36
BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON
HISTORIC CHURCHES
21ST ANNUAL EDITION
Detail of the Sign of St Mark and a fictive moulding by Clayton & Bell 1908; All Saints, Maidstone, Kent
(Photo: Kevin Howell)
St Mark, one of the Four Evangelists in an impressive late scheme which includes texts, shaded stencils and fictive mouldings; All Saints, Maidstone, Kent, with decorations
by Clayton & Bell 1907–8 (Photo: Kevin Howell)
skilled and artistic to concentrate on other
demanding tasks such as figurative work.
In late 15th-century France the simple
stencilled forerunners of modern playing
cards were introduced, and in Rouen in
the 17th century stencilled sheets of heavy
paper anticipated the development of
wallpaper. However, in England, although
stencilling continued to be used for various
purposes, the really significant catalyst
for its use in the decoration of churches
occurred in the early 19th century with
the burgeoning of the Gothic Revival.
In the vanguard was the brilliant pioneer
architect and designer AWN Pugin, perhaps
best known for his enrichment and decoration
of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. He also
used painted and stencilled decoration for many
of his other commissions, both ecclesiastical and
secular. Examples include St Chad’s Cathedral,
Birmingham; St Giles’ Church, Cheadle; and the
chapel at Alton Towers, Staffordshire. One of
Pugin’s closest collaborators was John Gregory
Crace,2 whose firm Frederick Crace & Son
carried out much of Pugin’s decorative work.
Pugin published the Glossary of
Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume in
1844 and Floriated Ornament in 1849, both
containing designs for stencil decoration.
An extract from Clive Wainwright’s
preface to the 1994 reprint of Floriated
Ornament is very informative:
If you read Pugin’s own clearly written
Introduction you will see he argues
that in the middle ages flat pattern was
so successful because the plants were
flattened and arranged in abstract
rather than naturalistic ways.
Pugin himself applied these principles
to stencilling the interiors of his
buildings, also to ceramics, wallpapers,
carpets, curtains, furniture, stained
glass and tiles… Designers from the
1860s like William Morris, Christopher
Dresser and Owen Jones owed a
great debt indeed to Pugin.3
It is this deceptively simple, two-
dimensional quality which gives stencilled
decoration its timeless attraction. Another
significant figure influenced by Pugin was
the architect George Gilbert Scott:
Pugin’s articles [in The Ecclesiologist]
excited me almost to fury, and
I suddenly found myself like a person
awakened from a long feverish dream,
which had rendered him unconscious
of what was going on about him.4
Scott was one of the most prolific architects
this country has ever produced and from the
1840s onwards many young architects and
designers were trained in his office. Some of
the better known among them were George
Frederick Bodley, Alfred Bell, Thomas Garner,
George Gilbert Scott Jr, George Edmund
Street and William White. As their careers
progressed they carried Pugin’s ideas with
them and put them into practice in their
own buildings and decorative schemes.
The 19th-century preoccupation with
architectural style led to the publication of
