Among those whose success has been greatest in Gothic work may be mentioned Sir Charles Barry, who was knighted for designing the Parliament Buildings, begun in 1840 and completed twenty years later; George Gilbert Scott, who did the Assize Courts, in Manchester, and New Museum, Oxford; George Edmund Street, whose Law Courts in London are so full of defects in plan yet so excellent in details; Alfred Waterhouse, whose interesting (Norman) Museum of Natural History gave substantial encouragement to the use of terra cotta; T. G. Jackson, the author of much collegiate architecture at Oxford and elsewhere; J. L. Pierson, the designer of eight churches in London; William Burgess, Sir Arthur Blomfield, and James Brooks, all well known for the high character of their work, as is also J. D. Sedding, whose broad sympathies and refined spirit ranked him as one of the most talented men of his day.
The first international exposition was held in London in 1851, and the single building in which it was contained was perhaps the most marvelous exhibit. It was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, and was the first example of the use of iron and glass on a scale of such gigantic proportions.
The so-called “Victorian Gothic” was used to a great extent for secular work as late as 1870, and as it was much stimulated by the writings of Street upon Spain and Northern Italy and by Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice,” there were frequent attempts at polychromy, shown in the use of different colored stone, brick, and terra cotta, and, in the Albert Memorial, by means of mosaic.
R. W. Edis and E. W. Godwin were among the foremost practitioners of the time, but in spite of the cleverness and boldness of design shown in some of their city and suburban buildings, neither they nor others could prolong the life of the fashion, and it presently yielded to the revival of a previous one, and the Renaissance forms of the time of Queen Anne became the vogue, especially for country houses,—nowhere more homelike than in England.
In the suburb of Bedford Park, in Lowther Lodge, as in his designs for the Alliance Assurance Company and the new Scotland Yard, Norman Shaw showed the facility of his clever pencil, and Ernest George Peto gave many evidences of his skill and taste; their work, however, often having a flavor of the Flemish.