Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

succeeded by an age of plagiarism’. 149 The chimneys of Hampton Court, the oriel from
Magdalen College and the chapel windows of All Souls College, Oxford began to appear
all over the country with monotonous and often incongruous regularity.
Perhaps the most significant architectural product of this cut and paste phase of
the antiquarian Gothic Revival was Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, then the home
of Charles Hanbury Tracy, Lord Sudeley (1777-1858), and now that of Damien Hirst
[fig: 18]. It was begun in 1819 and finished, externally, by 1840. A substantial house it
was supposedly designed by Tracy himself although the ‘draughtsman’ who assisted him
was J C Buckler (1793-1894), who was in reality an able antiquarian architect and no
doubt gave considerable support to his noble patron. Toddington, with its windows
copied from Christ Church, Oxford, its vestibule based on the Red Mount Chapel at Lynn
in Norfolk and the ceiling from Crosby Hall in London, all of them illustrated in various
Britton publications, marked clearly the distance between what an antiquarian architect
like Willson understood about propriety in Gothic architecture and the point which his
polite readership had reached. Toddington’s design used ecclesiastical sources for a
secular building, with the details of a chapel deployed for a hallway, exactly the sort of
solecisms Willson condemned. He was also insistent that, in line with the precepts of
Price and Knight, a building should reveal its function, whereas at Toddington the
principal, south, front was designed to look like a two-storey chapel, within which were,
in fact, a library and bedrooms.
149 Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, p. 89.
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