‘A Portentous Mass of Bastard Romanesque Frippery’: an Early Ecclesiological Export

One of the concerns of The Ecclesiologist from its very first edition, and one that was subsequently to reappear regularly in its pages, was the provision of church designs that would be appropriate for erection in the colonies. While subsequently the Cambridge Camden Society had much success in this direction, the outstanding artistic exports of the middle years of the nineteenth century were to sites rather closer to home: the designs — both executed and unexecuted — for great churches and cathedrals on the Continent of Europe by, among others, G. G. Scott senior, William Burges, E. W. Pugin and G. E. Street. Perhaps at no period in history was the Continent more ready to look to England for artistic inspiration, in contrast to a flow of ideas that more usually travelled in the opposite direction. It was ‘one of the very few artistic revolutions that began in this country and swept the world.’ Yet the starting point for the crown of European artistic leadership passing to England was a most unlikely one: in all probability the first nineteenth-century English architect to be employed at a Continental cathedral was Robert Dennis Chantrell (1793–1872), from Leeds. In 1839, in the very year that the Cambridge Camden Society came into existence, he was involved with the rebuilding of the roof of St Saviour’s Cathedral in Bruges following a fire that year; subsequently he repaired and considerably extended the tower and proposed other additions to the west end of the building.