I thought that Pugin's chapel in the college grounds was inaccessible but according to St Edmund's website "Non-members of the College are welcome to take part in the liturgy and use the Chapel for their private prayer." So I'll try and visit next time I'm passing.
ST EDMUND'S COLLEGE. Better known as the Old Hall Green Academy. It was named officially St Edmund’s College in 1793 and intended to be on the one hand the successor of the English College at Douai, founded in 1568, and the English school at St Omer (run by English Jesuits to the time of the dissolution of their order in France in 1762), and on the other of the small Roman Catholic school started about 1690 at Tayford and moved to The Lordship, Standon (q.v.) c. 1749 and to Hall Green in 1769. At Hall Green a brick house of 1630 was used which, with its two curved gables, still exists at the W end of the present College buildings. It stands together with divers cottages; and the Roman Catholic Parish Chapel, opened in 1818 (The Hermitage), blends in nicely with them, with its playful Gothick porch and its four arched windows. Its continuation by a light weatherboarded cottage front seems not at all incongruous.
The new college, reinforced by the immigrants from France, decided to build proper premises, an enterprise comparable in scale only with College work at Oxford and Cambridge, but far exceeding what English public schools did at that time. In 1795-9 a school was built, of fifteen bays width and three storeys height. The building which faces E is of stock brick with a three-bay pediment (also one on the W front, where a small cupola rises above it). The three main entrances and bays two and fourteen have surrounds of intermittent vermiculated Coade stone rustication. Inside on the ground floor a wide corridor or ambulacrum (painted in 1870 to designs said to be by Fuhrich of Vienna). The Refectory (altered inside) was an addition of 1805. It is two-storeyed with arched ground floor windows and stands to the SE of the main block. The architect of these early buildings was James Taylor of Islington.
In 1845, that is after the Catholic Relief Acts, an important further addition was decided on, a chapel worthy of the traditions and ambitions of the College. Pugin was chosen to be the architect. He disliked the existing buildings violently. ‘Priest factory’ is the term he described them by. His addition in a spectacularly different style is the chapel N of the old building. It was completed in 1853, without the projected tower and spire. It consists of an ante-chapel like those of Oxford colleges and a long, tall, main chapel. The two parts are separated from one another by a big two-bay-deep rood screen, an object of Catholic tradition on whose re-introduction into C19 church architecture Pugin was specially keen. The style of the Screen as of the altar and reredos is E.E., but that of the window tracery is of c. 1300-30; that is, geometrical to flowing (E window). The furnishings are by Pugin too, the red, blue, and yellow floor tiles, and much of the stained glass. Pugin, moreover, built a house for the headmaster (to the SW of the Refectory). It is in truth a small stock-brick villa, with a three-bay E front, decorated by two symmetrical bays and two symmetrical gables.
After Pugin the Scholfield Chantry was erected as a separate little rather heavy E.E. shrine, S of the Pugin Chapel. Its date is 1862, its architect unrecorded. The Galilee W of the Pugin Chapel came only in 1922 (architect: F. A. Walters).
Further large additions to the College in 1907-38 in a subdued Neo-Georgian style (by F. A. and later E. J. Walters; classrooms block T. H. B. Scott, 1922).
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