The Rogue Goths: R.L. Roumieu, Joseph Peacock and Bassett Keeling
by Edmund Harris
(Swindon: Liverpool University Press on behalf of Historic England, 2024)
ISBN: 978-1-83553-847-0-573-6 (paperback)
160 pp., many col. & b&w illus.
£30.00

“Rogue” (properly “Rogue Elephant”) architecture was a term employed by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959) as a label to describe works by those practitioners of the 19th-century Gothic Revival who were addicted to “Go” (pejorative shorthand  used by some Victorian commentators to describe architecture that was restless, too animated, “acrobatic”, and rather embarrassing). That short, staccato word implied empty fashion, ham-fistedness, clumsiness, discord, clashing colours, excessive liveliness, coarseness, loudness, decadence, furious vigour, recklessness, exaggeration, vulgarity, and generally something overdone for purposes of self-advertisement (so could easily be applied to the output of some fashionable architects of the 21st century).

“Rogue” architecture was not marked by scholarship, serenity, or tact: in the unattractive terminology of today it could be described as “over-the-top”. Among its more extreme practitioners were Enoch Bassett Keeling (1837-86), Edward Buckton Lamb (1806-69 — whose elephantine churches tend to have centralised plans and frantically busy timber roof-structures [e.g. St Margaret’s, Leiston, Suffolk, of 1853]), Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812-73), and George Truefitt (1824-1902). Keeling and Lamb, especially, designed churches for the Evangelical persuasion (and it shows): they both expressed roof-structures in an outlandish, restless way, seeming to want to jar the eye with repetitive notchings, chamferings, and scissor-shaped trusses. Their almost frantic originality, debauched Gothic, harsh, barbaric polychromy, and elephantine compositions brought critical wrath (notably from Ecclesiological quarters) down on their heads. Another, whose “Roguery” was perceived in his writings (e.g. Victorian Architecture [1860] and Examples of the Architecture of the Victorian Age [1862]) was Thomas Harris (1830-1900). All of them earned opprobrium, and none has really been taken completely seriously ever since. This new, slim volume goes some way to redress the balance, softening the derogatory overtones of the term “Rogue”, although, as its author admits, further “scholarly endeavours” will be needed to set the record straight and further understanding of an important and complex episode in the architecture of Victorian Britain.  

As an example of wild, inventive, hugely entertaining Roguery, a juicy example has been chosen to illustrate the cover of this interesting little book: this is Nos. 33-35 Eastcheap, City of London (1868), by Robert Lewis Roumieu (1814-77), designed (perhaps appropriately too) for the vinegar-brewing firm of Hill, Evans, & Co., of Worcester, to stand on the site reputed to have been that of the Boar’s Head Tavern, Mistress Quickly’s establishment in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, hence the Boar’s Head carved within the pointed arch in the middle of the second floor above the twin windows. This office-and-warehouse building was described by the late Ian Douglas Nairn (1930-83) as “truly demoniac, an Edgar Allan Poe of a building … the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare”, and indeed the busy polychrome façade is a veritable frenzy of spiky gables, with Gothic shafts set on corbels and a cluster of  shafts rising from the apex of a gable. However, is it really “demoniac”, a Gothic Horror of a building? I always thought it was rather fun, so chortled inwardly whenever I passed it, and certainly found it infinitely more entertaining than the oceans of ghastly mediocrity inflicted in the City since 1945, with even worse to come in recent years. 

Roumieu, who, as his name suggests, was born into a London Huguenot family, and in 1836 established a partnership with Alexander Dick Gough (1804-71), designing the beautiful Literary and Scientific Institution building, Almeida Street, Islington (1837-8), profoundly Grecian in inspiration, with a masterly use of motifs derived from an attenuated version of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens (319-279 BC), and exploiting advancing and receding planes in a highly sophisticated interpretation of Grecian themes. This exquisite little building has undergone many changes of use and alterations over the years, and is now the Almeida Theatre.

Roumieu & Gough were also responsible for Milner Square, Islington (1839-44), which is not, in fact, a square, but a rectangle, really a widened part of a street. Opinions of this extraordinary  piece of urban design have been myopic in the extreme: to Sir John Newenham Summerson (1904-92) it had  “an unreal and tortured quality”, and was a place it was possible “to visit … many times and still not be absolutely certain that you have seen [it] anywhere but in an unhappy dream”. The “square”, with its “eccentricity”, was said to display “disintegration of the classical conventions” in the “sheer harshness and negation of harmonious proportions”. Harris is far more balanced, and correctly points out the strengths of the unified composition through “repetition and the suppression of any individuality”, making the supremely important observation that “Milner Square would have been very different had the proprietary chapel on the west side been executed. This chapel was an elegant Greek Revival scheme, which the plainer elevations of the terraces would have set off most effectively”: it featured a yet more attenuated version of the Order used in the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus, handled with supreme confidence, an assured composition in which the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and language of a refined Classicism were perfectly understood.

Harris notes that, like most architects of the period, Roumieu & Gough “were not dogmatic about style”: indeed they were not. The partnership’s “most adventurous excursion into Gothic was the remodelling of St Peter’s in Islington, carried out in 1842”. Designed  by Charles Barry (1795-1860), “even by the standards of the time it was starkly plain — a yellow brick, towerless preaching box in a minimal lancet style”. In 1839 it became a parish church and in c.1842-4 Roumieu & Gough added a new entrance front to Devonia Road with a bell tower, as well as transepts and a short chancel. The crazily attenuated steeple shows free invention taken to an alarming extreme: it is very spindly, with plain flying buttresses, and the whole effect is thin and papery, anything but “Rogue Gothic” in fact. Nemesis came when the building was converted into flats in the 1990s. The coloured photograph reproduced murkily in the book is too dark to do justice to this strangely unsettling design.

Harris’s second “Rogue” is Joseph Peacock (1821-93), whose work has always struck me as anything but Rogueish. His church of St Simon Zelotes, Milner Street, Upper Chelsea (1858-9), though to some with a “little front overcrowded with gross Gothic motifs in the triumphantly bad taste of the mid Victorian years which is so often a relief after too much pedantic correctness”, and an “earnest, jerky interior” (as Cherry & Pevsner describe it in London 3: North West in the Buildings of England Series), it has always struck me as having rather a splendid interior.

It was hailed at the time as one of the most beautiful to have been built in the metropolis, although The Ecclesiologist sniffily considered it  as “no gain to art”. The treatment of the polychrome brickwork inside is very pleasing: what a pity Peacock could not have used brick for the exterior, though, as William Butterfield’s (1814-1900) marvellous Urban Minster at All Saints, Margaret Street, Westminster (1849-59), had shown how appropriate polychrome brick exteriors could stand up to the corrosive effects of the London atmosphere far better than the frequently used Kentish ragstone and other materials used at the time, which swiftly deteriorated, and just looked seedy. Harris writes appreciatively and well on Peacock: what a pity that architect, who had been commissioned by Bishop Charles Wordsworth (1806-92), never had his tremendous design for St Andrew’s Episcopal church and schools, Perth (1869), realised, but that was a time of religious controversy, involving, among other things, alleged breaches of faith in regard to ritual and even belief.  

With Keeling, the “Rogue” aspect is powerfully represented. Hailing from the north-east of England, he received his early training in Leeds, but headed for London in the late 1850s. There, he designed several churches, starting with St Paul’s, Stratford, in 1862, but, with his wildly spiky St Mark, Notting Hill (1862-3 — demolished), and St George, Aubrey Walk, Campden Hill (1864), his overt use of cast-iron for the piers of the nave arcades, together with his uninhibited employment of stripey polychromy, raked-back fronts of galleries (themselves detested by the Ecclesiologists), and rasping, sharp, notchings and chamferings, his contributions to “the modern school of Eclectic Gothic” were cautiously received in some quarters, but not in others, where his flaunting of “Go” in the loudest possible manner ruffled all sorts of feathers and sent a shudder of horror through the more tenderly refined architectural and ecclesiastical circles. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) thought St George’s was “atrocious”, but he saw it in its post-war state (it had been damaged), mutilated, tamed, and misunderstood. There was another aspect to explain disapproval: Keeling’s churches, with their short chancels and galleries, were not designed for Ritual observances, and they were markedly for the Evangelicals in the Church of England at a time when Anglo-Catholicism was gaining ground, and the best architects were not only designing exquisite things for a revived Catholic observance within the Church but were themselves of that persuasion. Keeling’s noisy architecture, and its overdone polychromy creating nave-arcades reminiscent of Zulu war-shields or of other “barbaric” artefacts, all proved too strongly spiced for more fastidious, and perhaps squeamish palates. 

Keeling’s church of St John the Baptist, Sheepcote Road, Greenhill, Harrow (1866), was small (it could only hold 400 at most), but it was an accomplished design featuring well thought-out, assured structural polychromy, with a magnificent scissor-trussed roof, itself powerfully decorated. The building suffered from subsidence and its small size, and was demolished and replaced with a larger church after 1904, designed by John Samuel Alder (1848-1919) in a competent Second Pointed style favoured by that architect, then extended yet again in 1925 by Alder and his partner John Turrill, finally completed in 1938 with chancel, furnishings, and stained glass by Martin Travers (1886-1948).

With the short-lived Strand Music Hall (1863-4) Keeling achieved not only extreme notoriety but catastrophic bankruptcy, as he had sunk his own money into the venture. This “palace à l’Aladdin” was subjected to vitriolic abuse. Some sneered that the building was an attempt to “adopt the Continental or modern eclectic Gothic”, but others mocked “Acrobatic Gothic”, declaring that Keeling had “played the fool with the recognised styles of architecture”, parodying certain features with “puerilites in the detail”, all of which ensured “grave censure” could not be withheld from the “author of the eccentricities … displayed in every portion of this building”. Keeling was said to have a “genius for practical joking”: the “hair-stand-on-end-style”, with “knobs, bosses, and balls”, “frantic” notchings “and chamferings with villainous spiky iron-work”, and many more “faults” were denounced in the most forthright terms. Keeling answered back, poking fun at “Acrobatic Criticism”, suggesting that “comic talent” had been hired to liven up the po-faced  pages of the Building News. 

The violent condemnations and insults would not have mattered much to Keeling’s career had the Music Hall been a commercial success, but it was a failure from the day of its opening. “The architecture of the place had something to do with it. A decorator’s studio, overloaded with samples picked up from all nations was the only thing the place suggested”. The interior had cast-iron columns, capitals of beaten metal, cast-iron brackets supporting the heavy cornice, Keeling’s trade-mark of raked balcony-fronts, an astonishing ceiling with coloured-glass panels set in zinc frames and glass prisms set in the soffits of the hollow ribs, and a stage that defied description. Unfortunately, the only images we have of this notorious Music Hall are those published in Building News: I would dearly love to be able to see what it really looked like inside (the exterior was nothing to be ashamed of: in fact it was rather pleasing, and well detailed). 

Time and critical opinion have not been kind to Keeling, for very little of his realised work still stands. The interiors of both St Mark’s, Notting Hill, and St George’s, Aubrey Walk, Campden Hill, were ruined long ago, and St Mark’s was demolished. However, in the 1970s I discovered a huge cache of his original drawings in the premises of Dove Brothers, who were the contractors Keeling often used for his jobs, and this important collection now reposes in the hands of the Royal Institute of British Architects: those drawings, some schemes published in the architectural journals of the time, and a few mutilated fragments of his buildings, are all we have remaining of the considerable output of one of the more interesting, if eccentric, Victorian architects, who was to die aged 49 after hæmatemesis lasting 36 hours, the final stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Keeling was unusually Clubbable, loved convivial sessions perhaps too much, and paid for all that with his life. As my friend, Gordon Lansdowne Barnes (1917-85), observed to me when I was carrying out my research in the 1970s, “Poor Old Bassett Keeling”. Quite so.

Harris writes well, and this little book has its attractions, but the subject is a big one, and I reckon the book is too small and limited in scope to accommodate the material I know is available. Some of the illustrations are far too dark: examples are Keeling’s contract drawings for St Mark’s, Notting Hill, St Andrew’s, Glengall Road, and St Paul’s, Upper Norwood, the Building News interior of St George’s, Aubrey Walk, Campden Hill, and the lovely perspective drawing for an unidentified but decidedly unrogueish church in the RIBA Collections. I was consulted about the last when the RIBA first acquired it, and although I could not shed any light on where or for whom it might have been produced, I thought it a fine design and a lovely, bright, excellent water-coloured drawing. As reproduced, though, it is dull, dark, with washed-out colour, and the book simply does not do justice to some of the illustrations therein. I also view photographs with converging verticals with horror, and to find them reproduced in a book should really not happen at all. Harris’s own shot of the former National School of St George, in Little Russell Street, Bloomsbury, by Peacock, of 1879-80 (anything but Rogue, let alone Gothic), is a real stinker in this regard, and should not have been reproduced. The same architect’s lovely, robust, and again very unrogueish proposals for St James the Greater, Derby (1863), shown in what looks as though it might be a very fine coloured drawing, is again dismally reproduced. 

In a perceptive prefatory essay (the best part of the book, although right at the start he gets Goodhart-Rendel’s year of death wrong, which is not a great beginning) entitled “Introducing Roguery”, Harris does mention architects such as E.B. Lamb and Frederick Pilkington (1832-98): as Goodhart-Rendel wrote, the latter was a “real rogue: nobody can mistake his work, and no other architect would wish, if he could help it, to produce anything in the least like it”. Harris makes the interesting point that Roguery was not confined to Gothic: Alexander “Greek” Thomson (1817-75) is even seen as a Rogue “for persevering with neo-Greek when the Greek Revival appeared to be irrevocably on the wane”. But Thomson’s was not the “limpid neo-Greek of the 1820s and 1830s, but a dramatic, eclecticising interpretation that was markedly Romantic in spirit”. Thomson’s work was far more that that, as he drew on Egyptian, Indian, and even Biblical themes, handled with incomparable zest, sureness of touch, inventiveness, and power, not entirely uninfluenced by the work of the great Prussian architect, Karl Friedrch Schinkel (1781-1841). There are aspects of St Vincent Street church in Glasgow that might even lead one to re-name the architect as Alexander “Semitic” Thomson. And that raises another point: why is this book called “Rogue Goths” when a lot of the material is not Gothic at all? Why not just “Architectural Rogues”, “The Rogue Styles”, or something that more accurately reflects content?

Harris also includes fascinating individuals such as the Nottingham architect, Watson Fothergill (1841-1928), whose rather wonderful works enliven that city’s streets, and George Thomas Robinson (1827-97), whose St Luke’s, Blakenhall, Wolverhampton (1860-1), has its interior shown in a rather dark photograph (today it has become an antiques centre). The excellent photograph of Smithfield Martyrs’ Memorial church, Clerkenwell (1869-71 — demolished), by Edward Lushington Blackburne (1803-88), shows a tower the uppermost stages of which are as Rogueish as one could wish for, and indeed to hope things would go no further: Harris refers to this building as “spectacularly exuberant both in form and colour”, so it is a pity we do not have any illustrations of the church in colour. Blackburne also completed (1877-80) the tower of the huge St Mark’s, Dalston, which had been designed by Chester Cheston (1835-1907) as a vast auditory church with wildly striped arches set on “vertiginous cast-iron columns”. With stained glass set in parts of the timber ceiling, it is just about as Rogueish as it is possible to be: when I first saw this church in the early 1970s, I was amazed, because I had never seen anything remotely like it before. 

Harris was set a very difficult task: the topic deserved a far bigger and more comprehensive book than what we have here. Given the limitations, presumably set by Historic England, The Victorian Society, and the Series Editor (who should have recognised there was a problem, and done something about it), Harris has valiantly done what was possible, but we could have done with something a lot better, with brighter and far more illustrations, and a much larger bibliography as well.  

The book was decently printed in the Czech Republic, and designed by Carnegie Book Production. Modern photographs were by the excellent Robin Forster, but all the illustrations, including Forster’s, have suffered from being somewhat darkened when being set, which is a huge pity. At £30 one might have expected something better.