This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Nicholas Olsberg, who has just written a handsome monograph on the work of the great Victorian architect, William Butterfield, is an interesting figure. He went to school at Rugby in 1956 and, as he describes it, absorbed not only the pleasures of reading in the school’s Temple Library, designed by Butterfield, and of exercising in Butterfield’s swimming pool and gymnasium, but also some of the intellectual high-mindedness of former pupils of the school, including T.H. Green and R.H. Tawney.
He then went to Merton College, Oxford, where the chapel was restored by Butterfield and one of its student buildings designed by him, before emigrating to the United States where he became the first head of the archives of the History of Art at the newly-established Getty Center and, later, director of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal.
Now retired in Wiltshire, Olsberg has gone back to studying the architect of his alma mater, adopting an approach which is not so much documentary (as was done fairly definitively by Paul Thompson in 1971) but based on surviving visual sources: first, Butterfield’s contract drawings which are very beautiful works of art themselves (many were acquired by Olsberg for the Getty in 1985); second, the ways that his work was recorded at the time, including engravings in the Illustrated London News, original photographs (there is a particularly beautiful image of the Coleridge Museum at St Augustine’s College taken by Olive Edis) and turn-of-the century picture postcards which he regards as an under-explored source of information; and, third, a set of documentary photographs taken by James Morris over a six-year period from 2017 to 2023 on a digital plate camera by a method that is deliberately subfusc, looking for the qualities in the buildings themselves without the benefit of sunshine.
Because Olsberg’s approach to his subject is descriptive and analytical rather than biographical, it is hard to get a sense of how exactly it was that Butterfield emerged as such a prominent and successful church architect during the 1840s. He was chosen as architect not only for the well-known All Saints, Margaret Street in London, a model church of the ecclesiologists, but also for new cathedrals in Fredericton, New Brunswick and Perth in Scotland, new training colleges reconstructed out of the medieval remains of St Augustine’s, Canterbury and at Great Cumbrae on a small island at the mouth of the Clyde, as well as new churches in rural Warwickshire and Wiltshire and the restoration of Dorchester Abbey and Merton College Chapel.
What seems to have been crucial to Butterfield’s success was joining the Engagement, a small but extremely well connected group of tractarians inspired by Edward Pusey and including the young William Gladstone and Robert Brett, a surgeon based in Stoke Newington who helped instigate the restoration of St Augustine’s and probably introduced Butterfield to the group.
Joining the Engagement — thought by Olsberg to be in June 1842 — led to Butterfield’s election in May 1844 as a member of the Cambridge Camden Society. He had already written an article on chancel screens for the Ecclesiologist which in turn led to his being employed to oversee the design of all their recommended church furnishings, published during the second half of the 1840s as Instrumenta Ecclesiastica.
In the space of five years, from 1840 to 1845, his contacts with this group of mostly Oxford-educated, high-church old Etonians enabled his transformation from an under-employed architect (nearly his only work being the design of a congregationalist chapel in Bristol for his uncle-by-marriage) to becoming the architect of choice for all sorts of church commission, running a small office in the Adelphi and designing carefully considered church buildings for the next 50 years.
Although Olsberg provides very beautiful images of All Saints, Margaret Street and acknowledges its importance in Butterfield’s oeuvre, one gets the impression that what he really likes are the more awkward, ungainly, small brick churches which require an element of pilgrimage to discover. He loves the rectory Butterfield designed for James Bliss at Ogbourne St Andrew in Wiltshire and the schoolroom and schoolmaster’s house at Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire.
As he describes it, “Adopting local building features in local materials, often with village builders whose craft in employing them was long-tested, he avoids the picturesque by stripping down details and emphasising structure, lending a vicarage gravity to the comfortable and familiar.” I particularly love his description of Butterfield’s church at Horton-cum-Studley where he “deployed a bright palette of yellow, scarlet and blue bricks that stands out like a haystack strewn with poppies and cornflowers in the meadows of Otmoor”.
Best of all, as Olsberg sees it, are the small churches Butterfield designed for William Dawnay, Viscount Downe, who built a model settlement consisting of church, village school and cottages at Sessay in Yorkshire. He also deeply admires the small brick church at East Cowick, which gets a double-page spread.
He describes the estate cottages at Baldersby as “the prototype of the tradition of brick-cottage housing of garden suburbs and municipal estates, which for many decades stood alone in England for architectural decency and honesty against the flood of speculative building”.
It is surely no accident that in the way the book is structured, the country comes before the town. One learns about Butterfield as a conscientious architect of parsonages and village schools before encountering the elaboration of his decorative scheme at All Saints, Margaret Street.
Over the 124 years since Butterfield’s death, there have been different interpretations of him. In 1866, when he was only 52, he was offered the Gold Medal of the RIBA, which he chose not to accept. On his death, he was looked up to by a generation of Arts and Crafts architects, including Halsey Ricardo, who admired him for his integrity, conscientiousness and truth-to-materials approach, although many of his workers regarded him as domineering.
Then, in the 1920s, his work at Keble and, to a lesser extent, Balliol College was so reviled that Kenneth Clark was unable to include a chapter on him in his pioneering study of the Gothic Revival. A book about Oxford by Christopher Hobhouse described Balliol’s chapel as “obscene” and “actively poisonous”; its polychromatic interior had already been stripped out.
He reveals a less familiar and more admirable architect
A revival of interest in Butterfield came in the 1950s. In 1945 John Summerson published an article entitled “William Butterfield; or the Glory of Ugliness” in the Architectural Review, which spurred a generation of Victorianists to seek out and study his work, including the social historian Paul Thompson. In an essay on Butterfield for a 1963 volume of essays on Victorian architecture, Thompson recognised that he was a more complex figure than was evident in his great set-piece buildings and later published the first analytical study of his architectural practice in 1971.
Now Olsberg has compelled us to look more closely at the buildings themselves and examine the variety of his work across the long span of his career. Through images as much as text, he reveals a less familiar and more admirable architect than the master of ugliness described by John Summerson or the Heathcliff figure invented by Ian Nairn.
Olsberg conveys an impression of someone who deliberately kept his office small, obsessively corrected the minutiae of the drawings his assistants prepared and never married so he could maintain absolute control over all aspects of his buildings. Although his style remained the High Gothic of the 1850s, he was still capable of producing impressive works late on in his career, including Exeter Grammar School, his final work at Rugby and St Augustine’s, Queen’s Gate.
If Butterfield could be prickly and occasionally difficult with clients, dressed in a tall chimneypot hat as he walked to the Athenaeum every afternoon for a dish of tea, he was also extraordinarily devoted to his religion and his craft. As Olsberg describes him, he was a “Master Builder”.
