Harry Goodhart-Rendel was born in Cambridge in 1887, the son of Harry Chester Goodhart, who had married the Hon Rose Ellen Rendel, a daughter of the wealthy Welsh Liberal politician the 1st Lord Rendel.
Harry Chester Goodhart himself was born in Wimbledon, and educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He enjoyed a surprisingly distinguished career as an amateur footballer, playing for the Old Etonians in 1879-80 when they won the FA Cup final against Clapham Rovers. He subsequently played for England. In 1881, he was elected a Classics Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1890, he moved to Edinburgh University as Professor of Humanity (Latin). Five years later he died of pneumonia when his son was only nine.
Goodhart-Rendel was therefore brought up by his excessively protective mother. In 1899, they moved to Chinthurst Hill, Wonersh. Much of his childhood was in fact spent in France. He followed his father to Eton, and then Trinity College, Cambridge in 1905, where he read music. The critic Lytton Strachey took him up, writing in November of that year to the political theorist Leonard Woolf: “He is possibly a genius, certainly remarkable and almost certainly nice… he’s violently musical and wildly architectural, he talks in torrents and believes in medieval Christianity.” He was elected to The Apostles but dropped when that august body realised he was so unfashionable as actually to believe in God.
In 1909, he worked briefly in the architectural practice of Sir Charles Nicholson before setting up on his own. His early work was mainly domestic in Surrey. He also remodelled Bagshot Park (the current home of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh) for the Duke of Connaught.
In 1913, he became a wealthy man on the death of his maternal grandfather, adding the additional name of Rendel to Goodhart and inheriting the Hatchlands Estate in Surrey as well as property in Brighton and the south of France. He lived at Hatchlands for 32 years before giving it to the National Trust in 1945.
In 1914, he joined the Grenadier Guards and fought in France until invalided out in 1917. He wrote a book on drill, subsequently revised in the Second World War.
After the war he became diverted to some extent from actual architecture, becoming president of the Architectural Association (1924-5), Slade Professor of Fine Arts in Oxford (1933-36), president of RIBA (1937-9) and president of the Design and Architectural Association 1948-50. He was a popular lecturer and acquired a vast knowledge of 19th-century architecture; he left his annotated card index to RIBA. He wrote a number of books; English Architecture Since the Regency (Constable, 1953) was probably the most influential. He was appointed CBE in 1953 for “architectural criticism” rather than architecture as such.
Much of Goodhart-Rendel’s work during the early 1920s was domestic. His rather dominant mother died in 1928 and cleared the way for his brief emergence as a modernist with the design of a new headquarters for Hay’s Wharf in Tooley Street. Thereafter, most of his more famous buildings were ecclesiastical. From 1922 to 1936, he worked for the Revd Humphrey Whitby at St Mary’s, Graham Street (now Bourne Street), designing its red-brick polygonal porch and north aisle culminating in the Lady Chapel as additions to the original church by Withers. His subsequent Anglican churches were St Wilfrid, Elm Grove, Brighton (described by Betjeman as “about the best 1930s church there is” and so inevitably declared redundant by the Church of England in 1980 before being turned into sheltered housing), and St John the Evangelist, St Leonards-on-Sea, which still functions as a church, describing itself as being in the “liberal Anglo-Catholic tradition”.
In 1936, Goodhart-Rendel, until then a conservative Anglican, became a Catholic. The circumstances leading to his conversion are unclear. His friend Abbot Wilson Upson of Prinknash wrote: “It was the result of Grace acting upon his intellect, for his emotions had no place in his Catholic life.”
Goodhart-Rendel shifted from the modernist to the traditionalist camp, and designed the following Catholic churches:
St John Fisher, Rochester, built 1953-4.
This is a plain-brick neo-Romanesque church with external stone dressings. The sanctuary has a fine ceramic reredos.
St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley, built 1955-9. This brick church for the Capuchins is fairly austere. It has a long nave and a hexagonally patterned ceiling. Various fittings from the earlier Victorian church have been retained, such as the effigy of William Scawen Blunt of Crabbet Park. The Victorian courtesan Skittles and Lord Alfred Douglas are both buried in the churchyard. The Capuchins left in 1981.
The Sacred Heart, Cobham, built 1957-8. This pretty church is built in a Georgian vernacular design on a Latin cross plan and faced in pale brown brick. The weatherboarded tower is surmounted by a shingle-clad spire. The interior is white with the nave arcade consisting of Tuscan Doric columns. A narthex was added in 1993, and there has been some reordering.
The Most Holy Trinity, Dockhead, Bermondsey, built 1957-9. This is a large and striking church built in red and yellow patterned brick to replace its bombed Victorian predecessor. The exterior of the church is dominated by paired polygonal western towers, with the main entrance and a five-light transomed window above. Horizontal stripes decorate the lower parts of the towers. The interior is an exercise in combining modernism and tradition on essentially Romanesque precedents. The sanctuary (reordered) is lined with contrasting grey and buff stone. The baldacchino survives.
Our Lady of the Rosary, Marylebone, built posthumously, 1961-4. A modern neo-Romanesque brick church, it has an impressively light and complex interior created largely by arches and transverse vaults. The church is considered one of his best. It suffered from a dreadful reordering, as late as 2005.
A huge amount of Goodhart-Rendel’s energy was spent on the proposed design of the Abbey of Our Lady and St Peter at Prinknash, a 300-foot-long church and monastery for 100 monks, for his friend Abbot Upson. The concept preoccupied him from 1938 until his death. He was involved emotionally, and the design became increasingly elaborate. He was a confrater of the community, but little was built in his lifetime. He died in 1959, and was buried in the grounds at Prinknash. He left his money to the abbey. Abbot Upson died in 1963 and FG Broadbent produced an alternative modernist design, which would have grieved Goodhart-Rendel. This was built; the dwindling number of monks have abandoned even this, and retreated to their original buildings. The farrago at Prinknash helped ensure that Stephen Dykes-Bower tied up his £2 million legacy to St Edmundsbury Cathedral so tightly that the wonderful tower there (2000-05), completed by his pupils, had to be built almost exactly as planned.
Evaluating Goodhart-Rendel is an interesting exercise. Part of his problem, in retrospect, was that his wealth made him seem a slight dilettante. Architecture was also merely one of his obsessions. He told James Lees-Milne in 1942 that his concerns were the Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and architecture, in that order. Sir John Summerson – himself an unsuccessful architect turned architectural critic – brutally (and unfairly) said: “Rendel was an architect whose buildings nobody understood, and therefore nobody liked.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.
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