This note is based on:
The
Contexting of a Chapel Architect: James Cubitt 1836-1912
by
Clyde
Binfield, 2001, viii + 111 pages
Occasional Publications 2, The Chapels
Society, ISSN 1475-6404
I
am indebted to Professor Binfield for permission to draw extensively on
his work; the views expressed are however my own.
INTRODUCTION
FAMILY
BACKGROUND
TRAINING AND EARLY PRACTICE
STUDY AND PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICE
PUBLICATION
COMMENT
INTRODUCTION
The
architect James Cubitt (1836-1912) is an example of a professional who
develops a special expertise directly in the service of the churches.
Himself a Baptist, he served English Nonconformity widely.
Furthermore
Cubitt’s story is a good example of how family background leads to
training and early practice. With travel and study a philosophy then
starts to emerge, which is tested by use in significant projects. All is
then drawn together in a publication for the education and guidance of
others. This note therefore contains the follows that sequence.
Family
background
Binfield explains that the Cubitt’s are a Norfolk clan. In the early eighteenth century some of them migrated to London. Various Cubitt's were involved with the development of Bloomsbury, Belgravia and Clapham; with canal, dock and railway building; and with the construction of the Crystal Palace. James Cubitt’s part of the family came from Worsted and Horning. Occupationally they were millers, farmers, teachers andironmongers, while religiously they were Baptists. Revd James Cubitt (1808-63) became a Baptist minister. His church
at Bourton-on-the-Water was a meeting house that had been built in 1701, re-constructed in the 1740’s and completely rebuilt in the 1760’s.This James Cubitt, the minister, was the father of James Cubitt (1836-1912) an architect of FRIBA standing.
Training
and early practice
The
young James Cubitt was first articled to Isaac Charles Gilbert of
Nottingham
, son of a Congregational minister and architect of various
Congregational chapels.
Later
he proceeded to work with GW Elmslie of Great Malvern, whose work also
included church projects.
Subsequently
he was associated with brothers RJ and FC Withers. RJ Withers
developed a reputation ‘for a good, cheap type of church, plain
and honest rather than mean.’ FC Withers went to
America
carrying ‘the polychromatic gospels
of Ruskin and Butterfield to the thoroughly receptive
New York City
and State’. Binfield continues,
‘After a Ruskinian flourish for the Dutch Reformed of Fish Kill
Landing, his chapel work returned to the good ecclesiologist’s early
English austerity of ‘plain surfaces, clear volumes and quiet
rhythms’. His secular work was more extrovertly Ruskinian.’ Binfield
concludes that ‘The Withers brothers were good Churchmen and sound
church architects. They were admirably placed to acclimatize able pupils
who could abstract their architectural from their ecclesiastical
principles and whose sense of place was pronounced but never insular’.
Cubitt’s
next major association was with WW Pocock, a Wesleyan and architect for
the Baptist Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle. Revd James Cubitt came
to the Tabernacle as tutor to the Pastors College based there and his
architect son set up his own practice in Camberwell, where he worked on
designs for various Baptist chapels connected with Spurgeon. The church
at Wandsworth was built by the Baptist builder William Higgs who had
himself given the land.
Cubitt
moved his office to
26 Finsbury Place
where his neighbour was the architect
Henry Fuller who had Baptist, Congregational and Presbyterian
connections and was also a son of the manse. Binfield notes that
‘Fuller’s concern with light, space and their technical achievement
was demonstrated in his last and best building, Clapton Park
Congregational Church, Hackney. This building was a great galleried
horseshoe. Some twenty years later, Cubitt wrote, ‘the Meeting house
Gallery [is just] about the crudest attempt ever made at providing seats
for a certain number of people over the heads of the rest. It is a
failure practically and a horror artistically. A particular church,
possibly one surmises, Clapton, Cubitt, said was a somewhat better
‘modification of this antiquated type’.
Cubitt had reached the stage of knowing that his own work had to
be both Gothic and architectural’
Study
and philosophy
Binfield
unpacks Cubitt’s philosophy of nonconformist chapel architecture. He
was ‘an unabashed Goth’, in company with, among others, Pugin and
Butterfield, and drawing ideas from the architecture of many Western and
Middle European locations. In addition he had respect for Wren ‘whose
grand manipulation of space delighted him’. Binfield continues:
Cubitt’s goal.... was
massive honesty and historically grounded up-to-dateness. He sought to
be a monumental architect, a man for broad arches and sweeping rhythms.
He aimed to transcend fashion and to banish the taste for ‘trash and
toffee’. His was the high Victorian passion for the ‘muscle and
sinew of a building’, for ‘its life and force and
expression’....... (p36)
Cubitt’s
method of digging out the true contemporary spirit was to go back to the
thirteenth century. There he found his inspiration. But it was
inspiration and challenge to work authentically in his own time and
situation. He asked what it was like for the medieval man to be in
church. For medieval man the heart of things was not the nave, a mere
outer court for the laity; ‘what was really held essential was what
went on within – the priests about the altar’. Well, for modern man,
for modern Protestant man, what was really essential goes on all around
him, for all are priests. So, Binfield continues,’ Cubitt seized for
his all-believing, all-seeing purposes on that strongest of Christian
reference points, the Gothic style, as the best departure point for his
new architecture’. And since the high Victorians were happiest when
travelling most hopefully, it was indeed a departure, not a destination.
He strove mightily for ‘a real nineteenth century church, in a
masculine and monumental style’ and for an architecture of ‘breadth,
space and largeness of parts’.
Philosophy
into practice
Binfield
discusses a number of Cubitt’s designs in detail, identifying Union
Chapel, Islington as his ‘Master Work’. Here I would like to refer
to the project that I have personally visited, Emmanuel United Reformed
(formerly Congregational) Church,
Cambridge
.
At
Emmanuel, there were various given starting points: the building
committee insisted on a tower and the site precluded transepts or a
large central area. More
importantly, the building had to express the significance of the
recovered place of evangelical Free Churchmen in the university. The
site seemed to entail an oblong nave and the need for light, a
clerestory, piers and aisles, altogether ‘the ordinary type of
church’. Cubitt cut into this traditional line of thinking with new
ideas:
Cubitt’s
Cambridge
solution was to carry his clerestory on
four arches of unusual span supported by two huge stone columns so
placed that only one per cent of a full congregation would have no view
of the pulpit. The problem of the tower was solved by opening it full
frontal to the nave and filling it with a deep gallery for 130 of the
700 sittings. (p42)
Cubitt
described his style as ‘early English, with some slight adaptations of
early French detail’. The tower ‘escaped the English solution of a
soaring spire by opting for the continental solution of a moderate
spire’. Inside, any ornament was to be ‘of a rather reserved and
simple type’. That meant early thirteenth century with some simple
foils and mouldings but ‘nothing approaching tracery’. While there
is some stained glass, some of the proposed internal decoration has
never been completed. Binfield concludes, ’Emmanuel works. Its
acoustics are good enough. Its draughts are few enough. Its sweeping
space is exhilarating. There can be little doubt that its style has
formed the style of its select generations of worshippers.’
Publication
Cubitt
became FRIBA in 1890 and in 1892 published A
Popular Handbook of
Nonconformist
Church
Building
.
He encapsulates his design philosophy as follows:
We build churches for the
worship of God, and for the moral and spiritual culture of men. We build
them for worship, not because of any special sanctity in them or in what
they contain, but simply because the building of them and the act of
united worship in them are signs of, and helps to, the profoundest
reverence which we know how to display. We build them for moral and
spiritual culture, whether that culture be carried on by means of the
emotion or of the intellect; and whatever raises men to a higher level,
or guides them to a truer judgement of right and wrong may find a fit
place in our buildings and in our services.
(p75)
This
philosophy unites intellect and emotion, truth and beauty, the fleeting
nature of a service and the permanent nature of the building. If each
service is an act of re-creation, the building is what unites them. Such
buildings do not have to be grand or costly; the principles can be met
equally in the ordinary:
A church full of thought
and refinement will look respectable whatever its materials may be, and
the secret of building well and cheaply is just to use common materials
in an artistic way. .... From the common brick, or rubble or tiles or
concrete of the neighbourhood, something worth looking at may be
made.... (p76)
Cubitt
emphasised his craftsman’s gospel. ‘Men’ he believed
want to put something of
their souls into their work, something of their aims and hopes; they
want the spiritual to shine through and transfigure the material. Where
this is, there is art. It does not depend on ornament, or luxury, or
expense. (p76)
Ultimately
an architect can only do what he is allowed to do, for:
an architect’s work is
a building, and not the mere plan or view of a building. His
productions, then, it is always in the power of others to influence to
an extent beyond that to which the productions of most other artists can
be influenced. (p79)
Cubitt’s
clerks of works tended to be Baptist on Baptist projects, Methodists on
Methodist projects and so on. However, in a piece on Faith and Facts for
the Building News he opined that too much religion of a particular kind
might be a bad thing and that
There is a sense in which
every man ought to grow his own creed, as every shellfish grows his own
shell. But few men do this. Most men, before they are men, are saddled
with a ready made belief, which is too tight here, and too loose there,
and which never really fitted them at all. (p92)
Comment
Cubitt’s
is an exciting professional story. He was working at a time when all
churches were in an expansive mood and were operating on distinctive
denominational lines. The climate of expansiveness created a large field
into which he could enter, and the strong denominational structures with
their distinctive modes of worship enabled him to carve out a
nonconformist speciality. Thus he was able to realise a strong
faith-related professionalism which was completely authentic for his
time and place. He was able to make being ‘a chapel architect’ into
a coherent life’s work.
Possibly
Cubitt’s immediate successors include those architects and surveyors
today who develop skills in varied works of adaptation, conservation or
conversion of chapel buildings of his era.
A
wider group of successors may be those who have to try to fathom what
the Word says, not only about chapels in which it can be expounded, but
with true catholicity about the wide range of buildings called for in
our different kind of era.
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