Finally, a client asks you to design a cathedral – only one drawback – he wants you to design it in the Byzantine style and you’ve spent your entire career up to this point designing Gothic buildings. This was the dilemma facing architect John Francis Bentley (1839-1902) when he was commissioned to design Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral by Cardinal Vaughan, the Archbishop of Westminster. Vaughan was only too well aware that the site which he had managed to acquire was at one end of Victoria Street in London and sitting at the other end was the mighty, Gothic, Westminster Abbey – known the world over as the scene of British Royal coronations, marriages and funerals – so he chose Byzantine to differentiate what would be the Mother Church of the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales from its famous Anglican neighbour.
Bentley thought he’d better brush up on his Byzantine before starting work so set off on a tour of Northern Italy and the Middle East (which unfortunately, didn’t get as far as the magnificent Hagia Sofia, as there was an outbreak of cholera in Istanbul). On his return he knocked out his design for the cathedral in a matter of months, in doing so producing one of London’s finest and most interesting Edwardian buildings. The banded brick and stone, (which had actually been quite fashionable since the completion of Richard Norman Shaw’s first New Scotland Yard building in 1890) the great tower and the domed interior, established the architectural links with the Byzantine Empire, but Bentley soon made the language his own in a virtuoso display of quite extraordinary architectural skill. Externally his towers and great arched entrance doorway face the cathedral’s modest piazza off Victoria Street and provide a complete and unexpected contrast with his sombre and powerful interior. Its great nave was planned to be covered in mosaics, but the cash ran out with only the lower levels complete, leaving the brick and concrete of the its shallow concrete domes exposed above. The unintended but nevertheless extremely evocative effect of this is to provide a richly decorated, worldly and rather materialistic, lower human level, while above, the building simply dissolves as it soars upwards into mysterious and mystical otherworldly shadows.
Sadly, neither Bentley nor Cardinal Vaughan lived to see their creation completed and in dying before the official presentation was able to take place, Bentley was also denied the RIBA’s Gold Medal (which he thoroughly deserved).
Well worth a detour if you get the chance! If you don’t want to miss out on future blogs then please follow me on johngooldstewart.com
John Stewart 