ARCAB, P55/T); Peter Jones, Jonah Jones: An Artist’s Life (Bridgend: Seren, 2011), 109–12.
32 Illustrated in Ratcliffian 30 (1961–62), unnumbered plates (Ratcliffe College Archive); CBRS (1961), 170–71.
33 For example Harrison & Cox at Our Lady of the Assumption, Birmingham (CBRS [1958], 128); Sebastian Comper at Christ the King, Bedford (CBRS [1960], 150); even Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were initially asked to use Romanesque at St Benedict, Drumchapel (Proctor, ‘Churches for a Changing Litany’, 300); J. B. Moriarty (parish priest, St Benedict, Drumchapel) to Jack Coia (Gillespie, Kidd & Coia) (8 Feb. 1960) (Glasgow School of Art Archives [GSAA], GKC/CHDU/1/1/221).
34 CBRS (1959), 196; (1960), 196–7.
35 CBRN (1960), 98.
36 CBRN (1961), 118.
37 Brian Thomas and Eileen Richardson (ed.), Directory of Master Glass-Painters (London: Oriel Press, 1972), 113–14.
38 CBRN (1963), 66.
39 H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, Commonsense Churchplanning (London: Incorporated Church Building Society, n.d.), 18.
40 Gavin Stamp, ‘Victorian Survival of Revival? The Case of H. S. Goodhart-Rendel’, AA Files 15 (1987), 60–66.
41 Powers, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, 17–20; Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays, trans. J. F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1930).
42 R. Velarde and F. X. Velarde, ‘Modern Church Architecture and Some of its Problems’, Clergy Review 38 (1953), 513–26 (516).
43 Ibid. 517.
44 Powers, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, 44.
45 H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, English Architecture Since the Regency: An Interpretation (London: Constable, 1953), 126–35; John Summerson, ‘William Butterfield: Or, the Glory of Ugliness’, in Heavenly Mansions (London: Cresset, 1949), 159–76; Powers, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, 10–12.
46 CBRS (1962), 62; ‘From Our Notebook’, The Tablet (16 Sept. 1961), 879.
47 Goodhart-Rendel, Commonsense Churchplanning, 18–19, citing Arthur Trystan Edwards, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (London: P. Allan, 1924).
48 Powers, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, 44; CBRS (1958), 57–9.
49 Velarde and Velarde, ‘Modern Church Architecture’, 515.
50 Pollard, Pevsner and Sharples, Lancashire, 156–7; Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 358, 362.
51 Pollard, Pevsner and Sharples, Lancashire, 598–9.
52 CBRS (1958), 50–51.
53 Ibid.; Bernard A. Harrison, St Luke’s Catholic Church, Pinner: The Story of a Parish (London: n.p., 2007), 42–4.
54 CBRS (1961), 72–3; (1962), 57–9; (1963), 34–7.
55 John Sanders, ‘Pugin & Pugin and the Diocese of Glasgow’, Architectural Heritage 8 (1997), 89–107 (103).
56 CBRN (1958), 188–9; Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 352.
57 Stamp, ‘“A Catholic Church”’, 76–7.
58 Ibid. 79; CBRS (1962), 215–17.
59 John Summerson, ‘Coventry Cathedral’, New Statesman (8 Sept. 1951), 253–4, quoted in Bullock, Building the Post-War World, 77.
60 Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 338, 341–4; Little, Catholic Churches, 178, 205; CBRS (1956), 33–5; (1958), 35–9, 69; (1961), 40–43; (1962), 51–3.
61 CBRS (1957), 102.
62 Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 354.
63 CBRS (1957), 102.
64 CBRS (1962), 60–61; (1965), 53–4; (1967), 44–7.
65 CBRN (1956), 58; (1959), 170.
66 CBRN (1956), 42.
67 CBRS (1956), 38.
68 CBRS (1964), 134.
69 Goldhagen, ‘Coda’, 308.
70 Goodhart-Rendel, English Architecture, 280–81; Velarde and Velarde, ‘Modern Church Architecture’, 518.
