Refashioning Gothic: the Architecture of Temple Moore

Former Chair of the Victorian Society Geoff Brandwood analyses the architecture of an innovatory Gothic architect.

'Arguably the greatest of all Victorian church architects' wrote Gavin Stamp some five years ago. Quite a claim when one considers the field includes mighty figures like G.G. Scott senior, Butterfield, Street, Pearson and Bodley. Moore was from a younger generation and carried the Gothic torch into the second decade of the twentieth century until his death in 1920. He was part of an architectural world that reacted against the highly ornate, highly coloured fashions of the mid-Victorian years. After pupilage under the great G.G. Scott junior, Moore's practice took off in the 1890s, patronised by England's most liberal church-builder, Yorkshire's Sir Tatton Sykes. He is best known for his forty or so fine churches plus numerous restoration and furnishing schemes. His secular commissions show he could look beyond the doctrinaire Gothic confines of some of his predecessors and draw inspiration from the post-medieval world. Moore's greatest achievement was to recreate a church architecture that depended, as one commentator put it, on 'good proportion and sweetness if line'. This lecture will show how Moore was pivotal in creating an aesthetic for the twentieth century, including some buildings of startling power.

A former Chair of the Victorian Society and long-serving member and sometime Chair of the Events Committee, Geoff Brandwood is well known for his (academic) interest in pubs and his legendary Victorian Society pub crawls. He is the author of a well-received, extensively illustrated monograph, The Architecture of Temple Moore (2019), on offer from the publisher Shaun Tyas for £35 inc. postage 01775 821542 (RRP £45).