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.

Ickworth II

   Ickworth is now in the hands of the National Trust, the old family wing a hotel.  The incomplete western wing, very sensibly, is now the reception and café.  The entrance lobby is spoilt by painted quotes, in the way that the National Trust seems to be fond of today.  Alas.  However the long thin orangery is just right.  The Lloyd Loom furniture hits just the right note of timelessness.  Perfect.  It could have be the Edwardian age or the 1920s, but I liked to think it was the early Seventies and that any moment Celia Birtwell and David Hockney were going to step in from the garden.  A few floor standing uplighters between the windows would add a little more glamour, but anything else would spoil it.
   To the south of the house there is a Victorian Italianate garden bounded with a great bastion of a wall complete with gravel walk.  It effectively separates the house from the landscape park beyond - which is the work of Capability Brown and one of his duller numbers.  Down in the valley is a lake and between it and the house is the old village church and a large walled garden which is in a sorry state at the moment but there are signs of restoration.  The summer house is a delight.  The church is small and neat.  The tower, I think, is late 18th/early 19th century, stuccoed, and the rest of the church looks entirely Victorian, but is I think, almost a replica of what was there before - note the squint into the chancel.  It is the traditional resting place of the Herveys, but, alas, on our visit the church was locked.

Wimpole Hall I

   When we returned from Wales I spent a few days with the bf - one of our excursions was to Wimpole Hall.  As the Cambridgeshire edition of 'The Buildings of England' points out it is the county's 'most spectacular' Country House.  It is certainly the largest, though as Pevsner also points out the architecture is domestic in scale; the fireworks are on the inside.  And it is those fireworks - a chapel by James Gibbs and James Thornhill, and rooms by Sir John Soane that were the reason for our visit.
   Wimpole Hall sits on the southern slopes of the clay uplands that make up the majority of SW Cambridgeshire; to the south the house looks out over the wide, gentle valley of the Rhee to the chalk hills of Hertfordshire. (Hertfordshire, I think, has some of the most beautiful country in England.)
   The hall is the focus of the remains of a vast and monumental Baroque layout of avenues - south, west and north - the work of  Charles Bridgeman.  The longest avenue stretches south from house for two miles to the old Roman road 'Ermine Street' - in the distance, half way down, is an octagonal pool that I can't believe didn't have a fountain in it. To the north, the avenue, which can never have been very long due to the hills rising in steps behind the house, was partly removed by Capability Brown to make one of his most successful, and beautiful Landscape Parks; the axial vista being closed by a folly, a sham ruined castle designed originally by Sanderson Miller and erected by James Essex of Cambridge, the architect and antiquarian.  In the early 19th century Humphrey Repton, in keeping with the then Picturesque theory, began a process which has restored some of the original formality to the gardens immediately around the house.

   The building of the house has been a long and complicated story.  It goes something like this: the original house, which forms the central 3 storey section, was started in the 1640s.  It was a triple pile house of brick and stone.  In the early years of the 1700s it was extended to the east and west in a sympathetic style by James Gibbs for the Tory politician Lord Harley partly to hold Lord Harley's vast collection of books and artifacts - his book collection alone consisted of over 50,000 items. Gibbs's library is on extreme right of the photograph. In the 1740s the Neo-Palladian architect Henry Flitcroft ('Burlington Harry') refaced the original part of the house, adding the three bay windows to the north front.  Further additions, including a tower, were made in the nineteenth century by H E Kendall, but most of those, tower included, have been swept away with the exception, wisely, of the central chimney stack. It strikes quite the right visual note.

Thought (21.10.15):  There's a similarity between the centre of the south front of Wimpole and the centre of the Gibbs Building, King's College, Cambridge.  Wimpole is roughly twenty years after King's.  Was Flitcroft influenced by James Gibbs?  It would make sense if he had been.

   To the east of the house, and the Neo-baroque stables by Kendall, is a model farm designed by Sir John Soane, 1794-5 (which was, for me, surprisingly vernacular); the octagonal dairy (inside like a Medieval English chapter house)and the adjoining farmhouse however are later, 1860 and 1862.