The monarchy has nurtured a very English genius
The country has a unique ‘royal style’ of architecture. It is neglected, but it explains a lot about us
When I think of the Queen, the image in my mind often includes the ceremonial backdrop to her life, the buildings where she lives and carries out her duties. From Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s to Holyrood, these symbols of our monarchy also symbolise Britain. They shape not just others’ image of our country but our own. As Churchill said: “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.” Some of these buildings are part of the great main tide of European architecture. But others form their own special tributary. Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle, in particular, showcase a building style – the so-called Perpendicular – which is unique to this country.
This Jubilee weekend is a good moment to look at it, because Perpendicular is this country’s only “royal style”. It was created by the English monarchy and sustained by its public works department. Yet somehow it is neglected. There’s only one book about it and that was written in 1978. It gets just three pages in David Watkin’s A History of Western Architecture. It is often treated as a minor part of the great story, nowhere near as interesting as the initial growth of Gothic in northern France, more as its last almost decadent outworking as the Middle Ages waned.
Yet it dominated this country’s buildings for two centuries. Ask a child to draw a church tower and they will probably sketch a Perpendicular one (my home town, Derby, has one of the greatest examples). It’s part of our mental furniture, so familiar that its individuality is not appreciated.
English architecture went its own way early in the 14th century. The first three Edwards wanted their equivalent of the French kings’ Sainte-chapelle in their own palace at Westminster. What they got, under the supervision of the genius Michael of Canterbury, was something quite new. St Stephen’s Chapel Westminster was the new style in embryo. It would take English building in a totally different direction to that of the Continent.
Sadly, we lost most of that chapel in the Westminster fire of 1834. The crypt that remains today, heavily restored, gives no real sense of its qualities. So you have to go to Gloucester to see the first genuinely Perpendicular architecture, almost certainly designed by Michael’s son, Thomas of Canterbury. There, you see not elaborate decoration but simple form: straight lines, rectangular panels, an emphasis on the horizontal as well as the vertical. Gloucester also started to show that modern church buildings could be shaped by columns alone, with walls increasingly replaced by glass – as its remarkable east window shows. And there, too, we see a new form of vault characteristic of Perpendicular and of nothing and nowhere else. In its cloisters, familiar today from the Harry Potter films, the columns flower into delicate tracery; the first ever fan vaults.
Medieval architects seem to have been nervous about using these fans at scale in a cathedral vault. Hence the subsequent halfway house of Canterbury’s nave, irresistibly recalling an avenue of giant oaks, designed by Henry Yevele, another Derbyshire man, who became the king’s architect and built the great hammerbeam roof in Westminster Hall. But the architects grew in confidence, and everything came together in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, and of course King’s College, Cambridge. Here the internal columns have disappeared, the walls seem entirely of glass, and the fans in the vault have blossomed and grown, at the Abbey even into pendants, for all the world like lilies drooping from their branches.
Royal prestige spread Perpendicular across the country. Parish churches were remodelled – see the masterpieces in Norwich or at Malvern – on the proceeds of English cloth or booty from the French wars. Perpendicular chantry chapels were endowed so that prayers could be said for the souls of the men who conquered half of France, lost it again, and then descended into the blood-letting of the Wars of the Roses.
But economics played its part, too. After the Black Death, labour became scarce and hence expensive. Productivity had to increase – just like today. The straightforward and repetitive forms of Perpendicular could be produced easily without highly skilled workmen. Even so, those simple forms and mass-produced materials did not make ugly buildings – a lesson we could well learn today.
And then, suddenly, it was over. The Reformation and the destruction that followed broke the continuity. Medieval buildings were seen as part of the “Dark Ages”. Renaissance and classical forms slowly entered the country, although Perpendicular had a secular afterlife in the characteristic forms of Tudor great houses and Oxbridge colleges. But the masterpieces remain, in Westminster, Windsor, Gloucester, Canterbury, York, and beyond. As do their echoes across the country. They are one reason why England “looks” different from the Continent.
And the supreme echo remains, in perhaps our country’s best-known building – Pugin’s Perpendicular Gothic Houses of Parliament, showing continuity from the medieval to the modern, like our evolving constitution under our constitutional monarchy. Let us then this Jubilee not only thank the Queen for her service, but the monarchy for giving us the stability we have needed to allow change – and for providing us with our own architecture of genius into the bargain.