As a general rule in the 19th century, and to a slightly lesser extent afterwards, Anglican churches tended to be built by Anglican architects and Catholic churches by Catholic architects. The great Anglican ecclesiastical architects – George Frederick Bodley, William Butterfield, John Loughborough Pearson, Sir George Gilbert Scott and George Edmund Street – built no Catholic churches. The latter more often than not were built by the Catholic architectural dynasties of Pugin, Scoles, Hansom, Goldie and Scott.
In the 18th century, Anglican architects had done a certain amount of work building Catholic chapels as part of their design of country houses. James Paine had constructed beautiful chapels at Thorndon (Essex) for Lord Petre and Wardour (Wiltshire) for Lord Arundell of Wardour. John Carr of York had designed the chapel of Holme-on-Spalding Moor (Yorkshire) for Lord Langdale.
For most of the 19th century, Catholic architects were broadly excluded from Anglican church work, particularly where the clergy were involved as patrons. AWN Pugin did build the occasional Anglican church after his conversion, eg West Tofts (Norfolk) and Tubney (Oxfordshire), for secular patrons. His painting of the chancel roof at Leadenham (Lincolnshire) in 1841 caused a magnificent row with the Bishop of Lincoln and the subsequent conversion of the vicar, Bernard Smith, to Catholicism.
The career of Henry Clutton (1819-93) exemplified the more usual reaction of Anglican clerical patrons. He became a Catholic in 1857, and immediately lost the commission to restore Salisbury Cathedral to George Gilbert Scott. Bishop Walter Kerr Hamilton wrote to Clutton regretting “that from personal circumstances you are prevented from undertaking in compliance with our wish the survey of this cathedral”. This did not prevent Clutton in obtaining subsequent church commissions from Anglican secular patrons, such as the 7th and 8th Dukes of Bedford, to build Anglican churches like those at Souldrop, Woburn and Tavistock. The last is now in the possession of the Catholic Church as Our Lady of the Assumption. Indeed, the open-minded Revd Lord Wriothesley Russell, the Rector of Chenies and a chaplain to Queen Victoria, wrote in connection with the restoration of his church by Clutton to the 7th Duke that the former was “not merely an architect of consummate ability but a man who might thoroughly be trusted to carry out honestly and fairly his employer’s wishes”.
The real breakthrough for Catholic architects in the Church of England was the appointment of Giles Gilbert Scott for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in 1903. FX Velarde won an Anglican commission for St Gabriel’s, Blackburn; although a few Anglican architects did build Catholic churches in the 19th century, it was usually on a one-off basis.
The first Anglican architect to build a post-Emancipation Catholic church seems to have been Thomas Rickman at Redditch (Worcestershire) in 1834. He specialised in pre-Puginian Commissioners’ Churches. Our Lady of Mount Carmel was built on land given by Lady Catherine Smythe. The church with its tower has been described as “delightfully unarchaeological” and is an amalgam of Early English and Perpendicular styles. The interior is plastered throughout. The church was served by Benedictine monks until 1948.
George Webster was a prolific Lancastrian builder of country houses and Anglican churches. In 1835 he built the Church of Holy Trinity and St George, Kendal (Cumbria) in a pre-ecclesiological Gothic Revival style. The ashlar front has three lancet windows and pinnacles. The high altar is in a splayed ribbed recess, now painted pink and red.
Another Lancastrian Anglican architect who built a couple of Catholic churches was Edward Paley of Lancaster itself. In 1857-8 he designed both St Peter’s, Lancaster (now Lancaster Cathedral) and St Mary and St Michael, Garstang. The former is undoubtedly his chef d’oeuvre. It is built of stone in the style of 1300. The steeple is 240 feet high, and the interior is light, high and impressively proportioned. The later baptistery by Paley and Austin in 1895 is a tour de force.
The church of St Mary Star of the Sea, Hastings (Sussex) was built in 1882 by Basil Champneys, son of an Anglican vicar and best known for his collegiate work in Oxford and Cambridge, for the Pallottine Fathers at the instigation of the convert poet Coventry Patmore, who contributed a third of the £15,000 cost in memory of his wife. The site is somewhat cramped. The style is Perpendicular in flint and cobble with a continuous nine-bay nave and sanctuary.
Arthur Blomfield was the son of a Bishop of London and a fecund producer of Anglican churches. His only Catholic church was that of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Edward the Confessor, Lyndhurst (Hampshire). It was designed for Edouard Souberbielle in memory of his wife in 1896. It is in simple English Decorated style of Purbeck stone with an aisleless nave and a small tower and spire.
Anglican work on Catholic churches continued during the 20th century. William Henry Romaine-Walker, a pupil of Street’s, designed the north aisle of St Mary’s, Farm Street, London in 1898-1903. Edwin Lutyens was commissioned in 1929 by Archbishop Richard Downey to build a great classical cathedral in Liverpool to rival the magnificent Anglican one built by Giles Gilbert Scott. Work started on the crypt in 1933, which was the only part of the magnificent design completed before the funds ran out after the Second World War. At roughly the same time he was commissioned to build Campion Hall and its chapel by Father Martin d’Arcy, SJ. The remarkable Church of St Mary of the Angels, Brownshill, (Gloucestershire) was built by WD Caröe in 1937 for two ladies who had been First World War nurses. It is “Romanesque with a hint of the Baroque” (Pevsner) and now owned by that splendid body, The Friends of Friendless Churches.
Abbot Christopher Butler was responsible for getting the great Anglo-Catholic architect Ninian Comper involved in decorative work at Downside Abbey, Somerset. He designed the stained glass of Christ Pantocrator above the chancel arch as well as the whole stained-glass scheme in the Lady Chapel and the reredos in the St Sebastian Chapel.
His Anglican son Sebastian Comper built a number of churches for the Catholic Church, mainly for the Diocese of Northampton: St Gregory, Abington, Northampton (1954), St Thomas Aquinas, Bletchley (1956), St Mary, Woburn Sands (1956), St Augustine, Apostle of England, High Wycombe (1957), Christ the King, Bedford (1960), Our Lady Immaculate and St Etheldreda, Newmarket (1964) and All Saints, Bletchley (1965). These were invariably built of brick in Romanesque or a simplified Gothic style. Decent buildings, if less imaginative than those of his father.
Francis Johnson, that Anglican country-house architect, built St Joseph’s, Scarborough (Yorkshire, East Riding) in 1958 in a classical Scandinavian style.
The most recent Anglican construction of a Catholic religious edifice has been that of the Cathedral Church of St Mary and St Helen, Brentwood (Essex). Quinlan Terry built this in classical style for Bishop Thomas McMahon in 1989-91. The building is a white neo-Baroque rectangle of Portland stone with a semi-circular Doric portico and a central altar.
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