The Clock Tower at Dulwich College
by Dr J R Piggott, former Keeper of Archives, Dulwich College and author of ‘Dulwich College A History’
Canaletto’s painting THE STONEMASON’S YARD (1728) at THE NATIONAL GALLERY (right) in London shows the prominent campanile of S Maria della Carità at Venice. Although the magnificent tower had collapsed in 1744 – the site is now occupied by the famous Galleria di Belli Arti, the Accademia – it was the model for the Victorian clock tower at DULWICH COLLEGE (1866–70).
The campanile may be glimpsed by visitors to Dulwich Picture Gallery on the south side of Dulwich Common, the local stretch of the South Circular Road, on the way to West Dulwich railway station.
The architect of Dulwich College was CHARLES BARRY, JUNIOR (1823–1900), the eldest son of Sir Charles Barry who was the architect of the Palace of Westminster after the great fire of 1834. Barry had been appointed as his father’s General Superintendent at the Thamesbank site at the age of thirty four, and designed some of the ornamentation on the clock tower, Big Ben. Sir Charles Barry thought ‘no design in outline could be complete without towers’.
Barry’s campanile resembles a finely sharpened pencil. Vertically it marks an aspiration; horizontally it signifies sublimation, progressing upwards from square to octagon to circle to fine vanishing point, where matter becomes spirit.
In 1858 Charles Barry succeeded his father as Architect and Surveyor to the Dulwich College estate; the large seventeenth-century manor had been bequeathed as a charitable Foundation to Dulwich College by the great actor Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), the creator of the title roles in Christopher Marlowe’s plays. The Grammar School (1841), a small building at Dulwich across Gallery Road from the Picture Gallery, is an early essay by Sir Charles Barry in his Tudor Gothic style.
The younger Barry filled his notebooks with sketches of North Italian buildings in 1847–8, making a particular study of the campaniles of Venice and Lombardy. Dulwich College derives from the Certosa di Pavia, the Charterhouse near Milan, with its elaborate terra cotta enrichments. The College is a hybrid or ‘eclectic’ production, and was criticised at the time for its miscegenated attempt to reconcile styles and historical references. Barry overworked his designs, quoting many details from his notebooks, like a young poet who uses too many adjectives. The Great Hall at the College imitates the interior of Westminster Hall with hammerbeams, above which Barry imposed a wagon roof in a barrel vault from a church in Vicenza.
In designing the palazzo for schoolboys Barry owed much to a book by George Edmund Street (1824–81), Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855), particularly for the red and buff colour scheme: Street commended the buildings of Lombardy for their ‘deep red hue . . . a most satisfactory effect of colour . . . when alternating with warm-coloured stone’.
The overall effect of Barry’s architecture at the College was described by the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912–90), who lived for a while in Dulwich as a boy, as a fair candidate for the wildest nineteenth century building in London, with a crazy Dostoevksian gleam in its eye.
‘Dulwich College A History’ was launched at Dulwich Picture Gallery on Wednesday 2 July.
Another article on local history by Jan Piggott
Loading ...