Born in 1852, Edward Prior studied under Richard Norman Shaw and the experience fostered a lifelong respect for building processes and craftsmanship.  He established his own practice in 1880 and although the buildings he produced over the next thirty years were few, the majority are highly accomplished and marked by his rigorous intellect.  In common with William Morris and his followers, Prior aimed to unify the arts and the crafts and free architecture from stylistic revivalism.  These ideals are enshrined at St. Andrew’s, a building widely known as the ‘Cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement.’ 

The building is pervaded by a restless interlocking of forms.  The body is cruciform, but the robust transepts shrug off perfect symmetry.  Unusually, the massive tower is not placed above the crossing, but sits astride the chancel, which nevertheless punches through the tower and obtrudes at the east, where its gable is surmounted by a gaunt cross.  Such bold massing is typical of Prior’s work, and would later earn him the epithet of ‘rogue-architect’.  Surprisingly, however, there is no spectacular entrance, only two humble porches with lean-to roofs that confer a certain modesty on all who enter. 

In the nave windows, sinuous Gothic tracery is replaced with brutally angular forms.  The deliberately raw and stark quality of the church speaks eloquently about the nature of its materials: the local magnesian limestone is crystalline but porous, making it unsuitable for decorative treatment.  By extolling these properties, the forms of the church seem to have evolved almost organically from the materials.  A central tenet of Prior’s thinking was the concept of texture.  To Prior, the myriad textures of materials expressed the generative and also degenerative forces of nature.  The large nave windows are filled with clear glass arranged in minute, irregular panes.  This means that the nave is transfused with scintillating light that plays across the stonework and emphasizes its coarse texture to startlingly tactile effect. 

In accordance with Arts and Crafts notions of honest construction, vestigial buttresses on the exterior indicate that the heavy walls and roof are, in fact, supported from within.  Inside, the nave arches double as internal buttresses, emerging immensely thick and heavy from the walls but tapering inwards to form vast transverse arches which vault across the entire space, creating a cavernous interior.  The arches are abruptly cut off at head-height and come to rest upon short hexagonal piers, which create tunnel-like passages beneath.  The coupled columns beneath the arches are based on those of the Saxon church of St. Peter nearby, which Prior studied when he visited the site.  In his 1922 publication, Eight Chapters on English Medieval Art, Prior wrote that English culture acquired its distinctive character in the rudimentary stonework of Saxon churches and he clearly viewed Monkwearmouth in terms of its pre-Norman past. 

Beneath the rugged stonework, the church conceals an innovative structure of reinforced concrete.  Iron stanchions are embedded in the base of the walls and four iron rods run up through the arches.  Exposed concrete purlins run laterally along the ceiling.  This skeletal framework allowed Prior to supersede the nave-and-side-aisle plan of most churches, achieving the unimpeded flow of space that is crucial to how the church functions.   The underlying structural frame brings us to an apparent contradiction at the heart of St. Andrew’s.  The use of iron and concrete seems incompatible with the Arts and Crafts ideal of craftsmanship that candidly expresses its construction, but it was typical of Prior to arrive at an individualistic interpretation of current principles.  To his mind, reinforced concrete was ‘only the simple straight forward elementary science of building,’ and he asked, ‘Is this not an ideal for a great church to aim at, that it shall be the best building of its time?’

Embodying an ideal of collective labour, St. Andrew’s houses work by many of the leading members of the Arts and Crafts Movement.  Ernest Gimson (1864-1919) designed the ebony lectern inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver.  In the chancel, the wrought iron crosses and candlesticks were executed by Gimson’s blacksmith, Alfred Bucknell.  These are lacquered to prevent rusting, but the surfaces are pitted with the marks of the maker’s tools.  Dedication panels were created by Eric Gill (1882-1940), who went on to found the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic in 1921. 

Together, the church and its fittings express a theme of redemption through work.  This of course is a central tenet of the Church, but one which is thoroughly compatible with Arts and Crafts precepts.  The rough stonework and stark, angular tracery speak of the ‘hard labour of quarrying and cutting stone.’  In selecting the stone, Prior avoided the mechanised quarry nearby at Fulwell in favour of a more distant quarry at Marsden, because this was still ‘worked by quarrymen with their usual tool – the scutcher, a broad bladed pickaxe.’ Similarly, the glass was made by hand to Prior’s own recipe and streaks in the surface of each pane show that it bears ‘the impress of the loving hand’ of the craftsman.  St. Andrew’s is a paean to the virtues of simple craftsmanship. 

The nave and chancel are connected in typically forceful manner: arches spring diagonally from the base of the tower and fuse it with the transepts, creating cave-like recesses that house the organ and Lady Chapel.  The high chancel is hollowed out of the base of the tower.  After the starkness and severity observed elsewhere, the chancel bursts with colour in the form of a lavish mural painted on the walls and ceiling.  This is a pictorial retelling of Genesis and the forms radiate from a central globe of alabaster, representing the sun.  The mural was executed in egg tempera by Macdonald Gill – brother of Eric Gill – to a design by Prior, although a number of assistants were employed. 

The foreshortened chancel has the almost magical effect of bringing the altar deceptively close to the congregation.  A typically somnolent tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones serves as a reredos.  Based on the artist’s Star of Bethlehem (1897), this was executed in Morris’s workshop at Merton Abbey.  The wood panelling in the chancel is much more precise and refined than that in the nave and here the bare stone floor is robed with William Morris’s lavish carpet, coloured with vegetable dyes instead of the harsh chemical tones common at the time.  Overall, the rough-hewn, laboriously-executed nave is transcended by the splendour of the chancel: the implication is that heavy labour is rewarded in Heaven.  Stained-glass windows by Henry Payne depict this theme in allegorical terms: a workman is shown having his burden lightened as he gazes upon Christ, and the window of the Lady Chapel bears the inscription, ‘Come unto Me all ye that labour and I will give you rest.’

St. Andrew’s anticipates many ideas that became axioms of the Modern Movement.  Structural virtuosity, the valuing of form over applied decoration, and the aversion to stylistic revivalism are characteristic, while the concern for truth-to-materials and structural honesty are the principal lessons that Modernists learned from their Arts and Crafts forebears.  Reflecting on his technical innovations, Prior predicted that ‘the application of cement fortified by iron to structure is, in my opinion, going to be a revolution . . . an entirely new range of expression may be opened up.’  There is a tendency to regard Arts and Crafts as a regressive movement, grounded in moribund traditions, and Modernism as a revolution without historical precedent.  By highlighting the inherent rationalism of Arts and Crafts, and its little-known engagement with modern technologies, St. Andrew’s reveals that the movement was in many respects a dynamic and progressive force, yet one that retained its faith in nature, individual creativity and spirituality.