The image above is of a section of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, located in the unremarkable North Kent town of Northfleet. What is remarkable about this church, built between 1913 – 1916, is that it was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect who later went on to design Liverpool Cathedral, Waterloo Bridge, Battersea and Bankside Power Stations and the traditional K2 red telephone box. The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, then, being one of the buildings on which Scott cut his teeth, is a building of national importance.
Confusingly, Giles Gilbert Scott is the son of George Gilbert Junior and Sir George Gilbert Scott Senior. Between them, this father and grandfather combination were responsible for Norwich Cathedral, St Pancras train station and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. Scott Senior has been touted by Jonathan Glancey as "the Norman Foster of Victorian England":
[F]orever busy, an inveterate traveller, he [Scott Senior] ran the biggest and most prolific architectural practice of his day.Such architectural heritage, however, was overshadowed for Giles Gilbert Scott by the alcoholism of his father. Indeed, when he was three, his father was declared as of unsound mind and consequently Scott saw little of him: he claimed to remember only seeing him twice.
Overcoming the difficulties of his childhood, Scott entered in 1902 the competition to design Liverpool Cathedral. To his surprise — and at the age of just 22 — Scott was awarded the commission. Thus began nearly 60 years of influential architectural design to flow from Scott's pencil.
Scott's father's aesthetic had gone against the rigorous early High Victorian Gothic style of his grandfather, Scott Senior. In doing so, he
was the creative missing link between the Victorian gothic revival and the arts and crafts movement, between Pugin and William Morris.Gilbert George Scott was something of a halfway house between his father and grandfather and blended the Gothic tradition with modernism. He "packaged modernity in British traditionalism" throughout his career by embracing a more symmetrical approach. After thirty years of exploring his style,this style culminated in Scott's employment as a consultant to make the newly commissioned power station at Battersea more appealing. To do so, Scott:
suggested brick as the main material for the central structure and turned the four chimneys — one on each corner — into reassuringly familiar neo-classical columns.The result is the remarkable, vast structure that still exists at Battersea, a building that represented Scott's advocation of the "middle line" — an approach that embraced both "technological progress and the human qualities of architecture".
Scott died on 9 February 1960. Like Liverpool Cathedral, the construction of Bankside continued for the rest of Scott’s life. He designed more power stations at Billingham in County Durham and Hoddlesdon in Hertfordshire, but most of his later commissions were for churches. He was working on the final one, for the Church of Christ the King in Plymouth when he was admitted to the hospital in which he would die.
For Londoners, Scott's legacy will be the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station and the single tower of what is now Tate Modern. For those that admire form, Scott will remain one of the key individuals that demonstrated that bricks can be beautiful.
