By the 1850s the Gothic Revival had entered a new phase, which we call High Victorian Gothic. Architects began to explore French and Italian Gothic, which were very different from British forms.
The famous art critic John Ruskin fell in love with the architecture of Venice, and published a book called The Stones of Venice. Venetian Gothic is middle-eastern in flavour, because Venice had been a mercantile city during the Renaissance.
British architects began to copy these exotic forms of Gothic. The forms became very muscular, strong and angular. Colour was built into the fabric of buildings because they were constructed from a variety of building stones. This style was confident and strong, which matched Victorian society.
One of the first exercises in High Victorian Gothic was the Natural History Museum at Oxford (1855-60) [Fig. 1]. This building was supervised by Ruskin; he chose the architects and instructed them. The outside is a straightforward essay in Venetian Gothic, but the interior is a revelation. Venetian Gothic arches are grouped together and tinged with colour. But in this building, every one of these columns is made from a different type of stone. The Venetian Gothic style has been fused with an encyclopaedic knowledge of geology; so the building illustrates the natural history of the British Isles.
Fig. 1 Natural History Museum, Oxford
The most striking feature is the roof, which is constructed from cast iron and glass. This was highly innovative for its time, but even here they have used the Gothic style. There is decorative foliage executed in cast iron, and the arches have been painted. Even when they were using modern materials and innovative structural solutions, Victorian architects continued to communicate through an historicist language.
Fig. 2 Natural History Museum, Oxford
The most prolific architect of this period was Sir George Gilbert Scott, who built so many churches he often could not recognise his own work. He designed the Gothic Midland Grand Hotel next to St Pancras Station in London [Fig. 3]. It is executed in red brick with stone dressings. It has Venetian arches and Flemish gables. It has huge cathedral-like doors with elongated arches. The station is behind the hotel. It's concealed by this Gothic facade. The Victorians felt it was necessary to cover up the modern industrial structure with a historicist façade. This is neo-medievalism used for modern commercial and industrial purposes.
Fig. 3 Midland Grand Hotel
Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert died in 1861. George Gilbert Scott designed the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, which features a statue of the prince seated beneath a magnificent Gothic canopy [Fig. 4]. The Prince is enshrined as a saint. At each corner there's a sculpture representing one of the continents over which Britain ruled. So the monument is also a celebration of the British Empire. The series of statues around the base eulogise great figures of British history, including Scott's heroes Pugin and Ruskin.
Fig. 4 Albert Memorial, Hyde Park
Another High Victorian architect was William Butterfield, who designed Keble College in Oxford (1870s) [Fig. 5]. This has a relentlessly patterned exterior and the colour is visually abrasive. This is called structural polychromy - colour is embedded in the surface. This was nicknamed the "streaky bacon style." This is a completely new version of Gothic; you could not accuse it of copying mediaeval examples; it is quintessentially Victorian. This kind of thing was despised during the 20th century. In fact, Keble was known as "the ugliest building in the world".
Fig. 5 Keble College, Oxford
The Elephant Tea Rooms in Sunderland was designed by an eccentric local architect called Frank Caws (1873) [Fig. 6]. The building looks like a fantastical collision between an Italian Gothic palazzo and a Hindu temple. The architect called the style "Hindu-Gothic." This turret resembles an eastern minaret, but it's covered in Gothic detail, including gargoyles. Along the roofline, there's a series of Gothic niches with Indian elephants inside. Each one has a tea chest on its back, indicating that the building was intended as an emporium for exotic beverages and spices.
Fig. 6 Elephant Tea Rooms, Sunderland
