Christ Church, Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy

Abstract

In January 1929, John Summerson, then just twenty-five, wrote a pre-emptive article on James William Wild, ‘An Early Modernist’, for The Architects’ Journal. The focus of the piece was Wild’s ‘unusually interesting’ Christ Church, built at the top of Brixton Hill in Streatham, London, in 1840–42. Of this he said: In considering this unusual building it must be borne in mind that it was finished some eight years before Butterfield’s famous church in Margaret Street was begun, and that Ruskin’s dogmas on polychromy did not appear in full till ‘Stones of Venice’ was finally launched in 1851. At Margaret Street the use of different colours was regarded as a surprising innovation, but at Streatham Wild had already employed bricks of three colours to decorate the exterior of his church, and had contrived to give style and character to the design by the use of ingenious cornices and strings built up of these materials.