Hinterland

Before he built for princes and PMs, George Gilbert Scott made the poor workhouse a thing of wonder

George Gilbert Scott, architect of the Albert Memorial, is perhaps Britain’s greatest Gothic revivalist. Yet, after losing a fight with the prime minister Lord Palmerston, he was pressed into building the Foreign Office in the Italian Renaissance style he abhorred. Thankfully, Scott’s original design was not wasted – it became the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station – but I rarely walk down Whitehall without wondering how a huge Gothic edifice would look there.

Scott was born near Buckingham in 1811, a clergyman’s son, and became the pupil of

James Edmeston, a specialist in drinking fountains whose masterpiece was St Paul’s Church in Onslow Square, London. Edmeston was better known for writing hymns than for his buildings (his greatest hit, of the 200 or so he wrote, was Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us). In 1832, Scott moved on to work for Henry Roberts, who built Fishmongers’ Hall and had a hand in London Bridge Station, but also sought to design better housing for what the Victorians called “the labouring classes”. After two years, Scott made the key connection that would shape his early career, becoming assistant to Sampson Kempthorne, who was only two years his senior and specialised in a form of building that boomed in the 1830s: the workhouse.

The boom was triggered by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, a Whig measure decreeing that poor relief would be given in parishes only “indoors” – in workhouses – rather than in a form of dole or benefit to people living in their own homes, a system that, it was decided, was open to abuse. Groups of parishes combined into “Unions” to create economies of scale, with a large workhouse, usually in a local town, accommodating the indigent from the surrounding villages.

It is a supreme irony, given how many of these impressively built early Victorian buildings across England have in recent decades been converted into apartment blocks for the well-to-do, that the original intention was to make them look as much as possible like prisons or places of correction, with conditions in them so spartan that people hurried to get out and hoped not to return. Anyone who has read Oliver Twist, in which Dickens attacks this system, will understand what was required.

However, there were rich pickings for architects in creating what Carlyle called these “Poor Law Bastilles”. In 1835, Scott, still aged only 24, moved on from Kempthorne and took on his own assistant – William Bonython Moffatt, who in 1838 became his partner. Scott and Moffatt became just about the most prolific builders of workhouses in England, designing more than 40 in the decade they worked together. It was also in this period that Scott fell under the Gothicising influence of Pugin, and started seeking commissions to design churches (then also in the midst of a building boom, because of the great expansion of the population after the Industrial Revolution) and other institutions, notably Reading Gaol, and a few lunatic asylums.

Scott’s first workhouses were on his home turf in the south Midlands. His first was at Winslow in Buckinghamshire in 1835, followed by Buckingham, Northampton, Oundle and Towcester. However, word of his

Designed to look like prisons, many have become apartments for the well-to-do

excellence in this grim line of business soon spread further afield, with several commissions in Devon (Bideford and Tiverton are now hospitals, and noted in Pevsner; as is Tavistock, which is now flats; and he and Moffatt also built at Newton Abbot and Totnes) and in Cornwall (Liskeard, Penzance, Redruth and St Austell).

Sadly, some of these fine buildings are long gone, but those that remain are usually awesome, such as at Great Dunmow, in

Essex, which is now flats, built in Scott’s annus mirabilis for workhouses, 1838. James Bettley, in his revised Essex Pevsner, describes this building as “one of the most expensive and ostentatious” of the genre – it cost £10,000 – and it is Jacobean in style, which gives it an unusual aspect, but also suggests the command and greatness of imagination that Scott would bring to the middle period of his career, as he moved on from public buildings of local importance to those of national significance.