page_title: Ewan Christian
section_title: Surveys and architectural competitions
hierarchical_section_title: Ewan Christian / Life / Career / Surveys and architectural competitions
caption_attribution_description: English: St Martin, Ludgate Hill, London EC4 - East end, near to London, City of London, Great Britain.
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: Christian's colossal work load required enormous amounts of energy to match it and despite having some bouts of serious illness as he got older the architect continued to meet the demands of his large practice. Typical of this is his appointment in 1887 as Consulting Architect to the Charity Commissioners for whom he produced a great report on the City of London churches which was said to be 'the most complete account [of them] ever written'. Christian personally inspected the 54 churches, strenuous and sometimes dangerous work, undertaken when he was over 70 years old. Christian carried out restoration work on several of these churches, a notably restrained and respectful one being that of 1892–95 to Sir Christopher Wren's St Martin Ludgate on Ludgate Hill. This contrasts with his rather insensitive restoration work of 1851 and 1866 to Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields in east London where he drastically removed the old galleries and box pews and made alterations to the original windows. The architect's personal survey of the old unstable tower of Chichester Cathedral in 1861 could have resulted in his death as it collapsed in a gale the day after he had climbed it.} Adding to his burdens, Christian also acted as an assessor and judge in important architectural competitions throughout the country, though not always satisfactorily. In that for an Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool (1884–86) his choice of Sir William Emerson's odd design of mixed styles for the building, which was to be built on a sensitive site close to St George's Hall, caused a controversy within the RIBA which was aired publicly in the press. The chosen design was not built and the present cathedral by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960), begun in 1903 on a different site, stemmed from a later competition. Christian's report on the competition for St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh (1872) was thought to be 'a model of its kind' though the donors chose the design by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) before seeing Christian's report which favoured George Edmund Street's design. The competition for a new Admiralty and War Office building in Whitehall, London, in 1884 involved Christian in a selection committee as President of the RIBA. The committee were faced with a difficult two-stage process with 128 entries to assess. Despite their arduous and careful work the committee experienced much hostility towards their choices and, having made the final selection, parliamentary economic concerns led to the collapse of the scheme (two separate buildings were later constructed), thus wasting the time and effort of Christian and his colleagues.
caption: St Martin's Ludgate, (interior view east) in Ludgate Hill in the City of London, Ewan Christian restored this church in 1892–95
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