This Members’ Talk will focus on the Arts and Crafts Church. In the 1880s Arts & Crafts was something new – by 1920 it was old hat: but around 1900 the ideas were in their prime, and especially rich and suggestive in the architecture and decoration of churches.
After the certainties of the High Victorian Gothic Revival and before the stern diktats of Modernism, church architecture in Britain took a primrose path. The Arts & Crafts were idealistic, egalitarian, visionary – rejecting convention, the city and machine capitalism. Instead architecture was all about nostalgia and romance – unworldly, impractical and a little fey. The architects – and their clients – were most interested in houses, comfort, and the right way to live. Churches had had their day: church-going was no longer central to cultural life. People were going their own way. And yet churches were still being built. It was just that the reasons had changed - and thus the results were no longer so sure-footed or predictable. And, therefore, much more interesting. The peak of Arts & Crafts church- and chapel-building was around 1900. Alec Hamilton considers churches from this period – lions of innovation and ambition; lambs of self-effacement and equivocation: oddities, puzzles, conundrums and artistic dead ends. Yet all these churches express something thrilling about the way Britain was turning from church-going certainties to a world more radical, exploratory, adventurous and brave. In this talk, Alec Hamilton will consider 25 little-known churches – none of which he has lectured on before. Who commissioned them? And why? Who designed and built then? What did they have in mind? Did they lead on to Modernism, as Pevsner argued? Or were they a beautiful, self-contained, seductive backwater, aesthetically ravishing and intellectually left-field? The talk is lavishly illustrated, and unashamedly provocative. (And 100% different from his talk in October 2020 to the Victorian Society!)
Alec Hamilton has been researching Arts & Crafts churches since 2004, first for a dissertation in a Fine Art BA; then in an MA on the work of Charles Spooner; a DPhil completed in 2016 – ‘The Arts & Crafts in church-building in Britain 1884-1918’; and finally, a book, Arts & Crafts Churches, published by Lund Humphries in September 2020. His first career was in advertising, with a side-line in radio and theatre. He has written and performed at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. More recently he has been a Trustee of the Landmark Trust, and of Friends of Friendless Churches. He has lectured widely on Arts & Crafts subjects, including the Arts & Crafts in Gloucester Cathedral, and on individual churches and architects, as well as on the churches of the Wye and Severn Valleys.
For the foreseeable future the SAHGB events will be virtual events via Zoom. We will circulate joining instructions via email the morning of the scheduled event. Please complete the form below to register.
Support the SAHGB
Please consider making a donation to support our virtual programme and educational mission: