page_title: Ewan Christian
section_title: Styles
hierarchical_section_title: Ewan Christian / Life / Career / Styles
caption_attribution_description: English: St Paul's parish church, Swanley Village, Kent, seen from the west
context_page_description: Ewan Christian was a British architect. He is most notable for the restorations of Southwell Minster and Carlisle Cathedral, and the design of the National Portrait Gallery. He was Architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from 1851 to 1895. Christian was elected A RIBA in 1840, FRIBA in 1850, RIBA President 1884–86 and was awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1887.
context_section_description: Though the Early English style was Christian's favourite he was not restricted to it. Many of his original churches and church restorations display beautiful window tracery in other styles of Gothic architecture. An excellent example of his Decorated Gothic work can be seen at St John's Church, Kenilworth in Warwickshire built in 1851–52, using rough cut red sandstone for the body of the church with ashlar dressings and displaying a fine south-west steeple with a broach spire. Typically the interior is open and spacious with little division between nave and chancel. Other churches by Christian in the Decorated style include the prominently sited Christ Church, Forest Hill (1852–62) in the London Borough of Lewisham, built in Kentish Ragstone with an impressive tower and spire of 1885, and the charming St Paul's Church, Swanley in Kent completed in 1861 with a west tower added 1862–65 which is built of rubble stone with bands of red and yellow brick and topped by shingled pyramidal spire. 
  Christian also worked in the Perpendicular Gothic style providing some very attractive Perpendicular traceried windows for the church of St James the Greater (1883), Oaks-in-Charnwood in Leicestershire, which was built in local granite and has a fine west tower, and also for the church of St Dionis, Parsons Green in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, built in red brick with stone dressings in 1884–85, its tower completed after Christian's death in 1896. For the restoration of the ancient Church of St Laurence (1860) in Warkworth, Northumberland, Christian provided a lovely group of chancel east windows in the round-arched Norman style and designed a Neo-Norman organ case for Romsey Abbey in Hampshire in 1858. In 1876–77 he added a Norman style family chapel and vestry to St Andrew's Church near Weston Park in Staffordshire to match the classical work of 1701 a little better than with Gothic. The composition of Minor Canonries (1878–80) that Christian designed as residences for canons of St Paul's Cathedral, London in nearby Amen Court is in the manner of Norman Shaw's Domestic Revival architecture, inspired by original Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings. Here Christian provided a careful design in red brick, beautifully set along the court, with large mullioned and transomed windows; patterned gables and tall chimneys; a tower topped by his usual pyramidal roof and elegant shell hoods over the doors. The court is entered through a pretty gateway, also in red brick, with a Tudor style arch which has an oriel window above on both sides. In a similar Elizabethan style is the bank (1884–86) that Christian designed for Messrs Cox & Co, bankers to the army, in Whitehall, Westminster, though here the building is faced in stone. The former bank is set at the north corner of Craig's Court and has three large gables decorated with a raised grid pattern similar to the work at Amen Court, perhaps alluding to the timber-framed gables of Elizabethan buildings. Below the gables there is an impressively wide expanse of mullioned and transomed windows for each of the upper floors. An extension was added to the corner under a smaller gable in 1900, designed by J. H. Christian. Also in an attractive Shaw style were two large convalescent homes which Christian designed, the first at Folkestone in Kent (1881, chapel added 1888) and the second, the Surrey Convalescent Home at Seaford, East Sussex (1888–91, demolished in the 1960s), both had the usual bold display of heavy mullioned and transomed stone windows, big gables, tall chimneystacks and dormers. Finally, Christian's National Portrait Gallery in London as noted above was designed in a striking Italian Renaissance style.
caption: St Paul's Church, Swanley Village in Kent, 1861 by Ewan Christian, the tower was added in 1865
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