FINE ARTS SPECIAL

Conservation

Puritanism and politics

Anthony Symondson on why St Ethelburga's could and should be rebuilt Before the Great Fire in 1666, London had 109 mediaeval churches. Until this year, seven survived in a recognisable mediaeval form. Now there are six. St Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate, destroyed by a bomb on 24 April, was thought by Sir John Betjeman to be one of the best City churches of the Middle Ages. His reasons were twofold. It represented a humble statement of 15th-century church architec- ture in which London was once rich; and its interior was given beauty, mystery and con- viction by a sensitive restoration in 1911-22 by the church architect, Sir Ninian Corn- per, who refurnished it with parclose screens, Gothic benches, wainscot panel- ling and an organ gallery at the west end. The result looked as it might have done when the last Catholic rector, John Larke, was executed at Tyburn for refusing to accept Henry VIII's supremacy.

St Ethelburga's was the smallest church in London. Modestly built of ragstone, it was sandwiched between business premis- es, unassuming, almost unnoticeable. It had an irregular, uncomplicated plan: nave and chancel under one roof, with a narrow south aisle divided by a simple arcade of four bays and a clerestory. Inside it looked bigger than it was. It offered no rivalry to its neighbour, St Helen's, Bishopsgate no grandiose monuments, no accretive legacy of mediaeval and Renaissance furni- ture. Great St Helen's represents mercan- tile riches, patronage and, as half of it was once a conventual church, relics of a Bene- dictine monastic past. St Ethelburga's denoted a long-vanished, everyday paroch- ial life.

Henry Hudson, the navigator, and his companions made their Communions there in 1607 before setting out on their voyage across the North Pole to find a short and easy passage to the 'islands of spicery'. It had few other historical associations. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries it was classicised. In 1775 it lost its weather- boarded steeple. In 1862 all post- Reformation furniture was removed by an Anglo-Catholic rector in a harsh, mid- Victorian restoration of uncompromising ugliness by R.J. Withers. Until 1932 it was hidden behind late-Georgian shops. A new rector, W.F. Geikie Cobb, was appointed in 1900. He was an unconven- tional eccentric who combined Anglo- Catholic worship with Evangelical preaching and, until his death in 1941, attracted notoriety by his unorthodox prac- tice of re-marrying divorced persons when to do so was canonically illegal. Cobb was a man of taste who was influenced by a movement in the Church of England which was set on establishing an English, rather than Roman expression of Anglo- Catholicism. It gave literal assent to the ornaments rubric of the Book of Common Prayer which stipulated that 'chancels shall remain as they have in times past' and their ornaments and clerical vesture 'as in the second year of the reign of Edward VI'.

Sir Ninian Comper was at the spearhead of this movement. He gave its scholarly principles an architectural expression of fastidious artistry. Comper was fired by the exquisite beauty and refinement of the untouched Perpendicular churches of East Anglia. His early restorations, gleaming with gold and colour, returned stripped mediaeval churches to what they were intended to be: churches of eucharistic worship, beauty and devotion, churches in which it is easy to pray.

Betjeman was not the only modern admirer of Comper's work. Sir John Sum- merson discovered Comper at Wymond- ham Abbey in Norfolk, restored at the same time as St Ethelburga's, when he was on a sketching tour with a fellow student in 1923. Shortly before he died Summerson wrote to me, 'We found the reredos breathtaking. It was still comparatively new and I had no idea that such lovely work could still be created in the 20th century. About the same time I got to know Pugin's work. Pugin, Bodley and Comper have always had for me the same magic — a genius for making late English Gothic come alive.'

As a mediaeval building St Ethelburga's is expendable: there are hundreds like it all over England and Wales. What made it unique and compelling was Camper's restoration. At St Ethelburga's he restored the mediaeval sanctuary levels. He left no colour or gilding. Wood surfaces were stained dark and the effect was dependent upon shadow and texture. Mediaeval authenticity had already been established by the existing east window. It was an early work by the glass-painter C.E. Kempe, designed in 1872 with much white taberna- cle work. It was so convincing that it reminded T. Francis Bumpus, the ecclesiol- ogist, of a genuine piece of 15th-century work. Comper enormously admired it and regarded it as Kempe's best window.

Cobb and Comper had a strained profes- sional relationship. As early as 1912 Cam- per had acidly noted, after his design for the high altar had been declined, that Cobb `was of opinion that his ladies must always know better about the altar than an archi- tect'. Sinuous Arts and Crafts branched patterns, painted on rough linen, resulted. After 1922, when a small war memorial chapel in the south aisle had been complet- ed, Cobb abandoned Comper. Four dark, heavily leaded windows by the Arts and Crafts glass-painter, Leonard Walker, were substituted for Camper's rejected designs. Yet Camper's work held the mastery of these disparate elements until a fatal error of judgment was made in 1962. The archi- tects Seely and Paget proposed the treat- ment of the east wall by a brutally harsh, obtrusive and too big mural by Hans Fiebusch. Fiebusch's mural was the only decoration violent enough to survive the explosion unscathed.

In 1991 St Ethelburga's was declared redundant. In the following year an amend- ed scheme made it a chapel of ease to St Helen's, Bishopsgate. Public worship was discontinued; the vestries became church offices; the church was left as a place of prayer. In effect, it had become an unwant- ed church with limited functions. The pow- erful public response after St Ethelburga's destruction is impressive and surprising. I would like to see St Ethelburga's rebuilt, but my fear is that this will be compro- mised by politics on several fronts.

First, diocesan politics: I do not expect the Diocese of London will readily want to rebuild a redundant church which only pre- cariously survived as a chapel of ease. The sale of a valuable site would pay for the repair of other under-insured City churches damaged by recent explosions. Secondly, ecclesiastical politics: St Helen's is a powerful centre of Evangelical fundamentalism. Its vicar, Prebendary Dick Lucas, is not sympathetic to Anglo- Catholic worship or spirituality. He seems to have little liking, or respect, for mediae- val architecture. After St Helen's was dam- aged by an earlier explosion, he engaged Quinlan Terry to draw up plans which promise to ruin the church, giving scant consideration to its mediaeval character or to its monuments and fittings. Terry pro- poses to remove J.L. Pearson's noble gild- ed reredos and screen. Mediaeval chapels will be effaced by alien floor levels. If accomplished, the result would be Calvin- ism with a lisp, a cold and sterile parody of puritan austerity, a mincing exercise informed by the dead hand of taste. With such an approach there would be no hope for St Ethelburga's.

Thirdly, architectural politics: St Ethel- burga's has already provoked a tired, Pav- lovian response from Maxwell Hutchinson, past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who recently thundered on the Sunday programme against rebuild- ing the church in pastiche. He recommend- ed Sir Basil Spence's solution at Coventry Cathedral, leaving consolidated ruins and building a modern shrine in part of them to victims of terrorism. He clearly does not know the site nor realise how small it is. But there is a more serious problem. Apart from S.E. Dykes Bower, there are few architects capable of rebuilding St Ethel- burga's. He is shortly celebrating his 90th birthday and it is unlikely that he will be commissioned to do so. Of a younger gen- eration, there are only three who are likely to approach the task with knowledge and respect: Camper's great-great-nephew John Bucknall, Warwick Pethers and Mar- tin Stancliffe. Forget the rest.

Fourthly, conservationist politics: the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Victorian Society in this case promise to be unreliable friends. Both are implacably opposed to facsimiles. Their ideology is out of date: it originated in John Ruskin and William Morris raging against conjectural restorations of mediae- val churches in the 1870s. 'Restoration is a lie from beginning to end,' they fulminated, it is a 'falsification of history'. And so it was when no evidence survived of what was being restored. The worst Victorian restor- ers had as little respect for old buildings as the present RIBA establishment. In the case of St Ethelburga's, abundant evidence in the form of original architectural draw- ings and photographs survives to justify not a loose restoration but reinstatement.

In this case, polemic is unnecessary. St Ethelburga's is not irretrievably damaged, as I first thought. The north, south and east walls survive. So do four bays of the arcade — only the west bay is damaged. The clerestory has gone but one window in the chancel remains; it could be rebuilt. The window embrasures and mullions of the east window are intact. Fifteen to 20 per cent of Kempe's east window survives, including the lead tames, which are buck- led but unharmed. Broken pieces of glass could be collected and re-assembled. Com- per's parclose screens and chapel in the south aisle are relatively unharmed. So is much of the wainscot panelling. Most of the chancel screen survives in pieces and could be reconstructed. Many of the pews are either turned over or buried, but safe. The wooden roof transoms are complete, scattered on the floor of the nave.

The entire west wall is reduced to rubble. Its fall destroyed the organ by Harrison, and Camper's west gallery. Leonard Walk- er's glass has gone, and some late-17th- century heraldic glass in the south aisle, but the ferramenta remains. The small 17th- century font saved after the war from St Swithin's, London Stone, might have sur- vived beneath the rubble and so, too, might the sword-rest from the same church.

The repair of Comper's furniture need not solely rest with conservators. A com- plete set of drawings for St Ethelburga's is kept, with the architect's drawings, in the Drawings Collection of the British Archi- tectural Library, including his design for the west gallery. Hans Fiebusch has sketch- es of his mural. That, too, should be saved as it is part of the building's history.

Intrinsically, the greater part of St Ethel- burga's survives. Abundant documentary evidence exists of what the church has and has not lost. There is little excuse for not rebuilding it, using the existing materials where possible, nor for not reinstating what remains of its furniture, incorporating most of the features and elements that were originally there.

A repaired piece of antique furniture is not pastiche. Nor is a repaired church. If it has been possible to reinstate the Queen's Gallery at Hampton Court after worse dev- astation, and to apply the same principles and techniques to the reinstatement of St George's Hall, Windsor, then it would be simplicity itself to apply the same care to St Ethelburga's.

What is required is money. One way of raising it would be for City institutions which have offered help to take on sepa- rate projects within the church. The result, if politics were overcome, would be a tri- umph of responsibility and common sense.

Anthony Symondson S.1 organised the exhibi- tion Sir Ninian Camper: the Last Gothic Revivalist at the RIBA in 1988.