In 1854 Scott began, under the instructions of Mr. E. B. Denison (now Lord Grimthorpe), the reconstruction of Doncaster church, which had been destroyed by fire, and in the same year was again successful in an open competition at Hamburg (this time for the Rathhaus), but his design was not carried out.
The next year (1855) he was elected to the associateship of the Royal Academy, and he became a full member in 1861.
The competition for the rebuilding of the war and foreign offices in the autumn of 1856 was signalised by a stormy conflict between the Gothic and classic schools of architecture, waged even in the House of Commons. Scott's first design submitted in the competition was a sincere attempt to adapt the elements of French and Italian Gothic to the purposes of a modern English institution. Scott's name did not appear among the five premiated designs for the war office, but he was placed third for the foreign office, and it was subsequently discovered that the architectural assessors engaged to advise the judges had placed Scott's design second for both buildings. In November 1858 he was appointed architect, and set to work on certain necessary revisions of his design. The war office portion of the scheme was abandoned, but it was arranged that Scott should be associated in a design for the India office with (Sir) Matthew Digby Wyatt [q. v.], the official architect to that department. At this point the classical opposition gathered strength, and its cause was taken up in ignorant warmth by Lord Palmerston. After prolonged debates and controversy Scott was induced, by the threat of the appointment of a classical coadjutor, to prepare a fresh elevation. Parliament gave orders for an Italian design to be submitted in comparison with the Gothic drawings. Scott sought a compromise in the ‘Byzantine of the early Venetian palaces,’ only to be told (on 8 Sept. 1860) by Lord Palmerston that it ‘was neither one thing nor t'other; a regular mongrel affair,’ and that ‘he would have nothing to do with it.’ Scott was thus forced either to abandon his appointment or to strike his colours as the Gothic champion. He chose the latter course, accepted Wyatt's collaboration as before arranged for the India office, and, after the purchase of ‘some costly works on Italian architecture,’ and a visit to Paris, produced a design which satisfied Lord Palmerston. As might be expected, it encountered stout opposition from Scott's old friends of the Gothic party, but finally passed the House of Commons in 1861, nearly five years after the competition was initiated. Nine years later he was commissioned to complete the block of buildings by the erection of the home and colonial offices. Scott's Gothic design is to be seen in the diploma gallery at the Royal Academy.
In 1864 Scott was engaged in carrying out the Albert memorial. He entered, by royal invitation, a limited competition for this work [see Cockerell, Frederick Pepys], and submitted, besides his design for the monument, several schemes for the Albert Hall, which were not accepted. The successful project for the memorial was, in its author's intention, to be a ‘kind of ciborium to protect the statue of the prince;’ in fact an attempt to realise the class of building of which a shrine is the supposed imitation in miniature. Another royal commission was the rearrangement of Wolsey's chapel at Windsor to form a memorial to Prince Albert. To Scott was due the substitution of stone and mosaic for the timber and plaster of which the vaulting was formerly composed, but he had no responsibility for the marble inlay by Baron Triqueti, of which he disapproved.
In 1865 Scott designed one of his finest works, the station and hotel at St. Pancras. He regarded it as the fullest realisation of his own special treatment of Gothic for modern purposes, and classed it in this respect with his work on the town-hall at Preston, Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire, and the old bank at Leeds. The idea of working the iron roof trusses of the station into the form of a pointed arch was due, not to Scott himself, but to the engineer of the company. The buildings of the Glasgow University, undertaken at about the same time, were designed in a manner which Scott had already adopted in the Albert Institute at Dundee, a ‘thirteenth or fourteenth century secular style with the addition of certain Scottish features.’
In 1866 Scott was one of the six architects (afterwards increased to twelve) invited to compete for the royal courts of justice. The officially appointed judges decided in favour of two architects, George Edmund Street [q. v.] and Edward Middleton Barry [q. v.], and the government, after much confusion, eventually displaced the latter. The competitors believed they had been unjustly treated. Scott, who acted as chairman at the meetings of the competitors, keenly felt his own failure (cf. Reminiscences, p. 274).
In 1870 the Royal Institute of British Architects, which had awarded Scott its royal gold medal in 1859, invited him to accept nomination as president, an honour which he then declined. He, however, held
