George Gilbert Scott junior, born in 1839, was the lost hope of Late Victorian architecture. Today he is little known but during his tragically short life he helped change the direction of British architecture. His work inaugurated the refined, elegant style of the last decades of the nineteenth century which dared to look to Perpendicular Gothic for inspiration. His now-demolished church of St. Agnes in Kennington, South London, was hugely influential and one of the key buildings which marked the rejection of High Victorian Gothic in the 1870s. Scott was also a domestic architect and was known as a pioneer in the 'Queen Anne' revival of a vernacular classicism. He was responsible for furniture, metalwork and painted decoration. Moving in advanced artistic circles, he designed wallpaper for William Morris and then for the firm of Watts & Co. which he established with G. F. Bodley and Thomas Garner. Nor was Scott just an architect, designer and church restorer: he was briefly a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, having written a prize-winning essay which attempted to reconcile Christianity with the unsettling scientific discoveries of his day.
