Gothic London
For a city which gives off such a strong flavour of the Gothic, London has surprisingly few mediaeval Gothic buildings. You can count them on the fingers of two hands: Westminster Abbey; Westminster Hall; a clutch of small churches in the City of London. These authentic, mediaeval Gothic structures are pretty much what’s left of old London; their contemporaries burned down or buried under layers of Georgian, Victorian and the twentieth century. Gothic, so far as London is concerned, went into a kind of internal exile at around the start of the sixteenth century; and for two hundred years stayed there, of interest only to antiquaries and lovers of the ancient picturesque. So where, exactly, do you look for Gothic? Any kind of Gothic? And when you find it, why does it feel as if it’s never really left?
Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s fantasy rococo Gothic villa by the Thames at Twickenham is where London Gothic was, to all intents and purposes, reborn. Clearly, this mid-eighteenth century micro-castle, with its extremely secular enjoyment of line and colour, is as unlike Westminster Abbey as a building can be. Walpole, an aesthete in search of the commodity known as gloomth, took the truths of mediaeval Gothic and turned them into a mixture of stage set and private boudoir. But when it was done, Strawberry Hill had brought back the Gothic arch, Gothic decoration, Gothic colour, Gothic asymmetry, Gothic waywardness. It was a codmediaeval revolt against the Georgian verities of balance and harmony. It rejoiced in the quirky, the excessive, the self-consciously moody. It advertised a new sensibility and its effect on the look of London was huge. In the space of two generations, Victorian London redefined itself through its Gothic Revival buildings. It’s hard, now, to understand quite how this revival could have taken hold so fast and with such dynamism. But it had a spiritual energy to drive it forward, as well as an aesthetic imperative.
This retro-Gothic was an ethical crusade, not merely a style transition.
Mediaeval Gothic meant churches, English churches at that: translated into the nineteenth century, the message you took away from a piece of Victorian Gothic (whatever the purpose of the building) was that here was a work expressing a national identity and a high moral seriousness.
Its proponents had a point. Looking around, some of the best-known, most recognisable buildings in London are neo-Gothic: the Houses of Parliament, encrusted, inside and out, in the teeming mediaeval visions of A.W. Pugin; G. E. Street’s knottily faux-French Law Courts; the great gingery late-Revival pile known as Holborn Bars, designed by Alfred Waterhouse; George Gilbert Scott’s frankly scary Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras. Even Tower Bridge – although not strictly Gothic – has a profile a bit like the Houses of Parliament; enough to give it that true, eye-catching otherness. The Gothic Revival always had to fight against the established classical stylings of its competitors and ended up building relatively few major buildings. But these individual cynosures – to say nothing of the scores of churches and dwellings scattered across London (William Burges’s Tower House in Kensington; Holly Village in north London; Butterfield’s All Saints in Margaret Street) – define the spaces they inhabit in a way that their rivals can’t. They even make their neighbours seem more Gothic than they actually are, turning any nearby finial or doorway into a part of the darker Gothic narrative; blanketed, once, in fog and soot. Love them or hate them (and, yes, it is hard to love many of them) they have presence.
But then Gothic, by the time we’re half-way through the Victorian age, is not just a way of designing buildings. It’s a mood, an atmosphere, a source of mystery. As it happens, the three most celebrated writers of Gothic fiction – Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker – were inhabitants of greater London. Shelley ended her days in Belgravia; Stoker lived in Chelsea and Pimlico. Shelley’s Frankenstein was scarcely a London creation – rather, an accidental outpouring from her time in Europe with Byron; while Walpole’s un-Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto was written in King’s Lynn, of all places. But Dracula does have London in its veins –- as does Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Both novels
respond to the other kind of Gothic, the metaphysical Gothic, the Gothic which celebrates the idea of London as an occult map of wickedness. In this Gothic, the greatest metropolis in the world has nothing to do with a crusade for a moral architecture; it is, instead, black, labyrinthine and unintelligible.
They weren’t the only ones. Dickens wrote plenty of London Gothic – most visibly in Bleak House, with its fog-laden overture and its grisly spontaneous combustion of Krook, the rag and bottle merchant. When Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold produced their epic of words and pictures, London, it was the same darkness, the same decay, which most gripped their imaginations. To say nothing of Henry Fuseli’s paintings. Or indeed, the folklore myths which instantly grew up around Jack the Ripper. So why was the Gothic Revival more or less finished before the end of the century? Scott’s Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens marks a terminal point – a piece of building so mad, so extreme, it can only announce its own end. With startling abruptness, the Revival vanished; the greater Gothic sensibility in art and literature faded away too. By the end of the 1800s, a new aesthetic – less dense, less fanatical, easier to accommodate – had arrived. There was no longer any call for the kind of sensation-seeking that the nineteenth century Goths indulged in. Instead, Norman Shaw designed the buildings; E M. Forster wrote the books. The Revival was just too intense to last.
Except that it never quite went away. Sometimes, covertly, in the new century, it emerged in the movies – in Gaslight, or the film version of The Turn of the Screw. Sometimes it flavoured the writings of Patrick Hamilton or Elizabeth Bowen. And then, just when the bright lights and the relentless materialism of the 1980’s were everywhere, Gothic London found the twin voices of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd to give it another very public rebirth. Occult mapping is what Sinclair and Ackroyd have devoted much of their writing lives to: Ackroyd the more craft-conscious, in Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Sinclair – whose body of writing intentionally confuses fiction, autobiography, reportage and poetry – the wilder, more urgent. What they both manage is to unearth layers of meaning
buried beneath London’s restless surface; to re-draw erased connections between points. The surface of things is once again alive with the uncanny, the unsettling. The chill which animated the Gothic novelists is never far from Sinclair and Ackroyd’s texts.
Which then ties into a whole subculture of psychogeographers, of urban explorers: people who search for the hidden – literally, in abandoned buildings, fenced-off installations, restricted zones; or more cabalistically, by scrutinising the visible environment for concealed meanings. Abandoned Government facilities; haunted gasworks – these are the new Gothic, a kind of found Gothic. It’s a strange new distillation; but it can trace a line back to its antecedents, just as Walpole could trace a line from his own Gothic fantasies to the profound reality of Lincoln Cathedral. More importantly, the modern inheritors of the Gothic tradition treat London as an epicentre for their discoveries. London – huge, impossible to encompass, layered in lost objects, lost narratives, unknowable mysteries – is the perfect place for these investigations. It is metaphysically Gothic from top to toe, if you want it badly enough.