Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.