York, Rowntree Park

 

Gate of peace

I thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.

Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about the park does, however, confusingly refer to it as a lychgate, the structure traditionally marking the entrance to a churchyard, where at funerals, the bearers may rest with the coffin, before proceeding on to the church (‘lych’ being an old word for corpse).

In fact it is a gateway from the outer part of the park, where the café stands, to a quieter inner area, a garden with a water feature, a statue of Mercury and an ample supply of benches, where one might rest and indeed remember those who laid down their lives in war, as the Rowntree family clearly intended. I have begun to think of it as a lychgate to a memorial garden, that garden being the horticultural equivalent of a cenotaph.

The gateway’s simple vernacular structure does this job well, aided by two further powerfully suggestive elements. Inside are two brass plaques, describing the donation of the park after World War I and the further donation of some fine wrought-iron gates after World War II. The first plaque is in retrospect very sad, expressing at it does the hope that the first conflict might be the ‘end of war’ and that the creation of the League of Nations might be the crowning post-war achievement. In the light of subsequent events, a further suggestive symbol is perhaps more powerful: in the roof of the lychgate is a dovecote – the entrances for the birds are just visible in the gable end – and white doves still flutter in and out. At least these delicate creatures endure, living symbols of peace, both peace in general and the peace of the garden that the Quaker Rowntrees shared with those of us who survive.

York, Rowntree Park

Ice cream, confectionery and books

‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,’ wrote the American poet Wallace Stevens. This arresting line brought enquiries, including one from the US Amalgamated Ice Cream Association, no less, who no doubt wanted to know the poet’s precise meaning. But on a blisteringly hot afternoon in York, anyone who could sell us a good tub of the cold stuff would be high in our estimation indeed. A walk away from the crowded city centre towards Rowntree Park, in search of shade, nature and ice cream, seemed a good idea. I was sure there would be something of architectural interest along the way.

The Quaker Rowntree family, confectioners of renown, had their factory in York and were great benefactors to the city. After World War I, Jospeh Rowntree gave the 25-acre park as a memorial to the members of his staff who lost their lives in the war. He liked the idea of a place of quiet contemplation, and also of a recreational area accessible to all, and his architects set out the park with gardens, trees, a lake, large areas of lawn and places to play sports and games. It’s still popular today, even when a succession of heatwaves has dried the grass and much of the planting to a sorry crisp. In charge of the layout were two architects, Fred Rowntree and W. J. Swain. Fred Rowntree was from a branch of the family that lived in Scarborough and were cousins of the confectioners. He trained in his home town and designed numerous buildings in York as well as in London, which he later made his base.

Rowntree is said to have been the designer of the building in my photograph. It’s a multi-purpose structure. At the top is accommodation for the park keeper that looks out over the lake and gardens in the middle of the park. At the bottom are the open arches of what was originally a boat house. The middle part of the building, including the single-storey wing to the right, was designed as a café and still plays that role. It’s now the Explore Rowntree Park Reading Café. A café with books, no less, a relatively recent idea, but one that would no doubt have pleased the early Rowntrees. The whole was built just after World War I and completed in c. 1921. It’s a pleasant building, with casement windows, round-headed doorway and arches, and tall pantile roofs, that looks well amongst the surrounding trees and shrubs. It seems to evoke that moment in English architecture when traditional materials (brick, tile, render) combine with a plain, unornamented style to create something that has a hint of the old and a bit of the new too. The café also sells excellent ice cream.

York, Oglethorpe

 

All done in brick

Glancing up a York backstreet called Oglethorpe, I caught sight of this, a brick building of 1648, to which a pair of curvy, Dutch-style gables with dormer windows were added a bit later in the 17th century. It is said to be the earliest house in York built completely of brick, although bricks had been used extensively in eastern England by the time it was built. The Dutch gables give the house its name (it’s called the Dutch House) and cap a pleasant facade in which almost everything, from the door surround to the window mullions, the central oriel to the pediments above each window, is fashioned out of brick. A pantile roof completes the composition of orangey-red clay.

All those bold brick details give the building the air of the style known as Artisan Mannerism, although this style is typically applied to grander buildings incorporating brick scrolls, mouldings, and chunky eaves-cornices. Another house once called Dutch, the palace in Kew Gardens, is such a building at the grand end of the scale, Wilberforce House in Hull is a middling example. But something like York’s Dutch House, enlivening a quiet street, is certainly an eyecatcher. It has had a varied history. Starting as an impressive individual house, it was later divided into three separate dwellings, before becoming part of John Smith’s brewery. Needless to say, numerous internal alterations were made during the building’s first 300 years.

In the 1950s, Smith’s wanted to demolish the house, but the York Civic Trust restored it and it’s now a holiday home available to rent. It looks to be an excellent refuge in the city centre as well as a visual asset to the street. Convenience, history and style – it sounds like a good combination.

York, Foss Gate

The view from the pavement

When I go to a city that’s new to me, or one I’ve not visited for years, one of the things I do is stroll around randomly and look out for any interesting buildings that I come across. I’m taking a leaf out of the flâneur’s* book, if you like, although I have also read guidebooks and the pages of Pevsner in advance, so there are specific buildings I’m looking out for too. I York the other week, I was on one of my wonders when this building hit me between the eyes. I’d seen it in a book already and it was somewhere in the back of my mind, but for the moment I’d forgotten exactly where I was and so find it at that moment was a surprise. It hit me between the eyes and I needed to spend a few minutes taking it in.

It was built in 1911 as the Electric Cinema, York’s first purpose-built picture house, films having been shown in the city before, but in places built for some other purpose. 1911 is early for a cinema and there was no consensus about what such a building should look like but the large arch, symbolically welcoming the potential cinema-goer and adorned with luxurious-looking decoration, is the focus of more than one early cinema facade. This frontage plays that role. It’s supported on Ionic columns and describes a gentle curve that is very much of its Edwardian period. It’s decked out with swags of fruit and topped with a face modelled on an actor’s mask from the ancient Greek theatre. This ornament is ceramic, and was supplied by Doulton’s, a large amount of whose output was architectural faience.

What’s within the arch has changed. Where there are now doors and windows were once ticket booths, a signboard indicating what film was showing inside, the entrance doorways, and a great deal more faience decoration. It’s a shame that all this has gone, but the pattern of cinema history intervened. After functioning as the Electric, the place carried on under other owners, eventually being renamed the Scala Super Cinema (see the name of the adjoining alley, Scala Yard), but the decline in filmgoing that came with the television age led to the its closure.† For some time it was furniture shop and now, like so many city buildings, it’s made over to the hospitality industry. Now there are chairs and tables out front, where the flâneur may pause, enjoy a drink, and watch the people go by. 

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* An originally French term for an urban stroller or loiterer, ‘a gentleman stroller of the city streets’, as Baudelaire put it, who walks around a city with no apparent aim apart from people-watching and taking in the atmosphere of the place. The feminine equivalent is flâneuse.

† I’m indebted to the cinema treasures website for some of this information.

Guiting Power, Gloucestershire

New light on an old box

I interrupt my flow of blog posts featuring buildings seen on my travels to turn my attention to something only a few miles from where I live. Nowadays the village of Guiting Power is typical Cotswolds: well kept stone cottages, a couple of pubs, a church with Norman roots, a former Post Office now selling excellent coffee and food. Farmers, the horse racing fraternity, cyclists and locals mingle, mostly amicably. Battered old Land-Rovers vie for parking spaces with polished BMWs. The place looks prosperous.

It was not always so. In the early-20th century, agricultural decline brought poverty, together with dilapidated cottages. Two landowners turned the place around: in the 1930s, Moya Davidson bought up cottages and let them to local people; in 1958 Raymond Cochrane ran the estate and continued to improve the cottages. It was Cochrane who was faced with finding a new use for the old blacksmith’s shop on the green. Part of this building was converted to a bus shelter and next to this a telephone box was installed – not the usual red freestanding kiosk, but a small booth incorporated into the building and fronted by a standard door as used on a K6 telephone box. The familiar door is testimony to the effectiveness and ubiquity of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s phone kiosk design – we know exactly what it was designed for, even though there is no ’Telephone’ sign.

Some years ago, however, the public telephone, little used in the age of the mobile phone, came to the end of its life. A new use was found: the box became the home of the village defibrillator. More recently still the building's custodians have smartened up the door with new paint. The original colour scheme consisted of a grey frame and red door, a combination that was once the recommended livery for telephone boxes in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Guiting Power was in the Cotswolds AONB, which is now the Cotswolds National Landscape, so this box merited the design with the red door and grey frame. Maybe whoever looks after the box will come back with some grey paint and finish the job.

I hope people near and far will appreciate this small triumph of public service and its unusual design solution – only a handful of telephone boxes are incorporated into existing buildings in this way and this one, with its important new use, deserved to be preserved. As a result, the Twentieth Century Society has submitted applications for this building, and four more unusual telephone boxes, to be listed. It’s a good idea to afford them this protection and I hope the listing comes into place.

Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Crossing point

The Palladian Bridge in the park at Stowe was built in 1739 by the first Viscount Cobham, around the time that many of the numerous other garden structures – temples, pavilions, statues and monuments – were erected there. Its design was probably by the great classical architect James Gibbs and he based it closely on the similar bridge at Wilton House, Wiltshire, which went up just two years earlier.The arrangement of an Ionic arcade of four columns between a pair of pedimented end pavilions is beautifully satisfying – no wonder the architect adopted it with few changes. Gibbs did modify the earlier design slightly, however, chiefly by making the structure wider than the Wilton bridge and also lower, so that carriages could cross it as their passengers went on tours of the gardens. It’s the second of the great trio of English Palladian bridges, the other being at Prior Park, Bath.*

The design doesn’t come from any extant structure by the great Italian architect Palladio, although it is based on a scheme he created for a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice that was never built. The Stowe bridge has changed slightly since it first saw the light of day. It originally had open arches on the westward side, but a blank wall on the east (behind the bridge in my photograph). The rationale behind this was that the bridge was near the edge of the park, and the idea was to encourage those on the bridge to admire the view across the water and into Cobham’s grounds. On the inside of the blank wall was a relief carving by Scheemakers of the Four Quarters of the World bringing their products to Britannia. The bridge was never an ideal place for the carving as it was actually quite difficult to see it clearly because you couldn’t stand back far enough from it. So it was removed in 1762 and placed in the pediment of the Temple of Concord and Victory. When this was done the builders fitted a matching colonnade, so that the two sides were identical.

The Palladian Bridge as it stands does not bear obvious symbols of the philosophical and political ideas expressed in many of Stowe’s temples and monuments – buildings such as the Temples of British Worthies and Ancient Virtue, statues such as those of the Muses, and monuments like those to heroes like Captain Cook and Captain Grenville all represent very specific values. However, the elegant classical architecture of the bridge, together with its key position on the Path of Liberty, a long itinerary through the grounds, places it firmly in the same category as these monuments and structures. No doubt ,many of those taking a walk in the grounds were grateful for it too, pausing there to admire the view or taking advantage of the shelter it offered from the rain. The bridge is clearly as useful as its design is beautiful.

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* There’s a fourth, known as the Marble Bridge, in the grounds of the Russian imperial palace at Tsarskoye Sole, St Petersburg. Another structure, at Stourhead, known as the Palladian Bridge, lacks the striking superstructure of the other four, and is hardly Palladian at all.

Lee Common, Buckinghamshire

 

Wellsprings of Liberty

When I catch myself taking our water supply for granted in the face of countless communities in other parts of the world who do not have the benefit of a reliable supply of clean water, I think back to my childhood. In the village in Lincolnshire where I was born, my mother had to go to the village pump every day to collect the water we needed to drink, wash and clean. And we were lucky. Our house was called Pump Cottage because it was next to the pump – fetching the water was simply a matter of walking down the garden path and opening the gate. For my grandparents, in a still more rural location (their house was in the middle of a field), water was even nearer: a spring discharged right next to the kitchen door. But in the 1950s, neither of these households could draw water by simply turning on a tap. Universal fresh water in England is a surprisingly recent development.*

In some villages, people had to wait for a local philanthropist or benevolent landlord to come along and sink them a well. Such a man was Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty, founder and owner of the famous Liberty & Co store in London and lord of the manor at Lee Common in Buckinghamshire. Actually, Liberty did not pay the full cost of the well, which was built by public subscription, but he was the prime mover and where he led, many others no doubt followed. Local historians will tell you how workers had to dig a shaft some 365 feet deep, using candles to light their way and a large pair of bellows borrowed from the local blacksmith to keep the shaft ventilated with fresh air.† The well is conveniently close to most of the houses in Lee Common. We stayed there a short while ago, but at the other end of the settlement, so missed the well for a few days before we stumbled on it. But it must have been a boon to villagers until it closed in the 1950s due to pollution – and the coming, one hopes, of piped water.

The well was beneficial to the locals and a good way of celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It being a project spearheaded by Sir Arthur, the well house is as beautifully designed as the home furnishings he stocked in his London shop. Indeed he organised Liberty craftsmen to make its wooden structure – hexagonal, with an oak frame, a tiled pointed roof, and panels like wooden gates between the posts. In the period between 1890 and 1910, Liberty embraced the fashionable Art Nouveau style of design, and there are traces of that in the woodwork of the well house. This is clear in the beautifully cut lettering of the inscription, which extends around the structure’s six sides, telling the reader that ‘This well was built by public subscription in commemoration of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, Anno Domini MDCCCXCVII’. The lettering, with its ornamental letter forms, is as decorative as it is informative, reflecting the combination of elegance and utility displayed by the well house itself.§

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* And yes, I’m sure there are households in some isolated places where there’s still no mains water.

† I’m indebted to the website of The Lee, the neighbouring village in the local cluster of settlements, for this information. The depth of 365 feet seems conveniently memorable, recalling those country houses that have a room for each day of the year, but is no doubt accurate to within a foot or two.

§ The well shaft is kept covered today, but the winding machinery is still there, the well still functions, and the water is tested periodically, to ensure that if needed, it is still fit for use.

Lee Common Jubilee Well, detail of lettering