Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959) is one of my greatest architectural heroes. All of his buildings are worth a special trip, but here is one that you may well have seen without ever quite registering it – St Olaf’s House on Tooley Street. If you cross London Bridge going south across the Thames you will see it on the left. At first sight it may look simply like a rather engaging inter-war period piece. Indeed, all sorts of predictable labels get thrown at it, but none quite sticks. With a straight face, its architect called it gothic. To understand why, we need to know a bit about him.

Background and education

Born into a privileged and educated family (his father was a fellow in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge), Goodhart-Rendel showed a keen interest in architecture from an early age. Significantly, he was attracted by highly individual figures such as Nicholas Hawksmoor and Arthur Beresford Pite, who as architects stood outside the mainstream and produced no direct successors.

But his interest in music was equally strong and that was what he chose to study when he went up to Cambridge in 1905. This had been preceded by a period of study with the composer and musicologist Donald Tovey (1875–1940). It was not a success owing the their antagonistic tastes in music (André Messager and Brahms were their respective idols), but the two remained on good terms, and when Goodhart-Rendel entered architectural practice after graduating in 1909, one of his first works was a house for Tovey’s patron, Miss Sophie Weiss, at Englefield Green in Surrey. Goodhart-Rendel never lost his interest in music and was reputedly a good pianist who also composed a small amount, some of it published. He was vice-president of the Royal Academy of Music from 1953 (which made him an honorary fellow in 1958) and a governor of Sadler’s Wells from 1934.

The 20th century Victorian

In 1936 he converted to Catholicism and the churches that he built for his faith are among his most important works. He was eventually buried at the Benedictine abbey of Prinknash in Gloucestershire, for which he designed an immense church, intended to have been 300 feet in length (regrettably construction got no further than the sub-crypt and was abandoned after his death. But he also handled numerous Anglican commissions, including the restoration following severe bomb damage of G.E. Street’s masterpiece of St John the Divine, Kennington, something which probably no other architect at the time could have handled with comparable skill. He championed Victorian Gothic at the time when it was a deeply unfashionable cause. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and his English Architecture since the Regency – an Interpretation of 1953 is one of the best and most readable introductions to 19^th century architecture that there is.

Goodhart-Rendel was Slade professor of fine art in Oxford from 1933 to 1936 and it is clear from the surviving texts of his lectures given there (some of which formed the basis of English Architecture since the Regency) and elsewhere that he possessed in ample quantity the most important skill of any good teacher of architecture – the ability to instil a desire to go and see it for oneself. He was as gifted a communicator as he was a designer. The 19^th century greatly influenced his own work, in which the strident colour and bold sense of form characteristic of the High Victorian movement are evident, although he was not in the slightest bit dogmatic when it came to style.

It was thanks to this that he was able to respond with great sensitivity and imagination when extending or restoring existing buildings. He had the rare ability to make additions that harmonise, yet have intrinsic value and interest – an ideal widely promoted, yet rarely attained. But this means that his output is so varied that it can be difficult to pin him down. Though he occupied several influential positions – he was president of the Architectural Association in 1924–1925, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1937–1939, then director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1936-1938 – he produced no direct successors.

Hay’s Wharf

The building that I have chosen to profile in tribute to him exemplifies that individuality. It is not merely unusual in his own output (the early concept sketches were resolutely neo-classical), but also in inter-war British architecture as a whole. St Olaf’s House was built in 1930-1932 as the headquarters of Hay’s Wharf. Originally set up by Alexander Hay in the 17^th century, at one time this company owned all the warehouses on the south side of the Thames between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, which were used for storing freight arriving at the Pool of London. It also operated related and equally lucrative businesses, such as shipping and distribution services.

Though the current name of this building is relatively recent (it dates from when Hay’s Wharf vacated the premises in 1986) it reflects the long history of the site. It was formerly occupied by the church of St Olave, Tooley Street, a medieval foundation rebuilt to the designs of Henry Flitcroft in 1738-1739. The body of the church was demolished in 1926 after it was made redundant and the tower followed two years later. But what seems to have been part of an octagonal stair turret was saved and turned into a drinking fountain in Tanner Street recreation ground a short distance away. That was laid out on land purchased by Bermondsey Council (later absorbed into Southwark Council) with funds from the sale of the site of the church, which had briefly been one of the few public open spaces in the locality.

St Olaf House is roughly T-shaped in plan, although the vertical stroke of the ‘T’ bends to accommodate the change in alignment between Tooley Street and the river front. The main elevation of the building is right on the waterline, making it very difficult to photograph since it faces north and for most of the day the sun is behind it. One needs binoculars to pick up all the detail, although the building repays the effort. The oriel windows lighting the common room and double-height board room are adorned by gilded faience panels mounted on polished back granite entitled ‘The Chain of Commerce’ by Frank Dobson (1886–1963). There is also plenty of imaginative detail to delight one on the landward side, where it is a lot easier to view, such as Dobson’s outline figure of St Olave in black and gold mosaic.

I said earlier that the stylistic labels thrown at this building are usually of little help in understanding it. In fact there is one that describes it well, although it has little name recognition. It is what is sometimes called Moderne – Art Deco, but without the superficial, Jazz-age decorative fripperies; modernist, but nothing like as stark and austere as Corbusian ‘white modernism’. It sums up Goodhart-Rendel’s ambivalent relationship to the architecture of his own time. “New or old in style? It will all soon be old, and neither better nor worse for that”, he replied when asked for his view of the Exhibition of British Art in Industry of 1935. Yet equally he was never content to resort to the pale imitations of Nordic Classicism, Scandinavian National Romanticism and Dudok’s brick cubism – the ‘safe’ brands of modernism popular at the time – which dog inter-war British architecture.

While there are plenty of other buildings of this date with superficial modernist trappings such as strip windows, metal-framed glazing and smooth Portland stone cladding, here a powerful intelligence has grasped something much deeper than just a set of mannerisms. Goodhart-Rendel is keen to rise to the intellectual challenge of the Modern Movement and to engage with it on its own terms. The stanchions on which the building is supported have as much to do with a requirement in the brief for vehicular access to the waterfront and a covered area for cars to drop off passengers by the entrance as with Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points’. The angular modelling of the forms is dictated by the need to maximise the amount of light that could be brought into the drawing offices on the sixth floor rather than the influence of the ragged outlines of Art Deco. The load-bearing steel frame is clearly expressed in the elevation to the river, yet the source of Goodhart-Rendel’s theories of structural rationalism was Viollet-le-Duc, who in turn claimed to have derived them from his study of the architecture of the 12^th-13^th centuries. The architect was therefore not being in the least flippant when he replied, having been asked to describe the style of the Hay’s Wharf, that it was ‘early French Gothic’.

This is such a satisfying bit of architecture that I wish there was more like it. Yet even on their own terms, Goodhart-Rendel’s buildings are unrepeatable – each one is a fresh response to the problems posed by the commission and the site. If this post has made you want to go and see this building for yourself, you can combine the trip with a visit to another important work of his only a short walk away from St Olaf’s House on Jamaica Road – the Roman Catholic church of Most Holy Trinity, Dockhead of 1957-1960.