Scott, Sir George Gilbert
Scott, Sir George Gilbert (1811–78). Architect. Scott was the most famous and successful of Victorian Gothic master builders; and also the most correct stylistically, except when it came to railway stations. The most famous of those is St Pancras in London (1865), a kind of Disneyland castle in bright orange brick. A few years earlier he had submitted a similar design for the new Foreign Office in Whitehall, only to have it vetoed by Palmerston on the grounds that Scott would ‘Gothicize the whole country’ if given his head. This was called the ‘battle of the styles’. Scott lost it, but not the commission itself, if he promised to carry it out in an Italian Renaissance style, which he did. The result probably vindicates Palmerston's pig-headedness. Scott was also a restorer—even an over-restorer—of hundreds of ancient churches. His talent was inherited by his grandson, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960), who built Liverpool's Anglican cathedral in his grandfather's favourite style, and Battersea power station in a more modern one.
Bernard Porter
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Scott, Sir George Gilbert