Dan Cruickshank and the Family That Built Gothic Britain

The St Pancras Grand Midland Hotel in London

is a Gothic Revival masterpiece,

a Victorian fairy-tale palace,

a cathedral of commerce.

For years unloved and abandoned,

now resurrected to its former glories.

But behind its facade, lies a dark secret.

On Thursday, in early May 1897,

a real-life Gothic tragedy took place here.

It was a tale of madness, alcoholism,

religious conflict and sexual scandal.

It happened in one of the hotel's warren of more than 300 rooms.

Nobody knows exactly where the ghosts from a Gothic past reside.

A 57-year-old man lay on his deathbed, disgraced,

forgotten, broken.

His body ravaged by cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease.

He had been a heavy drinker.

His estranged family gathered around the bed to bid him farewell,

and this included the 16-year-old son

he had only ever met once before.

This moving, Gothic scene took place within the masterpiece

designed by the late father of the dying man.

The family were the Gilbert Scotts

and their tale is the greatest story Charles Dickens never told.

Over three successive generations, the Scotts enjoyed triumph, wealth

and acclaim, but also suffered controversy, tragedy and scandal.

As a dynasty, they shaped 19th century Britain and beyond.

They helped to give the greatest empire in history

its look and identity.

They believed they could beautify Britain by rebuilding it

in the Gothic style...

..at the same time as embracing the glory of God and the power of money.

They took the language of the past and built the future.

The Gilbert Scotts were inspired architects who took the historic,

Gothic style of Britain,

adapted it to the industrial

and technological world and, in the process,

paved the way for the architecture of the 20th century.

The first of the great Scotts, as we could call them,

was George Gilbert Scott.

He's one of the most prolific, brilliant

and controversial architects working

in Britain during the 19th century.

He spent a lot of his time on trains like this,

travelling around the land to visit his various projects.

And while travelling by train, he would

while away the time completing a rather personal journal.

He wrote, for example...

"So far as I was personally concerned, my love

"of Gothic architecture was wholly independent

"of books relating to it.

"None of which, I may say, I had seen at the time

"when I took to visiting and sketching Gothic churches."

Scott's passion for the Gothic was aroused as a boy growing up

in rural Buckinghamshire.

He was born in the village of Gawcott,

where his father was the vicar,

so Scott was surrounded by Gothic churches.

At the age of 16, Scott set off from his humble origins to

seek his fortune in London.

He became an architect's apprentice, but his first boss moaned

that Scott wasted his time doing drawings of medieval buildings.

The young architect could see the future in the past,

but he would have to wait.

After the death of his father in 1834, the career of this

fledging architect was forced down a rather un-Gothic and ungodly route.

In that year, new legislation led to the building of scores

of workhouses for the poor,

like this one in Northampton

designed by Scott in the classical style

when he was in his early 20s.

This is a raw and chilling building, and a reminder that Scott

started his career designing in the late Georgian, classical tradition.

Anyone who has read Dickens will be well aware of the cruelty

and abuses associated with the workhouse system.

But for struggling young architects like Scott in the 1830s,

the sudden boom in the construction of workhouses offered a gravy train.

It was tempting to ask no questions and jump aboard to make money.

Later, Scott would call this work dirty and disagreeable,

but he needed the money because he had a young family to support.

Scott toiled hard and built about 40 workhouses...

..as well as Reading jail...

and an asylum for orphans at Wanstead in Essex.

Scott was, perhaps, typical of his age, God-fearing, ambitious,

hard-working. A bit of a snob about his family.

Desperate to make the social climb, fearful of fall.

And, I'm sad to say, he didn't look like a sort of typical

romantic Goth, with his piercing eyes and mop of hair.

But to judge by later portraits, a balding

and rather conventional mutton chopped bank manager.

Typical, I suppose, of a businessman architect.

And business dictated that he

designed workhouses in the classical style,

but his true passion in life was the Gothic.

Scott had a profound knowledge of medieval buildings

and had a very good eye, as well as a good understanding,

of how they were constructive.

And he was caught up in the great enthusiasm for the Gothic, combined

with the religious revival which occurred in the 1830s and '40s.

And then he read Pugin, and he talks about how he was somebody

that had awoken from a dream by the thunder of Pugin's writings.

And after that, he wanted to be a Gothic revivalist.

Pugin was the architect who gave the Gothic Revival a programme

and a manifesto and Scott was a keen apostle.

It was in Oxford, the city of dreaming spires,

that Scott designed one of his finest

and most revealing Gothic Revival buildings,

the chapel of Exeter College.

The chapel, constructed in the late 1850s, is something of a surprise.

It's very large and it's based

on a mid-13th century French prototype -

the Sainte-Chapelle - the Royal Chapel

on the Ile de la Cite in Paris.

A modest early 17th century chapel was swept away from this grand,

sophisticated, metropolitan construction. Very ambitious.

But Scott wanted to make it the centre of a reconstructed

Gothic world.

Scott adhered to Pugin's principle

that Gothic architecture reigned supreme

because it was Christian and structurally refined

unlike the classical, which he believed was pagan in origin.

He was a Gothic magpie, who copied the details from Sainte-Chapelle

in Paris and other churches he'd visited on the Continent...

..with saints enveloped in exuberant canopies,

grotesque gargoyles warding off evil spirits...

and the most slender of spires pointing to the heavens above.

Mmmm.

As with the Sainte-Chapelle,

the glory of this building is its interior.

Huge windows allowing God's light to flood inside.

Light manipulated, made sacred by colour, by the stained glass.

It's also a monument to authentic Gothic construction.

Stone vaults, stone ribs,

restrained outside by these massive stone buttresses.

The buttresses follow a key principle of Gothic

architecture - honesty.

Their beauty comes from their functional perfection.

The inspiration of Sainte-Chapelle was very direct.

Scott had visited the chapel during his French tour of 1847

and made a series of studies of the chapel.

These are shafts, column shafts, grouped together.

Capitals and from the capitals spring these lovely,

minimal stone ribs.

And between the ribs, areas of stonework.

He thought it beautiful, but also, he believed it to be

the ultimate expression of the Gothic

system of construction in which shafts and capitals and ribs

and vaults and decoration were all working together in happy harmony.

The same thing could be said about Scott's life.

He was the archetypal self-made Victorian man,

who was busy building a dynasty.

In many ways,

the story of the Scott dynasty could be a novel by Charles Dickens.

Great Expectations crossed with Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House.

It's a story of a battle for success, a fear of failure,

light and shade, life and death.

George Gilbert Scott had five sons with his wife, Caroline Oldrid.

Scott's favourite son was number three, Albert Henry.

He won a scholarship to Exeter College

and studied here amongst his father's Gothic buildings.

Scott doted on the boy and wrote proudly about his academic

achievements in mathematics and science.

The future looked rosy.

By now, the family lived in the idyllic village of Ham in Surrey.

Home was the grand manor house.

Scott's hard work had paid off and he was a wealthy man.

But, as in a Dickensian melodrama,

where there was triumph, tragedy lurked nearby.

In January 1865, Albert Henry caught a chill

while boating on the Thames and fell gravely ill.

Scott rushed home to be at his son's bedside.

I have in front of me,

reproductions of the handwritten pages from Scott's Journal.

This was what he wrote about Albert Henry.

"He seemed to wake from some fearful dream

"and with the fullest conviction, that he was in the world of spirits.

"He told me he had seen the torments of the lost

"and he was filled with the most intense horror."

Think of this, your favourite son, cradled in your arms and dying.

He tells you he's been to Purgatory. He's seen the suffering of the dead.

He's terrified that he's going to return and join them

in their suffering, and there is nothing you can do to help him.

The horror, the intense horror that Scott must have suffered.

After three days of mental and physical suffering,

Albert Henry died aged just 20.

He was buried in the churchyard at nearby Petersham in

a tomb designed by his father.

Death robbed Scott of his son,

but it also presented him with an opportunity

to seal his reputation as a Gothic trailblazer.

Poignantly, when Albert Henry died, Scott was designing

a memorial for another Albert - the husband of Queen Victoria.

His death at the age of 42 in 1861 had left the Queen

overwhelmed by grief.

The Albert Memorial is a most extravagant affair.

Gothic, sacred architecture, used to celebrate the life of one man.

It's inspired by a ciborium, which is the canopy erected in a church

over the high altar.

But here, the altar has been removed and instead

is an image of Albert.

Or indeed has the altar been removed?

Is Albert actually sitting on the altar?

In which case, this is surely somewhat blasphemous.

Certainly, the glittering statue of Albert has a god-like presence.

But this is much more than just a monument to grief,

the Victorian equivalent of the Taj Mahal.

It gave regal pedigree to the new national style.

The memorial marked the coming-of-age of the Gothic Revival.

When completed in 1872, it was hugely popular

and soon became a national icon.

It also carried a particular message about the nation's aspirations,

ambitions, achievements, about empire.

It suggests that empire, the conquest and exploitation of

distant lands, was validated by what Britain could bring

to their inhabitants.

It creates an image of civilisation and superiority,

of virtue and dignity,

of Christian values and technological progress.

There's one detail I particularly love.

There's a portrait of George Gilbert Scott.

He had himself inserted there amongst the great architects,

past and present.

So, the son of a country vicar had made it at last to the high

table of architectural culture.

Queen Victoria was so delighted by this memorial to her beloved

husband that, in 1872, she made George Gilbert Scott a knight.

If churches and monuments had made Scott's reputation,

they were not the limit to his ambition for the Gothic Revival.

He wanted to take it much further.

One of Scott's lesser-known, but most intriguing buildings,

lies hidden near this woodland in Nottinghamshire.

It's his only country house.

And its design gave him the opportunity to disprove what

he called that absurd supposition that Gothic architecture is

exclusively and intrinsically ecclesiastical.

The old Kelham Hall had been destroyed by fire in 1857

and the owner, the local squire

and Conservative MP, John Manners-Sutton,

chose Scott to rebuild it in the fashionable Gothic style.

Designing Kelham Hall gave Scott the opportunity to experiment

with the Gothic language.

He wanted to demonstrate that he could design a country house

that was comfortable, convenient and modern, yet Gothic.

Scott didn't want to replicate an esteemed Gothic model,

as he had done slightly earlier with the chapel at Exeter College.

He wanted to create something new,

an authentic 19th-century Gothic architecture.

The result is somewhat curious.

A bit of a mix and match affair, really.

It doesn't look like a church, nor particularly does it look

like a country house.

More, I suppose, like a public building.

A Town Hall roomed in the countryside.

Golly, this does feel like a public building.

This double height, medieval-style

Great Hall with masonry vault with ribs. Incredible scale.

And also, the corridor has a vaulted ceiling -

most unusual for a country house. Not cosy, certainly.

Also...feels like a church, despite what Scott wanted to achieve.

This was the withdrawing room,

but there's a central column,

this shaft, making it feel rather like a cathedral chapter house,

so the inspiration is ecclesiastical.

These shafts are marble, but below them, iron,

wrought iron, you see?

And beautiful, wrought iron capital mould stone, but wrought iron.

But this Victorian pile has a sinister, Gothic tale to tell.

Well, tell me about the man for whom this house was built,

John Manners-Sutton.

John Manners-Sutton, very respectable on the surface,

MP for Newark on two occasions, fine, upstanding

man in the local community,

an excellent aristocratic fellow.

But of course underneath this veneer, there was dark,

deep undercurrents of a Gothic nature.

He was absolutely a horror to his wife.

He committed vile acts of cruelty over a long period of time.

And the initial cause of this ghastly treatment?

She found out that her husband was committing

adultery on a serial level,

in other words, with many, many women, in Kelham Hall itself.

Good heavens. He brought his doxies back here his and misbehaved,

-almost in front of his wife?!

-Yes, indeed.

And this is really someone who is behaving as a monster.

While working on Kelham Hall, Scott won a commission,

which seemed like the chance in a lifetime to take

the Gothic Revival to new heights in the secular realm.

But it drew him into a battle of wills with the most powerful

man in the land, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.

It was over a new building for the Foreign Office in the heart

of British Government at Whitehall.

It was potentially the most important

and high profile job in Scott's career.

Certainly, it was the longest. In the end, it went on for 21 years.

And it was very lucrative, bringing in £35,000 in fees.

But I would suggest that also, it was the most humiliating job.

It was a key conflict in the mid-19th century

battle of the styles, which pitted the virtues of the Gothic

against the might of the classical.

Scott, of course, believed in the Gothic.

Gothic was the national style, it was rational,

it was Christian and he was determined to show what he could do.

But Palmerston was horrified by the idea that Scott was going to

Gothicise the whole of Whitehall.

He felt he had to resist this tide of pointed arches.

Once his Gothic design had been rejected by the man

he calls "my archenemy", erm, "had become autocrat of England",

he came up with a compromise which was Byzantine.

Palmerston took one look at it

and said it was "neither one thing nor t'other.

"A regular mongrel affair".

So, Scott had to think, should he resign on principle,

-but he really believed that the job had come to him by providence.

-Yes.

And he wasn't going to give it up.

So, in the end, he did as he was told

and produced an extremely creditable classical design.

It was almost unthinkable - the Gothic evangelist built

a temple to the classical.

Just as Scott was losing the biggest architectural

battle of his life, the grim reaper came back to haunt him.

This is Scott's Journal for March 1872.

Now... "A terrible blow has fallen upon me."

His beloved wife Caroline had died.

It led to much soul-searching and to guilt.

He says, "Oh, my dearest wife...

"If thou canst hear me now, forgive the faults which thou knowest

"but too well."

Really broken man.

Scott designed this beautiful tomb for Caroline in the churchyard

at Tandridge, the Surrey village where they'd been living.

One of the reasons Scott may have felt he'd neglected Caroline

was he'd been working obsessively on a major new commission.

After the grief of losing both his wife and the battle

of the styles, it seemed the last chance to restore his self-respect

and win back his reputation as a leader of the Gothic Revival.

It wasn't a cathedral or a palace or even a country house.

It was a bustling hotel for a railway station,

but this is a grandiose design that transcends commercial function.

It proclaims to the world what would have been

if the Foreign Office had been built in its original Gothic vision.

When the Midland Railway Company launched a competition to find

an architect for a hotel and offices for the new

St Pancras Station in London, Scott entered a design that was much

larger and more expensive than the brief.

But amazingly, he still won.

The Midland Grand Hotel is arguably George Gilbert Scott's masterpiece.

Some critics argue that it's architecturally too

grand for a mere railway hotel, but that surely was to miss the point.

This was the Cathedral of its age,

celebrating new technology, improved communications, progress.

It gave the modern world the pedigree of history.

Scott used Gothic detail and allied it with bold

and modern methods of construction to produce a building that

has vigour and originality.

I love this marriage between heroic Victorian engineering

and the Gothic revival architecture.

The architecture was beautiful, full of crafted details and ornament.

Lovely brickwork.

This granite shaft here, this stone shaft,

whereas engineering is ruthless, unadorned,

simply wrought iron plates riveted together.

Simple and honest expression of the means and materials of construction.

Stepping inside is like entering another world -

a world of glamour and excess.

The grand staircase is the architectural

showpiece of the hotel.

It floats through space in the most impressive manner.

And also, it reveals a brilliant

and eclectic mix of architectural influences.

Together, these reveal the richness of Gilbert Scott's imagination.

The masterstroke of his vision is how he marries

Gothic Revival principles to modern construction methods.

He takes the past and paves the way for the future.

This is the ladies' coffee room as was

and it's fascinating here to see how, in public rooms like this,

major public rooms, Scott fused medieval building traditions

with modern building technology to forge a new

and distinct Gothic style of architecture.

Between these lovely granite columns, very traditional,

between these columns and the wall, you can see these beams

standing, but those beams are in fact made out of wrought iron.

Here, the essential structure is exposed

and in the Gothic spirit ornamented.

It's incredible, really, those gilded details being in fact

the rivets holding the wrought iron plates together.

The hotel was pioneering.

Radiators heated the corridors

and ceiling cornices were perforated for ventilation,

and had the first passenger lift in London, now gone.

When it opened in 1876,

the Midland Grand Hotel was state of the art...

..but as tastes and fashions changed its popularity waned.

It closed as a hotel in 1935

and became railway company offices before being abandoned.

For years it lay neglected and faced demolition.

But miraculously it has been restored to its former glories

and is once more a fitting testament to the genius of

Sir George Gilbert Scott.

Scott died in 1878.

He'd done much single-handedly to give Victorian Britain

its aesthetic language

and transform the Gothic into a national style.

Where better to be buried than the medieval Gothic masterpiece of

Westminster Abbey?

In total, he'd designed or restored at least 850 buildings.

His death was not the end of the Scott dynasty.

He had a son, a brilliant son, who's capable of developing

the Gothic language of architecture into the later 19th century.

The son was also called George Gilbert Scott,

but has been known rather cruelly to history as Mad Scott.

It was always going to be a struggle following in the footsteps

of such a successful and famous father.

Middle Scott enjoyed a privileged education,

but he would never escape from his father's shadow.

He was a gifted architect,

we know that from his surviving drawings and buildings...

..but it was impossible to live up to his father's great expectations.

To make it worse,

misfortune and the loss of some of his best buildings

have diminished his legacy.

Well, Scott Junior and his father, their relationship was complicated.

But George Gilbert Scott Junior worked closely with his father

on a number of restoration projects,

not least that of rebuilding the spire and tower of

Chichester Cathedral after it collapsed,

but I think he was temperamentally different.

He was certainly more refined, but his two finest buildings,

the two London churches, Kennington and Southwark,

were badly damaged in the Second World War and then destroyed.

So we just have photographs now of St Agnes, Kennington.

It was in its day almost a revolutionary building.

This looked at the late Gothic and it sought refinement and elegance.

In many ways it was in the, as it were, the High Victorian tradition

of urban churches - very bare on the outside.

And the glory of St Agnes, Kennington,

it's quite clear from the photographs,

was the interior, and that's what impressed me.

Middle Scott is a tantalising figure.

While his father's legacy seems to be everywhere,

you have to hunt for examples of his genius.

I've come to a very remote location on

the edge of the north Yorkshire moors

to see the best surviving Gothic church

with which middle Scott was involved.

The church is named St Mary Magdalene Eastmoors,

and there it is in front of me.

Gosh, this is exciting. Ah!

Golly.

It's small, of course, I knew that.

But I can see, architecturally...

it's very big indeed.

This is a sign post to where the Gothic Revival was going.

Pretty amazing little bellcote. There it is, the tower...

with a pyramid. Strange and inventive details,

not directly dependant on Gothic prototypes,

but this is an invention in the Gothic spirit.

Look at the door - it's absolutely fascinating.

You have...

this slab of masonry, smooth with very little ornamentation.

This big, very simplified...

Gothic moulding around the top of the portal.

And that's it. Otherwise, plain, abstract, simple, modern.

And there's no great carved corners detail,

just the edge of the roof coming down

and these lovely water spouts, no gargoyles.

Oh!

The nave.

Well...

sophisticated, simplicity. The roof is wonderful. Wonderful.

It's a medieval-style wagon roof, that's what they're called,

pointed with a ridge.

But it has an utterly modern feeling

because it's so reduced, so minimal in a way.

It's a celebration.

It's celestial, the heavens, it has a feeling of joy.

It's important down below

and then this wonderful sophisticated shape

and colour up there.

And the lovely tiny beams slightly cambered up in traditional manner

with stencilling.

Again, very playful, just little flowers. God's creation.

Another thing which is fascinating, fascinating,

here in front of me...

What appears to be, again,

a very modern, abstract and strange window is in fact

an ancient medieval tradition.

This is a squint,

a medieval idea, so that people in the aisle would stand there

and have a view through here of the high alter.

And the reredos is lovely too - very much of the period.

Of course, more obviously directly Gothic.

This building is charming and very important.

It's been given much more of the simple language of the modern age,

where direct reference to history is to a large degree abandoned,

and pure Gothic form and spirit is being used

to create a 20th century architecture.

Fascinating, fascinating, and important.

Within such a small building lurks such a big idea,

lurks the modern world.

Middle Scott experimented with different architectural styles,

of which his Gothic father wouldn't have approved.

This can be best seen in Hull,

where he designed a number of houses in the suburbs.

George Gilbert Scott Senior wanted to demonstrate that Gothic

was appropriate for all types of buildings, churches of course,

but country houses, museums, hotels, railway stations.

His son, middle Scott, had a somewhat different idea.

Yes, Gothic for churches, or even public buildings,

but for domestic architecture he wanted to go back to

the English classical tradition called the Queen Anne Revival.

Wonderful example here of middle Scott's work.

Queen Anne really is an earlier style, early 17th century.

His idea really, I suppose, was that this type of architecture

represented the great English domestic tradition

and made more comfortable homes.

Scott's palate of materials and variety of details is fascinating.

Very attractive.

Red brick, white painted joinery, white areas of plaster.

The details are Classical,

the mask up there appearing from foliage,

very lovely, sort of early 17th century.

I think these panels are particularly interesting. Look here.

You see triangles impressed in what would be plaster or concrete.

Very hard. Lovely.

It's a sense of ornament achieved in the most abstract and minimal way.

Middle Scott was clearly his own man.

He branched out further from his father in 1874

when he set up Watts & Co.

The company today run by his great-great granddaughter,

Marie-Severine de Caraman Chimay,

who has some ribald tales to tell.

Lots of stories like he used to go to the opera house

and measure a lady's bottom with his dividers.

I heard this!

Now I hear you say it, I have to believe it!

I think we have to believe it cos...

when you read about what he's done and all about his life,

yes, you can see that probably he did this.

He was obsessed with anything...

Anything had to be aesthetic, designed.

He wanted to like everything he had at home,

so if you didn't like a plate of a bit of crockery,

-he would just smash them on the floor.

-As a child?

I think as an adult as well.

I know the feeling. I often do it myself.

-Do you have pictures?

-Yes!

I mean, they loved partying, so that's them in fancy dress.

Absolutely fascinating.

He's had a few brandies, maybe.

He's smiling at her with, seemingly, affection.

She's looking a little bit unamused, isn't she?

-We have one remaining drawing he did.

-Oh, really?

Oh, design for a wallpaper, I suppose.

Probably.

I mean, we're still looking and studying it to find out.

-This... So this was designed by him for the company?

-Yes.

-It's the only one you have.

-It's the only drawing that we have.

And then on, the other hand, we have examples of... That's a wallpaper.

-This is similar, but not the design.

-No, it's not the same.

But we haven't got the original design,

but we know that's one of his...designs.

And it's quite nice.

I was looking through the stock book the other day of 1878

and it's already in there, and we're still doing it today.

It seems that middle Scott, unlike his workaholic father,

was an eccentric dandy.

Then disaster tipped him towards madness.

In 1870, middle Scott's house and studio in Cecil Street,

off The Strand, was destroyed by fire.

He lost all his drawings, his beloved library,

in a sense, his identity.

That would be enough to drive you mad.

Enough to drive me mad.

He started drinking heavily

and seemed to rebel against his family background.

He had a complete mental breakdown.

First of all, was he rejected something of what his father

stood for by becoming a Roman Catholic,

although he waited until his father was dead.

This caused a breach certainly with his brother John Oldrid,

who inherited Sir Gilbert's practice.

And after that, his behaviour became extremely erratic and distressing.

I don't think it had anything to do with architecture.

Indeed, his architectural ability remained quite unimpaired.

He designed the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist

in Norwich, today the cathedral of East Anglia.

It turned out to be his largest work

and surely would have made his father proud.

But his life was unravelling.

His brother tried to have him committed for lunacy...

..so middle Scott fled to France,

where he set himself up with a French mistress.

On his return, things only got worse.

Middle Scott's behaviour became increasingly bizarre

and disruptive, to put it mildly.

In consequence, he was abandoned by his outraged wife,

who no doubt feared that middle Scott's behaviour would plunge

the family into social disgrace.

They put middle Scott here for a while,

in the St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, a lunatic asylum,

which strangely has in its grounds a splendid Gothic chapel

designed, of course, by Gilbert Scott Senior.

Strange coincidence.

While here, middle Scott, I suppose out of desperation, out of anger...

..wanted protest, attempted to burn the hospital down.

I have a lot of sympathy for middle Scott.

His odd behaviour was due to mental illness

and his family didn't behave with much sympathy,

support or understanding.

The Times waded in and accused John Oldrid

of operating out of fury, out of anger.

He was so put out by the affair his brother had been having with

the anonymous French lady.

There was to be no reprieve for middle Scott.

He died in 1897 at the age of 57 of cirrhosis of the liver,

brought on by his heavy drinking.

His final days were spent in the Midland Grand Hotel,

his father's Gothic masterpiece.

Why remains a mystery.

Could dying there have been homage to his great father

or some kind of twisted revenge?

He was buried in the cemetery of St John's Parish Church

in Hampstead, near where he'd lived with his family

before everything started to go wrong.

Well...

Well, well well.

You never think that one of Britain's most intriguing

19th century architects lies buried here, not much of a monument,

just an off-the-peg slab with a cross on it.

Let's have a look.

Let's have a look.

No-one has bothered to clear the brambles away.

"In memory of George Gilbert Scott.

"FSA. Sometime fellow of Jesus College Cambridge."

Well, well, well.

"On whose soul, Jesus, have mercy."

Middle Scott had genius, but his life was blighted by scandal,

family conflict and mental illness.

I suppose it was impossible for him to follow successfully in

the slipstream of such an ambitious and successful father.

So in his way he rebelled and followed a different path,

a path that led him initially to a sublime...

..Gothic architecture and ultimately to grotesque Gothic tragedy.

Perhaps the most touching epitaph to middle Scott

came from his son Giles, who hardly knew his father.

He remarked, "I always think that my father was a genius,

"who was a far better architect than my grandfather,

"and yet look at the reputations of the two men."

Giles once commentated that he only met his father twice,

and one of these meetings was on his father's death bed,

so it's hard to see how middle Scott could have inspired Giles

to take on the baton of the Scott dynasty.

We know that Giles was encouraged by his energetic mother

and taken under the wing of one of his father's former colleagues,

who would work in the brave new world of the 20th century,

when modernist architects were determined to consign

the Gothic to the dustbin of history.

It was up to Giles not to just preserve the Scott legacy,

but to reinvigorate it.

His opportunity came sooner than anyone could have expected.

In 1901, while still training,

he entered a competition for

the design of an Anglican cathedral for Liverpool.

It's impossible to overestimate the size and importance of this job.

It was only the third new Anglican cathedral built in this country in

the 350 or so years since the Reformation.

More than 100 architects competed.

When the competition for Liverpool Cathedral was open,

his mother, who I think was probably a good character,

came around and said, "Giles, where are your drawings?"

He was like, "You know, I've done a few

"because we do things like that in the practice."

"OK, let's put them on the table."

And she put everyone around the table and they all worked on drawings,

finishing the stones and everything, details, and he won the competition.

Of course, the competition was an anonymous competition.

Yes, and he won.

No-one knew he was one of the Gilbert Scotts.

And he was only 21.

For the easy-going young man, this was Wonderland.

It was his chance to bring the Gothic into the 20th century

and prove it was still relevant to the modern age.

The reredos at the high alter is a thorough essay in medieval Gothic.

But look in the other direction,

towards the part of the cathedral constructed from the 1920s,

and you can see emerging from Gothic form and detail

the world of modern architecture,

characterised by soaring, lofty spaces

and increasing bold simplicity.

And look at that strange bridge,

like a factory walkway.

This is not so much the house of God, but a power house.

It's a brilliant fusion of the Gothic and the modern.

This becomes clear once you delve beneath the skin of the cathedral

and see how it's built.

I'm in the crossing tower -

astonishing, modern, industrial construction.

Below me is the vault, which one can see from

the body of the floor of the church.

Stone, I believe, but also areas of concrete there.

But above me, all this reinforced concrete construction -

the walls, strong, modern brick.

Of course, an entirely different atmosphere to

the body of the cathedral below.

Inside, the bell tower is like a skyscraper -

an almost shocking contrast to what's outside -

but it remains faithful to Gothic Revival principles.

Giles Scott rejected the modernist view that ornament is a crime

and sought to graft the best ideas of modernism on

the best traditions of the past.

It was the perfect marriage of the Gothic and modernist.

He is honest about the materials and means of construction,

at the same time as humanising the building,

by adding details inspired by the past, he's looking to the future.

Outside, you can see more clearly

how Scott forged a modern architecture

by evolving the Gothic tradition.

Here, Gothic details are reduced,

instead are cliff-like areas of plain wall, wonderful utilitarian

oblong windows and that large window.

That's a strangely un-Gothic quadrant side

and, over there, the wall's bevelled.

This is Gothic, but Art Deco Gothic.

Giles would work on the cathedral throughout his life

and he would go on to produce many other buildings that combined

a modern sensibility with a respect for history.

I'm on my way to Scott's masterpiece.

Along the Thames, we can take in

some of the other highlights of his career.

First, there's the iconic Battersea Power Station.

In the 1930s, Giles designed the chimneys in

the style of giant classical columns.

After the Second World War, he was brought in to help rebuild

the Palace of Westminster, which had been bombed during the Blitz.

And there's his smallest and perhaps best-known design -

the telephone box.

We pass under Waterloo Bridge -

completed in 1945 to Giles's designs -

before we reach our destination.

It's opposite St Paul's Cathedral,

and I believe it links the Gothic Revival of George Gilbert Scott

with his grandson's modern take on the Gothic.

It's the former Bankside Power Station,

now known as Tate Modern.

Bankside is Giles Gilbert Scott's greatest and most ruthless

expression of his modernistic brick cathedral industrial style.

The great chimney in the centre of the composition reveals this to be

a functional industrial building,

and yet it invokes memories of medieval towers,

giving the structure the sublime

and sculptural presence of a structure rooted in history.

Like his grandfather's masterpiece, the Midland Grand Hotel,

for many years, Bankside was reviled and threatened with demolition

after its closure as a power station in 1981.

Gavin Stamp led a campaign to save it.

What a fantastic space.

It's like a great ship or a cathedral.

Just think what you could do with it,

and yet it's going to be demolished.

As far as I'm concerned, that is a crime

for this is the finest power station every built -

the greatest temple of power.

It worked.

I now declare the Tate Modern open.

A disused temple to power became

the nation's most popular temple to the arts.

I imagine that the idea that Bankside should become

an art gallery would have been beyond Scott's wildest dreams.

But it's such a beautiful, sound structure

that is has proved to be astonishing and adaptable.

He built the great, refined, sublime landmark,

and thank goodness it's found a new use.

Tate Modern is a wonderful building

and the cathedral-like turbine hall, a magnificent space.

It enshrines the architectural principles of

the 19th century Gothic Revival,

and is a testimony to the creative brilliance and continuity of

the Scott Dynasty.

It's an honest building,

expressing truthfully the methods and the materials of construction.

And faithful to the Gothic Revival principle -

decorating the essential structure...

..so the functional beams and rivets become the building's ornaments.

The artistic journey to Bankside, over three generations of

the same family, has revealed a surprising and dramatic link

between the Gothic Revival and modernist architecture.

It's no exaggeration to say that

the story of the Gilbert Scott dynasty

is a story of British architecture,

from the early Victorian era to the 20th century.

Thanks largely to its efforts, the Gothic Revival

became more than simply a rehash of history,

it became a foundation stone of modernism.