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I am in the fortunate position of never having had to make a career decision.

From prep school, it seemed my masters thought it likely that I would be an architect and I am not conscious of having questioned this wisdom. People sometimes ask if I was, “very interested in buildings” - I cannot say I was any more so than other people, but then I cannot read their minds.

One might like to say that one’s interest came from awareness of the importance of the built environment upon the social and emotional well-being of the population, collectively and individually. But this would be mere hubris, the awareness of this truth, and it is a truth, must surely have come later with more mature discernment.

What I can admit to is a childhood and formative years spent among lovely buildings within the shadows of a mediaeval church, and then studying in Edinburgh was a great formation for an understanding of beauty. But of course, many modern architects producing monumental hideousness have lived in beautiful places, so the search for beauty must always be a conscious act of the will.

I started my career, qualifying in 1984, in a small practice based in Grays Inn in London, again a place of beauty and one which had been occupied by some of the great names of early 20th century architecture. Lutyens had briefly had rooms there, I myself worked in rooms once occupied by Frank Troup, a master of the arts and crafts. Everything one experiences has an influence.

In 1988 I started my own practice. Having as a student had the privilege to spend six months studying in Italy, in the formative shadow of the Grand Tour, with three months spent measuring antiquities in Rome, my preferences have always been for traditional architecture. By nature, I would regard myself as a classicist but equally there is a good English tradition for working in a variety of styles, to suit one’s client and the surrounding environment. This variety, even eclecticism, can bring much joy.

The only thing I have never learned to do is modernism - whatever that is.

My one or two forays have only ever really been an exercise in satire. How can one work within a style which knows no philosophy, whose only discipline is utility and the practical consideration of structure? Indeed, I would say that there are no true modern architects today - only those who mimic the modernist forms of the mid-20th century, designed as an intellectual revolution, a rejection of a tradition rather than a quest for truth, by men who were themselves classically trained.

Whether I have been successful in my little endeavours is for others to decide, the quest for brilliance is a sure path to failure. What I can say is that to succeed in architecture it is necessary to put oneself at the service of every aspect of one's art: the building or environment in which one works, the people who will occupy it, and the function it is to serve. Only in this way, by making the actions and choices of the architect invisible at the end of the process, can one achieve one’s true goal. I am not so naive as to realise that this may seem an uncommon view, both today and in several earlier ages, though not perhaps in the mediaeval age of Faith.

One is often asked how one gets a project, to which the answer, after 40 years of practice, is I have no idea.

I have long since given up any form of publicity, let alone drinks parties for one's potential clients, which one rather pompously gave in one’s youth - a complete waste of time.  My most enjoyable projects have tended to creep up on me unawares, starting as casual conversations, or an initial request for a quick sketch and then one hears no more for several years.

Oscott was no exception. Church work is like that, incredibly slow; not the clergy, but the increasingly lugubrious bureaucracy they seem to think is good company in their sacred ministry, and then the civil authorities, whose understanding of the needs and traditions of the Church is nowadays nil.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned is patience. Or the need to aim for it.

My work at Oscott started as a very simple request for some colours to redecorate the Pransorium. Of course, it is possible I am also guilty of enlarging a project to its maximum potential. Nevertheless, it has been a great privilege to work on this building, so important in the life of the English Church for nearly two centuries. Few of the seminarians of today will remember it eight years ago, but it had become rather dowdy, with its architectural genius hidden behind a mist of institutional pragmatism.

My work in the College has been a source of great joy; restoration of a building is somewhat like gardening: you collaborate with people who have gone before you to give new life to something which is already there and which has already been appreciated by previous generations. Whereas if a building is a new work, there is always a sense that it is somehow ‘your’ creation, your child (an erroneous emotion, to be mortified!). With work on an existing building this is not the case.

You ask me what my favourite feature of Oscott is - these questions are always difficult as they depend upon varying interpretations and moods. But I think the part which has given me most delight is the Refectory, partly because it was so very dreadful when I first saw it and partly because I like my food and am aware of the importance to one's well-being of eating and of fraternity in a beautiful environment. The other thing about it is that all the men use it, whereas other beautiful rooms, such as the Episcopium, for all its stunning furnishings and which was great fun to restore after the flood, hardly contribute to the daily life of the College.

The other truly lovely thing, which deserves to be so much better known (and with which I have had no involvement) is the quite amazing series of heraldic glass in the cloister windows and the main rooms. In every way glorious, both in design and execution and the most correct way of displaying heraldry as a record of people involved with the college throughout its history. They deserve to be much better known.

This brings us back to the point of this article. The objective necessity of beauty to social and spiritual growth.

This is not a question of architectural style or aesthetics, though they can play their part. For instance, a man who prefers classical buildings and would never dream of buying a gothic house will still receive an enrichment of his character by spending his formative years in a Gothic building (provided it's a decent one of course, a place of natural beauty). He will grow into quite a different man from what he would have been had he grown up surrounded by ugliness.

Ugliness can take many forms, and there are, of course, ugly, ill-proportioned old buildings, but for the most part, sadly, we are talking about modern buildings, with brutal proportions and brutal materials. It is this which makes me so sad as I walk around modern towns, particularly for example this great city of Birmingham, which was once so proud of its civic values and tried to create itself as a place of beauty and culture.

How can the poor achieve what they might become if they are to spend their early life surrounded by concrete amid the spirit of economic utilitarianism and cheap profit? This is the world of today, and we see it being built at great speed all around us. The children of this environment will be the future parishioners of our churches, and today’s seminarians will have an additionally burdensome task to teach them of an invisible God when they have been denied every glimpse of Him, which many of us once took for granted.

In a previous age, the age of my own formation, when the progenitors of the architectural Modern Movement were still alive, they could convince themselves, and persuade us, that there was a philosophical base to their aesthetic, a beauty of mechanical efficiency and a pretended economy of means. These first men were of course themselves classically trained, and thus had the philosophical grounding for their revolutionary experiment. Many of them were also men of some faith, and indeed it remained a goal for them to design a few churches or chapels (apart perhaps from those who were Jewish, who later took Modernism to the very conservative United States).

Their successors, however, had no such benefit of formation, unaware of classical antiquity and proportion, devoid of any supernatural awareness and descended to the ranks of mere copyists, aping their predecessors’ external forms, locked in increasingly banal ways. We see a very similar pattern in the world of Church music. In the words of Monseigneur Giles Wach (ICKSP), “mediocrity is dead - all that is left is vulgarity.”

I do not think it is too strong to say that we shall not restore the Faith, reconvert Europe, until we recapture a sense of Beauty in everyday life.

I am not here going to give answers as to how we might achieve this; clearly those who pay for buildings have to have a change of heart away from profit-motive and the quest for innovation and ‘trophy’ buildings and my own profession has to relearn a philosophical formation which directs itself to public service, not just in name.

None of this is within our immediate power to change, but there is something that those studying at Oscott can do as priests and that is simply to be aware of the power of beauty to change people, to lead them to God. This you can do in all things, even the smallest, how you dress at the altar, how you celebrate and how you arrange and decorate your churches.

Yes of course there are pragmatic considerations, cost, space, comfort, disabled access - they are numerous, but none of them should ever displace a sense of beauty, of the numinous. It is your role, as it is mine, to reconcile these things so that nothing is compromised and we instil a sense of the numinous in everything we achieve.

Just as with our Victorian predecessors who built beautiful and elaborate churches in the East End of London, in the great industrial cities crawling with poverty, to raise the hearts of the poor to Heaven, so should we be aware that most of the people in our urban parishes often know no beauty outside the parish church. They live in ugly houses with ugly cheap furniture, send their children to ugly schools and treat their infirmities in ugly hospitals. You are perhaps their only bridge to the Heavens.

I hope these musings serve some purpose, it was an honour to be asked to write something for the Oscotian Magazine. If the reader takes anything useful away, I hope it will be an awareness that a building is not simply a machine, a place where activities happen, or a shelter from the elements but a powerful tool in the hand of the Church. For every priest who is fortunate enough to be involved in building or restoring a church building can work to demonstrate the Heavenly truths in bricks and mortar.