In Pursuit of an English Style: The Allure of Gothic

Abstract

On Easter Monday in 1786, the western tower of Hereford Cathedral collapsed and demolished two bays of the nave and the whole of the building’s west front (Figure 1.1). Of course, various parts of England’s churches fell down with some regularity, but the downfall of Hereford’s west end and the ensuing reconstruction shifted a local architectural casualty into a national argument. Contention about the appropriate way to repair a church eventually became linked to larger ideas rooted in an English cultural consciousness. Not least among those ideas was a renewed and growing interest in Gothic architecture as an enduring form of national expression, and its reconstruction as a specifically English genre. By the late eighteenth century, cracks were clearly becoming visible in the dominance of the culture-wide neoclassicism that had characterized both state and architecture earlier in the century. As debates about the practices of architectural restoration were sparked by the repair/rebuilding at Hereford, and the restoration/demolition at Salisbury Cathedral around the same time, interpretation of the meaning of Gothic intensified and expanded. As that interpretation and its consequences began to secure an equation between Gothicism and Englishness, the publication of Thomas Rickman’s architectural taxonomies, in the years that followed, sought to make that link unbreakable.