Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) Home page.

This was a Commissioners Church built between 1848-53 for the cost of £4500 with 360 pews and 501 free seats. It has a western tower with a broach spire, chancel, a nave of five bays, aisles, a north porch and thirteenth century style details, and has been described as ‘plain’ and ‘honest’, ‘not exciting’ (Pevsner).

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The school was built opposite Christchurch between 1846-8 and may have been by Scott too. It was demolished by 1981.

http://www.pittdixon.go-plus.net/denton-rip/christ-church-school.htm

This was an estate church built for Lord Sefton between 1852-6 in Second Pointed style. It is built of red sandstone and has a crossing tower, which cost £4000 and was paid for by Mr Pemberton Heywood. With the great expense of providing secure foundations for the tower, the original more elaborate design had to be significantly modified. The remainder of the church cost £8000 and was raised by voluntary subscriptions with Lord Sefton giving the land and a further £500 towards the building cost. The church has a polygonal apse and windows by Clayton and Bell. Two drawings of it were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853 and 1856. The Ecclesiologist in 1853 described it thus: ‘The interior inspires awe at once, by height and nobility’.

Scott built this Commissioner’s Church between 1850-2 at a cost of £4085 in a thirteenth century Gothic style. It had 429 pews and 572 free seats. It was demolished due to the railway works and replaced by St Stephen’s Church, Grove Street, in 1881.

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In 1840, Scott entered a competition to design this building, which was won by Elmes. Scott came second out of twelve entries. The conditions stipulated that the design should be in a Tudor style and of red stone cased inside with brick. The site was moved to Shaw Street soon after the competition.

Scott designed a house here in 1865 for Joseph Leather, a cotton merchant. The house has since been demolished but the lodge and stables remain either side of Cleveley Road, now as residential property.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=J8wC8b6wIAIC&pg=PA219&lpg=PA219&dq=cleveley,+allerton&source=bl&ots=0rFoYitXaH&sig=f7LEXiu0f06gPthlanoI2ymryvk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lSyaUfPaPOmN4ASy04HwAg&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=cleveley%2C%20allerton&f=false

Scott carried out work here in 1872 when he restored the wooden Rood Screen. A new parapet was added and it was made up of old fragments including one of St. George over the door. At the same time, he designed an organ case for an organ by Wadsworth of Manchester. This was damaged in 1940 during the Second World War and not replaced. He also worked on the Cheetham Chattel, as shown by his drawings.

In 1857, Scott recommended the restoration of the Cathedral west tower but his advice was ignored and it was demolished.

National Archives, Kew, Papers concerning the replacement of the Mediaeval Tower Mancath/2/B/4 Sep 1857 and Letter of Advice concerning the Mediaeval Tower Mancath/2/B/4/1 Sep 1857, see http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/rd/1df55bfa-8396-44c7-ae24-447bccdbf5bc

This was certainly won in a competition held in 1841, when in partnership with Moffatt, with work starting the following year. It was built for Miss Eleanora Atherton and altered in 1850 by R. J. Withers before it was demolished in 1953. It had a west tower, galleries and was in the Early English style, and was apparently as dull as the usual run of so-called Commissioners churches. It has recently been the subject of an excavation before the site was used for Manchester Metropolitan University buildings.

Colvin, H., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 119-20.
http://www.mereweather.net/hulme.html
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/archaeologists-dig-deep-to-ex-hulme-a-medieval-679755

This was probably Scott’s last major building, designed in 1875, the building carried out between 1876-8, in association with John Oldrid, who completed it after his father’s death. The church was demolished in the mid-twentieth century.

http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/gone/stpaulschurch.html

Scott worked on a church in Preston between 1866-72, as represented by drawings in his Drawings Collection although there appear to be no further details.

After nine years of trying to decide if it could afford a new town hall, Preston Council decided that ‘an eminent architect’ would have the necessary authority to bring the scheme to fruition. By February 1862 the Council had chosen a site and Scott was requested to submit plans, a drawing of the ‘Market’ exhibited by Scott at the Royal Academy that year.

Preston was the ideal place for him to put into effect his ideas, as stated in the Remarks, for the expression of civic dignity. It was an ancient and prosperous borough, the judicial centre of Lancashire and it had a great history of industrial enterprise. But if the councillors of Preston expected that their building would resemble the formal designs of Hamburg or Halifax, they must have been somewhat surprised to see that Scott's design was an informal layout, owing more to Kelham than Hamburg.

The site was between the main street and the Market Square and two narrow side streets. On the north side, towards the Market Square, Scott designed a symmetrical elevation, while the other three elevations were irregular. The main feature was a clock tower at the south-western corner, which became a prominent landmark in the main street. This started as a more robust version of Kelham's clockless clock tower but, apparently, it was not high enough so it was raised during construction to an overall height of 197 feet.

On 2 September 1862, the Mayor laid the foundation stone of the new town hall. The contractors, who were only appointed after the ceremony, were the local firm of Cooper and Tullis, and the total cost was £69,412. The building was constructed entirely of local stone from quarries at Longridge, four miles north-east of Preston, with a considerable amount of ornamentation and carving by Farmer and Brindley. Although Scott's layout of the building was probably functionally effective as the administrative centre of the Borough of Preston, its siting seems to have denied him the opportunity of making it into a grand and dignified composition to reflect his stated aims. The south front, towards the main street was the show front, and it was illustrated in The Builder of 30 August 1862 with a drawing by John Drayton Wyatt. This shows an arched colonnade at street level with a range of tall plate-traceried windows above, like a portion of the Hamburg facade, but with the great clock tower on the extreme left. Under the tower was the entrance to a vast space, like a medieval undercroft, containing two rows of polished granite columns supporting a vaulted ceiling. It was intended to be an ‘exchange and public news room’, as well as housing a ‘weekly market day for commercial purposes’, but neither idea seemed to be successful and it became the public library until the monumental Harris Library was completed across the Market Place in 1893.

The fundamental fault in Scott’s design was that the main entrance to the Town Hall proper was actually off the side street on the west side where he provided all the trappings of a grand approach, including a projecting porch, incorporating much heraldic carving, and a balcony over. The symmetrical north elevation toward the Market Place was the only place that Scott could have formed a really dignified entrance to the building, and although he provided another porch here, it only led to the Town Clerk's and Treasurer's offices and those of the School Attendance Officers in the basement.

On the other hand, the interior of the building, beyond the somewhat demeaning approach via the main entrance, was as grand as befitted its status. A short flight of steps led up to the entrance hall from where an imperial staircase, only slightly less grand than that of the Foreign Office, rose up to the first floor, with the Guild Hall to the left over the exchange and the Council Chamber to the right over the offices. The Guild Hall has been described as ‘spacious, and stately in appearance - while, in ornamentation, it is charmingly elaborate’.

The building was opened on Thursday 3 October 1867, ‘amid much pomp and circumstance’, by the Duke of Cambridge. But in 1947, the only town hall that Scott ever built, and what he considered to be one of his best works, was damaged by fire, and eventually demolished in 1963.

Hewitson, A., A History of Preston (Chronicle Office, Preston, 1883), pp. 358-60, 362, 365.
Scott, G. G., Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future (John Murray, London, 2nd ed. 1858), p. 201.
Eastlake, C. L., A History of the Gothic Revival (Longmans, Green and Co., London 1872), p. 116.
The Builder, 30 August 1862, p. 621.
Read, B., Victorian Sculpture (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1984), p. 240.
Cole, D., The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott (The Architectural Press, London, 1980), p. 124.

Built by Scott between 1864-5, the church has a slim west tower with broach spire. The clerestory has foiled circles and it has lancet windows and glass by Hardman and Kempe. The clerk of works was James Frater. A chancel chapel was added in 1875 along with a baptistry and vestry.

Towards the end of 1843, Lord Francis Egerton (1800-1857), the M.P. for South Lancashire, asked Scott to design a church for his colliery village of Worsley, to the west of Manchester. In 1833 Egerton had inherited a vast fortune from his great-uncle, the Duke of Bridgewater, and now proposed to use some of his inheritance to provide a church which would not only improve the spiritual welfare of the people of Worsley, but also act as a focal point in the beautification of the village. The site that Egerton proposed for the church was on a low hill above the basin that the Duke had formed at the entrance to his colliery. On 22 November 1843, Scott sent a sketch to Egerton showing a large church, with a spire at the west end, a deep chancel, and a south aisle and porch. It is all in a plain lancet style. The laying of the foundation stone took place amid great celebrations on 14 June 1844, as it was also the day of Egerton's eldest son's twenty-first birthday. This was obviously a pre-arranged date and may have had little relevance to the actual building programme as the church was not consecrated until 2 July 1846, by which time it had been transformed from the plain building shown in Scott's sketch to a highly ornate early Decorated style church.

How Scott obtained this commission is not clear. Egerton was already employing Blore to build nearby Worsley New Hall and a parsonage to the north of the site of the church, both in his characteristic Elizabethan style. However, in 1843 The Ecclesiologist condemned Blore as ‘entirely unaquainted with the true spirit of Pointed Architecture’, while Scott was enjoying his brief moment of favour among the Ecclesiologists. Blore was anyway nearing the end of his career, and in view of his selection of Scott for the Camberwell church, perhaps suggested Scott's name to Egerton. Scott would certainly have read Pugin'sTrue Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture , when it appeared in 1841. There Pugin states as his first principle ‘that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety’. In his letter to Egerton, of November 1843, Scott seems to paraphrase his hero when he says that it was his wish ‘to introduce no feature but what has its use and no ornament which is not part of an essential feature’ and that he had preference for ‘substantial construction to external decoration and Simple reality to shewy pretence’. But the church was actually built in a highly ornate Decorated style.

Ten days after the foundation stone jollifications, Scott went abroad for the first time, and while the work was in hand, he was abroad four times in connection with St. Nicholas's Church in Hamburg. The supervision of Worsley was left to the Clerk of Works, George Evans, with Moffatt presumably making periodic visits. The long building period may reflect delays caused by the amount of carved decoration and the lack of Scott's personal supervision, although it may also reflect changes in style. Egerton would certainly have approved the changed style, and may even have instigated it. Three days before the consecration of Worsley Church on 7 July 1846, there was another family celebration, when Egerton was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Ellesmere. He eventually bore the entire sum of £7,727-8s-10d, required to build the church, including Scott's fees of £250. The south choir aisle was designed as a family chapel, but the north aisle to the nave was not added until 1851, at a cost of £4,000, again at Ellesmere's sole expense. The Earl died in his London home on 18 February 1857 and his remains were carried back to Worsley.

Cole, D., The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott (The Architectural Press, London, 1980), p. 30.
Victoria & Albert Museum, Sir Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) Architect of the Gothic Revival (Exhibition Catalogue, V & A, London, 1978), [10].
Milliken, H. T., Changing Scene, Two Hundred Years of Church and Parish Life in Worsley (H. T. Miiliken, Worsley, 1985), pp. 8-9, 11, 18.
Colvin, H., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 130, 133.
Pugin, A. Welby, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture: as set forth in two lectures delivered at St. Marie’s Ascott (Henry G. Bohn, London, 1853), p. 1.
C[okayne], G. E., revised by the Hon. Vicary Gibbs and H. A. Doubleday (eds), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland , Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant or Dormant (The St. Catherine Press, London, 1926), p. 55.
Gunnis, R., Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 (The Abbey Library, London, 1964), p. 274.
Leatherbarrow, J. S., A Victorian Period Piece, Studies Occasioned by a Lancashire Church (S.P.C.K., London, 1954), p. 153.

Scott was commissioned by Ellesmere's eldest son, now the second Earl, to design a memorial to his father. The Earl was buried in a vault in St Mark's below the family chapel, which was extended so that its east wall was level with the east wall of the chancel, and Scott placed a fine table-tomb in a new arch between the chancel and the chapel. The memorial takes the form of a recumbent figure of the Earl in the robes of the Order of the Garter and was carved by Matthew Noble (1817-1876) in white marble. The base is a highly decorative solid chest in Caen stone, by Philip, and an ironwork screen, which separates the chapel from the chancel, is considered to have been the work of Francis Skidmore (1816-1896), who was another of Scott's favourite craftsmen at that time. The Ellesmere Chapel is, said to have been ‘as impressive an example of Victorian craftsmanship of that character as could be found anywhere’.

The second Earl died only five years after his father, on 19 September 1862, and was buried at St Mark's, where he is commemorated by a plain red granite slab with incised decoration, which was inserted into an arched recess on the south side of the family chapel. This is so typical of the dignified memorial slabs that Scott was designing at that time that it seems very likely to have been his work.

The reredos was erected in St Mark's to the memory of the first Earl's wife, who died in April 1866. This extends across the full width of the chancel and is a typical Scott design in alabaster inset with polished coloured stones surrounding panels of glass mosaic, which are very similar to those that Salviati of Venice was making for the Albert Memorial at that time.

Scott carried out an inspection here in 1848 for the new church. This was finished by 1853 by Shaw and Cunningham.

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