George Gilbert Scott
George Gilbert Scott designed or restored more than eight hundred buildings, from the St Pancras hotel to the Albert Memorial. He brought the Gothic Revival to its most splendid form and restored many of England’s medieval cathedrals.
George Gilbert Scott was born in 1811 in Gawcott in Buckinghamshire, the son of a clergyman. He was apprenticed to architects in London and began his career designing workhouses under the new Poor Law. He became a devoted follower of Augustus Pugin’s ideas that Gothic was the only true Christian architecture. His first great success was the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford, followed by the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he won in a competition in 1844.
Scott built up one of the largest architectural practices in 19th-century England. He designed churches, university buildings and public buildings, and he restored a great many cathedrals and churches, among them Westminster Abbey, Ely, Salisbury and Lichfield. His best-known buildings are the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. For the Foreign Office in Whitehall he wanted to build in Gothic, but the Prime Minister Palmerston demanded a classical style, and Scott had to redesign the scheme in Italian Renaissance.
Scott was knighted in 1872 and died in 1878. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His restorations were severely criticised by William Morris and others, who held that he destroyed medieval traces by restoring buildings to how they ought to have looked. The criticism led to the founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, and it influenced attitudes to restoration in Sweden as well. His grandson Giles Gilbert Scott also became an architect and designed, among other things, Liverpool Cathedral and the red telephone box.