While architects who adhered to tradition could claim the support of Church documents and the clergy, modernism was advocated and practised by many Roman Catholic church architects and increasingly welcomed by the clergy after 1955. This chapter examines some of the reasons behind this turn towards modernism, while the following chapters explore in more detail the variety of ways in which modern architects approached church design. Modernism could bring to the Church the promise of an institution that was part of the modern world and relevant to the needs of its inhabitants, a different vision of the institution to that proposed by architects such as Velarde or Goodhart-Rendel. This was a world characterised by rapid change, by the vast movements of people rehoused in new towns and estates, by new and exciting products and materials and, above all, by a feeling of optimism for the future as war and its aftermath of economic struggle became a memory. The Catholic Church was not hermetically sealed from this general cultural climate; on the contrary, its members were inhabitants of the modern world, wished to understand the Church in its terms and hoped to present a public face of the Church that would be well regarded by modern society. Modern architecture offered potential to achieve these aims.
Modernism was characterised by the ready acceptance and expression of modern conditions in architecture in relation to the contemporary technological, social and cultural world. Architects eagerly employed the latest building techniques and materials, from steel and reinforced concrete to industrial prefabrication. Rejecting the conventions of tradition and the past, they wanted to analyse the functions required of their buildings to see if people’s lives could be better accommodated in new ways. This implied not just the scrutiny of existing functional programmes but also the working out of new programmes and the rejection of conventional ideas about building types.1 The new conditions of the city were an important aspect of social and technological modernity with which architecture had to engage, so architects aimed to participate in urbanism even through the design of individual buildings. Architects also shared in a wider artistic culture that included modern artists and craftsmen, drawing on their ideas and commissioning their work for new buildings. Within these broad principles, any one architect or writer might emphasise some intentions over others, so that modernism became extremely diverse in its concerns and in the forms of buildings that resulted, particularly as younger generations of modern architects brought further complexity to modernist architectural discourse and design from the 1950s.2
The modernist attitude in architecture of thinking in detail about the functions of a building and planning it without recourse to convention to meet its social needs was the most fundamental and revolutionary principle of this movement. In church architecture, however, it could also be the most problematic, because it threatened to upset not only the way churches looked but also how they were used. The most radical modernism found its ally in the liturgical movement, as a rethinking of the conventions of buildings coincided with the work of clergy who were advocating a similar approach to liturgy – an analysis of its purpose and a revision of the forms of its rites and settings. In adapting modern architecture from different sources to their practice of church design, modern architects contributed to the production of the spaces of the institutional Church in its local manifestations.
One principal reason for the turn towards modernism in church architecture was that by 1955 the architectural profession and its journals had long since moved decidedly in that direction.3 While members of the older generation running small practices as principal designers could resist the wider influence of the profession, larger firms gave more work to younger employees who had trained in a different atmosphere. For most architects churches were a small proportion of their business, often modest in recompense compared to more important post-war projects associated with the welfare state such as schools, housing and hospitals and the increasing quantity of work available from commercial clients. Architects’ ideals were therefore formed in a larger arena than church architecture, in work where modernism was virtually a necessity given the economic and planning constraints established by the state, particularly for schools.4 Church projects were frequently given to younger architects, many of whom had studied in schools of architecture where modern methods or at least precedents were taught; and, inevitably, given the nature of practice just after the war, their apprenticeships had involved work on modern secular projects, especially schools and housing.
The Church tended to trust the architects it knew. A few young architects, such as Gerard Goalen, established their own practices by obtaining commissions from Catholic dioceses for the first time in the 1950s. Yet when architects established new practices they had usually come from firms with an existing relationship with the Church: Austin Winkley, trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, had worked for the Bolton firm of Greenhalgh & Williams, which had a longstanding relationship with Roman Catholic clergy throughout England; Desmond Williams of Manchester had been in partnership with Arthur Farebrother; others, such as Francis Prichard in Liverpool, Richard Gilbert Scott and Peter Langtry-Langton took over the family firm, the latter after having worked for Basil Spence.5 Perhaps the majority of modern Catholic churches in post-war Britain were designed by relatively large practices with an established reputation with the Church, notably Weightman & Bullen of Liverpool, working throughout England and Wales, and Gillespie, Kidd & Coia of Glasgow, who built churches across Scotland.
The organisational structure of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia was fairly typical of architectural firms of this period, and the ample evidence for the firm allows a detailed picture to be drawn of the workings of an architectural practice specialising in churches. In 1969, eccentric Glasgow architect Jack Coia, famous by then for a substantial body of Roman Catholic churches, was awarded the annual Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Invited to speak on receiving the award, he made his two partners in the practice – Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan – walk up to the podium to give speeches of their own. They in turn praised the firm’s architectural assistants, including Charles MacCallum and Robert Walkinshaw.6 Together, they had been responsible for some of the most extraordinary modern churches in Britain. In the 1950s, the practice had made a sudden transition into a youthful avant-garde form of modern architecture for which Coia himself could obviously not have been responsible. Coia had become a partner in the older Glasgow firm of Gillespie & Kidd in 1927, but the two senior partners both died in the 1920s.7 As a Catholic child of Italian parents in a sectarian city at the height of a depression, Coia struggled to obtain clients and turned to the archbishop of Glasgow, Donald Mackintosh, for help. He received several commissions for new churches, which he designed in styles ranging from eclectic Romanesque and Renaissance at St Anne’s in Dennistoun to International Style modernism for a Catholic pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow of 1938, a work significantly intended to highlight the Catholic Church’s role in modern Britain.8 By this period, however, his work was already influenced by his assistants, especially T. Warnett Kennedy, who cultivated an active interest in European modernism. In the 1950s (after Kennedy’s departure), Coia returned to a modern-traditional approach similar to that of Velarde, for example at St Paul in Shettleston.
Gradually, however, he relinquished much of the design work to younger members of his firm while remaining its figurehead. In that role, he nurtured the modernist enthusiasms of this new generation of architects. Metzstein, who had escaped Berlin as a child and served his apprenticeship with Coia while studying at the Glasgow School of Architecture, was joined in 1954 by fellow student MacMillan, who had been working for the East Kilbride Development Corporation. Within a few years they were designing largely on their own. The firm’s churches of this period ranged from modest Scandinavian-style modernism at St Paul’s, Glenrothes, designed in 1956 (Figure 3.1), to a more monumental approach inspired by Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and English brutalism at churches such as St Patrick’s, Kilsyth (Figure 3.2).9 Like many other firms, the name of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia represents a changing group of architects transforming the approach to church design after the war, while the apparent continuity of practice offered by the senior partner allowed the architects to maintain a special relationship with the Catholic Church and a continuing specialism in church building. In the 1950s, Coia would present his assistants’ designs to dioceses, persuading and reassuring bishops and financial secretaries alongside the parish priests who had selected him specifically to build modern churches.10 The same was true of Weightman & Bullen in Liverpool, where the ageing Alfred Bullen, brother of two priests in the archdiocese, attended the Sites and Buildings Commission in the 1950s on behalf of his assistants, several of whom were young Polish immigrants.11
3.1 St Paul, Glenrothes, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1956–58. Photo: William Toomey. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
3.2 St Patrick, Kilsyth, by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, 1964. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2010
While for most architects churches were one aspect of a wider range of output, church design nevertheless remained distinctly outside the mainstream of architectural practice. It allowed aesthetic experimentation with greater freedom than was possible in the rationalised projects of housing and schools, which had government guidelines for planning and strict limits on cost. Church projects gave architects opportunities to work closely with artists, to whose professional sphere they often felt close, occasions that were otherwise rare. Churches often came with expectations from both client and architect of a different kind of modern architecture, one that was more permanent, more grounded in historical precedent and convention, even if these could be radically reinterpreted, and carried an assumption of sacredness at odds with the expediency and efficiency demanded in other areas of architectural practice. These assumptions lent themselves well to certain forms of modernism, especially the more expressive and artistic forms emerging with the advent of the New Brutalism in the 1950s. Churches were much less often discussed in the architectural press than before – indeed in 1960 the magazine Church Buildings Today (later retitled Churchbuilding) was started to cater for this neglect. Church architects read specialist periodicals such as the French magazine L’Art sacré, begun in 1936 and edited by Dominicans Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey, responsible for pioneering modern art and architecture in the Catholic Church, and L’Art d’église, a similar Belgian journal edited by Frédéric Debuyst, a Benedictine, from 1959. The former was always available in Coia’s office; the latter was read by Richard O’Mahony and Austin Winkley amongst others.
One reason why churches were regarded almost as a parallel branch of modernist practice is that modernist principles often excluded aesthetic wilfulness in a discourse of functionalist derivation of form from programme. Architects had been encouraged from the heart of the modern movement to integrate art into their work and cater for the emotional needs of society in a debate on the ‘New Monumentality’ instigated by Siegfried Giedion in the 1940s, yet in Britain a more strict approach to programme often remained in architectural discourse.12 When Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s churches were discussed in the architectural press, they were always praised, but hints of criticism implied they might be straying outside the modern movement: the Architects’ Journal, confidently describing their church of St Paul at Glenrothes as ‘probably the most successful modern church to be built on this side of the English Channel’, qualified this statement by noting ‘certain mannerisms’, including a design detail for which there was ‘no apparent reason’, while an article in the Scottish journal Architectural Prospect on St Bride at East Kilbride cagily described its use of brick as a ‘return to tradition’.13 Church architecture carried a risk for modern architects that they might be seen as betraying the movement’s principles, a criticism that was made even of Le Corbusier when he astonished architects with his chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp.14 This problem was decisively resolved when the influence of the liturgical movement transformed the debate on church architecture in Britain around 1960, reconciling the building type with the principles of modern architecture. Yet even when there was greater consensus over the principles of a modern church architecture, the forms in which those principles were expressed could vary widely: there were many different strands of modernism, and each could embody the institution of the Church in a different way.
While church architects had their own reasons for adopting modern architecture, the clergy gave them patronage knowing and accepting their approaches, though often with much debate. Most architects of post-war Roman Catholic churches were trusted firms and individuals with longstanding relationships with the Church, and most were also Catholic. Though few of Coia’s assistants were Catholics, it was his prominent Catholicism that brought Gillespie, Kidd & Coia repeated commissions from the Church. Meanwhile other firms often did favour Catholics, although by no means exclusively. Non-Catholic architects were occasionally employed on exceptional commissions. After the Nonconformist Frederick Gibberd won the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral competition in 1960, for example, he was asked to design a chapel for the De La Salle order’s teacher training college at Middleton, near Manchester, supplanting the college’s existing architects, Reynolds & Scott, who were relegated to the status of draughtsmen (see Figure 3.3); later, Gibberd was invited to work for the Benedictine Douai Abbey in Berkshire.15 Occasionally a project seemed too prestigious for the smaller scale of Catholic firms: hence Clifton Cathedral in Bristol was designed, following advice from the RIBA, by Sir Percy Thomas & Son.
Most architects of post-war Roman Catholic churches had developed relationships with dioceses before the Second World War, and so, like Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, while their design approaches changed, their work existed in institutional continuity with the past. A few dioceses maintained lists of approved architects and recommended them to parish priests – in Menevia, for instance, the diocese covering southern Wales, Weightman & Bullen of Liverpool had almost the status of official diocesan architects, though other firms occasionally found work.16 This was unusual, however; in most cases there was little or no official control over the choice of architect. The Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, responding to Peter Whiston after the architect complained of being overlooked for work, assured him that ‘it has been diocesan policy, as far as possible to leave parish Priests free to choose their own architects’.17 Similarly, in Westminster, an artist approached Cardinal Heenan to ask for work in the diocese, only to be told: ‘I never interfere with the choice of priests when they employ artists and architects. I think that the only way of securing commissions is through personal recommendations.’18 Patronage networks ran across dioceses: the church-building career of John Rochford, for example, began and remained most fruitful in his native Sheffield in the diocese of Leeds in the 1950s, gradually extending southwards with work in Nottingham in the early 1960s, and culminating with several important commissions in London later in the decade. Architects sometimes artfully cultivated the clergy: Reynolds & Scott occupied an office overlooking Albert Square, where every year a procession of Catholic parishes from across Manchester converged; after the event, the architects would invite the clergy inside for a drink with a view of the dispersing crowds.19 Coia, too, moved his practice strategically to Park Circus, next to the Glasgow archdiocesan office.20 It was generally left to the parish priest to select his own architect, but he would rely on recommendations from colleagues and the bishop to choose one who could be trusted for Catholic work.
3.3 Hopwood Hall Chapel, De La Salle Training College, Middleton, Manchester, by Frederick Gibberd and Reynolds & Scott, 1961–65. Photo: John Mills, c.1965. Source: RIBA Library Photographs Collection
In most areas, there was a choice of several Catholic architects, a choice which could also therefore be a stylistic one on the part of the priest. Coia and his partners faced competition from several other architects in the three dioceses in which they worked. In Glasgow, Thomas Cordiner had, like Coia, been well established since the 1930s, but tended to produce less daringly modern churches than Coia after the war. Another architect of the older generation, Alexander McAnally, similarly continued to design churches in the city in Gothic and Romanesque revival modes well into the 1960s. Cordiner may have been, as Metzstein put it, ‘Jack Coia’s bête-noir’, but when a parish priest chose Coia it was often specifically because he wanted a modern church.21 Similar choices were available to parish priests in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere. The competition between firms, though limited, therefore allowed the parish to choose an architect according to the image of the church it desired for itself, while architects satisfied the diversity of their clients’ visions by occupying well-defined areas of current architectural practice. Priests and parishes who wanted a modern church building chose architects they trusted specifically to accomplish this task.
The Roman Catholic Church came to accept and embrace modern design because of what it could bring to the visual expression of the institutional Church, but it made this acceptance on its own terms, qualifying it with numerous conditions and colouring it with its own ideals and demands. The documents that O’Connell cited in advocating a middle course between the extremes of modern and historical styles could also be interpreted as permitting modernism. While Mediator Dei and the ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’ condemned excessive and controversial novelty and abstraction, they also said that modern art and architecture were not to be prohibited, since the Church had never promoted or advocated any particular style. O’Connell gave the opinion of Cardinal Celso Costantini, a Vatican official and commentator on modern church art:
Nowadays one can see churches whose construction was inspired by a new style – for one can truly say today that there is a new architectural style – and which fully satisfy the requirements of worship, of a fresh appreciation of artistic beauty, and of an enlightened economic sense.22
The ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’ was specifically designed to attack the kind of modern art seen at the chapel of Notre Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy in France. Here Marie-Alain Couturier managed the artistic programme and commissioned well-known modern artists including Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Georges Rouault to decorate a church by Maurice Novarina of the late 1930s. The project created controversy in France surrounding the elite and abstract nature of the artworks, particularly because many of the artists were not even Christian, let alone Catholic, and it was a controversy in which the Church felt obliged to intervene.23 Yet Assy, and similar projects such as the church of the Sacré-Coeur at Audincourt and the chapel decorated by Matisse at Vence, were widely published and highly influential despite the Vatican pronouncements. Meanwhile modern Catholic church architecture proliferated throughout Europe, especially in France, Germany and Italy, becoming increasingly well-known as European journals such as Casabella became more accessible in Britain.
By 1960, when a Picasso retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London drew enormous audiences, modern art had become so generally accepted that it could no longer be deemed to be shocking even in a church. Moreover, as a theology emerged that wanted the Church to be fully expressed in its local contexts, the Vatican changed its stance. At the Second Vatican Council, the document with the most importance for church-building, the ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’ of 1963, was distinctly positive in its encouragement of modern design:
The art of our own days, coming from every race and region, shall … be given free scope in the Church, provided that it adorns the sacred buildings and holy rites with due honour and reverence. It will thereby be enabled to contribute its own voice to that wonderful chorus of praise in honour of the Catholic faith sung by great men in times gone by.24
Its only proscriptions were against art that might be considered irreligious through ‘distortion’ or ‘mediocrity’. Good modern art and architecture were now to be actively sought.25 Just as the liturgy had to be adapted to the local circumstances of the Church, especially through the greater use of local languages, the liturgy, and the Church itself, were to be made relevant and meaningful to diverse cultures, whether the mission fields of Asia or Africa or the modern industrial West.
Since the Vatican’s mid-century statements on art and architecture condemned extremes but failed to advocate anything definite, individual members of the clergy had to interpret this advice as they felt best. Hence, while Cardinal Godfrey in Westminster repeatedly called architects to order and condemned modernism in church design, other bishops promoted the cause of modern church architecture. In the northern edition of the Catholic Building Review George Andrew Beck, bishop of Salford, recommended that architects and clergy planning new buildings read L’Art sacré for its theologically informed approach to modern church architecture.26 Beck argued that architects had been too hesitant to adopt modern architecture, erring too much towards tradition:
Discriminating judges may well say that, on present showing, we have not yet found the ecclesiastical idiom in modern architecture. Some of our best modern churches are still being built in what may be called ‘traditional’ style. … Are we justified in asking architects for a contemporary style of ecclesiastical building? I think we are; but I do not think that they have yet provided it. Many ‘contemporary’ buildings are a compromise between what might be called ‘Festival of Britain’ forms of construction and traditional ecclesiastical style.27
For Beck, the favoured middle course had been interpreted too conservatively: church architects and clergy had to be braver in building modern churches.
In 1960, Heenan in his post as archbishop of Liverpool announced that the winner of the competition for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was a well-established non-Catholic modern architect, Frederick Gibberd. On receiving this news, Beck argued that the decision should be viewed by architects and clergy as an encouragement to develop an appropriate language of modern architecture for the Church, one which could represent its relevance to the modern world:
The Liverpool award will have given a great impetus to church design and planning in the direction which may be described as ‘modern’ rather than ‘traditional’. This is bound to be a good thing in the long run, for church art which is not vital, contemporary and, to some extent, controversial must be approaching stagnation and death. … We have still to find a style of architecture, particularly in elevation, which will suggest the ‘God-dimension’ in human living, which will express dignity, majesty, and the sense of worship, while at the same time showing clearly that these qualities do not belong to a past and dead age but are the expression of an active and energetic spirit in the contemporary world.28
3.4 Frederick Gibberd, competition-winning plan for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 1960. Source: RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Courtesy of the Gibberd Garden Trust and Frederick Gibberd Partnership
While for Beck the designs of modern architecture in elevation were as yet insufficient – too much like ‘factories, swimming pools and municipal buildings’,29 he wrote – he enthusiastically approved of the new types of ground plan, like Gibberd’s circular nave, developed by modern church architects to gather the congregation around the altar (Figures 3.4, 3.5).
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was therefore seen as a turning point that marked, for many architects and clergy, the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s endorsement of modern church architecture in Britain. Heenan had sacked Adrian Gilbert Scott from his post as architect of the cathedral only a year after becoming archbishop in 1957, deciding to interrupt the progress of the building when the crypt, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1932, reached completion. In place of Scott’s reduced version of Lutyens’s enormous Byzantine-Renaissance design, Heenan wanted a cathedral built quickly and cheaply – and whose cost limit of £1 million would, it was implied, preclude traditional materials.30 A modern building was clearly intended. Heenan had previously been bishop of Leeds, where he had begun a campaign of new church buildings, encouraging modern architects: Peter Hickson described how Heenan had studied his model for the church of Our Lady of the Assumption at Stainforth, near Doncaster, in 1956, explaining that ‘it was felt that the church must express the age in which it was built’.31 After transferring to Liverpool, Heenan continued his interest in architecture, encouraging new building, including significant modern churches by architects such as Weightman & Bullen. In 1963, when he was appointed archbishop of Westminster following the death of Cardinal Godfrey, his arrival in this diocese brought an atmosphere in which modern church architecture could develop more freely in the capital.
3.5 Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, by Frederick Gibberd, 1960–67. Bell tower sculpture by William Mitchell. Photo: Elsam, Mann & Cooper. Source: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Library Photographs Collection
Before then, Godfrey had not only insisted on tradition in print but had sometimes exerted his influence in person. Architect Alfred Archard tentatively proposed a church for the parish of Carpender’s Park in north-west London in 1958 combining modern features with some traditional elements, arguing that the situation in a new housing area demanded a modern treatment. He wrote to Godfrey:
We shall be only too ready to submit alternative designs for approval and obviously these would be traditional in character. When building Churches in new areas we often find that the Architects to the [Local] Authority have very decided views about what they will permit. In this case we have tried to adopt a middle course, we realise that middle courses are sometimes fraught with danger, but we honestly believe that the Town Planning Authority would not accept a completely traditional Church, on the other hand we do realise that strongly contemporary design does not commend itself to Ecclesiastical Authority.32
Their ‘middle course’, an implicit reference to Mediator Dei, was too middling for Godfrey, however, who replied:
We examined it briefly yesterday and we do not feel satisfied with it in its present form. We shall, no doubt, make certain suggestions for an adjustment or possibly a radical change. I appreciate the point about the housing estate but we hope that a new church can be built which will satisfy both local requirements and our own ideas of what a Catholic place of worship should be.33
The church finally built at Carpender’s Park was a plain brick building with more than a hint of the Romanesque style, suggested by round-headed lancet windows and a square brick campanile.
When the Church did accept modern architecture at an early date, therefore, it could be due to the personal interest of the bishop, especially in major and exceptional commissions such as that for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. In most cases, however, the bishop might have prompted new building but did not intervene on stylistic grounds. Heenan, for instance, certainly had a personal interest in modern architecture but did not censure traditional designs. In dioceses such as Glasgow and St Andrews and Edinburgh, traditional architects such as Reginald Fairlie and Alexander McAnally received just as many commissions as modernising colleagues such as Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and Peter Whiston. Modern church architecture therefore resulted just as much from the decisions of individual members of the clergy as it did from the tolerance or promotion of bishops.
Several other cases contributed to a changing atmosphere in the Church. Our Lady of Victories in Kensington, London, perhaps first showed that there could be a general parish and lay interest in modern architecture. This was another church whose design was entrusted to Adrian Gilbert Scott, replacing a bombed-out Victorian building on a narrow but prominent site in a wealthy area of central London (Figure 3.6). When the choice of architect became public in 1954, several distinguished parishioners raised complaints, first with the diocese and then in the Catholic press. Amongst them Lord William Forbes-Semphill wrote to Cardinal Griffin, the archbishop of Westminster, deploring the architect’s proposals.34 His despair became a public campaign undertaken by a group of parishioners against the design. The Royal Fine Art Commission became involved, invited to comment by the parish priest, John Bagshawe, in order to settle the controversy.35 Its members, who included Frederick Gibberd, advised the diocese to commission a completely new design, considering Scott’s proposals ‘quite unsatisfactory and unworthy’.36 The grounds of criticism were unclear, however; Scott argued that the commission had found his work ‘too modern and not traditional enough, hence the difficulty of satisfying everyone’.37 In the end, with agreement from members of the commission, Cardinal Griffin asked Goodhart-Rendel to modify Scott’s design. He agreed, making the design plainer and modifying Scott’s parabolic arches to a more conventional Gothic outline (Figure 3.7).38 When this decision was announced and construction began in 1955, it might have seemed that an opportunity for abandoning tradition in favour of modernism in church architecture had been lost.
3.6 Our Lady of Victories, Kensington, London, by Adrian Gilbert Scott, 1952–59. Perspective of first design, drawn by J. D. M. Harvey, 1954. Source: parish archive. Courtesy of the parish of Our Lady of Victories, Kensington
3.7 Our Lady of Victories, Kensington, by Adrian Gilbert Scott, 1952–59. The sculpture of the Risen Christ by Michael Clark replaced a crucifix in the 1980s. By permission of Joseph Lindsey-Clark. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
Yet the controversy had been partly played out through the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, becoming a highly significant debate over modern church architecture. The debate was especially stimulated by Nairn’s condemnation of Scott’s church at Poplar, which suggested that his work was poorly regarded by the architectural profession.39 One concerned parishioner at Our Lady of Victories was Nicolete Gray, an art critic and historian of typography who had written for the Architectural Review.40 She wrote to The Tablet to lament the design and explain the importance of commissioning a modern building:
The sort of churches which we build are the most explicit sign which we give to the world of the nature of our Faith. … We want our churches to be symbols of the Catholic Church alive. There are plenty of people who think that Christianity is dead, a relic of the middle ages; what better confirmation could they have than the sight of Catholics building new pseudo-Gothic churches in the twentieth century?41
Others defended Scott and wrote against modern art and architecture, one writer citing Pius XII in his favour and arguing that ‘nine out of ten of those who worship in the present temporary church … would find an ultra-modernistic church completely repugnant’.42 Simon Elwès, a portrait artist, argued instead that Pius XII had not condemned modern art at all, but only bad taste. Elwès cited what soon became a familiar passage of the ‘Instruction on Sacred Art’: ‘Let new churches be resplendent also for the simple beauty of their lines, abhorring all deceitful ornament’.43 While this important Vatican statement could apply equally to traditional as to modern architecture, Elwès explicitly used it to promote the latter. The debate in The Tablet was concluded by a young Catholic architect, Lance Wright, who later designed several modern Catholic churches. He summarised the case for modern church architecture, arguing that to reject modernism was ‘to further a break between the Church and our society in the sphere of culture, which is the same as saying in the sphere of everyday life’, confirming Gray’s view that the church building should express the relevance of the Church to the world around it, implying that the Church should be seen as an active agent within the world.44
3.8 Our Lady of the Visitation, Greenford, London, by David Stokes & Partners, 1956–60. Photo: Colin Westwood, c.1960. Source: RIBA Library Photographs Collection
While Our Lady of Victories may therefore have appeared to represent a defeat for those within the Church who favoured modernism, it caused the arguments over church design to be aired amongst Catholics, and the prevailing argument was in favour of modernism. By the time Scott’s church opened in 1958, several architects in London had had modern church designs accepted. David Stokes’s church of Our Lady of the Visitation at Greenford was designed in 1956 with dramatic broad parabolic arches of reinforced concrete forming the interior and an unornamented brick exterior with a modern tower (Figure 3.8), while John Newton designed his church of St Aidan in East Acton around 1958 as a reinforced concrete and brick basilica containing significant works of modern art.45 Both of these architects were already well established and had the trust of the diocese. Even as a strongly opinionated archbishop, therefore, Godfrey could not prevent the adoption of modern architecture when it was desired by parish priests and cogently defended by Catholic architects.
Even in places where the clergy were ambivalent about modern architecture, one reason for choosing it was cost, or at least a perception that it was cheaper than traditional building. Despite the gradual easing of post-war austerity in the 1950s, the morality of austerity remained an important consideration for architects and churchmen alike. Traditional architecture, especially in the hands of architects such as Adrian Gilbert Scott and Goodhart-Rendel who preferred durable and high-quality materials, was expensive. Modern architecture could also be expensive when a client had a significant budget to spend, but when a building was needed and the budget was small, modern architects could use simple materials, new building technologies and an absence of ornament to meet financial constraints without aesthetic compromise – indeed, the expressive adherence to cost limitations was seen as a virtue by modern architects. In some places cost was hardly an issue. Parishes receiving war-damage compensation had substantial budgets: the cost of Our Lady of Victories was estimated at around £125,000 in 1955, over £100,000 of which was due to be met by compensation; Sts Mary and Joseph in Poplar was projected in 1953 as costing £150,000; Velarde’s St Alexander in Bootle was built for £90,000.46 New churches built for long-established parishes whose congregations had saved substantial sums might also reach such amazing figures: Goodhart-Rendel’s church in Marylebone was estimated at £144,250 in 1957 (and, including its presbytery, totalled £190,000 by its completion in 1963).47
Yet as costs for labour and materials rose rapidly between 1955 and 1975, economies had to be continually sought: on a single project, costs could escalate alarmingly between the quantity surveyor’s estimate and the opening of the church a few years later. Clergy often wanted to build quickly before costs rose out of reach. Throughout the period, general economic conditions deteriorated. In 1956, a brief ‘credit squeeze’ was imposed by banks, which refused to lend money; an economic boom in the late 1950s and early 1960s fizzled out with a second credit squeeze in 1966, followed by a period of spiralling inflation, the devaluation of the pound and a disastrous depression in the early 1970s.48 The Roman Catholic Church in Britain was especially vulnerable to economic vagaries because of its reliance on bank loans for funding new buildings: when credit was unavailable, churches could not be built; when interest rates soared, debt repayments became crippling, reducing the capacity for further borrowing. Furthermore, as new parishes were created in new housing areas following post-war population movements, the majority of churches were needed for recently established parishes that had not yet accumulated significant funds. Throughout the two decades considered here, cost was a pressing concern, and modernism in architecture seemed to promise convenient and economical new church buildings.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was not the only case where a traditional architect lost a commission to a modernist one at least ostensibly on grounds of cost. Adrian Gilbert Scott failed to complete several other projects because a perception of extravagance invited criticism and delay. At St Aloysius, Somers Town, in central London, the parish priest, Arthur Welland, had agreed with Godfrey in 1959 to appoint Scott to design a new church to replace an early nineteenth-century building damaged by bombing. Scott’s first design was costed at £150,000; his second at £90,000. After three years, the chairman of the diocese’s Parochial Development Commission, auxiliary bishop David Cashman, wrote to Godfrey that ‘Scott is either unable or unwilling to produce drawings and plans for a church less ambitious and, consequently, we wonder whether Your Eminence would approve of changing the architect’.49 In the time taken to reach this decision, the Liverpool Cathedral competition had already pointed Catholic church architecture in a new direction. Godfrey died in 1962, and Scott in 1963. John Newton of Burles, Newton & Partners was then appointed to design a modern church with a concern for liturgical planning, as delays took the project well beyond the Second Vatican Council to the eventual opening of the new church in 1968.50 During this time the parish had raised new funds, but inflation had taken its toll: including hall and presbytery, the building’s final cost was £150,000, the same as Scott’s original proposal a decade before.51
In Birmingham, Scott’s optimism had also caused difficulties. The parish priest of Our Lady Help of Christians at Tile Cross, Timothy Dinan, commissioned drawings from Scott in 1962 and presented them to his parishioners to arouse their enthusiasm and elicit donations for the new building.52 His plans were quashed by the diocese, which insisted he raise half the capital for the building, projected to cost over £90,000.53 A meeting between Dinan and an advisor of Francis Grimshaw, archbishop of Birmingham, was recorded for the latter’s information: ‘Fundamental difference of thinking. Final wish to see fine grandiose church. Does not believe it possible to seat 600 for £60,000’, the diocese noted; ‘it is possible to seat 600 comfortably for less. So don’t wait, start on adequate church’, was to be Grimshaw’s response.54 After Scott’s death, the diocese wrote to his partner with a reduced cost limit of £50,000. ‘The Archbishop must beg architects to be realistic’, wrote his secretary, adding that Scott had ‘had a generous notion of what parish resources can provide’ and urging him to eliminate unnecessary features, including side chapels, from Scott’s design.55 Richard Gilbert Scott then took over the practice, and, in 1965, his new plan for a modernist design with soaring reinforced concrete vaults forming a tower over the centre of a T-shaped plan was submitted and approved (Figure 3.9). During the delay, Dinan had, like Welland at Somers Town, managed to raise substantial further funds, and the diocese eventually approved a sum of £100,000.56 The diocese’s objections were therefore not merely on financial grounds; rather, the desire for ‘a fine grandiose church’ was regarded as an irresponsible ambition. The delays imposed by the diocese meant that, again, the project was overtaken by the Second Vatican Council, after which Scott’s architecture seemed both extravagant and impractical.
By contrast, modern architects could offer the Church a reassuring image of simplicity and even of poverty, and therefore of the wise husbandry of resources. One of the most important and widely published modernist churches of the 1950s was said to have been built for a mere £14,000. Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s church of St Paul in the Scottish New Town of Glenrothes, completed in 1958, was admired by the architectural press because of its striking simplicity, though it used conventional materials, brick walls painted white and cheap timber.57 Though cheap, however, it was not small: it could seat a congregation of 350, about a third of the size of Our Lady of Victories, but at a tenth of the cost.58 In the discourse of modern church architecture, St Paul’s was an example of how good design could result from severe cost restrictions.
3.9 Our Lady Help of Christians, Tile Cross, Birmingham, by Richard Gilbert Scott, 1965–67. Photo: Robert Proctor, 2009
Yet the fact that cost was an important constraint in most cases of church-building was only the case because members of the Church – parish priests and their parishioners and often also bishops – wished in the first place to build so many churches and so often on a large scale. Parish priests pressed for permission to build and often had their way because church buildings were seen as a necessity. There was a cultural desire amongst Catholics for the ‘grandiose church’ that only waned by the end of the 1960s. Modernism could satisfy the clergy’s desire, and the desire of the people, to build ambitiously and quickly. But perhaps more importantly, it could give churches the same serious and austere sobriety as the modern buildings of the cities which surrounded them. This, it seems, may be the underlying motive behind the Church’s acceptance of modernism: an anxiety to show to the modern world a socially acceptable face, not only to show that the Church belonged in the modern world and was relevant to it, but also to show that the Roman Catholic Church deserved a place as an institution in the British establishment, on a par with other Churches and civic institutions. Economic responsibility was one aspect of this engagement, good taste was another, and both could be supplied by modern architects.
1 For example, John Summerson, ‘The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’, RIBA Journal (June 1957), 307–10, cited in John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (London: Routledge, 2007), 265.
2 Throughout this book I use the terms ‘modernism’, ‘modern movement’ and ‘modern architecture’ fairly broadly to describe aspects of both principle and style, informed to some extent by (though partially also in disagreement with) Sarah Williams Goldhagen (‘Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 64 [2005], 144–67); my use of ‘modernity’ follows Hilde Heynen (Architecture and Modernity: A Critique [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009], 9–12).
3 On the modernist discourse in the architectural journals, see Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain (London: Routledge, 2007).
4 Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School-Building in Post-War England (London: Yale University Press, 1987).
5 Austin Winkley, interview with Robert Proctor, London (8 Dec. 2011); Desmond Williams, correspondence with Robert Proctor (7 Aug. 2008); Peter Langtry-Langton, interview with Robert Proctor, Bradford (17 July 2009).
6 ‘News’, Architects’ Journal (25 June 1969), 1732–40.
7 Robert W. K. C. Rogerson, Jack Coia: His Life and Work (Glasgow: n.p., 1986), 2, 12; Gavin Stamp, ‘The Myth of Gillespie Kidd & Coia’, Architectural Heritage 11 (2000), 68–79 (69).
8 Rogerson, Jack Coia, 18.
9 Proctor, ‘Churches for a Changing Liturgy’, 292, 302.
10 For example at Kilsyth ([Gordon Gray] [archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh] to Thomas McGarvey [parish priest, St Patrick, Kilsyth] [14 June 1956; 21 Jan. 1958] [Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh (SCA), DE/59/317]).
11 For example, minutes of Sites and Buildings Commission, Archdiocese of Liverpool (24 May 1955; 20 Sept. 1955) (Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Roman Catholic Archdiocesan Archives [LRCAA], Finance Collection, 12/S3/III); Patricia Brown and David Brown, interview with Ambrose Gillick, York (3 Apr. 2012).
12 Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 151–2; Bullock, Building the Post-War World, 49–50.
13 ‘Church and Presbytery at Glenrothes New Town’, Architects’ Journal (5 Feb. 1959), 231–8; A. M. Doak, ‘Buildings in Prospect’, Architectural Prospect (Summer 1959), 10–13.
14 James Stirling, ‘Ronchamp: Le Corbusier’s Chapel and the Crisis of Rationalism’, Architectural Review (Mar. 1956), 155–61; Colin Rowe, ‘Dominican Monastery of La Tourette, Eveux-sur-Arbresle, Lyons’, Architectural Review (June 1961), 400–410.
15 CBRN (1961), 76–7; (1965), 86–7.
16 Little, Catholic Churches, 219.
17 Walter Glancy (secretary, Finance Committee, Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh) to Peter Whiston (24 Feb. 1959) (SCA, DE/71/15).
18 John Carmel Heenan to Albert Stafford (9 Dec. 1968) (WDA, He1/A7).
19 Brian Mooney, telephone interview with Robert Proctor (7 Dec. 2012).
20 Watters, Cardross Seminary, 25.
21 Isi Metzstein, interview with Robert Proctor, Glasgow (23 June 2003); Proctor, ‘Churches for a Changing Liturgy’, 300.
22 Celso Costantini, Osservatore Romano (30 July 1952), quoted in O’Connell, Church Building, 44, 34–5, 41.
23 William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Lai-Kent Chew Orenduff, The Transformation of Catholic Religious Art in the Twentieth Century: Father Marie-Alain Couturier and the Church at Assy, France (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).
24 ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’, in Walter M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (New York: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), 175.
25 ‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy’, in Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II, 175.
26 George Andrew Beck, ‘Value for Money’, CBRN (1958), 196–7.
27 George Andrew Beck, ‘Plans and Prices’, CBRN (1959), 215–16.
28 George Andrew Beck, ‘Design, Price and Value’, CBRN (1960), 171–2; see also Walker, ‘Developments in Catholic Churchbuilding’, 187–93.
29 Beck, ‘Design, Price and Value’, 171.
30 Architectural Competition for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Conditions and Instructions to Competing Architects (Liverpool: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool, 1959), 3; John C. Heenan, A Crown of Thorns: An Autobiography, 1951–1963 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), 285, 289.
31 CBRN (1956), 98.
32 A. Hodsdon Archard (Archard & Partners), ‘Report to Accompany Sketch Plans for Proposed Catholic Church, Carpender’s Park, Oxhey’ (28 Jan. 1958); Archard to Godfrey (28 Jan. 1958) (WDA, Go/2/132).
33 Godfrey to Archard (30 Jan. 1958) (WDA, Go/2/132).
34 [William Forbes-Semphill to Cardinal Bernard Griffin] (8 July 1954); ‘Notes on the Rebuilding of OLV in Kensington’ (n.d.); Anthony Sefi to [Derek] Warlock (Archdiocese of Westminster) (7 Dec. 1954) (WDA, Gr/1/36h).
35 [Adrian Gilbert Scott] to [Godfrey] Samuel (secretary, Royal Fine Art Commission) (14 Sept. 1954) (WDA, Gr/1/36h).
36 [Balcarres, Colinsburgh, Fife] to Griffin (21 Sept. 1954); ‘Notes on Meeting with the Royal Fine Art Commission’ (5 Aug. 1954) (WDA, Gr/1/36h).
37 Adrian Gilbert Scott to The Tablet (n.d.) (WDA, Gr/1/36h); edited version of Scott’s letter (The Tablet [4 Dec. 1954], 558).
38 Goodhart-Rendel to Griffin (2 Dec. 1954); Scott to Griffin (6 Dec. 1954) (WDA, Gr/1/36h).
39 Nairn’s article is mentioned in the debate (for example Erica O’Donnell, letter to the editor, The Tablet [20 Nov. 1954], 502).
40 Biographical details from Nicolas Barker, ‘Obituary: Nicolete Gray’, The Independent (13 June 1997), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-nicolete-gray-1255651.html (accessed 28 Oct. 2011).
41 Nicolete Gray, letter to the editor, The Tablet (6 Nov. 1954), 454.
42 Edward A. de Courcy-Cameron, letter to the editor, The Tablet (20 Nov. 1954), 502.
43 Simon Elwès, letter to the editor, The Tablet (27 Nov. 1954), 526.
44 Lance Wright, letter to the editor, The Tablet (27 Nov. 1954), 526.
45 CBRS (1958), 54–7. Our Lady of the Visitation was designed under Griffin but not begun until Godfrey arrived, when its details were personally overseen by him (David Stokes to Canon A. Rivers [finance secretary, Archdiocese of Westminster] [15 May 1956]; Griffin to Stokes [18 May 1956]; Rivers to Stokes [11 Aug. 1959] [WDA, Gr/2/132]).
46 [John] Bagshawe (parish priest, Our Lady of Victories) to [Derek] Warlock (Archdiocese of Westminster) (27 July 1955) (WDA, Gr/1/36h); ‘Church and Presbytery of St. Mary and St. Joseph, Canton Street, Poplar’, Architect and Building News (24 Dec. 1953), 774; ‘Archbishop Opens New City Church of St Alexander’, Liverpool Daily Post (29 July 1957), Liverpool History Projects, http://www.liverpoolhistoryprojects.co.uk/stalexander/news.htm (accessed 4 Nov. 2011).
47 Agenda for vicars general meeting with archbishop (24 May 1957) (WDA, Go/2/132).
48 For credit squeezes associated with changes to church-building programmes, see for example, Canon Rivers to Godfrey (31 May 1957) (WDA, Go/2/132); minutes of meeting of the Council of Administration, Archdiocese of Westminster (12 Oct. 1966) (WDA, He/1/C23(a)).
49 David [Cashman] (Parochial Development Commission, Archdiocese of Westminster) to Godfrey (22 May 1962); Godfrey to Cashman (24 May 1962) (WDA, Go/4/25).
50 Minutes of meeting of the Council of Administration, Archdiocese of Westminster (15 Apr. 1964; 7 Sept. 1964; 30 Sept. 1967); [Canon A. Rivers] (financial secretary) to G. M. Reeves (Durrant, Westmore & Reeves) (7 July 1964); Reeves to Rivers (30 June 1964) (WDA, He/1/C23(a)).
51 Campaign document (c.1967) (parish archive, St Aloysius, Somers Town, London).
52 Timothy J. Dinan to [Francis Grimshaw] (archbishop of Birmingham) (5 June 1963) (ARCAB, Parish File, P53/T4).
53 B. Gould (Birmingham diocesan treasurer) to Dinan (13 Oct. 1962) (ARCAB, Parish File, P53/T4).
54 Anonymous memo, ‘Tile Cross. Visit 10/9/63’ (ARCAB, Parish File, P53/T4).
55 Archbishop’s secretary to F. G. Haddon (26 Sept. 1963) (ARCAB, Parish File, P53/T4).
56 Dinan to unnamed recipient (5 Feb. 1965) (ARCAB, Parish File, P53/T4).
57 For example Edward D. Mills and William E. A. Lockett, ‘Plans of Churches Here and Abroad’, Church Buildings Today 1 (Oct. 1960), 9–13.
58 ‘Church and Presbytery at Glenrothes New Town’.
