‘Architects may have added an element of style but the wishes of the Meeting will always have had a strong influence.’ Photo: Friends House Euston, under construction 1924
Body building: Chris Skidmore celebrates the work of Quaker architects
‘To know something about who built our Meeting houses, and who worshipped there, makes them special.’
I have been thinking a lot, during the pandemic, about our Quaker-built heritage. What does it tell us of the Quaker past, and what lessons can we learn from it? This might be a deeply suspect thing to do, at a time when the Yearly Meeting epistle refers to ‘possessions like Meeting houses that might hold us back’. And it is true that, for our seventeenth-century forebears (who were, as the same epistle reminds us, ‘wild about their faith’), a place to meet was not a primary concern. Friends at Pardshaw in Cumbria, for example, met in the open air on Pardshaw Crag for nearly twenty years before building a Meeting house. There is also often nothing special architecturally about old Meeting houses, other than their survival. But to know something about who built them, and who worshipped there, makes them special. What assurance of the Truth was demonstrated by Anthony Myers at Farfield, who gave the land to Friends on a 5,000-year lease! What desire to maintain community was shown by the Brigflatts Quakers who climbed onto the roof each autumn to stuff moss between the cracks in the slates, to keep their Meeting protected from the winter!
Those early Meeting houses were probably built by the Meeting itself, getting together to provide the means or the materials, and often the labour as well. But eventually the job was handed over to professional builders or contractors, some of whom were Quakers. The first Quaker contractor we know of is not associated with a Meeting house at all: Joseph Avis, a London Quaker. He was a carpenter and, in 1699, contracted to build the original Bevis Marks synagogue for the Sephardic Jewish congregation in the city. In 1747 the second Bristol Friars Meeting House was built by George and William Tully, described as surveyors and builders. Later in the eighteenth century we first have the word architect applied: to John Bevans of Plaistow, who was responsible for Meeting houses at Guildford and Winchmore Hill, and the Retreat at York.
Quakers have never felt the need to regulate the design of Meeting houses: the similarities between them have arisen from the needs of worship and business meetings, and probably a certain amount of imitation of existing models. The involvement of architects may have added an element of style but we can be sure that the wishes of the meeting concerned will always have had a strong influence.
From the late nineteenth century, and into the present, Meeting houses have invariably been architect-designed, several by Quaker architects. Around the turn of the twentieth century the favoured style was a version of what is often called ‘Arts-and-Crafts’. This includes the striking Meeting house at Bournville by William Harvey, and the elegant Hampstead Meeting House by Fred Rowntree. The most ambitious of them is undoubtedly Letchworth, where a house – Howgills – built for the Quaker heiress Juliet Reckitt in high Arts-and-Crafts style, is fused with a reinterpretation of the Meeting house at Brigflatts in Cumbria. The garden front of the house is an almost exact copy of Brigflatts, including its distinctive double-height porch. The Meeting room behind has a similar balcony but is loftier and less rustic than the original. The design is thought to be largely the work of the Quaker architect Benjamin Bidwell, who, in partnership with Robert Bennett, designed many buildings in the garden city.
Two prominent Quaker architects working in the twentieth century were Hubert Lidbetter (1885-1966) and Paul Mauger (1896-1982). Both went to Quaker schools and were conscientious objectors in the first world war. Lidbetter spent four years in France driving ambulances with the Friends Ambulance Unit while Mauger spent time imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs, and then did relief work in France.
Hubert Lidbetter moved to London to practise after the war and was soon successful in the competition to design the new Friends House in Euston Road. His carefully-detailed neo-Georgian design, meant to reflect the building’s then surroundings (much of which have disappeared) was immediately recognised by a RIBA bronze medal for the best building erected in London in 1927, and described as ‘eminently Quakerly’. He used a more modest version of the same design for the 1930s Meeting house at Bull Street, Birmingham. This was not to be his enduring style, however. In fact his next Meeting house design was in the Arts and Crafts vein at Harrow in 1935, and he returned to this style when providing a design for Croydon in the 1950s, where he had to match the low-eaved roofs of the Adult School Hall of 1908, which had survived the 1940 bombing raid.
Paul Mauger was strongly linked to the garden city movement – he lived for much of his life in Welwyn and designed many houses there, and in Hampstead garden suburb and at Jordans, not designing his first Meeting house until the 1950s. He was of a more internationalist outlook than Lidbetter, spending some time in the 1930s in Palestine, where he was involved in the building of the archaeological museum in Jerusalem.
The major challenge for the Meeting house architect in the mid-twentieth century was to provide, on as small a footprint as possible, sufficient spaces for the social and organisational success of a Local Meeting – classrooms, committee rooms, kitchens and so on – without their functions disturbing the quiet preferable for a successful Meeting for Worship.
Solutions included clustering ancillary rooms together and separating them from the Meeting room, using social spaces such as corridors and foyers as a buffer zone, or even placing them in separate buildings.
Lidbetter and Mauger both used designs of this sort, notably Lidbetter at Watford in 1953 and Mauger at Chelmsford in 1957. The Watford design has been largely obscured by later changes, but had a central two-storey square Meeting room fronted by single storey blocks, two side pavilions flanking a recessed lobby block, the whole in brick with flat roofs. Chelmsford is slightly more complex, consisting of a Meeting room with pyramidal roof surrounded by smaller flat-roofed blocks containing auxiliary rooms. Both might well be described as modernist, not a term which is often used of Lidbetter, although his Meeting houses at Sutton Coldfield and Liverpool (now demolished) shared some of these characteristics.
Mauger’s most startling Meeting house, and the one which won most critical attention, is that at Hitchin (1957), where he was required to build on a burial ground with minimal disturbance to the graves. The whole structure is on concrete columns a full storey’s height above the ground, with unfortunate consequences for future accessibility.
It is striking that neither Mauger nor Lidbetter accommodated fully to the changes in worship which took place in the twentieth century – our customary circle of chairs – by designing hexagonal or octagonal Meeting rooms. This was left to younger Quaker architects, such as William Barnes and Norman Frith. But both Mauger and Lidbetter did, however, design churches for other nonconformists, and at least one of those was hexagonal. Their contribution to our Quaker heritage has, like that of their predecessors, been considerable. Their buildings will join those of earlier centuries as places of inspiration and peaceful contemplation for future generations.
Chris’s Quakers and their Meeting Houses was published by Liverpool University Press for Historic England on 1 November.
