page_title: Architecture of Wales
section_title: Ruskinian Gothic & Polychrome brickwork
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of Wales / Gothic Revivalism and Historicism of the 18th and 19th Centuries. / Ruskinian Gothic & Polychrome brickwork
caption_attribution_description: Cymraeg: Adeilad yn Aberteifi, Ceredigion English: Building in Cardigan, Ceredigion
context_page_description: Architecture of Wales is an overview of architecture in Wales from the Medieval period to the present day, excluding castles and fortifications, ecclesiastical architecture and industrial architecture. It covers the history of domestic, commercial, and administrative architecture.
context_section_description: The influence of John Ruskin  and G E Street can be seen on British architecture from the mid-1850s onwards following the publication of Ruskin's  Stones of Venice. Ruskin and Street advocated styles of architecture which used striking colour combinations and were modelled on Venetian and north Italian Gothic architecture. There is little evidence of Ruskinian Gothic in Wales, but with the notable exception of Cardigan Town Hall, but it did give rise to the use the use of Polychrome brickwork. Cardigan Town Hall was designed by Robert Jewell Withers and built in 1858–60. It was a multi-purpose civic building acting as a Town Hall, Corn Exchange, Grammar School, News-room, corn store  and markets. The clock and clock tower were added in 1896. 
  An example of Ruskin's Venetian Gothic are the block of chambers at 24-26 Queen Street Cardiff. These have been attributed to C E Barnard,apparently a Civil Engineer and were originally built alongside the Glamorgan Canal, possibly giving the inspiration to build in the Venetian Gothic style. The construction is dated to 1878, although this stylistically seem a decade or more too late. The building has a four storied facade with  Stucco and Portland stone and seven bays. Gothic cornice with pierced pinnacles at either end with  ornamental battlements. The third floor has single windows with rounded heads and rope-moulded architraves and the second floor has ogee-headed windows with  floreated stringcourses and projecting balconies to single windows, and the  first floor has trefoil headed windows  with capped columns arranged in Venetian manner either side of a splayed oriel window. 
  The use of patterned or polychrome brickwork, sometimes associated terracotta was popular in the towns in Montgomeryshire and North Eastern Wales in the 1870s and 1880s. A striking example is the Plas Castell Gatehouse at Denbigh, a Tudoresque machicolated tower with bars of yellow brick contrasting with the red bricks. The tower was built in 1882.  In Kerry, Montgomeryshire the estate architects J W Poundley and D Walker produced an unusual composition of a terrace of houses built for the Naylors next to the former Kerry workhouse. The red bricks are punctuated by a double string of white brick and a pattern of white and black bricks below the eaves and for the upper voussoirs. The use of curved bricks in the voussoirs give the impression of an Egyptian pharonic head-dress.
caption: Town Hall, Cardigan
exif: {}