16 Restoration

For centuries when a building needed repairing, people replaced the defective fabric in the manner of the day, so that old buildings gradually turned into an amiable hotchpotch of styles. But in the late 18th century a new awareness of the history of medieval architecture plus a powerful religious revival combined to make architects think again. It became fashionable to replace old fabric in a style similar to what was built in the Middle Ages: restoration was born.

The idea of restoration had its heyday in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period when many of Britain’s medieval churches were in a sad state of disrepair, having survived centuries of change and decay. Transformed for Puritan worship in the 17th century (when stained-glass windows were removed and frescoes painted over with whitewash), many were then transformed again in the 18th century, the age of the sermon, with the addition of box pews and oversize pulpits. But the 18th century, as well as being the age of the sermon, was also, for many churches, the age of neglect, when buildings were run down, clerics were often absentees and roofs leaked.

A religious revival The Victorian period, by contrast, saw a religious revival. The Evangelical movement brought an emphasis on the Gospels, the Bible and personal religious experience. The very different Oxford movement stressed the importance of traditional liturgy and presented Anglicanism as a branch of Christianity on the same footing as the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Through these differing agencies, religion was very much in the air, and church building and the proper maintenance of old churches became burning issues.

An early reaction

Almost from the beginning, restoration had a bad name with those who were willing to think outside the religious box. The first recorded use of the word “restoration” occurs in the long, mock-epic poem Don Juan, by Lord Byron. Canto XVI of the poem introduces us to an English aristocrat who (like the poet himself, whose home was Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, below) lives in a building that was once an abbey. Lord Henry has had his grand home restored by an architect who was keen to do rather more than patch it up:

There was a modern Goth, I mean a Gothic

Bricklayer of Babel, called an architect,

Brought to survey these gray walls, which though so thick,

Might have from time acquired some slight defect;

Who, after rummaging the Abbey through thick

And thin, produced a plan whereby to erect

New buildings of correctest conformation,

And throw down old, which he called restoration.

Byron liked to make fun of what he called cant. He saw through the presumption of architects who talked about restoring buildings when they were actually building anew in a way that reflected some modern idea of what an old building should be like.

For most, under the influence of the Gothic revival (see Revivalism), “proper maintenance” meant the use of the Gothic style. And this maintenance was seen as a chance to restore churches to an imagined former medieval glory. Yet it was impossible to know exactly what church buildings had looked like 600 years earlier—the process always involved guesswork.

Restoring and “improving” One example of this process was the restoration of Hereford Cathedral undertaken by James Wyatt after the medieval west tower collapsed in 1786. This was a building that had evolved over the centuries, with parts in the round-arched style of the Normans, other parts in the pointed-arched Gothic style that followed it. Wyatt saw the restoration as a chance to sweep away the Norman round arches and replace them with “correct” and consistent pointed ones. When he had finished, the building seemed thoroughly Gothic.

Sir George Gilbert Scott

Scott was one of the most successful of all Victorian architects. In a career spanning more than 40 years he produced such important structures as the government offices in London’s Whitehall, the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford, and the Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London. His practice was so large and widespread, and his activity so relentless, that he sometimes forgot which job he was on. Scott restored several cathedrals, including Chester, Chichester, Ely, Exeter, Lichfield, Ripon and Salisbury—undoing some of Wyatt’s poor work at the latter. His touch was usually more gentle than that of Wyatt, but he was still much more inclined to rebuild than a modern conservationist would be.

Wyatt did similar things at other cathedrals, where “inconsistent” features, such as a free-standing bell tower at Salisbury, were removed. Later Gothic architects, such as Sir George Gilbert Scott and George Edmund Street, restored hundreds of churches, although often with a gentler hand than Wyatt had displayed.

In France, too, architects such as Viollet-le-Duc (see Revivalism) chiseled their way through churches and châteaux. Viollet, in particular, was keen to make buildings better, somehow more authentic, by adding “correct” features to make them look more medieval.

“… the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up, and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts. And as for direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can there be of surfaces that have been worn half an inch down?”

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

So “restoration” could mean much more than putting back old features and mending holes in roofs. It could amount to a virtual rebuilding in the architect’s or incumbent’s idea of the ideal Gothic style and it frequently involved “replacing” features so worn away that the restorer could have little idea what they originally looked like. It was a con, essentially, albeit a con often undertaken for the best of reasons, with religious sanction and sometimes with stunning architectural results. And yet we owe something to the restorers, too, for they did save many buildings that might, without their too-eager attentions, have collapsed into rubble like the western tower at Hereford.

the condensed idea

The repairer knows best

timeline
1786 James Wyatt restores Hereford Cathedral
1850s George Gilbert Scott restores Exeter Cathedral
1857 Scott begins extensive restoration of Lichfield Cathedral
1862–70 Scott restores Ripon Cathedral
1871 G.E. Street begins his restoration of York Minster
1884–86 J.L. Pearson rebuilds tower of Peterborough Cathedral