Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960)

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was the third generation of his family to enter the architectural profession: his grandfather, Sir George Gilbert Scott, designed the controversial, High Gothic Albert Memorial, while his father George Gilbert Scott Jr. was famous for a series of churches in London and Yorkshire that bridged Victorian gothic and the arts and crafts movement. Despite his early promising career, Scott Jr. was eventually to succumb to alcoholism and was committed to a mental asylum, leaving Giles Gilbert Scott and his siblings in the care of his mother.[1] From these two men, Scott absorbed a deep appreciation for the Gothic style, and its relationship to modern building design. Rather than attending an architectural school, he studied under Victorian church builder, Temple Moore, one of his father’s former students, and with Moore’s encouragement entered into a competition to design a new Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. Scott won the competition for the Liverpool Cathedral in 1903, despite being both twenty-two and a Roman Catholic.[2]

Considered “Britain’s most prestigious architectural competition for the ‘design of a 20th century cathedral,’” the commission to build the cathedral ensured Scott a stable, successful career as an architect, though the project itself proved to be rife with difficulties.[3] The ultimate design of Liverpool Cathedral was heralded as a triumphant success in the Neo-Gothic style, and his choice to maintain the Gothic style while utilizing design and construction techniques of the 20^th century demonstrated his reverence for the past as well as an ability to meld the past with the present.[4] Scott would later gain additional recognition for his secular design work, including Waterloo Bridge, the Guinness Brewery at Park Royal, and the No. 6 “Jubilee” telephone kiosk, modeled after the tomb of another famous British architect, Sir John Soane.[5] Soane’s architecture, especially his ecclesiastical work on Liverpool Cathedral, reveals an appreciation of ornament, modern design elements and construction techniques, and a utilization of monumental scale in order to endow structures with significance – all elements that feature in the designs of both Bankside and Battersea power stations.