William Wardell
William Wilkinson Wardell was a noted architect who practiced in the second half of the 19th century, and is best known for a series of landmark buildings in Australia in Melbourne and Sydney.
Following a successful career in the 1840-50s as an ecclesiastical architect for the Catholic church in Britain, Wardell emigrated to the Colony of Victoria in 1858. He then designed the Catholic cathedrals in both the major cities, St Patrick's in Melbourne and St Mary's in Sydney, as well as St John's College, at the University of Sydney, and numerous parish churches in Victoria. His Gothic Revival church designs have been compared favourably with his friend, English architect and Gothic pioneer Augustus Pugin. He also served as the Chief Architect of the Victorian Public Works Department from 1858-1878, personally designing Government House, Melbourne, and ensured refined classicalism was the predominant style for most public buildings. Wardell also maintained a private practice, designing a mansion, and a series of banks for the ES&A, most notably the Gothic Bank in Melbourne.
Early life in London
Wardell was born in 1823, the son of Thomas Wardell, baker, and his wife Mary; his birth date is not recorded, but he was baptised the following year, on 3 March 1824 at All Saints Church of England, Poplar. He was educated as an engineer, and spent a short time at sea before practicing in London, working for the commissioners of sewers for Westminster and part of Middlesex, and for W. F. East, an architect. While employed on railway surveys in the early 1840s he studied near-by churches.His interest in Gothic Revival architecture was stimulated by his friends, architect Augustus Pugin, and John Henry Newman, who encouraged him to become a Roman Catholic. Pugin became his friend and mentor, and was to inspire him not only in architecture but also in his religious convictions. Mixing in the artistic and literary circles of London, he fell in with the philosophy of the Oxford movement, which taught that Gothic architecture, as symbolized by the great medieval cathedrals of England, was the only form of architecture worthy of God and fostered a spirituality that made it easier to communicate with God. In 1843 Wardell made the unusual decision to convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, adopting the motto Inveni Quod Quaesivi. While Catholics were not actively persecuted in Britain at the time, there was still open discrimination against the Faith in certain political and business quarters. Newman himself did not himself make the leap of faith until 1845.
This manifested in his architectural interests, directed towards the revival of the Gothic of England's medieval period, and or the remainder of his life he saw architecture as a means of praising God. He always had a room in his home set aside as a chapel, dominated by an ancient carved wooden French cross, which he visited several times during the course of a day;iIt is thought that he frequently prayed before working on plans of church buildings.
The lifting of most restrictions on Catholics, which had prevailed since the time of the reformation, through the Catholic Emancipation Acts led to a Catholic revival in Britain. Thus the newly converted Pugin and his protégé Wardell were well placed to receive the numerous commissions which came flooding in.
On 7 October 1847 Wardell married Lucy Ann Butler, the daughter of William Henry Butler, a wine merchant and one time Mayor of Oxford. The couple married at St Mary's Catholic Church, Moorfields in the City of London and are known to have had eleven children.
Architectural career
London office
By the time of his marriage aged 23, Wardell was already independently practicing as an architect. Between 1846 and 1858 he designed, restored or re-ordered about 30 churches in the UK, a rapid success.The heritage-listed Church of St Birinus in Bridge End, Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire was constructed between 1846 and 1849. The small and simple building is an almost exact replica of a 14th-century Gothic chapel. It is constructed of Littlemore stone with a Caen stone porch. The interior has a rectangular nave leading in the traditional fashion through a rood screen to a smaller and lower ceilinged chancel. The nave has a vaulted ceiling supported by wooden strapwork. Lit by stained glass windows, the whole structure hardly differs from the design of Anglican churches constructed in the same period. The expected paraphernalia of the more ritualistic Catholic worship is absent; side chapels and numerous secondary altars are conspicuous by their absence. The only contemporary jarring feature not found in an English country church is the set of late Byzantine style gilt chandeliers.
He designed several London churches, many now listed by Historic England. Our Ladye Star of the Sea, Greenwich, begun in 1846 and completed c1851, is fronted by a tower completed by an ornate spire which in turn is complemented by the smaller spire of the adjacent stair turret. The ruggedness of the rough faced stone tower with tall buttresses bears comparison with his later and much larger work, St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne. Also heritage-listed is Our Immaculate Lady of Victories, situated in Clapham Park Road, Clapham, South London, constructed between 1848 and 1851, the same year that Wardell completed Holy Trinity, Hammersmith. From 1853 to 1854, he designed St Mary's Church in Chislehurst, where Napoleon III was buried from 1873 to 1888. Other Grade II* listed heritage buildings designed in part or full by Wardell include the Church of St Mary and St Michael in Stepney, and the lower levels of the plain brick Church of St Peter and St Edward in Palace Street, Westminster. At the former convent of the Holy Child Jesus on Magdalen Road in Hastings, Wardell designed the gateway, the training college a rugged Gothic style, and the priory in a polychrome brick mode, while his mentor Pugin designed the chapel. Wardell also designed the Old Lodge and simple Chapel of the Sacred Heart of Digby Stuart College; a lodge at Grove House in the London Borough of Wandsworth; the plain brick industrial Spode Pottery including buildings around the north west courtyard, including the entrance gate and the bottle kiln at Stoke-on-Trent. His last completed work in England was a fine chapel for family burials commissioned by Lord Petre, located in the forest at Thorndon Park, near Brentwood, Essex; this features an elaborately painted ceiling with hammerbeams featuring carved angels, and along with the ceiling and altar of the Sacred Heart Chapel in Digby is probably the only such decoration in his British work to survive.
Wardell's work wasn't just limited to England; he was commissioned by Robert Hope-Scott and his wife, of Abbotsford, Melrose, to build Our Lady & Saint Andrew's for the growing Roman Catholic community in the nearby town of Galashiels, Scotland. Work on the simple gabled church with small paired spires began in 1856, but wouldn't be completed for another 20 years.
By 1858, aged 35, Wardell was in poor health, diagnosed with tuberculosis, and decided that the warmer climate and clearer air of Victoria would be beneficial. In the course of that year, he collected testimonials and sent them to a range of prospective clients, packed up his possessions, family, and business, and set sail, arriving in Melbourne in September 1858 on the ''Swiftsure.''
In Victoria
Melbourne at the time was in the throes of a boom sparked by the Victorian gold rush, which began in 1851. The city transformed from a rough provincial outpost to a wealthy and rapidly expanding city. Between 1853 and 1854 Melbourne doubled in size, many living at first in tents, rough huts or prefabricated houses. The need for buildings of all types, coupled with available funding drew aspiring young architects from around the world, among them John James Clark, Peter Kerr and William Wilkinson Wardell.Wardell was probably the most experienced and well known British architect to emigrate to Victoria, certainly in the 1850s, and his services were immediately in demand. As a highly regarded architect of Catholic churches, he was soon commissioned to draw up plans for a new St Patrick's Cathedral; this was to be on an enormous scale, and was to occupy him for much of his life. The Victorian Government, faced with a huge task of providing government buildings of all types across the state also decided to draw on his expertise, and on 7 March 1859 he was appointed Chief Architect of the Public Works Department, with the right of private practice.
Over the next twenty years of his time in Victoria, he not only oversaw the design of dozens of public buildings, his private practice covered a wide range of buildings types, including another 14 parish churches for the Catholics and one for the Anglicans, houses and a mansion, banks and schools. He designed for places in country Victoria, as well as other cities in Australia, especially Sydney. He could design in any architectural form that seemed appropriate, including Palladian, Neoclassical plus the various forms of Gothic for his churches and some of the banks. During this time he designed some of the major landmarks in 19th Century Melbourne, including St Patrick's Cathedral, Government House, the Gothic Bank, and Cliveden Mansion.
At first, the family lived in Powlett Street, East Melbourne. In 1867 they moved into a large house known as Ardoch at 226 Dandenong Road, St Kilda, built a few years before, at a time when the suburb was home to much of the wealthy elite of Melbourne. In 1859, Wardell had designed the nearby St Mary's in St Kilda East, where he then personally worshipped.
In 1877 Sir Graham Berry became the premier of Victoria. His mission, considered radically left wing at the time, was to redistribute the grazing land of Victoria, and to introduce a bill providing for the payment of members of the Legislative Assembly, which would enable working-class candidates to be elected. When his aims were rejected by the Legislative Council, he embarked on a public campaign of coercion. "We coerce madmen," he said, "we put them into lunatic asylums, and never was anything more the act of madmen than the rejection of the Appropriation Bill." On 8 January 1878, known afterwards as "Black Wednesday", his "coercing" began. Using the reasoning that without his bill civil servants could not be paid, Berry began to dismiss public servants, starting with police and judges. Wardell's was one of the many heads which fell - dismissed from office, he left Melbourne to seek employment in Sydney.
His most notable works in Victoria are listed below :