Prior to the 2010-12 earthquakes, no city in Australasia was as strongly marked by Britain’s ‘Gothic revival’ of the nineteenth century as was Christchurch. This is at its most evident in the Provincial Council Chambers, Canterbury Museum, the Anglican Cathedral that lay at the city’s heart, and the buildings of the Arts Centre that were formerly home to the University’s town campus. The ‘Gothic revival’ inspired not only new interest in ‘medieval’ styles of architecture and design but helped fuel the broader revival of Anglicanism that led to the Canterbury settlement.
From British Inspiration to New Zealand Stone
20 November 2023
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Patterns of Diapering
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, 2nd ed (London: Bohn, 1846)
University of Canterbury Library
Today, Augustus W N Pugin is best known for his contribution to the design of the Palace of Westminster, home of the British Houses of Parliament. His Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament, of which the University of Canterbury holds the expanded second edition, is a richly coloured reference guide intended to assist those furnishing and decorating the kind of churches that marked the Christchurch cityscape. Pages such as this one contain all the elements needed to create an idealised ‘medieval’ church interior. Pugin’s work helped fulfil a growing nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the ‘Gothic’.
Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort was Canterbury’s key ‘Gothic revival’ architect. He trained in London during the 1840s, articled to Richard Cromwell Carpenter, an advocate of Pugin’s aesthetic. Mountfort arrived in Canterbury in December 1850, where his first commission was the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Lyttelton (1853). This ink on paper design for ChristChurch Cathedral was completed by Mountfort in about 1873.
With so many of Mountfort’s stone buildings destroyed or severely damaged by recent earthquakes, his exquisitely rendered drawings, held at Canterbury Museum and the Anglican Diocesan Archives, take on an added poignancy as reminders of things and attitudes past, and as still-live documents that may assist in supporting restoration.
Ink drawing of the north elevation of ChristChurch Cathedral by Benjamin Mountfort circa 1873
Canterbury Museum, 1985.198.1
