The Royal Exchange, London, constructed by Tite and opened in 1844, an edifice with a fine Corinthian portico at its eastern entrance and having internally a quadrangle surrounded by an ambulatory, Goldsmiths' Hall, by Philip Hardwick, opened in 1835, University College, having a Corinthian portico 40o feet long and surmounted by a handsome dome, the National Gallery of Paintings (1832–r838), by William Wilkins, and the Custom-house by Laing, having an imposing facade toward the Thames, by Smirke, may be added to the classical piles before mentioned.
Birmingham has for its town-hall a marble Corinthian temple which was until recently the finest building in that modern city. A few other monumental structures, while following the style then in vogue, entered their mute protest against the prevalence of plastered facades.
Worthy of mention among the London Renaissance structures of the fifth decade of this century, and therefore contemporary with the Gothic revival, are the fronts of the Treasury and the Board of Trade (1847), the magnificent Bridgewater House, built for the earl of Ellesmere and fin ished in i85r—both by Sir Charles Barry—and the Museum of Practical Geology, by Pennetliorne, also completed in 1851.
The magnificent range of Italian palazzi which adorn Pall Mall, including the majestic and severe Reform Club with its grand crowning cornice and its Bramantian windows, the highly ornate Carlton, the Travellers' Club, by Sir Charles Barry, and others, many of them works of the fourth and fifth decades, remain to prove the applicability of the Renaissance to modern uses.
The " Stucco" Era.—The movement in the direction of honest con struction, though older in England than in the United States, did not commence until about the fifth decade of the century; it was preceded by an age of stucco, when bad brick-work was made to simulate stone and palaces of pretentious classicality rose on every hand. This was the age of the spas, of Cheltenham, Bath, Leamington, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, whose older streets are still lined with these stucco palaces, fallen from their high estate, yet for the most part maintained in tolerable order by paint and patching. London had more than its share of this stucco palace-building, and has scarcely yet relinquished it. The invention of Portland cement—a material more durable and more monumental in its appearance than Roman cement—tended to keep up the supply of sham fronts, and long after the greater part of the public and commercial build ings had imbibed a better spirit, and even cottages of small size had returned to honest brick, the mansions of the rich at the West End of London continued to be built of brick, covered with cornices, mould ings, balustrades, and elaborate window-dressings of Portland cement upon brick cores.
But at the age of which we are writing the mania for stucco invaded all classes of buildings; town-halls, assembly-halls, theatres, club-houses, even churches, were infected by it. Political economists lauded stucco
as a blessed invention which enabled the comparatively poor man to live in a palace and gave to small places the power to rival large ones in the ostentation of their public buildings. Architecture, in its true sense, was absent from these compo-facades, which were invariably conceived in " Palladian " manner, with gawky pilasters, usually Corinthian, running through two or three storeys, and with a lower floor divided into blocks to give a look of solidity. The later Portland cement mansions, such as abound in the neighborhood of Hyde Park, such as were built by the street in the years succeeding the exhibition of 1851, were more ornate: they threw Palladio over for the richer French Renaissance.
The Gothic is no doubt that the rebellion against this sham construction, usually " Palladian," but not seldom blossoming into the hood-inoulds, gables, and battlements of a corrupt Gothic, greatly aided the success of those students who from their long study of medifeval structures imbibed not only a love for Gothic, but also an earnest desire for honesty in construction. Such honest construction, avoiding alike the " compo " of a generation ago and the ultra-classicism of the early part of the century, was not applied to mansions and the less costly public buildings conceived in the various phases of the Renaissance until the medimvalists had shown the way.
The Gothic revival, led in England by John Britton, Rickman, the elder Pugin, the younger Pugin, and others, and perfected and con tinued by Sir George Gilbert Scott, George Edmund Street, William But terfield, mid a host of more or less celebrated enthusiasts for medievalism, for a while carried all before it. Not only were churches, town-halls, and other large public buildings where the aesthetic idea is supposed to have full scope designed in imitation of some phase of the English or conti nental pointed style, but hotels, railway-stations, private houses in the city and in the country, club-houses, museums, and even shops, ware houses, and office-buildings, presented to the English public more or less successful imitations of the buildings of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. For a while the perpendicular phase of English Gothic was popular in churches and large public buildings. The Houses of Parliament, at Westminster, were designed and executed in this style, but it was not long before the current of taste ran strongly toward the Decorated or Early Fourteenth-century manner, which became, despite occasional excursions into the simpler Early English of the preceding cen tury, emphatically the style of ecclesiastical buildings.