This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
I half registered Craig Hamilton’s Chapel of Christ the Redeemer when it was completed in 2015; but as it is in the grounds of a country house south of Henley-on-Thames, it did not get much publicity and looked marginal to mainstream architectural practice, designed for a charity established to construct a new Catholic chapel, an uncommon requirement.
But at a time when the country is trying to decide how best to commemorate the late Queen, it is worth looking closely at a project which is so totally confident about using the language of classicism for memorial purposes, rich in the traditional language of classicism, containing burial compartments in its crypt with the necessary equipment for winching the stone lid off to accommodate the coffin if required.
A building which is so calm and has such historical authority looks unexpectedly interesting as a possible model for a commemorative building.
Craig Hamilton was born in South Africa and educated as an architect at the University of Natal where he came under the influence of a tutor and mentor, Professor Barry Biermann, who travelled every summer to study the monuments of Greece and Rome.
Hamilton left South Africa on a scholarship in 1982 and travelled to Sri Lanka where he made friends with Geoffrey Bawa. In 1986, he moved to England where he worked for conservation architects Michael Reardon & Associates near Stratford-on-Avon and developed an interest in the specialist craft skills maintained by conservation architects. He set up in private practice in 1991, first in Warwickshire before moving to rural mid-Wales where he bought a farm which he has improved with neoclassical additions to accommodate his library and office.
It was originally planned to site the chapel close to the 18th century house, but the National Trust has a covenant on the land and vetoed the idea, so it was built instead on the site of an existing bungalow high up in the deer park with a view north across fields to the astonishingly unspoilt valley of the River Thames between Henley and Marlow.
From outside, the chapel is reticent, not quite English in style, more influenced by the work of 19th century neoclassicists, Karl Friedrich Schinkel or C. R. Cockerell, than by Palladio, William Chambers or Robert Adam, who are the more normal sources for contemporary neoclassicism.
It is surrounded by a semi-circular low flint chapel yard and is itself built of knapped flint and white Portland stone, reminiscent of the mausoleum at West Wycombe, not so far away. On either side of the entrance are full-size statues of S. Sabina and S. Cecilia by Alexander Stoddart, the Scottish neoclassical sculptor, who, like Hamilton, is able to work completely convincingly in a classical idiom from his studio in Paisley.
The chapel reveals its character slowly and it repays close scrutiny, particularly for the extraordinary quality of its detailing: the crispness of the stonework and the quality of so much of the stone itself, including the blue-green stone from Ballinasloe of the curved staircase down to the subsidiary chapel in the crypt and the dark red limestone from Öland in Sweden used as a background to some of the niches; the beautiful, slightly arts-and-crafts letter-cutting of the stone plaque by Lida Cardozo Kindersley which commemorates the chapel’s inauguration in 2015, when Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor led the choir of Westminster Cathedral from the house up the track to the chapel in vestments designed by Hamilton and supplied by Watts & Company; the way so many of the capitals are covered by a small stone altar cloth; the exaggeration of the Ionic volutes; the majesty of the seated Christ above the high altar.
Everything from the altar cloths to the kneelers has been designed with an extraordinarily meticulous eye for their historical detail and appropriateness.
Hamilton has drunk deep of the classical language of architecture and uses it with a confidence and authority rare even amongst his fellow classicists. He has exercised the most stringent control over the design of everything, living on site for the last three months of the project in order to oversee the quality of its finishing.
Modern classical architecture is normally regarded (and dismissed) as reactionary and irrelevant. But Hamilton makes the point that there were plenty of architects trained in the beaux arts tradition who lived on post-war. E. Vincent Harris, who won the competition to design the great neoclassical town hall in Cardiff in 1908 only died in 1971.
He won the RIBA Gold Medal in 1951 and in his acceptance speech is reported to have said, “Look, a lot of you here tonight don’t like what I do and I don’t like what a lot of you do … ” More recently, the flame of classicism has been kept alive not just by Craig Hamilton, but Quinlan Terry, John Simpson and Robert Adam, and there is now a new generation of classicists at work.
Given the King’s own deep knowledge of, and commitment to, modern classicism, it’s a pity the jury looking at designs for the late Queen’s memorial did not consider the possibility of a neoclassical cenotaph or mausoleum, which could have been a more dignified way of commemorating her than the current plan by Lord Foster — which involves someone (but who?) producing an equestrian statue on a plinth.
