When I visited I managed made the journey more difficult still for myself by deciding to cycle the 50 miles north from Birmingham. And I happened to do so during a period in which (as it transpired after I had booked train tickets and hotels) the previous, unseasonably balmy April weather - what been described as the "loveliest spring in recent memory" - had suddenly given way to rain and freezing cold due to (according to one weather report) "Arctic air" flooding the country. My trip, then, was a proper pilgrimage.
I had come to see the work that was the personal favourite of its architect, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, one of the chief instigators of the Victorian Gothic revival and probably responsible more than any other individual, albeit indirectly, for the way the average English townscape looks. He was also famously the designer of the 'Big Ben' clock tower and much of the rest of the Palace of Westminster.
It was nice, as I rolled in, shivering in my soggy mac and waterproof overshoes, to see that I had indeed got the right Cheadle: the steep, sharp Gothic spire soared over the whole of the centre of this small town (having also earlier made an brief, reassuring appearance in logo-form on the "Welcome to..." sign at the outskirts).
I was a little alarmed, though, when I walked up to the west front the next morning and there was ladder parked in the middle of the entrance with a man up it repainting the doors. Was the church closed for repairs?
No, I could still go in, thankfully. But for the duration of my visit the church (otherwise deserted, this being a weekday morning) was filled with the sound of the painter's radio. The incongruous strains of Jay-Z, The Zutons, and Calvin Harris echoed around the nave and chancel.
Or not so incongruous, perhaps. For "Pugin's Gem", as it is nicknamed, is a sugar rush of polyphonic geometry, loud colour, visual hooks, throbbing, reverberating pattern. This is the Victorian Gothic equivalent of pop, in the best sense of the word: joyful, clever and catchy.
In fact, the lighting here operates quite literally like a jukebox: put a pound in a slot, and the lights come on!
Visually, you are hit as soon as you step inside, in the manner of a Phil Spector wall of sound. The interior is not huge and it is possible to absorb something of a snapshot of the rich, overall composition in your first glance. But the pleasure really comes in walking around the place, or simply re-orientating one's gaze, and in so doing revealing one absorbing detail after another: patterned wall stencilling, gorgeous tiles, cute, bespoke metalwork, and stained glass, which, like almost all the interior decoration, was to Pugin's own design.
John Talbot, the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, a Catholic magnate and Pugin's main patron, and who had his home a few miles away, financed the entire construction. The Earl was prepared to spare (nearly) no expense on what Pugin billed as a perfect realisation of a medieval (and hence, in Pugin's mind, Catholic) parish church. The church was built between 1841 and 1845, at the height of Pugin's short but eventful career (he died at the age of 40 in 1852). Since it was the least compromised of his projects, Pugin cherished it: "Cheadle, perfect Cheadle, my consolation in all afflictions".
The church is often described as richly or lavishly decorated, but these epithets risk failing to do justice to Pugin's decorative genius, inasmuch as "rich and "lavish" can often simply indicate "filled with swag". That is, they can all too easily be applied to some ghastly collection of billion bric-a-brac such Versailles or Mar-a-Lago. Cheadle's richness, by contrast, is not about bling: it is not weighed down with alabaster statuary or solid gold fittings (albeit there is some gold leaf about). In fact, the church's proudest material feature is the use of a special type of ceramic for the floors (encaustic tiles): hardly a glamorous boast (albeit Pugin, with his uncanny, Alan Partridge-like knack for unintentionally absurd turns of phrase, told his client that it would produce the "finest floor in Europe"). The walls patterns are stencilled on. The sumptuous effect comes down to the intricacy of the decoration and the bold, unapologetic use of colour. 
The associations conjured by adjectives such as "lavish" are also unfair in that Pugin's decorative scheme has a coherence - and hence a beauty - that always seems to elude oligarchs' palaces and other such repositories of lavishness. Indeed, the coherence here is almost terrifying. Every pattern seems to respond to every other; every spur of the tracery in the carved wood roodscreen has is place in an intelligible geometric scheme; even the candle-holders are, I noticed, cleverly aligned with the stencilling on the walls. This is an interior that produces the visual equivalent of a melody, a choon. It is something that you can hum along to.
Like any good track, it is ultimately built around simple patterns, or hooks. All the fittings and decorative elements, however intricate they seem at first glance, resolve down to pleasingly legible, even bold, manouevres: compass-and-straight-edge construction in the tracery, geometric patterns in the tiling, red-painted metal fleur-de-lis clasps that join the candle-stick holders to the walls. The richness emerges from the inexhaustible and inventive compounding of the smallest parts, to create larger, coherent elements, which are compounded with others in turn, and so on and on.
This is an essentially fractal approach to design: arrangements that work on multiple scales, that avoid resolving down to monolithic, Platonic geometry. Fractals get more intricate the closer you look, yet rely upon relatively simple procedures to generate that intricacy. Indeed, both the rood cross (below) and the stencil design in the chancel (above) are reminiscent, interestingly, of a specific mathematically defined fractal, the "quadratic cross".
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| Courtesy of FracLab: https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/plugins/fraclac/FLHelp/Images.htm |
Another evident feature of Pugin's in-practice design philosophy is that he is big on intelligibility, not just in matters of layout and symbolism but in all decorative and architectonic details. Pugin doesn't ever mumble: he wants to be understood at all times. Take how, for example, with the carved wordwork of the roodscreen, all the main lines of the tracery - all the compass construction lines - are picked out in gold leaf. It is a device that says: "look, see, this is how this has been put together". I like that.
Intelligibility is not, except intermittently, anything to do with structural or functional honesty - honesty being a quality that only idiots assume to be important in this context - but, rather, about the opposite of meaninglessness, arbitrariness. There is no sensible reason to think we need or desire honesty - non-deception - in architecture any more than we need or desire non-deception in theatre, literature or music; there are quite a lot of good reasons to think that deception is a perfectly legitimate artistic device. But we do need and desire intelligibility: we do need architectural form - this line, that curve - to make some sense on some level, because making sense is the basic underpinning of aesthetic experience.
Pugin the visual genius understood this implicitly. But Pugin the writer failed completely to get it. He wrote - implausibly enough for someone resurrecting a historical style using modern, industrial techniques - that what he was doing was building "true" or "real" architecture. Timothy Brittain-Catlin exposes the silliness, and bullying harmfulness, of this rhetoric in his wonderful book Bleak Houses. He argues that that Pugin and others at the time were, in condemning non-Gothic architecture as "fake", echoing the language of sectarian Christian polemic: the insistence that this or that faith (Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc) is the true one, and that others are shams, imposters. Given that Pugin's schtick incorporated a fair amount of sectarian shoutiness (he was a loud and tactlessly proselytising Catholic convert), Brittain-Catlin's thesis seems plausible. But perhaps a more fundamental, straight-forward explanation for why Pugin, like many other architects, modernists notably, kept resorting to the rhetoric of honesty is, I think, simply that the proposition that "architecture should be true to itself" sounds like, in a somewhat double-sense, what Stephen Colbert would call a "truthy" one. It sounds right, and so people said it, and have carried on saying it. Architects have always been better with visual logic than with propositional logic.
At best the claim of realness was meaningless as applied to Pugin's own work; I think on a fair assessment it was demonstrably false. His buildings were, in fact, contrivances. But that is, repeat, not a criticism: so are, surely, all works of art. The non-necessity of their existing in the first place does not preclude their internal composition being infused with meaning and/or logic. Pugin's buildings might be mad, contrived and obsessive. But to the eye - and this is the only important thing - every line, every decorative inflection, every wider compositional gambit, makes sense on some, geometric or mimetic (or both), level.
This is why his works are beautiful, which is, in turn, why they dearly loved to this day. Whilst I was working my way around the place, an old man walking by spotted the painter and struck up a conversation with him. It turned out that the elderly gentleman had himself, some time before, re-painted nearly the whole of the interior of the church. It had taken him 20 years, he said (which seems plausible). The younger man then took some time out to walk around the church with his predecessor, both examining the latter's handiwork and talking about the techniques he had used. A touching moment of generational baton-passing that I felt privileged to witness.
This vignette prompts an observation that further reinforces the conclusion that the power of the work cannot depend on its honesty, reality or truthfulness to itself: nearly the entire surface area of the the interior of the church is new, and inauthentic, in the sense that it is the application of paint by someone working some 150 years after its consecration as opposed to the original material article. Does this detract in anyway from the effect? No, of course not. As with the late construction of Mackintosh's House for An Art Lover, discussed in a previous post, if anything, the magic is enhanced by the knowledge that the design exists as part of a living, renewing structure, rather than as a historical relic. Authenticity is a hollow virtue. I'll take colour and life instead any day.
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