Cardiff castle I

Or, let my lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely tow'r,

Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,

With thrice-great Hermes.

Il Penseroso, II 85-8, Milton

     It's been nearly two weeks now since our visit to Cardiff Castle and specifically the work of the Victorian Gothic Revival architect William Burges. We were not disappointed, for what Burgess achieved at the Castle, in collaboration with a rich and discerning patron, is truly remarkable. And it's Burges's work I want to concentrate on.

     But first a little history, a little context.  The site of Cardiff castle is ancient, located strategically at the lowest fording point on the river Taff. The Romans came here and established a succession of forts, one on top of another as it were.  (What you can see now at the castle is a reconstruction undertaken in the 1920s. A mistake, I think, as it did involve the destruction of the medieval walls on the south, east and north sides of the castle and the demolition of several historic buildings along Castle St in the process for very little, if any, aesthetic gain.) The remains of the last fort, built about 280 AD, were seized by William the Conqueror on his return from pilgrimage to St David's, and that fort, refortified with a great motte in the north-west corner and the the interior interior space divided into an inner and outer bailey came to serve as the administrative centre for the Marcher Lordship of Glamorgan. Towards the end of the Middle Ages a new residential block was constructed by the Earl of Warwick along the west wall of the old Roman fort. And rather stylish it is too - constructed in blue lias and with elegant two storey bay windows. Late in the 18th century Henry Holland and 'Capability' Brown were busy at work landscaping the grounds and adding wings to the north and south of the Earl of Warwick's work producing a neat symmetrical Gothick façade. A country house in fact. It was this enlarged structure that eventually formed the core of around which Burges's work coalesced.

     By then the Industrial Revolution was well under way in south Wales and Cardiff was booming - the 'Chicago of Wales'.  Cardiff's exponential growth was due to the foresight of the 2nd Marquess of Bute, a Scottish landowner (Cardiff had passed into the ownership of the Butes in 1766), who took a massive financial gamble to develop the docks at the mouth of the Taff and thereby turn Cardiff into one of the most important mercantile cities in the British Empire.  It also, eventually, made the Butes very rich.
     The 2nd Marquess died in 1848, heavily in debt, and his son, aged 6 months, inherited. John Patrick Crichton-Stuart 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900) is a deeply interesting if complex character, a polymath with all sorts of interests, some which at first sight may seem in contradiction. Industrialist and medievalist. Crichton-Stuart was a devout Roman Catholic, a convert from Scots Presbyterianism, with a deep interest in the occult. I suspect too that he was a bit of a recluse.

     His first commission from Burges at Cardiff, the Clock Tower, illustrates these sometime centrifugal tendencies well. And what can be said of the tower can be said of all that Burges achieved at Cardiff. for it set the tone of what was to follow. And what Burges and his client produced was a structure rich in layered meaning and complexity. The tower, built beautifully, in contra-distinction to the original house, in Forest of Dean sandstone, stands at the south west corner of the castle some distance from the house.  I am not sure about the original arrangement but now it is connected to the main house by a covered, and beautifully detailed wall walk. It contains accommodation for two - the Marquess and a servant - arranged vertically in a manner that a man of his wealth would not in the Middle Ages have had. No medieval tower in Britain, at least, ever quite looked like this. Yes, it is a public display of seigneurial pomp, a projection of personal power and status (as if that was ever the sole reason for anything. Such reductionism is a waste of time), but it is also a public building in the manner of those lofty towers you find on civic buildings in Medieval Italy. A civic building then and one that soon became the embodiment of the new Industrial city burgeoning at its foot. In fact as Andrew Richardson notes in his essay 'Ancient and Modern - Cardiff Castle' in 'Buildings and Places in Welsh History' the castle increasingly became the setting for a series of civic events. as the century progressed. In one sense it is a strange building in which to make a home for it could be argued that its inhabitant is subsumed by its rhetoric. (The rooms inside maybe lavishly decorated but are small and intimate.) It makes me think of a stylites' column in 5th century Syria that very public act of retreat from the world. Another indication of Bute's reclusive temperament is the eventual closing of the castle grounds to the casual visitor. It is in all, however, an extraordinary thing for a 21 yr old, newly come into his majority and now vast wealthy, to commission. An act, I feel, of intense confidence and self will. And to think that simultaneously across that burgeoning, sprawling city, in Roath, he was also beginning the rebuilding of the Anglican church of St Margaret of Antioch under the local architect John Prichard. Thus began Bute's architectural patronage.
     The collaboration of m'Lord Bute and Burgess, perhaps one of the fruitful in all British architectural history, transformed the sw corner of the castle, adding towers and heightening the existing, walled gardens were created to s and w beyond the castle walls increasing its size and further isolating, one can imagine, the Marquess from the world, and creating a dreamlike, almost visionary, quality that owes something to the real castles illustrated in the 'Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry' and perhaps to Pre-Raphaelite art. Yes, it is a fantasy but it is more than that; Cardiff Castle, bearing in mind that the castle is symbolically a place of order in a chaotic world, is an extreme example of the nineteenth century cult of the house - house as defense and refuge, essentially, from rapacious Modernity - in the which the house is fractured and reassembled and re-presented as ideal city. Perhaps as 'Emblematic City', even the heavenly Jerusalem itself. The ambiguity and indeed contradiction is immense.*

     Burges and the 3rd Marquess worked together for another 13 years until Burges's death 1881, after which things were completed by William Frame, Burges's assistant.  In those 13 years tastes changed within the Gothic Revival from the muscular High Victorian Gothic back to a refined Puginian style, that is back to a style that is grounded explicitly in our national Medieval styles.  Quite possibly a 'rogue' architect, Burges's earliest work at the castle was definitely within the High Victorian Gothic style - strong and blunt with considerable heft with much massive, inert wall surface - buttresses, for instance are quite rare. There is something distinctly Early French Gothic about this work, but it is noticeable that as the work progressed later Gothic and local influences both present themselves. The exotic, too. Client and architect achieved much, all of it of an almost overwhelming quality and inventiveness, humorousness too. The quality of the masonry to take one example is superb, as is the exterior woodwork. Burges was an an architect who could think readily in the 3 dimensions - according to the architect and critic Patrick Nuttgens not that common an attribute in architects. At times it all verges on the sublime, but that said the whole - Burges and pre-Burges as at it were - forms, on the exterior at least, a somewhat unhappy composition, not entirely successful.  The contrast in materials is unhelpful. Perhaps, had Burges lived, it was all to be sublimated into one organic whole.

* For another example of this in Burges's work see his competition entry for The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, London 1866-67.