[BITList] Great Scott - Liverpool Cathedral.

[John Feltham]

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Scott, Sir  Giles Gilbert  (1880-1960), architect, was born on 9  
November 1880 at 26 Church Row, Hampstead, London, the third son of  
George Gilbert Scott  (1839-1897) and the grandson of Sir George  
Gilbert Scott  (1811-1878), both architects. Scott's mother, Ellen  
King Sampson (1854-1953), was the daughter of William King Sampson, of  
a Sussex yeoman family. In 1889 her uncle George King-Sampson died and  
left Hollis Street Farm outside Ninfield to the young Giles Scott,  
with a life tenancy to his mother, which enabled her to take her  
children to Sussex and escape her sometimes violent husband who, in  
1884, had been declared of unsound mind. The most direct influence of  
Scott's father on his upbringing was to choose his school, Beaumont  
College, Windsor, because he admired the buildings there designed by  
J. F. Bentley.

In Sussex Ellen Scott took her children 'steeplechasing' on bicycles  
to visit churches and she decided that her two youngest children,  
Giles and Adrian, should follow in their father's profession. In 1899  
Scott was articled for three years to Temple Lushington Moore, his  
father's former pupil and 'coadjutor', but it was not a conventional  
pupillage as he saw little of Moore, who worked at home in Hampstead  
while his office in Staple Inn was run by P. B. Freeman. Although  
Scott hardly knew his father-he later recalled seeing him only twice- 
he became familiar with his architecture, and later remarked that 'I  
always think that my father was a genius. ... He was a far better  
architect than my grandfather and yet look at the reputations of the  
two men!'  (Scott to J. Betjeman, 19 Dec 1938, Betjeman papers,  
University of Victoria, British Columbia).

Cathedral and church commissions

With the encouragement of Moore, Scott entered the second competition  
for a new Anglican cathedral in Liverpool in 1902 with a 'Design for a  
twentieth century cathedral', for which he prepared the drawings at  
home in Battersea in his spare time. To his surprise, this was one of  
five designs chosen to go forward to a second round, in preference to  
schemes by, among others, Temple Moore. In 1903 Scott's design was  
selected by the assessors, Norman Shaw and G. F. Bodley, but it was a  
choice which dismayed the Liverpool Cathedral committee on account of  
Scott's youth, lack of experience, and religion: he was still only  
twenty-two, and a Roman Catholic. In the event, the compromise was  
reached that Bodley should join Scott as joint architect for the  
project.

Although Bodley had been a close friend of Scott's father, this was  
not a happy collaboration, especially after the elder architect had  
acquired two more cathedrals in the United States to design; Scott  
complained that this 'has made the working partnership agreement more  
of a farce than ever, and to tell the truth my patience with the  
existing state of affairs is about exhausted'  (Kennerley, 38). He was  
on the point of resignation when Bodley died in 1907. The separate  
lady chapel was then under construction and Scott promptly redesigned  
everything above the arcades, making the vault more continental in  
style with curvilinear ribs and the triptych reredos more elaborate.  
This first part of the cathedral was opened in 1910. In that same year  
the cathedral committee approved Scott's proposal completely to  
redesign the rest of the building: a remarkably brave decision, not  
least because it necessitated the demolition of stonework already  
executed. Scott had become increasingly unhappy with his winning  
design, which, for all its imagination, belonged essentially in the  
Gothic tradition established by his father, Bodley, and Temple Moore.  
With Bodley gone, 'I decided to start all over again'  (Cotton, 29),  
and Scott made his new conception much more monumental, sublime, and,  
in its overall symmetry, almost classical in feeling: what John  
Summerson described as a 'sudden diversion of late Victorian Gothic  
into an equivalent of Edwardian Baroque'  (Ford, 235). Instead of twin  
towers inspired by Durham Cathedral, Scott now proposed a single,  
central tower rising above pairs of transepts, which had the further  
advantage of providing the central space required but not supplied in  
the original competition design.

Scott also greatly simplified the elevations to create a masterly  
balance between massive bare walls of pink sandstone and concentrated  
detail. Writing later, he explained how 'at Liverpool I have  
endeavoured to combine the uplifting character imparted by vertical  
expression with the restful calm undoubtedly given by the judicious  
use of horizontals'  (Morning Post, 19 July 1924). This, together with  
the rich sculptural feeling of the great reredos and other  
furnishings, may reflect the influence of Albi Cathedral, France  
(which, in fact, Scott never saw), as well as that of a visit to Spain  
made with Sir Frederick Ratcliffe, honorary treasurer and later  
chairman of the cathedral executive committee, who became a lifelong  
friend. Scott designed every detail in the building and the work of  
craftsmen and artists, such as the sculptor Edward Carter Preston and  
the stained-glass artist J. H. Hogan, had to conform to the  
architect's personal vision.

By adopting symmetry for the cathedral, Scott imposed an obligation on  
posterity which ensured its completion in a very different economic  
and social climate and he continually refined his design as the  
building rose. In 1922 the American architect Bertram Goodhue  
described it as 'the finest modern church building without a  
doubt'  (Daily Courier [Liverpool], 5 Sept 1922, 5), while for H. S.  
Goodhart-Rendel it was

a scenic prodigy, displaying the great imaginative power of its  
designer ... it has permanence as the memorial of long and arduous  
labour on the part of an architect exceptionally sensitive to the  
tastes and aspirations of his contemporaries, and permanence also as a  
memorial of the lofty aims of countless able artists who, in three  
generations, spent their efforts in the service of Romance. (Goodhart- 
Rendel, 252)
The choir and first pair of transepts were opened in 1924, the central  
tower was finished in 1942, and the first bay of the nave was opened a  
year after the architect's death, in 1961. The (liturgical) west end  
was finally completed to a revised and reduced design by his old  
assistant, Roger Pinckney, made for Scott's former partner Frederick  
G. Thomas.

The building of Liverpool Cathedral, an undertaking on a prodigious  
scale, dominated Scott's life, and it was in Liverpool that he met  
Louise Wallbank Hughes (1888-1949), whom he married in 1914. The  
daughter of Richard Hughes, she had been working as a receptionist in  
the Adelphi Hotel and was, to the distress of Scott's mother, a  
protestant. Despite his astonishing early success, Scott initially had  
little work other than the cathedral; his first complete church was  
the Annunciation at Bournemouth (1905-6), in which he used the high,  
flush transept idea he had initially proposed for Liverpool to make a  
sort of crossing tower at the end of a low nave. Another Roman  
Catholic church, at Sheringham, Norfolk (1909-14), revealed Scott's  
development towards simplifying Gothic forms, and the contemporary  
church at Ramsay on the Isle of Man (1909-12), with its rugged tower  
facing the sea, displays his acute sensitivity to site. At the church  
of Our Lady at Northfleet, Kent (1913-16), Scott's Gothic was made  
more monumental and unified with horizontal banding like classical  
rustication, and the modelling of the tower and shallow transepts  
makes the building seem like a prototype for Liverpool Cathedral.  
Similarly experimental is St Paul's, Stonycroft, in Liverpool  
(1913-16), where the wide vaulted interior is cleverly expressed  
externally in triple transepts.

Scott established himself as one of the most accomplished and  
sophisticated inter-war ecclesiastic designers in Britain in the  
several churches he designed for both Anglican and Roman Catholic  
parishes. In these buildings traditional styles were given a  
distinctive contemporary expression. He always took great care over  
building materials, and at St Andrew's, Luton (1931-2), long and  
streamlined behind a powerful squat west tower, interior transverse  
arches of reinforced concrete were expressed externally by buttresses  
faced in beautiful brickwork. At St Francis's, Terriers, High Wycombe  
(1928-30), a church of sophisticated simplicity faced in knapped  
flint, he demonstrated his masterly handling of natural light by  
omitting the west and clerestory windows so that dramatic illumination  
comes from the transepts and crossing tower placed towards the east.  
The Roman Catholic church at Ashford, Middlesex (1927-8), with its  
inward-sloping, self-buttressing walls, was a particular favourite of  
the architect.

Scott seldom repeated himself, and he experimented with different  
church plans. The Anglican church of St Alban, Golders Green, London  
(1932-3), is cruciform and built of special thin bricks, with pitched  
tiled roofs over the four arms and the low central tower. The Roman  
Catholic cathedral at Oban (1931-51) has a massive, rugged tower of  
pink granite facing the sea while the timber roof raised above tall,  
simple piers gives the interior a grandeur out of proportion to its  
actual size. A. S. G. Butler wrote how

Oban cathedral is a notable example of a design most suitable to its  
site and, in every way, to its purpose. It was Scott's power to grasp  
clearly the practical object of a building and design it on that  
basis. Appearance followed from the expression of this more than from  
a preconceived idea of beauty. (DNB)

Scott also designed the church at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, as  
well as boarding-houses for the school, and completed the nave of the  
church at Downside Abbey, Somerset. At St Alphege's, Bath (1927-30),  
and at the chapel for Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1931-2), he used a  
simplified Romanesque style instead of Gothic. Perhaps his finest  
chapel for an educational institution is that at Charterhouse,  
Godalming (1922-7), where a long, powerful mass like a fortress is  
articulated by a row of thin flush transepts which allow light to  
enter laterally as if from a hidden source.

Secular architecture

Scott was far from being exclusively a church architect, and his  
success at Liverpool led to a series of large secular commissions  
after the First World War (in which he served as a major in the Royal  
Marines, supervising the construction of defences in the English  
Channel). The Memorial Court for Clare College, Cambridge (1922-32),  
was built on the west side of the River Cam in a refined neo-Georgian  
or 'neo-Grec' manner in silver-grey brick. His own London house,  
Chester House, in Clarendon Place (1924-5), and Whitelands College at  
Putney (1929-31) were designed in a similar style. At Clare, a few  
years later, the dramatic central axis through the war memorial arched  
entrance was closed by the tall tower and massive wings of the new  
Cambridge University Library (1930-34), a building designed after  
study of American libraries in which windows between bookstacks were  
linked to leave the intervening brickwork to read as massive  
pilasters. The New Bodleian Library at Oxford University (1935-46), in  
its semi-traditional style with rounded corners, was perhaps less  
successful, but the technical achievement of keeping the building low  
in scale by building underground was considerable. More appropriate in  
Oxford was Longwall Quad at Magdalen College (1928-9), which continued  
St Swithun's Buildings by Bodley and Garner in a simplified Tudor  
manner.

As an established architect, knighted in 1924, Scott was in demand as  
consultant on new commercial building projects in London. He acted as  
'associated architect' with Gordon and Viner on the William Booth  
Memorial Buildings at Denmark Hill in south London (1926), where his  
personal treatment of the tall brick tower is unmistakable. Scott's  
Gothic canopy proposed in 1939 for the King George V memorial close to  
Westminster Abbey met with opposition, however, particularly from the  
newly founded Georgian Group defending the buildings on the site, and  
his alternative, classical design, with a statue by William Reid Dick  
executed in 1946-7, is not characteristic. Equally untypical but much  
more successful was Scott's design for the Charing Cross Road facade  
of the Phoenix Theatre. He was also responsible for Cropthorne Court  
at Maida Vale (1928-9), where a clever diagonal zigzag plan was  
adopted to obviate light wells. American architects expressed surprise  
that Scott could handle so much work; in the 1920s, Roger Pinckney  
recalled,

it was a small office, not more than 8 to 10 altogether, very informal  
and apparently unbusinesslike, but it was our pride never to have  
delayed a job from lack of drawings. Sir Giles designed everything  
himself, down to the smallest detail, but did not do a lot of  
visiting. (Pinckney to Stamp, 11 Sept 1974)
Other assistants included A. G. Crimp, the office manager, Lesslie K.  
Watson, and Arthur Gott.

A remarkable aspect of Scott's career was how he rose to the  
technological challenges of the twentieth century, for which his  
training as a church architect can hardly have prepared him. In 1924  
he was one of three architects invited by the newly founded Royal Fine  
Arts Commission to design a standard telephone kiosk for the General  
Post Office. Scott proposed a classical design in cast iron surmounted  
by a Soanian dome which reflected the contemporary interest in Regency  
architecture (it may be significant that he became a trustee of Sir  
John Soane's Museum at this time). This was chosen the following year  
and went into production as the General Post Office's kiosk no. 2.  
Scott subsequently adapted his design for other kiosk types and a  
decade later reduced and refined it for mass production, giving the  
fenestration a more horizontal and modernistic character. This, the  
no. 6 or jubilee kiosk, was introduced in 1935 and soon became  
ubiquitous and a familiar aspect of the British landscape.

Scott's resourceful talent as an industrial designer was confirmed in  
1930, when he was asked to act as consultant architect to the London  
Power Company for its electricity generating station in Battersea.  
This large and controversial structure had already been designed by J.  
Theo Halliday, of Halliday and Agate, and the engineer Sir Leonard  
Pearce. Scott's evident ability to handle huge awe-inspiring masses of  
masonry, to balance concentrated ornament against bare wall-surfaces,  
was put to good effect in such buildings; he chose the external  
bricks, detailed the walls with 'jazz modern' fluting to humanize the  
structure while not denying its scale or industrial character, and  
remodelled the four corner chimneys to resemble classical columns.  
After the first half of the Battersea power station was completed in  
1933, it became one of the most admired as well as conspicuous modern  
buildings in London. 'Whatever criticisms have been levelled against  
it, it remains one of the first examples in England of frankly  
contemporary industrial architecture', concluded Nikolaus Pevsner in  
1957  (Pevsner, London, 1957, 510).

Scott's success at Battersea resulted in similar industrial  
commissions, notably the Guinness brewery at Park Royal (1933-5),  
where he worked with the consulting engineers, Sir Alexander Gibb &  
Partners, on designing the several large brick-faced blocks; Scott  
wrote of such work that 'there is not nearly as much to do as might be  
anticipated from the size of the buildings'  (Scott to H. Robertson,  
17 Oct 1947, RIBA). In 1932 he was appointed by the London county  
council to design the controversial new Waterloo Bridge. Working with  
the engineers Rendel, Palmer, and Tritton and with Sir Pearson Frank,  
he proposed an austere and elegant structure of reinforced concrete  
with five shallow arches faced externally in Portland stone. After  
further controversy over the demolition of John Rennie's Greek Doric  
bridge, work on its replacement began in 1937 and it was formally  
opened in 1945, although without the railings or the sculptural groups  
at either end proposed by the architect.

Having demonstrated such versatility and openness to new ideas, Scott  
was an ideal choice for president when the Royal Institute of British  
Architects was celebrating its centenary. It was a time when the  
authority of historical styles was being undermined by the impact of  
ideas from the modern movement in Europe and, in his inaugural  
address, delivered in 1933, Scott announced that 'I hold no brief  
either for the extreme diehard Traditionalist or the extreme Modernist  
and it seems to me idle to compare styles and say that one is better  
than another.' Scott believed in 'a middle line' and was impatient of  
dogma, although happy to use new types of construction such as  
reinforced concrete when appropriate; his approach to design was  
intuitive rather than intellectual. He was not hostile to modernism,  
and recognized its 'negative quality of utter simplicity' as a healthy  
reaction against 'unintelligent Traditionalism'. But although he liked  
fast cars (and drove a Buick at the time), Scott believed that the  
machine aesthetic had been taken to extremes at the expense of the  
human element in architecture: 'I should feel happier about the future  
of architecture had the best ideas of Modernism been grafted upon the  
best traditions of the past, in other words, if Modernism had come by  
evolution rather than by revolution'  (RIBA Journal, 11 Nov 1933, 5-14).

Scott's belief in compromise and in 'gradual evolution' was to be  
rejected in the changed architectural climate after the Second World  
War, but at first enemy bombs brought opportunities. He was appointed  
architect for the new Coventry Cathedral in 1942, following the  
destruction of the town centre, and prepared a scheme with a  
remarkable centralized plan around a free-standing baldachin. The  
arrival of a new bishop in 1943 obliged him to modernize the interior  
with unusual parabolic arches, but this scheme was criticized by the  
Royal Fine Arts Commission for its compromised character and in 1947  
Scott resigned, commenting that

it is unlikely that a modernist or a traditional design will ever meet  
the approval of both parties. ... These differences of opinion, and  
the formation of numerous societies, committees and commissions etc.  
to give them expression, are characteristics of our time; they harass  
the unfortunate artist and hamper the production of the work. (Scott  
to the provost of Coventry, 2 Jan 1947, RIBA)

Scott's scheme for rebuilding the House of Commons was less  
controversial. Following the decision by the wartime parliament to  
rebuild the chamber exactly the same size and shape as the old, a  
select committee sought the architect 'best qualified to provide plans  
in keeping with the Gothic style of the Palace'  ('Select committee on  
the House of Commons', 4), so that Scott's appointment in 1944 now  
seems almost inevitable. Assisted by his younger brother Adrian and  
working with Dr Oscar Faber as consulting engineer, he succeeded in  
creating a new chamber in harmony with, but distinct from, the  
surrounding architecture by Barry and Pugin, while incorporating new  
technology and creating much more ancillary accommodation within the  
confined space. Scott described this as the most complex building with  
which he had ever been involved, and compared the new interior to that  
of a battleship. He followed Pugin in adapting Gothic to new purposes,  
but his was different, personal in style and characteristic of his  
time. 'Feeling as we do that modernist architecture in its present  
state is quite unsuitable for the rebuilding of the House of Commons',  
Scott wrote,

and bearing in mind that the Chamber forms only a small portion of an  
existing large building, we are strongly of the opinion that the style  
adopted should be in sympathy with the rest of the structure, even if  
it has to differ in some degree in order to achieve a better quality  
of design. ('Select committee on the House of Commons', 8)
Although when the new chamber was opened in 1950, few had a good word  
to say for Scott's unfashionable 'Neon Gothic,' both the tact and the  
cleverness of his approach have become evident over the intervening  
years.

Scott also rebuilt the war-damaged hall of London's Guildhall for the  
city corporation (1950-54), replacing Sir Horace Jones's Victorian  
timber roof with one with transverse stone arches which the medieval  
original probably possessed. In addition, he designed an office  
building to the north in his modernistic brick manner. But his  
greatest impact on the City of London was to rebuild Bankside power  
station on the south bank of the Thames opposite St Paul's Cathedral,  
even though the Royal Academy planning committee, which he had chaired  
after the death of Sir Edwin Lutyens, had advocated the removal of  
industrial buildings from such sites in 1944. Scott's design was  
published in 1947 and provoked controversy, with the architect lamely  
countering that 'power stations can be fine buildings, but it must be  
demonstrated'  (The Builder, 23 May 1947, 494).

This Scott certainly did demonstrate in what was his supreme  
'cathedral of power'. He disagreed with modernists by arguing that  
appropriate ornament had a purpose even in industrial buildings, and  
that 'contrast between plain surfaces and sparse well-placed ornament  
can produce a charming effect'  (Stamp and Harte). At Bankside the  
brickwork is superb, achieving a monumentality that reflects Scott's  
generation's interest in the sublime monuments of the ancient world,  
and, in contrast to Battersea where he had never been happy with the  
upturned table configuration, he contrived to gather all the flues  
into one single chimney or campanile. Completed in 1960, the building  
had a short life as an oil-fired power station before becoming an art  
gallery, Tate Modern at Bankside, although in the conversion carried  
out in the 1990s by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, the  
symmetrical stepped profile of the principal elevation was removed.

Death, the work of his son and brother, and posthumous reputation

Scott continued to design churches in the post-war years which,  
although superficially conservative, reveal a continuing interest in  
internal structural expression. In his new Carmelite church in  
Kensington (1954-9), which replaced another casualty of the Second  
World War, Scott used transverse concrete arches pierced by passage  
aisles to support a continuous clerestory as well as developing his  
favourite motif of flush transepts. The new Roman Catholic church in  
Preston (1954-9) is reminiscent of his pre-war church at Luton in its  
repetitive length. Scott's last church was the Roman Catholic church  
of Christ the King at Plymouth, and he was working on the preliminary  
details of the executed scheme in University College Hospital when he  
died there of lung cancer on 9 February 1960.

After a requiem mass at St James's, Spanish Place, London, Scott was  
buried by the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth outside the west end of  
his great cathedral at Liverpool next to his wife at a point which  
should have been enclosed by a porte-cochere had his final design of  
1942 been carried out. The marriage had been singularly happy and they  
had three sons, of whom two survived infancy. The younger, Richard  
Gilbert Scott (b. 12 Dec 1923), trained as an architect and became a  
partner in the firm in 1952, before eventually completing several  
projects such as the Guildhall Library, London, but he resigned from  
Liverpool Cathedral rather than make further economies to his father's  
conception. The firm of Sir Giles Scott, Son & Partner was finally  
dissolved in 1986. Until 1934 Giles Scott practised from 7 Gray's Inn  
Square, where Bodley had had his office; he then worked in 3 Field  
Court, Gray's Inn, and in 1956 moved to 6 Gray's Inn Square. He shared  
these offices with his younger architect brother, Adrian.

Adrian Gilbert Scott  (1882-1963)  was born on 6 August 1882 and had  
also been articled to Temple Moore. He assisted his brother Giles in  
early domestic jobs such as Greystanes, Mill Hill (1907), and during  
the First World War served in the Royal Engineers at Gallipoli and  
Egypt and was awarded the Military Cross. His principal work was the  
Anglican cathedral in Cairo (1933-8; dem.), for which the first  
designs were made in 1918. Most of his other buildings were for the  
Roman Catholic church and are very similar in style to his brother's.  
Adrian Scott also designed his own house, Shepherd's Well, Frognal  
Way, Hampstead (1930), in a neo-Georgian manner. After the Second  
World War, during which he was deputy controller of military aircraft  
production, Adrian Scott rebuilt the Roman Catholic church of Sts  
Joseph and Mary in Lansbury, Poplar (1951-3), using a pyramidal  
cruciform plan similar to that earlier used for St James's Church,  
Vancouver (1937). Mercifully, his simplified scheme for completing the  
Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens was  
soon abandoned. A particular success was the rebuilding of St  
Leonard's Church, Hastings (1953-61), which is enlivened by nautical  
symbolism. Adrian Scott married Barbara Agnes, daughter of the marine  
painter Charles Napier Hemy. He died on 23 April 1963 and was buried  
alongside his wife and father in the Hampstead churchyard extension.

Of Giles Gilbert Scott, A. S. G. Butler recalled that 'this excellent  
architect was a man of medium height and, at first sight, not unduly  
impressive, in view of his high distinction. He was very modest and  
approachable, with a charming sense of humour'  (DNB). Apart from  
architecture, Scott's passion was for golf. He lost most of his hair  
at an early age and John Summerson, who worked briefly in his office,  
was initially dismayed to find that the famous architect was a short  
man in an overcoat and bowler hat, with a newspaper under his arm,  
smoking a cigarette (he then smoked sixty a day): 'I was disappointed  
that the creator of so passionate a piece of architecture as Liverpool  
Cathedral could be so unpassioned in his person'  (autobiography of  
Sir John Summerson). In many ways Scott had a very conventional  
outlook, and assistants were sometimes disconcerted by his golfing and  
business friends. 'He was a jovial, generous man who looked more like  
a cheerful naval officer than an architect'  (Birmingham Post, 10 Feb  
1960), recorded Sir John Betjeman. For Sir Hubert Worthington 'his was  
a singularly beautiful character, free of the jealousies that so often  
spoil the successful artist. He bore life's triumphs and life's trials  
with an unruffled serenity'  (RIBA Journal, April 1960, 194).

Scott became a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in  
1912 and received the institute's royal gold medal in 1925. He was  
elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1918 and a full  
academician in 1922, the youngest since Turner. He was knighted in  
1924 after the consecration of the first portion of Liverpool  
Cathedral and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1944. He was also  
made a knight of the order of St Olaf of Norway for his advice on the  
completion of Trondheim Cathedral.

Gavin Stamp

Sources  correspondence and drawings, RIBA BAL + H. Worthington, RIBA  
Journal, 67 (1959-60), 193-4 + N. Pevsner, ArchR, 127 (1960), 424-6 +  
Architect and Building News (20 April 1960), 511-16 + The Builder, 198  
(1960), 345-6 + The Times (10 Feb 1960) + Manchester Guardian (10 Feb  
1960) + J. Betjeman, Birmingham Post (10 Feb 1960) + Liverpool Daily  
Post (10 Feb 1960) + private information (2004) [Richard Gilbert  
Scott, son; colleagues] + family papers, priv. coll. + G. Scott, 'My  
life for one job', Daily Herald (12 Nov 1931) + C. H. Reilly, 'Sir  
Giles Gilbert Scott', Building (March 1929), 106-11 [repr. in  
Representative British architects of today (1931), 142-56] + G. G.  
Scott, RIBA Journal, 42 (1933), 5-14 + G. G. Scott, The Builder (23  
May 1947) + G. Stamp and G. B. Harte, Temples of power (1979) +  
unpublished autobiography of Sir John Summerson + P. Kennerley, The  
building of Liverpool Cathedral (1991) + 'Profile: Giles Gilbert  
Scott', The Observer (29 Oct 1950) + G. Stamp, 'Giles Gilbert Scott:  
the problem of "Modernism"', Britain in the Thirties: Architectural  
Design, 49/10-11 (1979), 72-83 + J. Heseltine, G. Fisher, G. Stamp,  
and others, eds., Catalogue of the drawings collection of the Royal  
Institute of British Architects: the Scott family (1981) + V. E.  
Cotton, The book of Liverpool Cathedral (1964) + B. Ford, ed., The  
Cambridge guide to the arts in Britain, 8 (1989) + H. S. Goodhart- 
Rendel, English architecture since the Regency (1953) + DNB + London:  
the cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner (1957) + 'Select  
committee on the House of Commons', Parl. papers (1943-4), 2.591, no.  
109 + C. Riding and J. Riding, The houses of parliament: history, art,  
architecture (2000) + G. Stamp, 'Giles Gilbert Scott and Bankside  
power station', Building Tate Modern, ed. R. Moore and R. Ryan (2000)
Archives CUL, notebook of memoranda, sketches, etc. + Pembroke Cam.,  
letters + RIBA, professional corresp., drawings, sketchbooks | RIBA  
BAL, letters to W. W. Begley + St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden,  
corresp. with Henry N. Gladstone relating to Burton church
Likenesses  W. Stoneman, two photographs, 1924-44, NPG · P. Evans, pen- 
and-ink drawing, 1927, NPG · H. Coster, photograph, 1934, NPG [see  
illus.] · R. G. Eves, oils, 1935, NPG · R. G. Eves, oils, 1935, RIBA ·  
R. Guthrie, chalk drawing, 1937, NPG
Wealth at death  £98,965 0s. 1d.: probate, 3 May 1960, CGPLA Eng. &  
Wales