Ampleforth Abbey: How an iconic architect somehow blended Gothic Revival, Arts-and-Crafts and Modernism with clarity, simplicity and spatial coherence

On the morning of Wednesday, September 15, 1926, the new choir of Ampleforth Abbey was consecrated. The ceremony lasted upwards of 4½ hours and, after it was completed, there was a luncheon with speeches to match. Among those who rose to speak was the architect of the building, the recently knighted Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, famous today for such creations as the red telephone box, Battersea Power Station and the restored House of Commons. The Abbey would continue to concern him for the remainder of his life and was only finally completed in 1961, the year after he died. Remote and beautifully set, it remains one of his least familiar creations.

The community of St Laurence at Ampleforth claims descent from Westminster Abbey through the last living survivor from that great medieval foundation, Fr Sigebert Buckley. On November 21, 1607, he formally joined with two English monks to perpetuate the English Benedictine congregation. The day was symbolic, the anniversary of Mary I’s brief restoration of Westminster Abbey in 1556. This embryonic community of three grew and went on to establish several houses in exile. One of these was at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim, Germany, where a school was established. Another was at Dieulouard, in northern France, which supplied priests to the English mission in northern England.

In 1792, the community at Dieulouard fled the French Revolution and moved to England, occupying a succession of large houses, including Vernon Hall, Liverpool. A decade later, the suppression of religious houses by the Prussian government in 1803 likewise forced Lamspringe and its school back. The monks and school were united at Ampleforth in 1803 through shared connections with the Fairfax family at nearby Gilling Castle (Country Life, November 3 and 10, 2021).

The Fairfaxes had long taken English Benedictine chaplains and Charles, 9th Viscount Fairfax, was educated at Lamspringe. His unmarried daughter, Anne Fairfax, anticipated the reversion of the estate to Protestant heirs and, in 1783, built a small house for her chaplain, Fr Bolton, a monk from Dieulouard. The new house stood in open landscape on a steep, south-facing slope on the opposite side of the valley from Gilling. It is from this lost building that the modern school and abbey at Ampleforth have developed.

Fr Bolton’s house was initially expanded east-west along the line of the hill with spreading wings facing south over the valley. Hostility towards Catholics encouraged architectural anonymity and the whole could have been mistaken for an ungainly country house. Following Emancipation in 1829, however, there was greater confidence and an 1840s lithograph of the buildings shows that plans for a new Gothic chapel were under consideration.

Curiously, the steeple of this building was seemingly constructed, but a quite different chapel was in fact completed, in 1857. This was designed by the prolific Catholic architect Charles Hansom, then in partnership with his brother, Joseph. Hansom’s chapel was aligned with the other college buildings, but stood slightly further forward on the slope. It was in the ‘Decorated’ Gothic style, with ornate traceried windows and numerous side chapels.

Three decades later, the London architect Bernard Smith won a limited competition to rebuild the whole school and monastic complex for 40 monks and 150 boys. His plans, which included a Gothic church in a 13th-century idiom, were published in The Builder on April 8, 1893, and were anticipated to cost £136,000. Some progress was made on Smith’s wider proposals, but Hansom’s church was still untouched when the money ran out.

Then, in 1903, Ampleforth was raised to the status of an abbey, further underlining its architectural inadequacy. What finally prompted action, however, were the combined pressures of the growing school — which had increased in size from 113 boys in 1900 to 195 in 1918 — and the universal concern to memorialise those killed in the First World War. Certainly, by 1918 fundraising for both undertakings was being discussed and the two projects quickly merged.

By his own account, the then surveyor of college, a Mr Worthy, based in Liverpool, proposed the name of a suitable new architect. In a letter dated May 3, 1919, the procurator — the official voice of the ‘Building Committee’ that directed all the works at Ampleforth — followed his advice, asking him ‘to approach Mr Gilbert Scott with a view to obtaining his advice and plans for our proposed church extension’. Worthy obliged, forwarding the letter under a note in his own hand.

Scott, a grandson of the great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, had burst onto the architectural scene at the age of only 22 in 1903, when he won the competition to design Liverpool’s new Anglican cathedral. Apart from his Catholic faith, it was undoubtedly this commission that chiefly recommended Scott to Ampleforth and there are many echoes — both in conception and detail — of the cathedral in the abbey church.

On August 15, 1919, Scott submitted his first proposals for Ampleforth, suggesting the extension of the existing church and the addition of a belfry tower incorporating a large ground-floor chapel, presumably the Memorial Chapel (Fig 8). They came to nothing, however, and, on January 15, 1920, he offered what were essentially the first designs for the present building.

‘I have adopted,’ he explained, ‘an earlier form of Gothic than I originally contemplated; as without sacrificing architectural affect, we can employ a cheaper form of vaulting, window tracery etc. and thus economise. The idea I have in my mind is a severe monastic type of building, founded to a great extent on some of the early French work.’ Specifically, he was inspired by the churches of Aquitaine, such as Cahors and Angoulême, which he had visited just after the war. Characterising these buildings as ‘Gothic’ stretches the label to its extreme.

The new church was conceived as a series of three linked domes flanked to either side by narrow aisles. As executed, all the domes are of the same width, but that in the centre is raised higher than its neighbours and opens out into the space of the adjacent aisles to create a massive central volume. By contrast, the lower domes to either end, are separated from the aisles by triple arches. All the windows are lancets, set singly, in pairs or triplets according to their scale. Externally, a belfry tower rises above the central dome. This is boxed in on each face by steep roof gables. The gables to the north and south read as vestigial transepts and cover the aisles that flank the central dome. Nicked into the tower parapets are the slightest of battlements.

Questioned in 1948, Scott connected the idea of a structure focused internally on a central dome with Wren’s first design for St Paul’s, London, and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (which he admitted he had never seen). At Ampleforth, in other words, he was working in a Gothic idiom that not only rejected the English medieval models beloved of many late-19th-century British architects — and which inspired other new monastic churches such as Downside, Somerset, and Buckfast, Devon — but creatively and freely reimagined the idiom.

Scott needed to attach chapels to this coherently planned church and here the site presented particular difficulties. Building out along the north side of the church was complicated both by the rising hillside and the line of a corridor — the Bell Passage — connecting the monastery to the school. To the south, however, the fall of the land allowed for a crypt with structures over it, in this case the Memorial Chapel and Lady Chapel (Fig 7).

The intention was to realise the church in stages, so Scott’s first dome was planned as a westward extension to Hansom’s nave, necessarily reversing the conventional orientation of the church. Two foundation stones were laid on August 1, one for the choir and the other for the adjacent Memorial Chapel. The choir detailing is executed throughout in Hornton stone from Oxfordshire with all the carving apparently being done at the quarry of the supplier, J. F. Booth and son of Banbury, Oxfordshire.

No sooner had work begun than the new building underwent a transformative liturgical change. The High Altar was initially planned to stand at the termination of the choir, but this left insufficient space for coherent blocks of stalls for the monks. Very unusually, therefore, the architect proposed two altars set back to back on the division between the new choir and Hansom’s nave, one serving each space. Over them — operating partly as a choir screen and partly as a canopy — he designed an arch.

Scott lavished care on this arch as the visual centrepiece of the interior (Fig 5). Hung within it is a cross — supplied by Watts and Co — flanked by sculptures of praying monks and other saints (Fig 3). Carved on the capitals are scenes from the life of Edward the Confessor, possibly inspired by the 1440s High Altar reredos of Westminster Abbey. The candlesticks are integral to the design.

From 1925, furnishings were being installed, including glass by Geoffrey Webb, a nephew of the architect Sir Aston Webb, Powell and Sons, London, and Herbert Hendrie of Edin-burgh. Scott’s choir stalls are jointly inscribed under one board with his name and that of their maker ‘Robert Thompson, craftsman’, familiarly known after his carved signature as the ‘Mouseman’ of Kilburn. A monument for the first abbot of the monastery was commissioned from William D. Gough of Kennington in London (Fig 6).

Following the consecration of the choir in 1926, repeated attempts were made to complete the church and further plans were drawn up in 1933–35, 1937–39, 1947–48 and 1952 (Fig 9). It was not until 1954, however, that the necessary post-war building licence was obtained. A temporary church was raised and, in January 1957, the work of pulling down Hansom’s church finally began.

By this stage, the school had grown yet further and Scott faced the challenge of massively increasing the seating area of the building. He did this by extending the proposed nave with a gallery and adding transepts to either side of the central dome (Fig 4). Great care was taken to make these additions visually subsidiary to the main volume of the building with its central tower (Fig 1). The south transept, projecting out into the valley, however, now became the formal entrance front of the church. Scott insisted that it be approached up a dog-leg staircase.

Internally, all three additional spaces were covered by barrel vaults (earlier plans for an additional dome were rejected). To preserve an illusion of symmetry, meanwhile, the vault of the north transept oversailed the constraining Bell Passage. A section of the passage was rebuilt as a porch or narthex with organ pipes installed over it.

Enlarging the church in turn created problems with its internal sight lines. To make the arched altar canopy visible from the transepts, it had to be moved 11ft towards the new nave. At the same time, dramatic changes of internal level were introduced. In relative terms, the nave and south transept floors were set low and the aisles and north transept floors raised high to the level of the choir.

In the process of redesign, and with a view equally to economy and simplicity, Scott stripped out every architectural ornament. The aisle vaults of the nave became flat ceilings and the detailing in Hornton stone vanished. In its place were simplified mouldings and columns of poured concrete (Fig 2). The walls were constructed of brick rendered internally in plaster. Both new domes were created using a suspended wire frame covered in plaster. Plain and tinted glass set in dense lead lattices filled the windows. The church was consecrated in its entirety on September 6, 1961.

Ampleforth Abbey is not a building that is easy to characterise. In inspiration, the church is a product of the Gothic Revival, but not in its familiar English form. Here, through the prism of French medieval example, and enlivened by an interest in Modernism, Scott created a building of striking clarity, simplicity and spatial coherence. There is discernible as well an Arts-and-Crafts fascination with materials. Despite the complexity of its evolution and prolonged construction, it surely deserves recognition beside his most celebrated creations.

See more at the Ampleforth Abbey website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.