An architect of promise: George Gilbert Scott junior (1839-1897) and the late gothic revival. (Young George).

By Gavin Stamp. Donington: Shaun Tyas. 2002. [pounds sterling]49.50

Gavin Stamp is possibly best known as a polemicist, but this fascinating study of the almost entirely forgotten architect George Gilbert Scott Junior should reestablish its writer as an architectural historian of distinction and originality. Scott was the oldest son of Sir George Gilbert Scott, and his career at first overlapped with his father's, particularly in the restoration works being carried out by various Cambridge colleges which Scott junior generally directed with sympathetic discretion. Towards the end of his father's lifetime he designed his greatest work, the church of St Agnes in Kennington, later described by Comper as 'the greatest work of the greatest architect of the Victorian era'. Like that other lost Victorian masterpiece, Pugin's Bishop's House in Birmingham, it fell victim to spiteful, bullying philistinism and was pointlessly demolished after the last war.

The loss was the greater because 'Middle' Scott built so little. His father's death in 1878 brought him financial independence; his conversion to Roman Catholicism two years later inevitably affected his client base, and his early collapse into picturesque insanity effectively ended his career in 1883. Like one of the disloyal sons of Henry II, he rebelled against his father as the latter lay dying, and turned his hand to the Queen Anne style -- more out of conservatism than from any pursuit of a modern 'sweetness and light'. This excellent record of his thoughtful and troubled career as architect, restorer, scholar, and writer throws much light on a neglected and turbulent period of Victorian architecture.