The City and the Soul The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour

Gothic.

A single word for a beast with many heads...

..and different faces.

SCREAMING

To the Georgians, Gothic meant Gothic Revival architecture,

a medieval style of building brought back to life.

But it was also the Gothic novel, a new literature of fantasy

that gave voice to the real fears of an anxious age.

And as the 19th century dawned, those fears deepened.

Revolution, in science and industry,

was destroying the old social order, and threatening moral oblivion.

The British landscape was being transformed and urbanised.

And Britain became a battleground

where two opposing Gothic forces contended.

On the bright side, the idealistic dreams

of the Gothic Revival architects.

On the dark side, the Gothic of horror and of nightmares.

And as the modern world began to take shape, it would be that

dark side of Gothic, which fed on anxiety and alienation,

all the bad stuff, that really came into its own.

The Victorian city was a divided place -

new monuments and museums, slums and factories.

And beneath it all, a honeycomb labyrinth of sewers,

aptly subterranean image for the subconscious fears that

haunted the Victorian mind.

Was the Industrial Revolution turning people into mere cogs

in a soulless machine?

Was the new science putting out the light of faith?

It's as if the entire British nation were going through

a collective crisis of identity.

And what's the best way to get to grips with all of this?

I think it's by interpreting the many dreams of Gothic.

We begin our story in the late 18th century,

the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Science and technology were about to reshape the world,

but not quite yet.

Scientists were mapping and labelling the earth

and everything in it,

unravelling the very nature of physical matter

so they could harness its power.

Joseph Wright of Derby was an artist who chronicled

this moment of profound change.

He's not often associated with the Gothic imagination.

But his best work is infused with a thoroughly Gothic

sense of wonder and terror at the new ascendancy of science.

Never more so than in his Experiment On A Bird In An Air Pump,

of 1768.

At first sight you might say, what's Gothic about it?

Its subject, after all, is science, an episode from the Enlightenment.

A prosperous father of a family has invited into his home

a scientist, and the scientist's job is to explain what happens to

a living organism when it is deprived of oxygen.

Hence the bird in the bell jar,

hence the air pump with its handle, which he has been turning in order

to withdraw the air from the jar so that the bird slowly suffocates.

It's still just fluttering but its time is running out.

The little girl looks up with fear and dismay in her eyes.

Her slightly older sister can't bear to look at all,

while the father comforts both of them,

and directs them towards knowledge, acceptance, truth.

And yet, and yet...

is that really the subject of this painting?

Look at the way in which Wright of Derby has rather cleverly,

rather subtly, turned this into a haunted house,

made this a scene from a kind of modern Gothic novel.

The whole scene is lit spectrally with a sinister light.

Does that really look like a man of reason?

Or does that look like a magus, a charismatic,

perhaps some strange form of modern priest who is aiming to

bewitch us with some new fears, some new superstitions?

What's going on in that jar?

The bird resembles the dove of the Holy Spirit in ancient altarpieces.

So, God is being killed by science?

Is science benevolent, or is science the source of new fears,

new terrors, a new sense of darkness?

Those are the questions with which

Gothic writers, painters, thinkers, architects, poets -

those are the problems

they would wrestle with over the next 100 years and more.

The prolific Wright of Derby painted many subjects that explored

the tension between old-world faith and mystery,

and the new age of reason.

First he gives us, beneath crumbling ruins

reclaimed by the forces of nature, a skeleton, risen from the grave.

It beckons an old man towards the fate that awaits us all.

Then, in a gloomy lamplit cave,

a natural philosopher ponders the meaning of life and death.

But Wright was also the very first artist to paint a modern factory.

A sinister, block-like presence in the moonlit countryside -

all the more unnatural, because its lights are on.

Modern industry has people working day AND night -

that had never happened before.

MACHINE RATTLES AND CLANKS

As the 19th century clanked into life,

the frontiers of science were advancing too.

Pioneers of flight successfully crossed the English Channel.

British inventors built the very first working steam locomotive.

The mysteries of electricity,

seen by some as the spark of life itself, were being unveiled.

Many in Britain were made deeply uneasy by the relentless

probing of science.

But who would give voice to their fears?

A Gothic writer, of course.

A young woman we remember by her married name, Mary Shelley.

Mary lived in the London parish of St Pancras,

at the heart of the dynamic metropolis.

Yet it was in the graveyard that she found solace,

and the inspiration for one of the most terrifying

of all Gothic creations -

Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley grew up surrounded by visionary idealists

who dreamed of creating a better world, but she was not one of them.

Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneering feminist,

who'd died giving birth to the young Mary,

and was buried here.

Her father was William Godwin, a freethinker, an anarchist,

who gave Mary an extraordinary education,

introducing her to scientists, philosophers, writers, thinkers.

It was to this churchyard that Mary came

when she was young to be quiet with her thoughts

and to spend time with the mother that she'd never actually met.

And it was here too that she and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley

declared their undying love for one another and decided to elope.

She was 17, he was 22 and, inconveniently, married,

but that didn't stop them.

Shelley also was an idealist.

But it was Mary's destiny to sound a great warning

about what the future might hold.

To write a novel about progress and the dangers that come with it

that still sends a shiver up the spine today.

THUNDER CRACKS

One famously dark and stormy night in June 1816,

the teenage Mary and her lover Shelley were

guests of Lord Byron at his villa on the shore of Lake Geneva.

They entertained each other by telling horror stories.

Mary's tale told of a scientist hellbent on his quest - to build

a creature, a man, from decaying body parts, and then to animate him.

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse

a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.

It breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Mary's story drew on several well-known experiments

of the time, actual attempts to revive corpses,

animal and human, using powerful electrical currents.

Frankenstein might be a Gothic novel

but its subject is a very modern dilemma.

I think it's telling that people often refer to

the monster as Frankenstein, but that isn't the case.

Frankenstein is the monster's creator, the scientist.

Although in Mary Shelley's view, perhaps he's the true monster,

the real villain of the piece.

Why? Because he's a scientific obsessive, a monomaniac.

All he cares about is the realisation of his dream.

But he doesn't think about the consequences.

The moment he succeeds in bestowing the gift of life,

Frankenstein rejects his creation.

The unloved, deformed monster embarks on a killing spree

of revenge.

But he is not so much terrifying as tragic.

He learns to speak and tells his maker,

"I should have been your Adam, but I am instead the fallen angel.

"Misery made me a fiend."

I think the novel expresses a deep-seated, 19th-century terror

of science that might run out of control.

And I think that's why it's resonated throughout

the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Whether it's the human genome or the splitting of the atom, a great

scientific discovery is only as great as the use that's made of it.

And that use can contain as many nightmares as dreams.

I think Mary Shelley's point was that the bare bones

of scientific enquiry are not enough.

They have to be animated by the spirit of moral responsibility.

Another great fear was that modern science,

for all its miraculous discoveries, was actually destroying

the human capacity for wonder,

mapping God out of the equation.

Powerful lenses laid bare a microscopic world.

Diagrams left little space for the spiritual dimension.

In the same year that Frankenstein was published,

the eccentric visionary William Blake created his own monster.

Painted on a tiny panel, I think it's his way

of restoring to the world something he believed science had taken away.

According to Blake, art was the tree of life,

science was the tree of death.

And yet he was perfectly capable of being fascinated by

the new information and the new imagery being provided

by scientific discovery.

And this picture, this wonderful, strange, intense, weird picture, was

actually inspired by Blake's having seen

a microscopic image of a flea.

Blake called this picture The Ghost Of A Flea,

and it is itself, while inspired by science, hardly scientific.

It's the depiction of a man who'd been turned into a flea

as a form of punishment for having a vicious, bloodthirsty nature.

He's got a sting at the back,

and he's got a bowl of blood in front.

What I think is going on here is deadly serious, I think

this is Blake using his Gothic imagination to take revenge on

the scientific attitude.

He's taken an image drawn from science, and he's re-enchanted it,

made it mysterious, made it weird, made it Gothic.

In fact, the image is just the sort of thing that you might see

carved into the choir stall of a medieval church,

or carved into the front of a church, perhaps as a gargoyle.

So Blake has taken an image that's all about explanation, all about

discourse, science, discovery, and he's made it mysterious and strange.

As science scrutinised the world around us,

it inevitably turned its unflinching gaze

on the most intriguing subject of all - ourselves.

Scientists began to question the very nature of identity -

who are we?

Is consciousness evidence of a soul,

or simply the product of chemical reactions in the brain?

Mesmerism seemed to offer clues to the nature of the mind.

We recognise it now as an early form of hypnotism,

but in the early 19th century, such powers of mind control

independent of the body seemed much more sinister, more Gothic.

They suggested invisible realms.

Some claimed mesmerism allowed them to gaze into the future,

or contact the dead. But nothing was proven.

As science broadened the horizons of knowledge, so art followed.

Romantic poets explored the nature of the mind in their work.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

took Gothic horror to the high seas,

and to the depths of the human psyche.

In the poem, the haunted journey of a doomed sailor becomes

a metaphor for the searchings of a troubled mind.

When the sailor recklessly kills an albatross, nature condemns him.

He must roam the earth

and suffer the psychological torments of guilt and alienation.

But poets and scientists alike made a troubling discovery -

the more they tried to pin down the essential nature of who we are,

the more it seemed to evaporate like mist at sea.

We appear in a constant state of change.

Are we the product of our emotions? Our memories? Our will?

How do we even know our reality is not simply an illusion?

At least you knew where you were with the old Gothic ruined castles,

haunted abbeys.

But now the realisation suddenly dawned that perhaps the most

terrifying Gothic haunted house of all might be the human mind,

and the greatest terror was that of not knowing yourself.

Many writers found inspiration

through the products of science - namely drugs.

Opiate-based medicines provoked chemical reactions in the brain

that allowed the user to explore the darkest recesses of the mind.

Poets like Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth and Byron

all experimented with opium.

Even the fictional Dr Frankenstein

took laudanum to drown out his guilt.

But one writer went further.

He revealed to the world exactly what happens

when drugs open the door to the subconscious.

Thomas de Quincey was 36 when he wrote

The Confessions Of An English Opium Eater.

It's almost a stream-of-consciousness account

of his experiences with opium.

The book is presented as a warning against the dangers of excess,

yet throughout it runs a darkly Gothic fascination

with the interior world it opens up.

De Quincey was a deeply troubled man,

traumatised, as he wrote in Confessions Of An Opium Eater,

by the loss of many of those closest to him.

And it seems to me that he

used the drug as a way of fuelling his own escapist fantasies.

As he describes it in the book, it's as if he took opium in order

to turn his own mind into a kind of Gothic fantasy-producing machine.

He would take the drug, close his eyes and go on a trip.

And it's extraordinary when you read his book,

how many of his trips are as if scripted

by the Gothic novelists of the past.

They are visions of debauchery and excess, trips to hell and back.

And yet, for all its outlandishness, its weirdness, and its novelty,

I think de Quincey's book was important because in it,

he identified and confessed to being part of a new social phenomenon.

Namely, escaping your unhappiness by turning to drugs.

Whatever may be visually represented

I did think of in the darkness, shaped into phantoms of the eye.

I seemed to descend into chasms and sunless abysses, depths

below depths from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend.

Buildings and landscapes and proportions

so vast as the eye is not fit to receive.

I sometimes seem to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night,

sometimes a millennium,

or a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.

De Quincey's trips into inner space were both exploration and escape.

Escape from a world that was moving at an ever more terrifying speed.

Nothing epitomised the pace of change more than the locomotive.

On its maiden journey, the first passenger train

mowed down and killed a man.

It was soon achieving speeds previously undreamt of.

No human being had ever travelled this fast before,

and the sense of awe that it induced

was captured on canvas by England's greatest painter, Turner.

Rain, Steam And Speed.

It's such an astonishing picture,

such an explosive essay in a new form of perception.

It's so predictive of Impressionism, painted in 1844,

30 years before Monet even dreamed of creating Impression: Sunrise.

Yet, precisely for those reasons, I think

this explosion of a canvas has been in a sense misunderstood,

or rather its subject, its true subject, has been forgotten.

What's it actually about?

It's about a locomotive, it's about a steam train hurtling

towards us out of the void, into a void.

It's about this dark, clanking automaton,

this creation of science that is running out of control.

There's terror, and it lives at the heart of Victorian England.

That's Gothic.

That's Gothic right there.

The train mercilessly ploughed its tracks

deep into the British countryside.

Factories and cities soon followed.

In The March Of Bricks And Mortar,

satirist George Cruikshank depicted the relentless

forces of urbanisation as a demonic war waged by city on country.

It's almost impossible now to appreciate what it must have

felt like to live through such profound changes.

Britain's transformation from a rural to an industrial economy

was a real shock to the system.

It happened very quickly.

Within just a few decades,

more people in Britain were living in cities than in the countryside.

This was the first place on earth where that had ever happened.

The environment was changed -

huge clouds of smoke covered much of the landscape.

The phrase "Industrial Revolution" doesn't really do justice to it.

It was more of an industrial trauma.

The traditional extended family network was undermined

as people flocked to the cities in search of jobs.

In northern factory towns like Bradford,

nearly half the population came from somewhere else.

The landscape of the future was urban,

and its territory, a whole range of new anxieties.

For many Victorians, the source of their worst fears was the city,

associated with crime, grime, violence, poverty.

And a new form of popular literature sprang into being

which fed those fears and fed on those fears.

It was aimed at a mass audience.

It sensationalised urban horror, fictionalised it

and added all kinds of weird supernatural elements.

Characters like Varney The Vampire or Spring-Heel'd Jack.

It was all done with a flourish and using the language

and the imagery of...what else?

Gothic.

They began with the true crime stories of Newgate prisoners.

Then came urban myths - reports of a cloaked man who attacked women,

then flew off over the rooftops.

He was given a name and a storyline -

the dastardly Spring-Heel'd Jack.

But Jack began using his superhuman powers to solve crimes,

and turned into a Batman-style hero.

The murderous barber Sweeney Todd

was the most enduring creation of the Gothic comics.

They were nicknamed penny dreadfuls,

and they were popular because they tapped into working-class fears

about the modern city.

It was a place where people,

mixed in their millions, no longer really knew each other.

Where anyone could do anything

and just disappear back into the city's maze of streets.

One anxious critic of the penny dreadfuls wrote...

Boys and girls reared in the cellars and garrets of large cities

are reading a literature of animal passion and defiant lawlessness.

Lives of bad people, crime, madness and suicide

are powerful in preparing the young for convict life.

In fact, the evidence suggests that penny dreadfuls

worked like a pressure valve, easing urban anxieties.

They also boosted adult literacy.

Charles Dickens, the most popular writer of the age, would

reinvent urban Gothic for the middle classes.

There's more than a smattering of the supernatural in Dickens.

Think of the ghosts haunting Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

But his Gothic isn't really about ghouls from beyond the grave.

It's about the gloom of the industrial here and now.

Dickens painted his most vivid picture of modern urban Gothic

in Bleak House.

It's an epic tale of aristocrats and paupers,

country mansions and city squalor.

Where is the dark Gothic heart of Dickens' novel?

Well, it's certainly not the Bleak House of the title,

which is actually quite a nice place.

It's only gradually as you read the book that you realise that

Dickens' great Gothic castle, full of terrors and nightmares,

is actually London itself.

He describes it as if it were a huge, labyrinthine,

single, multi-celled structure.

Instead of being twined with ivy like a Gothic ruin,

it has fog creeping across every surface.

It's a place full of darkness where you can barely

see your hand in front of your face.

It has its demons, the crooks

and lawyers that suck the lifeblood from the city.

It has its lost souls, the poor stuck in their terrible slums.

I think Bleak House was Dickens' way of saying to his reading public,

if you're looking for Gothic horror,

you don't need to consult your imaginations.

The sad truth is you're actually living in it.

There was no welfare safety net in Dickens' London -

if you fell, you fell on your own.

That's why the terrible slum in Bleak House

is so aptly known as Tom-All-Alone's.

These ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that

crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards,

and coils itself to sleep

in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in and comes and goes,

fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil

in its every footprint.

Later in the novel, there's a ghoulish echo

of penny dreadful tales,

as two men who visit the rag and bottle merchant Krook

discover he's gone up in smoke -

a bizarre case of spontaneous human combustion.

The cat is snarling at something on the ground before the fire.

What is it? A charred log of wood? Or?

Oh, horror! He IS here.

Or all that is left of him.

At the book's climax,

the tragic Lady Dedlock lies down to die

at the gates of a rat-infested pauper's graveyard.

It was a dreadful spot, heaps of dishonoured graves and stones,

hemmed in by filthy houses.

On the step I saw, with a cry of pity and horror,

a woman lying, cold and dead.

The Victorians looked around at the new world

they were creating -

sprawling, grimy cities, smoke-belching factories -

and felt distinctly uneasy.

Just read their literature, look at their art.

And you can feel their sense that

society was coming apart at the seams.

That disaster loomed.

The critic John Ruskin

spoke of the dark storm cloud of the 19th century.

A warning that unless

something was done, social and environmental catastrophe lay ahead.

But one man's angst is another man's opportunity.

And Victorian anxieties were cannily exploited by the artist John Martin.

In 1851 he painted The Great Day of His Wrath.

A work very much meant for mass consumption.

It was a barnstorming depiction of the end of the world.

It's very much the end of the modern Victorian industrial world.

it looks like a terrible incident in a smelting furnace.

Inspect it more closely and you see that what he's envisioning

is, in fact, a city imploding,

consuming itself in a ball of flame.

It's a wonderfully theatrical,

in fact, perhaps almost pantomime-like depiction

of the end of the world.

Literally, it's a Gothic painting.

It returns art to that most Gothic or medieval of subjects,

the Last Judgment, or Doom.

But it's also a picture that seems to leap forward into the future.

It was seen by eight million people.

Martin toured it around the world. It was a smash-hit sensation,

a painting that predicted

the Hollywood blockbusters of the future.

It was a huge popular success.

Why was that?

Well, I think it was partly because Martin had tapped in so directly,

so viscerally to a genuine popular fear

that everything in their frighteningly modern world

was indeed about to go wrong.

But he also allowed them to experience

the worst that could happen, in the form of a work of art.

They could look at it, thrill to the terror of it all,

then reassure themselves that, well, it's only a nightmare.

But if John Martin used the dark imagery of Gothic to predict

the end of the world,

there was also another, lighter Gothic.

One which held out the promise of salvation from all this.

Gothic's optimists were determined to ride to Britain's rescue.

They had a vision.

Go back to the past and we'll build a better future.

And their message was popular.

People longed for an earlier age,

when everything had seemed more certain.

The whole nation began play-acting at being medieval.

Costume balls and banquets became all the rage.

TANNOY: And representing the Red Team is Sir Jasper...

Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert donned 14th-century gear

for a grand Plantagenet Ball held at Buckingham Palace in 1842.

TANNOY: We are the knights of Royal England.

But the new obsession with all things medieval

appealed to people of every class.

The Victorians loved Gothic colour, pageantry, chivalry, heraldry.

They loved the idea of Gothic as a return to a spiritual world,

a great contrast to the godlessness of their own cities and factories.

The Victorian Gothic dream took many forms -

architecture, literature, spectacle.

But above all, it was a fantasy of escaping from the present

and into an idealised past.

It was a deeply conservative fantasy,

fuelled by novels like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

A book that romanticised the medieval world

of the jousting tournament.

A rigidly hierarchical world, in which everyone

knew their place and everyone knew how they ought to behave.

The Victorians staged the first jousts

seen in Britain for centuries.

In 1839, staunch medievalist the Earl of Eglinton, a man with a

quite remarkably square face,

hosted a lavish tournament on his Scottish estate.

100,000 flocked to see

grown men dress up in medieval armour

and tilt at each other on horseback.

When the tournament actually got under way,

the weather was so miserable, so wet, so appallingly Scottish -

Eglinton would have killed for this sunshine -

that the horses immediately sank up to their fetlocks in the mud.

They soldiered on but the journalists had a field day.

This was the knight with the umbrella, they jeered.

But nonetheless,

Eglinton's tournament did bring the Gothic Revival

to the attention of a mass public as nothing else had done before.

And it set a trend for historic re-enactments which survives to this day.

All the Gothic fancy dress and tales of swashbuckling chivalry

were evidence of the Victorians' escapist tendencies.

It made them peculiarly receptive to the ideas of a man

who wanted to plunge the whole nation back in time.

The youngest and most valiant knight at Gothic's new round table,

or should that be drawing board,

was an architect named Augustus Pugin.

Aged just 24, he published what would become one of the most

influential books of the age.

The British Library holds the original copy of a work that

would reshape the Victorian world.

Contrasts, an argument for the superiority of the Gothic style,

is a none-too-subtle rant by a distinctly angry young man.

This is a very rare and precious book.

It's Pugin's own copy of Contrasts.

And it's even had bound into it his own drawings.

Now, Pugin sought to ram his argument down the throats of those

reading his book with a series of deliberately very unfair contrasts

between modern architecture, bad. Gothic architecture, good.

But although Pugin's subject in this book is nominally architecture,

I think his real subject is the modern city and its ills.

That's what he's really trying to get at, that's what he's

really trying to understand, that's what he's really trying to cure.

On the one hand, Pugin presents us with a modern city.

Factories, chimneys, gasworks, the workhouse,

modern bridge.

It's a soulless, barren, industrial,

commercial, sprawling, vast, impersonal place.

Against that he sets a medieval town

where man goes about his daily business

under the eye of God,

guarded by these great towering church and cathedral spires.

Everything is in order, everything is quiet, everything is tranquil.

So godlessness contrasted with spirituality.

There's something wonderfully naive about the book, of course,

because in it Pugin is saying,

if we build as they once did in the Middle Ages, then suddenly...

everyone will believe in God,

everyone will be cared for, looked after,

and society will be made better.

But, of course, life isn't quite as simple as that.

He might have been a Utopian, but Pugin perfectly caught the mood

of a Britain obsessed by fantasies of a glorious medieval past.

This was a match made in heaven, and it would produce its greatest

offspring from the flames of destruction.

When the medieval Palace of Westminster

burnt to the ground in 1834,

it was decreed that the new Houses of Parliament

should be built in the Gothic style.

Not least because classical architecture was tainted

by association with post-revolutionary republican France.

So the government turned to Pugin to cover its new home

with medieval detail.

Both outside and in.

Begun in 1838, just a year after Victoria came to the throne,

it is the embodiment of a very British democracy.

A New Jerusalem fusing ancient heritage with modern Empire.

It's crammed with Pugin's spectacular designs.

Ornate floor tiles. Elaborate window tracery.

Graceful fan vault ceilings.

But the greatest jewel in Pugin's crown

is the chamber of the House of Lords.

Now, admittedly a few things have changed in the chamber

of the House of Lords since Pugin's time.

There's this rather wonderful swarm of microphones

to enable the Lords to be heard.

But other than that, it's remained remarkably as it was created

by Pugin, and wow, what a profusion, obsessive profusion of detail.

The great gold gilt throne, these carved wooden animals.

Where the Lords themselves sit are rather like choir stalls,

it's as if Pugin wanted to turn

this space of political debate into a kind of secular church.

I think he expended so much blood, sweat and tears on this place

because he felt it was a really important commission for him,

a chance for him

to stamp the Gothic on the proceedings of political life.

GAVEL BANGS

Pugin dreamed that this benevolent, conservative, feudal image

of the past would stamp a moral vision on those who ran the country.

For the politicians themselves, it represented something else.

A kind of continuity, a soothing reassurance that Britain was

immune to the political revolutions sweeping the continent.

And perhaps that's its weakness.

The problem with it as a space, I think, is that it breeds...

..a kind of soporific indifference to the problems of the present.

What he's created is a space in which it's wonderfully easy...

..to forget about all of the problems of the present,

all of the problems of the modern city,

all of the problems of the poor,

the problems that so engaged and enraged Pugin,

and simply to lose yourself in the dream of a past.

The natural response...is actually just to fall asleep.

The Houses of Parliament

are the buildings for which Pugin is best remembered.

But to see the perfect expression of the gospel according to Pugin,

you have to travel 150 miles north.

To St Giles' Church, Staffordshire, which he completed in 1840.

Never was he given more freedom to express his belief that the

soul of Britain could be saved through bricks and mortar

and rich decoration.

It was very important to Pugin to carry the good Gothic fight

into the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution.

To bring light, colour, spirituality to those whose lives were

being blighted by the soot and the grime of heavy industry.

I think that's why he jumped at the chance to create this church here

in Cheadle, not far from Stoke-on-Trent

with its potteries,

surrounded by mines and the slagheaps

of the new mining industry.

And I think there's something almost desperate about the riotous

profusion of colour and design that Pugin flung at this church.

It's as if he wanted to squeeze the entire tradition of ancient Christianity,

at least in terms of art and design, into one building.

The gilded lions seem to contain echoes of ancient Venice.

Above there are these roundels of saints

and prophets that echo the art of Byzantium.

Stained glass windows.

A baptismal font that seems to recall

the objects of the ancient English Middle Ages.

Everywhere colour, pattern, design, surfaces crawling with it.

But for all its beauty, for all its splendour,

there's something a bit too much about Pugin's church at Cheadle.

This is Gothic architecture fed on opium.

There's a touch of mania about it.

Pugin stood for Gothic's bright side,

but he met a very dark Gothic end.

With astonishing, obsessive energy he built dozens of churches,

convents, cathedrals and private houses.

And he didn't just exhaust himself, he drove himself mad.

By the age of 40, he was dead.

Pugin's dream was a kind of mourning for a past that had gone for ever.

Even his most heroic buildings have a haunting melancholy about them.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that his Gothic visions seem

so conflicted, so contradictory.

After all, he lived in an age of contradictions.

Embodied by none other than Queen Victoria herself.

Imperial figurehead and grief-stricken widow.

Queen Victoria ruled Britain at its moment of greatest global influence.

She symbolised the empire on which the sun never set,

an empire of apparently supreme self-confidence.

Yet she was, in many ways,

an aptly neurotic emblem for a neurotic age.

The High Priestess of High Victorian Gothic

was a woman so morbidly obsessed by death,

she seemed positively bewitched by it.

When the Queen's beloved consort, Prince Albert,

died in 1861 at the age of just 42,

she plunged into a period of mourning

that would last for 40 years.

Dressed permanently in black, the Widow of Windsor,

as she became known,

ritualised the memory of her dead husband to a pathological degree.

She brought the royal family together to recreate group photos

from happier times, only now Albert was replaced by a marble bust.

She even had Albert's clothes laid out every day for decades,

as if he were about to wear them.

Most extravagant of all was the Queen's campaign to build

a towering Gothic memorial to her deceased consort.

Many in Britain thought it a waste of money.

But after a ten-year battle, Queen Victoria finally got her way.

This was the two faces of Gothic merged into one monument.

If the Albert Memorial were a piece of music,

you'd be hard-pressed to say

whether it's a symphony or a requiem.

On the one hand it's a triumphant celebration of British progress.

At its four corners are embodied the continents

to which the great British Empire has spread.

Above them are figures celebrating manufacture, commerce.

Indeed the whole structure of this monument was only made possible

by advances in cast iron technology -

the same technology that led to the creation of the first suspension bridges.

And yet the whole monument also speaks the language of loss,

of mourning, of bereavement.

At its centre, the golden image

of Queen Victoria's late beloved husband,

and above, in the form of this great Gothic canopy,

the dream of an England that has vanished,

the England of the Middle Ages.

I think this memorial speaks of a nation

that wants to embrace the future but can't forget the past.

The Albert Memorial

marks the apex of the Gothic Revival movement.

The nation had so utterly embraced medieval architecture

that it became the Victorian house style.

Railway stations...

..bridges...

museums...

..schools and colleges.

But even at their most expansive,

such buildings couldn't conceal the anxieties of the Victorian age.

In the later years of the 19th century, the triumphant, mournful

and even frightening elements of Gothic

increasingly came together.

Nowhere more so than in this now-forgotten gem

of late Victorian architecture,

built in 1885 on the fringes of the great sprawl of London.

It was the brainchild of Thomas Holloway, philanthropist

and purveyor of quack remedies, notably Holloway's ointment.

It had made him millions

and now he wanted to give something back to society.

His appointed architect, Thomas Crossland,

a devotee of Pugin's ideas.

The building is every bit as large as St Pancras railway station,

and every bit as copiously decorated.

But its purpose, not transportation but confinement.

This was a lunatic asylum.

The spectacular Holloway Sanatorium

embodies the Victorian fascination with institutions.

Whether you were sick in mind or body, criminal or poor,

they believed architecture could bring stability, order, wellness.

Yet something doesn't add up.

This building was meant to be a cathedral dedicated

to improving the lives of the mentally ill, but look

closely at the decoration and it suddenly seems

less optimistic.

Some of these writhing creatures suggest

the visions of a disturbed mind.

They have the feel of involuntary confessions.

Of terror, or the fear of failure

in what was meant to be a place of hope.

This is the recreation area, and for me it's one of the most poignantly

eccentric spaces ever dreamed up by the Victorian imagination.

Imagine yourself one of the first patients committed to this space, this place -

how was it meant to improve your condition?

Well, first off all, spiritual uplift.

The whole room looks like a chapel and it's crowned by this

enormous, tremendously impressive hammerbeam roof.

Down below, everywhere you look, encouragement.

On the walls, just above this coiling ornate golden decoration,

are a series of moral parables, phrases designed to make

those confined here feel as if they've still got a chance.

"Call no man happy till you know his end" - you may get better yet.

And everywhere you look, images of the great and good,

past and present.

Moral examples for the sick to aspire to

ranging from Wellington, Nelson, Oliver Cromwell,

the Defender of the Faith, all the way to Queen Victoria herself.

But the question is...

..could Gothic actually heal the sick Victorian mind?

Could it make people better?

Sadly, the evidence suggests the answer was no.

Instead of curing the afflicted,

vast institutions often became dumping grounds for problem people.

In the second half of the 19th century, the number of

so-called "persons of unsound mind" locked away more than quadrupled.

Many of them never left.

By the late 20th century, most great Victorian asylums

would have closed their doors to patients.

So the Gothic Revival style all too often turned out to be little more

than Olde Worlde set-dressing for complex modern problems.

As the Victorian Age drew to a close, the two faces of Gothic

offered two very different visions for Britain.

On one side, the pessimism of Frankenstein, of Bleak House...

the nightmares of the opium eater.

On the other, the idealism of Pugin

and those who followed him to the happy land of Gothic Revival.

Would there be a winner?

Personally, I think the bad dreams of the Gothic imagination

have stood the test of time better than the well-meaning fantasies

of the Gothic Revival architects.

Now, why is that?

I think it's because they simply told the modern world

more of the uneasy truth about itself.

But more than that, they showed more imagination, more bite.

HE GROWLS

But that's for next time!

GHOULISH LAUGHTER