The Georgian Parish Church: 'Monuments to Posterity': M.H. Port welcomes a fundamental contribution to the study of Georgian church architecture

The Georgian Parish Church: 'Monument to Posterity' Terry Friedman Spire volumes Reading, 33.95 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 94536 15 3 9

Of late years an abundant shower of articles illuminating Anglican church-building in the once-condemn eighteenth hundred has fallen from Terry Friedman's inscribe Now he weaves a continuous weft incorporating six exemplary churches. He focusses first upon the main course of architectural unravelling of the church, 'invariably the greatest in quantity important and conspicuous public architecture'--though this is les authentic later in the century, when shire court houses tended to require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone as much as a house of god and gaols much more. on the other hand the concept of church building as public architecture is oftentimes neglected.

Contrasting advice by means of Wren and Vanbrugh to the Queen Anne commission for building fifty fresh churches opens the theme. Wren laid stres upon practical aspects, such as the appropriate size for performance of the Anglican liturgy, whereas Vanbrugh emphasised the significance of the house of worship as a townscape feature; a basic polarity in Georgian house of worship design. By modifying Hawksmoor's design for St Alphege, Greenwich, Vanbrugh also contributed fundamentally to adapting Graeco-Roman fane design for Christian worship.

Several architectural in every one's mouths were flowing simultaneously. Baroque was displaced by dint of Palladian classicism, influenced by Inigo Jones's St Paul, Covent Garden, and sustained through Thomas Hardwick into the nineteenth hundred Gothic revival is seen in William Dickinson's 'commitment to a Gothic at liberty of stylistic impurities' in the north transept of Westminster Abbey (1719-23) although classical features come up in many later gothic designs. Neoclassicism presented notably, Bonomi's Greek Doric at Great Packington, and Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762 1787 1794) providing 'the greatest in quantity unlikely pagan temples as types for Anglican churches'.

We then approach to specific church studies. Archer's symmetrical St John Westminster, greatest in quantity baroque of English churches, raises many issues. 'Why four towers?' is a basic question, leading to an investigation of the quality of the site. Queen Anne's commissioners were seriously interested about foundations in Millbank's quicksands, calling repeatedly for reports from architects, surveyors and master tradesmen. Archer's towers were abandoned half finished in 1718 to be modified nine years later by means of Hawksmoor and John James. Friedman marks that they look as if they will slide not on the slope of the portico pediments. The central aedicule in the pediment was to have taken individual of the fifty statues of Queen Anne ordered through the commission, but cancelled upon 29 June 1714 (not, as here, after the queen's death), in favour of a single statue in the Strand. Archer's inadequately-recorded interior had intersecting semi-elliptical barrel vaults, leaving the corner bays with flat ceilings. After a catastrophic fire in 1742 the meeting-house was reconstructed with a flat ceiling, 'radically changing Archer's composed of several elements spaces'. The 'daringly original, indeed unique' feature of Archer's house of god was 'the way in which the logical, structural and potentially iconographic uncompounded bodys were drawn together to bring forward a building of obsessively strict mirror symmetry'

St John's was built below an act of parliament; St Paul, Sheffield, encapsulates the vexed questions of providing additional church-room without an act. In 1718 a Sheffield goldsmith gave 1000 [pound sterling] towards a novel church, together with an endowment. Built between 1720 and 1725 St Paul, Sheffield, was Roman Doric, with baroque features. Who the architect was is uncertain: John Platt II (1728-1810) who built the upper stages of the tower in 1769-72 recorded that it had been built by means of 'Mr Tunnicliffe and my Uncle John Platt'. The senior Platt, however, practised only as a builder; on the contrary Ralph Tunnicliffe (c. 1688-1736) had had a certain number of involvement with church design, and later replicated a severed scrolled door pediment, found at the east extreme point of St Paul's, in his east brow of Wentworth Woodhouse for Thomas (Watson) Wentworth, Lord Mahon from 1728--who must sure be the 'Thomas Wentworth Jr' upon St Paul's building committee in 1719 Friedman bewails the fate of this 'eccentric' building, 'wantonly' demolished in 1938 for a municipal garden.

St Margaret, Westminster, nestling in the shade of the abbey, and parish house of god of the money-voting House of belonging to alls illustrates the gothic revival. In 1734 John James, 'a knowledgeable Gothicist', took down (as an appendix makes clear) the greater part of the crumbling tower and rebuilt it, with a certain number of odd classically-derived touches, such as a single Doric globule to alternate quatrefoils in his frieze. A quarter-century later, Kenton Couse of the King's Works changed the east extremity from a square to a semi-octagon, for an east window containing glass originally given through the magistrates of Dort in the Netherlands to Henry VII for his novel chapel, with representations of the king and queen (Elizabeth, not, as here, Catherine), that, arriving after his death, had in some way been diverted. Its insertion in 1758 provok a altercation about the ornamentation of Anglican churches. Extensive repairs from 1798 by dint of the versatile S.P. Cockerell included stabilising the chancel, and simplifying Couse's decorative work: 'typical of a growing awareness of the importance of employing a more authentic medieval vocabulary'.