The date of George Frederick Bodley’s death (1907) offers a partial explanation for a commemorative exhibition, but ‘comes the hour, comes the man’ also applies, and in this case the man is Michael Hall, the editor of Apollo magazine, who for some years has studied Bodley’s work and succeeded in presenting it as a key to understanding many aspects of the late-Victorian mind, rather than simply as the oeuvre of a skilled but possibly rather conventional designer whose successors followed him into a dead end of style. He is the instigator and curator of this small exhibition in the V&A + RIBA Architecture gallery at the V&A. There is a book coming, but for that we shall have to wait a little longer.
The publication earlier this year of Rosemary Hill’s biography of Pugin has reminded the reading public that architectural ideas in Victorian Britain were primarily played out in the ecclesiastical sphere.
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