Architecture
Stephen Dykes Bower
Gavin Stamp
Pe 80th birthdays of architects are, per- imps, less remarkable than those of other luminaries. Architects, after all, often live to great ages and can do their best work when old; Wren, for instance, died at the age of 90, Soane at 83, Nash at 85, Shaw at 81, Comper at 96. But the 80th birthday a week ago of Stephen Dykes Bower deserves notice as he is an architect whose work, although highly accomplished and publicly prominent, has received very little recogni- tion.
Mr Dykes Bower is Emeritus Surveyor to Westminster Abbey (having retired as Surveyor in 1973) and he has worked in many English cathedrals, but the fact that critics are less interested in church architects than in the designers of university halls of residence or public housing schemes is not the only reason why his work is seldom published. Unlike many of his slightly younger contemporaries who have been deluged with knighthoods and RIBA medals, Dykes Bower was not seduced by the flashy charms of the Continental Modern Movement in the 1930s; instead he remained loyal to English traditions of building and developed, in particular, the legacy of the Gothic Revival. Having a pro- found understanding of the work of those scholarly Late Victorians like Bodley and Garner, he is one of the very few architects working today who can be trusted not only with a good Victorian church but also with a mediaeval one. It was Dykes Bower who recently completed the astonishing school chapel at Lancing — but such jobs do not attract critical acclaim.
Dykes Bower became Surveyor to Westminster Abbey in 1951, which fact ex- plains why that noble building remains the most atmospheric and least vulgarised of all our great churches. He has shown a respect for and an understanding of his predecessors' careful work at the Abbey, and if I at times regret that he has sometimes responded more to the self- confidence of Gilbert Scott in his restora- tions rather than to the 'anti-scrape' conser- vatism of W. R. Lethaby, I am convinced by the appropriateness and taste of every change he has made. Not for Dykes Bower are glass doors, strident new altars, spiky avant-garde metalwork, coffee stands and souvenir stalls; one of his achievements was to concentrate all the money-changing ac- tivities at the Abbey into the former offices attached to the west front.
With Godfrey Allen, Dykes Bower was responsible for the new baldacchino in St Paul's, a design closer to Wren's intentions than its splendid predecessor slightly damaged in the Blitz. If a little brightly gild-
ed, it and the American Memorial Chapel behind seem admirable in comparison with the slick visual indignities suffered by the Cathedral in the last decade or so. Dykes Bower also restored St Vedast's, Foster Lane. This, like other post-war rebuildings of bombed Wren churches, is not at all a careful reconstruction but it is, never- theless, a fine piece of work in its own terms and was combined with the building of a clever and beautiful new rectory.
Dykes Bower has designed a handful of new churches, all interesting for their thoughtful developments of ecclesiastical styles. St John's, Newbury, is a subtle tribute to the brick polychromy of a bombed church by Butterfield. His principal new creation may well be his monument: Bury St Edmunds Cathedral. The see was created in 1914, but when Dykes Bower started work in 1960 he was dealing with the old Perpendicular parish church of St James with a Victorian chancel by Scott. He has attempted to give the building an architectural dignity worthy of a cathedral, adding a new choir and transepts which, in flint and ashlar stone, are completely harmonious with the old work. The sadness is that the scheme is un- finished: the completion of the tower and cloister were halted in 1970 by a new bishop who felt it more Christian to spend the money of the Faithful in Africa than on new architecture. Had his mediaeval predecessors felt the same, the Church of England today would, of course, lack the visible structure and presence given to it by fine buildings.
What I particularly admire are Dykes Bower's restorations of Victorian churches. One of the finest is that of St John's, Tue Brook, Liverpool, a masterpiece of 1870 by Bodley and Garner. The magnificent sten- cilled and painted decoration has been restored and recreated, and the whole treated with a rare sympathy for Gothic Revival work. The mercy is that Dykes Bower here displaced another church ar- chitect, now dead, who made a successful career vulgarising churches throughout the land: sky-blue ceilings and fancy gilding. My regret is that Dykes Bower has not done more such work. He was going to restore St Agnes', Kennington, in South London, a superb building by Gilbert Scott the younger which, after bomb damage and neglect, was still 75 per cent intact. But the Diocese of Southwark and a new incum- bent, already suffused with the progressive spirit of modern Anglicanism, had other ideas. Despite the availability of war damage money and the opinion of the Council for the Care of Churches that it was 'the most important 19th-century building to have been damaged in the late war', St Agnes' was demolished in 1956 and replaced by architectural rubbish. It was typical of Dykes Bower that he protested and resigned as architect; it was also typical that he rescued the stained glass and many fittings and installed them in the Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea, another war casualty which he was then restoring. The result, a numinous dream of refinement
and spaciousness, is one of his loveliest creations.
Like all real architects, Stephen Dykes Bower has not retired but is still practising. Long may he continue to: he is needed — and Bury St Edmunds Cathedral ought to be finished.
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