English Buildings

Inglesham, Wiltshire

2012-01-28T20:02:00.004Z

Perceptions of the doors (2)

The door of 78, Derngate, subject of the previous post, is a very arresting example of the way in which a door can act as a symbol of the building to which it gives entry, signalling what we can expect inside. Here’s another door, at the tiny parish church of Inglesham in Wiltshire. Although my photograph shows only part of it, even this few square feet of timber and couple of bits of ironmongery speak volumes.

Inglesham is an isolated medieval country church, wholly unspoiled by the kind of 19th-century restoration that affected so many English churches. As I explained in an earlier post, the preservation of this church was in large part due to William Morris, who lived not far away at Kelmscott and supported the building’s sensitive conservation. Thanks to Morris, the building retains its patina of age and reads as an architectural palimpsest, containing as it does stonework and woodwork of a range of periods between the Saxon and the Jacobean, plus a variety of fragments of wall paintings, sometimes overlapping and fading into one another, to create an interior hat is both fascinating and moving.

The door signals the sensitivity with which this church has been preserved. According to the principles of the SPAB, of which Morris was co-founder, when a repair is necessary, a minimum of the old fabric is removed and the new material is fitted to the old, not the other way around; in addition, there should be not attempt as disguising the new material by fake ‘antiquing’ or distressing. These principles seem to have been followed with the woodwork of this door – just a sliver of weak or rotting wood has been taken away and a narrow fillet of timber inserted. It’s clear that it’s more recent, but that doesn’t matter – the difference helps make the history of the fabric clear.

At some point the door also needed a new handle. Again, the principle is, don’t fake a medieval handle, use something that’s modern, but works. That’s not a call for a piece of Bauhaus-inspired door furniture on a medieval door, though this handle has a simplicity and economy and kindness to the hand that Gropius and his Bauhausers would have admired. It’s just a bent strip of metal, but it’s elegant and it works. I wonder when it was fitted on the door? In Morris’s time? Later, perhaps, given the screw fixing? I don’t know. It’s timeless, and efficient, and makes a minimum impact on the ancient timber of the door. It remains true, too, to the spirit of tactful conservation that this wonderful building embodies.

St John the Baptist, Inglesham, exterior

Northampton

2012-01-24T21:25:00.006Z

Perceptions of the doors (1)

Doors and doorways can tell you quite a lot about a building, or about the people who live there. I’m rather fond of my own front door, a lump of well seasoned oak that’s very old indeed – considerably older than the house to which it gives entry, in fact. And I like some of my friends’ doors, too, not only because of their design but also because they seem to symbolize the smiles and welcomes that I know are waiting when they’re opened – a pale wooden door in Oxfordshire, broad and inviting next to a narrow window that reveals two retreating cats and the owner’s vibrant abstract paintings; a glass door in a whole wall of glass in the Cotswolds, where the welcoming waves and grins can be seen well before you enter; a 19th-century Gothic front door leading straight into a room full of books. It doesn’t always work like this of course, but a door can be a powerful symbol of both house and owners.

So what are we to make of these two doors in an unassuming terrace of early-19th century houses in Northampton? On the right, there's an original-looking door with its neat stained-glass window above, circa 1815. On the left, a doorway and door transformed, that seem to invite us into another universe, a place in which architecture and design are so far from the mainstream that it’s hard to give it a label. It seems to belong to no movement, exemplify no style, attract no label. Which is fitting, since this doorway belongs to a house that bears the fingerprints of the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It’s the doorway to 78, Derngate, the only house in England with an interior (and a door) designed by the Scottish master, whose work draws on Art Nouveau and on the Viennese Secession (of which he was a long-distance member), but is uniquely his own.

Mackintosh made over this house in 1916–19 for W J Bassett-Lowke, retailer and manufacturer of toys, especially model railways, when Bassett-Lowke got married. It’s not a big building, and this compact terraced house is very modest for the owner of an expanding company that already had at least one shop in London. But inside, the entire interior was redesigned – a dazzling black and gold living room full of Mackintosh’s trademark grid patterns and a surprisingly stripy guest room, anticipating op art, are among the highlights. So this unusual door is a fitting prelude to an unusual house, home to a man who did not want to show off with a mansion, but who cared about architecture and design – and wanted people to know it.

* * *

There are pictures of the interior of 78, Derngate here, plus lots of information about the house, and visiting times. It opens after the winter break on 1 February.

Bromyard, Herefordshire

2012-01-19T10:04:00.003Z

Hot tin roof

I’m stuck indoors writing, and with deadlines looming, getting out less and less to find new buildings to share with you. I’ve recently been describing the unlikely surfaces and forms of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and its wafer-thin titanium cladding, which curves this way and that like an overgrown eel that’s been put through one of those apps you get for your iPhone, which distorts photographs in disturbing ways. Not inappropriately, since designs like the Guggenheim are only possible with the most advanced software, not to mention the most costly materials.

And, stuck indoors, writing, I looked through my picture files to find something to share with you, and found this: a shed in Herefordshire with a corrugated iron roof. Notice how the surface curves this way and that, like an overgrown eel that…

I know, I know. This modest length of bent metal covering a knockabout structure of assorted brickwork and decaying woodwork is hardly the Guggenheim. But its use of corrugated iron is still rather inventive, the way it starts at one end as almost a flat roof and finishes at the other as almost a vertical wall. And are those openings skylights or windows? I’m sure there’s some logical reason for the way this roof has been built. Something big and tall that had to be accommodated in the far end that didn’t quite justify the time, expense, or whatever needed to build the brick wall higher. Perhaps it has something to do with the planning regulations. Whatever its raison d’être, it made one passer-by look up and smile.

Clanricarde Gardens, London

2012-01-14T16:53:00.005Z

A tall house near the Gate

Clanricarde Gardens, just off Notting Hill Gate, is a street of very tall, narrow houses built between 1869 and 1873 by a pair of West London builders, Thomas Good and William White. It was a speculative development, consisting of 51 of these houses, together with a row of six houses with shops below, just around the corner in Notting Hill Gate itself. The tall houses were intended for large Victorian families with servants, and the developers were probably successful in finding buyers because soon after they finished these, they embarked on another similar development nearby. The houses were convenient for town but in the 1870s very near the edge of London too, and no doubt appealed to professionals with one eye on the city and one on the countryside. Spacious, light rooms with big windows, elegant classical details on the facades, and sizeable service basements probably appealed, too. Among the early occupants were the Beerbohms and their young son, Max, the writer and artist to be. Max remembered that when he was a small boy the houses seemed as tall as skyscrapers to him.

But a few decades after Max grew up, these houses were nearly all subdivided into flats. Perhaps endless stairs without a lift, not to mention close proximity to the noisy Gate, meant that they lost their appeal to the well-heeled. Or perhaps owners just saw a way to make a fast buck out of multiple rents. The stairs were certainly a challenge, as I remember very well, having shared a flat at the top of this very house in the early-1980s. By then, many of the houses were labyrinths of multi-occupied flats and rooms whose occupants spoke a babel of languages – something that gave the place a wonderfully cosmopolitan atmosphere while also making the whole area a challenge to a friend who was employed on organizing the 1981 population census. I remember big, airy rooms, the continuous background roar of traffic, the squawk of gulls perching on the balustrade outside the upper windows, and a hot summer with many windows open and a hint of hashish pervading the air from neighbouring houses. “Ah, the scent of the orient!” a visiting elderly relative who had spent many of her early years in “the east” observed with relish. It was something that John Lennon relished too: there is a story that the Beatle smoked his first joint in this street. It was all more like the Notting Hill of Samuel Selvon† than the Notting Hill of Hugh Grant. And none the worse for that.

* * *

†Author of The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending, fine novels describing the lives of West Indian immigrants to London.

Maze Hill, London

2012-01-11T08:38:00.004Z

For my next trick…

The versatile Vanbrugh. Son of a tradesman and grandson of a refugee Flemish merchant, John Vanbrugh began his career as a soldier, won a commission in Lord Huntingdon’s regiment, and was imprisoned in the Bastille as a spy. Back home in London, he cut a flamboyant figure in society and became a playwright, popular for his Restoration comedies of the 1790s (The Relapse, The Provok’d Wife). Then in the early years of the 18th century he began to practise an architect, starting (starting!) with Castle Howard, the enormous house of the Earl of Carlisle, and continuing with equally grand so-called baroque piles such as Blenheim Palace and Seaton Delaval.

When the time came to build his own house, what did Vanbrugh produce? Another baroque mansion? Not quite. Thirty years before people like Horace Walpole began to put up medieval revival buildings, Vanbrugh designed himself a castle – albeit a rather un-medieval one, built of brick and with modern luxury within. Amazingly, it has survived, on top of Maze Hill in Greenwich, southeast London. The original building is to the left, a tall structure with central stair tower and square flanking towers. There are tall narrow windows too, not quite narrow enough to look like genuine medieval arrow-slits, but near enough to give one the idea.

When the architect married, he extended the house adding a wing to the right – the current right-hand wing is partly this extension, partly a further, post-Vanbrugh addition. The result of Vanbrugh’s extension (still in brick, still vaguely castle-like) was an asymmetrical building, something very unusual for a grand house of the early-18th century and seeming to anticipate the Picturesque movement that got going much later, in the 1780s. That’s just one more surprise from a man whose life that was never entirely predictable, who was never afraid to shock. People probably laughed, but the laugh was on them.

Shaftesbury, Dorset

2012-01-06T19:32:00.004Z

Fit for purpose

Post Offices. It is easy to conclude that they’re not what they were. A few decades ago in my local big town, the main post office was housed in a grandiose and spacious former hotel building in the town’s most elegant street. From there it moved to a cramped but serviceable High Street location with shelves for stationery and similar goods at the front, and Post Office counters at the back. From there it has migrated to part of the upper floor in the town’s branch of W H Smith. It’s all rather sad, and reflects the Post Office’s loss of its former grip on our lives.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, on the other hand, the Post Office was very much at the centre of things, and if an important new Post Office was built, it was likely to be a building of some consequence, probably solid-looking and traditional in appearance, like this example in Shaftesbury. With its stone walls, big gables, mullioned windows, and Tudor-style doorway, it wouldn’t look out of place in a Cotswold town, and it fits in well here too, turning the street corner with some style. It all adds up to the kind of Tudor revival style that, along with neo-Georgian, was popular for Post Offices in the interwar years. This one was built, so a plaque on the wall tells us, in 1946, so it’s very much harking back to the time before World War II. This was still a time when a lot of thought went into the design and functioning of Post Offices. Julian Stray, in his useful Shire book, Post Offices, quotes Lord Gerald Wellesley writing in the Architectural Review, around this period, telling his readers what a Post Office should be like:

A Post Office must be in a prominent position. It should look dignified and permanent, and should, as far as possible, harmonize with its surroundings…the public office, which should, of course, be of a size adequate to the number frequenting it, should, in the larger instances, have doors giving on to the streets at both ends…must be very well lit, and this may mean windows on the ground floor which ideally speaking, are disproportionately large compared with those in the upstairs offices. A clock and prominently displayed letter-box are also features of a Post Office front.

The Shaftesbury office ticks nearly all of Wellesley’s boxes. It is on the site of the Angel Inn, which was the home of the town’s first postmaster in the 1660s. Early post offices were often in inns, which could easily accommodate horses and carts delivering mail. Today this Post Office today is kitted out with a red oval sign and one of those brown metal built-in post boxes, helpfully labelled “POSTING BOX” in elegant capital letters. High on the wall, more capitals tell us that this was both a Post Office and Savings Bank. Ah, of course. Banks. It is easy to conclude that they’re not what they were…

Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire

2012-01-02T15:43:00.003Z

A great arch for a great house

As is well known, England is rich in country houses, but was once richer still. Hundreds of country houses have succumbed to the mallet and swinging ball of the demolition contractor, for reasons ranging from economics to fashion. The vanished country houses often leave traces behind, though, and amongst the most noticeable are lodges and gatehouses, built to mark and guard the entrances to country estates and often kept because they make good houses. A favourite of mine is the domed lodge at Stoke Edith in Herefordshire. Here’s another, the grand Palladian lodge near the B3089 at Fonthill Bishop in Wiltshire.

Fonthill is a name to make architectural historians pause. The place was the home of the most grandiose and bizarre Gothic revival house ever, Fonthill Abbey, built in the early-19th century by super-rich dilettante and author William Beckford. It is long gone (although a fragment remains, which I hope to see one day). But before Fonthill Abbey there was Fonthill Spendens, a vast Palladian house built for Beckford’s father between 1755 and 1770; its park was entered through this lodge.

The round arch, pediment, and blocks of heavily rusticated masonry are emphatically Palladian in style, so much so that some say the building is the work of the original English Palladian architect, Inigo Jones. If so, that would make it a 17th-century building, but it’s more likely to date from the time when Splendens was built. If so, it’s a powerful reminder of the kind of architecture of Splendens, a house that was pulled down in 1807, when William Beckford, a dedicated follower of Gothic fashion, was building his new house. If Fonthill Splendens was as solid as this great archway, it probably did not come down without a struggle.

Droitwich, Worcestershire

2011-12-28T17:28:00.002Z

One more from Mr Pippet

I wanted to show you one more mosaic from the church of the Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria, Droitwich, the building that featured in the previous post. This image of St Philip shows the Apostle carrying bread, having been present at the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes (the “feeding of the five thousand”). According to St John's Gospel, Philip remarked of Jesus’ five thousand followers that, “Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little.” The mosaic is also remarkable for the surrounding leaves and fruit, plus the charming population of birds with which the designer, Gabriel Pippet, enlivened the areas around the saint’s portrait.

Happy New Year to you all.

Droitwich, Worcestershire

2011-12-23T11:58:00.005Z

Peacock and Pippet

I hope this blog has brought some interest and pleasure to my readers this year and that some at least of the pleasure has come from unexpected sources. I like to think that quite a lot of what I bring you is out-of-the-way stuff, buildings that are little known outside their immediate neighbourhood and passed over by the standard architectural histories. My subjects interest me for all sorts of reasons but the ones I like best are notable aesthetically while also throwing some light on the past – on social, industrial, or commercial history.

So this year we’ve had, among other things, village lockups, in which quirky architectural form embodies past notions of crime and punishment; factories, in which low-cost, utilitarian architecture survives (sometimes by the skin of its teeth) to tell the stories of past industries; and shop fronts, in which former fashions in display reveal something about the ways in which retailers liked to catch the attention of customers. All very revealing and often surprising too.

Christmas, though, is a time when surprises come in traditional packaging. This fact came into my mind when I was looking at a building that combines tradition with surprise: a 20th-century Byzantine-style church…in Droitwich. The Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria, designed by Barry Peacock, is based on the form of early Christian basilicas. The long nave, with its rows of seven arches, its small apse housing the high altar, its carved capitals, and, above all, its mosaic decoration, shows the influence of the great early churches of Constantinople and, especially, Ravenna.

Most of the mosaics were designed by Gabriel Pippet and executed by mosaicist Maurice Josey. Their subjects are various – one group tells the story of St Richard de Wyche, Droitwich’s saint; another depicts scenes from the life of the Virgin, including the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Flight into Egypt. There are also portraits of saints and fathers of the Church – St Catherine’s mosaic in the apse of her little chapel is especially good. The details in these mosaics are beautiful. Interweaving plants and little groups of birds fill the gaps between the figures and narrative panels. Gold tesserae glitter. Even on a dull day in Droitwich, this lovely work of the 1920s catches the light like the mosaics of Ravenna in the Italian sunshine.

Season's Greetings to all my readers.

St Catherine, Church of the Sacred Heart and St Catherine of Alexandria, Droitwich

Market Harborough, Leicestershire

2011-12-21T21:38:00.003Z

Swans, up

I know I’ve gone on about swans on this blog before. About their seductive combination of strength and softness, their place in English tradition (swan-upping), their role in poetry and mythology, their presence near buildings such as the Archbishop’s Palace at Wells, even the memorable appearance of these usually quiet creatures in English music. Swans get me going, and there it is.

I was reminded of all this a while back when passing one of my favourite inn signs, which protrudes from the front of the Three Swans in the middle of Market Harborough. History books say that the first mention of the inn – then simply The Swan – dates from 1517. By the 18th century it was well established as a coaching inn, with stables at the back servicing regular coaches to London.

The central portion of the sign is probably the oldest – some sources guess 17th, others 18th century, when the inn was still The Swan. The collection of curlicues shows off not just the central sign but also the work of some local blacksmith. He was fortunate indeed to get the chance to display his work in such a prominent place, and took full advantage of the chance for a free advertisement. For who would not want a garden gate, or some andirons, or a trivet made by this craftsman?

At some later date, perhaps in the later-18th century, perhaps in the early 19th when the building was remodelled, the hostelry added a further two swans to its name and its sign. The smith’s successor came along and attached them in place, and, with their sinuous necks and the equally curvaceous ironwork that they bookend, they make distinctive silhouettes against the sky. No doubt I’m not the only one to crane my neck in homage.

Isle Abbots, Somerset

2011-12-16T17:10:00.007Z

Rubble rouser

Back at the beginning of the year I did a post about the church at Isle Abbots, which has one of the graceful late-medieval Gothic towers for which Somerset’s parish churches are justly famous. Around the side of the church I was fascinated to find a few masonry fragments that had been removed from the building at some stage, probably during a restoration. One of them is the part of a pinnacle shown in my photograph, and what’s particularly interesting about it is that it has a piece of metal sticking out of the top. This is a rod, probably made of lead, that was used to help hold this piece and another, now vanished, stone together.

Medieval masons used lead in their joints quite often, especially when building intricate, willowy structures such as window tracery, narrow shafts (mini-columns), and pinnacles. They did this by drilling vertical holes through the pieces of stone and lining them up. Then they called in the plumber – the man who worked with lead – and he undertook the painstaking task of pouring the molten lead in from the top. When the lead set, the pinnacle had a solid armature, adding greatly to its strength.

Working with molten lead in this way must have been a perilous business, especially if you were at the top of a 200-foot tower at the time. But it seems to have been a common occurrence in the Middle Ages, and helped architectural details such as this pinnacle survive from the 15th to the 20th or 21st century. Now some of these parts of the building have been renewed, it’s good to find some bits of the originals near ground level, so that one can look at them closely. Another medieval pinnacle seems to have found a new role in the garden of a nearby cottage.

Displaced pinnacle, Isle Abbots, Somerset

Piccadilly, London

2011-12-14T08:36:00.003Z

Space invader

An alien invader has appeared in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It’s a scale model of one of the great unbuilt projects of Russian communism, the Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20 by Vladimir Tatlin and commonly known as Tatlin’s tower. The original was intended to be 400 m high and although known as a monument it was intended to house various functions of the Third International, also known as Comintern, the organization set up in 1919 to fight for communism in Russia and beyond. Inside the tower’s double spiral of twisted metal were to be four structures of steel and glass, each in effect a separate building. These inner structures – in the model they are made of wire – were designed to accommodate separate parts of Comintern. Each was to be a perfect form (a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere) and the three lower ones were meant to rotate at different speeds.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that this monster monument was never built. The constructional challenges were immense and the amount of steel required was enormous. But not for the first or last time, an unbuilt structure started balls rolling. The idea of its intricate steel network inspired architects and engineers, and the tower (and its enigmatic designer) has enjoyed a long afterlife in books about architecture, histories of the Soviet Union, and even fiction. Now architects Dixon Jones have built this replica to accompany the Royal Academy’s exhibition Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-–1935, which is on at the RA until 22 January. The tower looks rather odd against the Palladian-Victorian background of Burlington House. As I was trying to photograph it, I longed for a neutral background. But the contrast between the constructivist steelwork of Tatlin’s tower and the stonework behind is, I suppose, part of the point. It was always meant to stick out and in its new incarnation in Piccadilly it still does.

There are details of the exhibition here.

Devizes, Wiltshire

2011-12-08T07:42:00.002Z

Piper and after

One of my favourite blogs is Adventures in the Print Trade, in which Neil Philip, proprietor of the online gallery Idbury Prints, shares some of his discoveries and enthusiasms. Neil recently posted about some images of 1940s Devizes by John Piper and I was particularly pleased to see these prints because I’d already read Piper’s short essay about the town reprinted in his book Buildings and Prospects (the dust jacket of which is illustrated with versions of some of the Devizes images). In the essay, Piper praises the town’s ‘good minor architecture, magnificent museum (contents not building), brewery and tobacco factory (sensible, small-scale manufactures for such a town), branch-line railway, good inns and bars, hotels… fair churches and chapels, canal of handsome appearance, sensible plan, bracing air, good-looking inhabitants, cinemas (old-fashioned and super, the super not ostentatious).’ If the place has lost some of these amenities since Piper wrote in 1944, it retains enough of them, from inns to churches, to make it recognisably the same town.

Piper’s approach in his illustrations is similar to the way he worked on prints of towns such as Penzance for the Architectural Review. He shows us groups of buildings, throwing light on how they relate to one another along a street, and conjuring up in the process a powerful sense of place. I’ve chosen a couple of examples from Neil’s collection to show what I mean. The simple outlines, blocks of colour, and rapidly sketched details give us the essential information – the shapes of the buildings, their materials, key details such as windows and doors. We quickly grasp the character of the place – a mix of Georgian and Victorian buildings in stone, brick, and colourwash, with a minimum of modern modification.

The prints also appeal to me because they bring out an essential difference between the way an artist like Piper worked and the way I work when I point my camera at the same place. Piper could include or exclude anything or anyone he liked from his sketchbook. My camera is not so selective. So when I last went to this town on a busy Saturday morning (and I was pleased to see that the place was busy and the shops well used), I tended not to take general views like Piper’s which would have been full of cars and shoppers, but to concentrate on individual buildings when there happened to be fewer passers-by in front of them.

So I went, for example, for the Old Town Hall (also known as the Cheese Hall), visible in Piper’s print down a street of the Market Place itself. This George II building (see my photograph above) shouldn’t work really – the old open arches of the ground floor have been glazed to make offices for a bank. And even in its original state the building was a cobble: an even number of arches (and, therefore, a column in the middle of the façade) is a no-no in Classical architecture. But from chunky ground floor to sculpted pediment it holds together. And look how Piper, in the upper print at the top of this post, has caught the context – the distant tower of the church to the right, the elaborate shop (a former Boots) with domed white tower to the left, and the framing buildings on either side.

Likewise with Piper’s view of the side of the Market Place containing the Black Swan, a coaching inn dating from the 1730s. His sketchy style doesn’t show as many details as a photograph might, but he’s got the gist of it. And the setting – including the streamlined 1930s Co-op to the right, now replaced, as you can see in my photograph, with a blander building, no doubt designed to “fit in” to the townscape, but sadly losing the struggle.

There’s so much more in Piper’s Devizes prints, and looking at them again makes me want to revisit the town and see what other details noted by the artist are still there. These small works show that Piper, whether he was producing a very worked-up, consciously grand, print or painting of a big country house, or these more modest images of a market town, could pack in telling details – and make us look, and look again with fresh eyes.

Worcester

2011-12-05T21:38:00.004Z

Simple gift

A stomach bug laid me low on Sunday, putting me off my stride and kicking my usual weekend post off the field of play. Here’s a brief post as compensation: one of my favourite pieces of monumental sculpture.

This monument is to Charlotte Elizabeth Digby, who died in 1820. She was wife of William Digby, who was a prebendary of Worcester Cathedral, which is how she comes to be here. Her monument was created by Francis Chantrey, who completed it in 1825. Chantrey, a prolific sculptor, was famous for his monuments to children. Some of the simplicity of his carvings of children is perhaps also seen in this reminder that after centuries of sleeping figures, putti, urns, berobed belledames, and theratrical gestures, a monument could show simply this: a young woman reclining on a couch, her hands together but not demonstrably prayerful, her head raised and calm, not downcast. Idealized? Yes. Classical? Certainly. But she belongs to the real world too.

Bisley, Gloucestershire

2011-12-01T08:15:00.003Z

Under lock and key (2)

Here’s another example of a local lock-up designed to be easy on the eye, but in a different style from the round, domed one at Shrewton in the previous post. The ogee-shaped gable, its double curves rising to a ball finial in the centre, is a baroque touch that’s quite surprising on what is basically a small prison. The gable conceals a roof covered in Cotswold stone “slates”, just visible in the picture. Beneath this roof are two separate cells with barred doors and above the doors are semi-circular openings like little barred fanlights. Inside, the cells have stone-vaulted ceilings, to prevent inmates from dismantling the roof and escaping.

For all the bars, the symmetrical front, with its curvaceous gable and finial, make this lock-up look rather like a picturesque garden building – a rather different visual approach from the usual “castle turret” appearance of many village lock-ups. The double accommodation, in contrast to the usual single cell, sets this building apart too. Bisley is quite a large village, but I don’t know if it was a particularly lawless place in 1824, when this little structure was built. For whatever reason, its builders felt that two cells were better than one.

Shrewton, Wiltshire

2011-11-27T19:32:00.002Z

Under lock and key (1)

I’ve blogged before about lock-ups, the small village prisons that were used until the 19th century. They catch my eye because they’re often unusual shapes (one like a pyramid, another with a conical top) and because they have interesting roofs, built with heavy stone blocks to make them secure. There are quite a lot of lock-ups still standing.

This domed example in the middle of the Wiltshire village of Shrewton is known locally as the Blind House, from its lack of windows. It was probably built in the ealy-18th century, and, as well as being a place to detain local wrongdoers, it may have been used as an overnight stop for prisoners being taken from the Devizes Assize Courts to the gaol at Fisherton.

The lock-up has been rebuilt twice – once after being hit by a tank during World War II and once in the 1980s, when it was moved back from its original site very close to the road, to make further mishaps with passing traffic less likely. In its safer, set-back position, it looks solid enough to stay standing for another two or three centuries.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

2011-11-24T10:40:00.003Z

Top shop

On either side of a traditional shop front are vertical features called pilasters. They frame the façade and may be topped with a kind of bracket (known as a console) that helps to support the signboard. Pilasters can take various forms, from plain wooden or tiled uprights to full-blown classical half-columns that reveal how, somewhere in the genetics of shop-front design, the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome is lurking. Few of these designs draw attention to themselves. The shopkeeper wants us to look at the stuff in the window, after all, not at the pilasters. Very often, therefore, designing a traditional shop front is an exercise in restraint.

Now and then, though, the inventiveness of Victorian design was unleashed on a shop front with all the ingenuity of Rube Goldberg solving a simple problem. The results include this stunner in Shipston-on-Stour. Here the pilaster is an unlikely mixture of vaguely classical and vaguely Gothic elements, with the addition of a stylized plant that looks as if it’s been borrowed from some Arts and Crafts source. But from plain fluted base to pointed finial it works, and the black-and-white colour scheme sets it off well. Small towns like Shipston, which still have their fair share of small independent local shops, are full of such gems, though few are quite as dazzling as this one.

One of the joys of this blog is being able to share finds like this with you all, and to benefit in turn from the sharp eyes of others. I’m reminded of this because friends who often go to Shipston once told me about this shop front, and encouraged me to do a post about it. I’d noticed it before, as it happens. But their encouragement made me look again, and appreciate it more, and tap it to make sure it was made of wood. Such small acts of togetherness and connection are shafts of light in a sometimes gloomy world.

Faringdon, Berkshire

2011-11-20T14:03:00.002Z

Town hall Tuscan

So you want your town to have a dignified civic building, with a hint of classical sophistication, but you can only give your local builder a limited budget. What do you do? For dozens of small towns, building a two-storey town hall with an upper room raised on columns, the answer was to use the Tuscan order. Tuscan, invented by the Romans, was the plainest of all the classical orders. Tuscan columns are plain, without flutes, there’s a base to connect the column to the ground, and the capital is very simple.

In the late-17th or early-18th century that’s the kind of building that the burghers of Faringdon provided for their town hall. It’s basic and functional, but those Tuscan columns give it just a hint of classicism. It seems that people have liked this building, and found it valuable, because it has survived numerous adaptations and changes of use. It has been, at different times, a library, shop, and fire station, in addition to the combination of civic meeting place, court, and market for which it was originally built. It’s a war memorial as well, as purpose that helped secure its survival when, after World War I, people wanted to pull it down.

This town hall is a modest building, a far cry from the glorious structure the citizens of nearby Abingdon built at around the same time. But it’s been useful, and it provides an unpretentious focus for the town centre. Civic pride doesn’t have to involve constructing grand, or grandiose, buildings. There’s room for the little ones too.

Broughton, Oxfordshire

2011-11-16T08:27:00.002Z

Tracery

In compensation for the gloomy picture in the previous post, here’s a more sunny image from earlier this year. It’s the parish church of Broughton, Oxfordshire, near to Broughton Castle, about which I posted back in April. I chose this picture partly because of the sunshine and partly because of the window tracery.

The use of window tracery, the intricate stonework in the heads of Gothic windows, was one way in which the masons of the Middle Ages could put an individual decorative stamp on their churches. Tracery developed steadily during the medieval period. In the 13th century it was usually made up of quite simple patterns, with standard elements such as circles or quatrefoils repeated in a symmetrical fashion. By the 14th century, though, tracery had got much more elaborate. 14th- century windows are often a riot of multiple curves, with stonework making exotic shapes and designs reaching sometimes dazzling complexity. It’s no wonder that the Victorians, classifying medieval architectural styles, called this kind of Gothic “Decorated”.

These two windows at Broughton have outstanding tracery of the early-14th century, one ornately geometrical the other curvilinear in the classic Decorated style. The window on the left is a beautiful bit of geometry raised to the level of art. The circle at the top is divided by two triangles to form a six-pointed star, the points of which are themselves small triangles arranged around a central hexagon. But none of these shapes is left plain – they’re adorned with little stone flourishes called cusps, which break up al the straight lines.

In the top of the right-hand window there are hardly any straight lines at all: everything looks as if it’s about to melt. Every line curves restlessly this way and that, producing in the head of the window a collection of shapes ranging from ellipses and squashed circles to forms that look like flames or tears. The whole design threatens to fall apart, but it doesn’t, because the layout of the tracery is symmetrical and everything is held together by the emphatic overall pointed shape of the window.

We know nothing about the people who built this church, but perhaps they were brought here, or attracted here, nearly 700 years ago by the rich family living in the neighbouring castle. They brought with them skills in geometry and pattern-making together with great visual flair, Add warm morning sun and you have a treat indeed.

Atherstone, Warwickshire

2011-11-13T17:01:00.006Z

Forgotten industries (2): Where you got that hat

I know, I know. Today’s building is hardly a beauty. An abandoned, brick-and-concrete factory, built probably at some time in the early-20th century, looking as if it’s waiting for what is tamely known as “the economic downturn” to come to an end before the speculators get busy on another canalside development. But even such unloved lumpen-architecture has its history and its interest.

Look at some film footage of a busy city centre in the early-to-mid 20th century – the period between the two World Wars, perhaps, or even the 1950s. Look at the men and at what’s different about their appearance: nearly every one is wearing a hat.† A sea of trilbies or flat caps in most towns, the occasional fedora or Homburg, endless bobbing bowlers in the City of London. Hats had long been part of the male wardrobe and were long part of the economy – a multitude of hat shops and, in the background, people and companies making hats. So where did they all come from, these hats of yore? If you were rich or upper class or both, you could buy your hats from one of the upmarket hatters in town. But the masses were more likely to wear mass-produced hats made in factories, and for centuries there were several of these factories in the town of Atherstone in Warwickshire.

Hats produced in Atherstone found their way all over the world. Billycock hats for slaves in the southern states of the USA, military headgear for British troops, trilbies by the million for everyday wear, they were all made in Atherstone, which had been a centre for hatting since at least the 17th century. When some of these markets disappeared, there was a decline in the industry, and some firms closed. The legion of hat-wearers, however, those British men who wore hats to keep their heads warm and to shade their eyes from the sun and because wearing hats was what men did, kept some of Atherstone’s hat-makers going. But in the end, hat-wearing fell out of fashion and there was just one firm, Wilson and Stafford, who took over a couple of their rivals and carried on making hats in this building by the canal until 1999.§

So there it is. Rows of broken windows (facing roughly northeast, to give useful working light, I suppose); purposeful if dingy brickwork and concrete framework; the Coventry Canal. A building that’s not important enough to be listed, or beautiful enough to be looked at by many except disaffected stone-throwers. But a vital part of history and everyday life for past generations of local people. As vital and everyday as the hats on their heads.

* * *

† They’re in books, too. Once you start looking, hats are everywhere in the literature of the not-so-distant past. From the headgear of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, which bears the worn inscription “Plasto’s high grade ha”, to the “disreputable” hat of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey, they are rarely items of glamour, but often revealing of their wearers. For treatments of hats and what they mean to their owners, I’d recommend searching out the elegiac piece on “Hats” in Michael Bywater’s glorious Lost Worlds and the short memoir “The Homburg Hat” in Richard Cobb’s People and Places, in which Cobb recalls a train journey to his public school and evokes the cringing embarrassment that can ensue when a teenage boy is not dressed exactly as his peers expect and require him to be.

§ And now if you buy a hat in the UK from anywhere other than a prestige hatter like Lock, it’s likely to have been made abroad. As an occasional hat-wearer myself, I can report that two of the three in my own wardrobe were made in South and Central America.

Fazeley, Staffordshire

2011-11-10T22:38:00.002Z

Forgotten industries (1): Red brick, red tape

This imposing red-brick mill was constructed in 1886 and is in many ways a typical 19th-century factory building – its brick walls conceal a metal frame, its rows of windows and long, narrow shape ensure that there’s plenty of natural light inside. The canal-side site is typical too: from the 18th century onwards thousands of factories and mills were built beside canals, to ensure that raw materials could be delivered with ease and manufactured goods transported across the canal network.

So what were the goods produced here? This building was owned by the Tolson family who were manufacturers of narrow fabric strips – basically tapes and webbing. This is an industry that goes back in this part of Staffordshire at least to the 18th century. Tolson’s developed it, making red tape to tie up legal documents, among other products. Their machinery was originally steam driven, with the engine house at this end of the building and the boiler house integrated into the main structure below the tall chimney.

I believe that fabric tape is still made in the mill, although parts of the building are now let as separate units to other businesses. The whole building is awaiting refurbishment, but it looks solid and functional (factories like this are among the ancestors of 20th-century functionalist architecture) and should continue to find a use for years to come. Even if the canal no longer brings deliveries, the waterside setting ensures that the building finds its admirers amongst those who pass by in boats – although few of them know about the red tape that circles its history.

Pevensey Bay, Sussex

2011-11-06T20:22:00.003Z

Window on the waves

A couple of months back, en route to a friend’s birthday party in Hastings and running early, I pulled in at Pevensey Bay because the map told me that there were Martello towers there. I’d also read something about plotland developments in the area and was wondering whether I would come across any interesting old wooden buildings or railway carriages made into bungalows. I didn’t find any railway carriages, but one of the Martello towers proved well worth the stop.

Martello towers are named after the Torre di Mortella in Corsica and were built along England’s southern and eastern coasts between 1804 and 1812, as part of the country’s defences against a possible French invasion. They are extremely solid brick buildings, with outer walls up to 13 feet thick and roofs at least 10 feet in thickness. They are elliptical on the outside with round interiors, meaning that the outer walls vary in thickness, and the thickest walls, in the narrow ends of the ellipse, face the sea. There were very few windows and the entrance was on an upper level, reached either by a retractable ladder or a drawbridge. Inside, a garrison of up to 24 men and officers lived and waited to train their cannon on approaching enemy shipping. In the event, the towers were not tested by a French invasion, but some 47 of them remain, rendered obsolete by advances in both armour and artillery, as reminders of an age gone by.

Each Martello tower was built with a flat top, on which was mounted a single 24-pound gun on a rotating platform that allowed it to be turned through 360 degrees. But this Martello tower at Pevensey Bay is unusual in that it is topped with a later superstructure of glass and concrete. I looked at this and assumed, since the tower had obviously been converted for domestic use, that some architect of the 1960s or 1970s had added this rather purposeful construction on top, to provide some rooms reached by natural light, life in an otherwise almost windowless Martello tower being a rather dingy business. The addition looked for all the world as if the 1960s architect, in love with the “white heat of technology”, had wanted the upper part of the building to look like the top of an airport control tower.

But when I got home and looked up the listing for the tower, I found that the reality was rather more interesting. The modern-looking top was actually added during World War II to house range-finding equipment serving a gun battery on the shore in front of the tower. Wartime functionalism looks, not for the first time, like post-war architecture, and the resemblance to a control tower was not accidental, for the wartime users of the tower needed to look out just as much as the occupants of a control tower need to keep an eye on the runway. Now that the tower is used as a home, this two-storey addition, with its rows of windows facing the sea, contains light rooms that must be assets to the owners, as they look across the shingle to the sea.

Nunhead Green, London

2011-11-01T09:31:00.003Z

Whizz and bang

Now we’ve got over Hallowe’en, it’s time to look forward to a festival I’ve more time for: Guy Fawkes’, the night of bangs and whizzes. I’ve always liked a firework, and I’ve been to some memorable Guy Fawkes’ dos in my time, which have ranged from occasions of Handelian gentility to some raucous, politically incorrect, and highly enjoyable displays in Sussex and Kent. And they remind me of something else. Long ago I lived in southeast London, not far away from Nunhead, an area on the edges of SE4 and SE15 known, if it’s known at all, for being the home of one the capital’s great Victorian cemeteries. Nunhead is also notable for Soper’s, one of London’s best fishmongers, and for the pub that has one of my all-time favourite names: the Pyrotechnist’s Arms.

The Pyrotechnist’s Arms is named in homage to Brock’s, probably Britain’s oldest fireworks manufacturers, who used to have their factory nearby. Brock’s began in Islington in the early 18th century and moved south of the river, where they had factories at various locations including Sutton and Nunhead, in the 19th century. They supplied fireworks to the relocated Crystal Palace as well as producing more serious explosives (they sold cartridges to the French army during the Franco-Prussian War). The company seems to have left London in 1910, but lasted until 1988, when it was bought up by Standard Fireworks.

This pub name seems to be the only visible link between this little known part of London and its former industry. I like the group of plotters on the sign – especially the way the artist went to town on their outrageous headgear and the fact that they’ve placed their risky candle on top of the barrel of gunpowder. It’s a reminder that many pub names and signs have links to bits of local history. But few as incendiary, or as unusual, as this one.

* * *

My overseas readers may find it helpful to be told that Guy Fawkes’ Night, otherwise known as Bonfire Night or simply November 5th, commemorates the foiling of a plot hatched by a group of Catholics who planned to blow up Parliament on November 5th 1605, when the Protestant monarch James I was in attendance, before installing the king’s nine-year-old daughter as a Catholic head of state. Celebrations involve fireworks and bonfires.

* * *

Compton Verney, the Warwickshire country house and art gallery about which I've blogged before, is holding an exhibition of fireworks until 11 December.

Nottingham...

2011-10-28T14:54:00.004+01:00

…and Lincolnshire, and Oxford, and…

I don’t remember much about my first experience of the seaside (the Lincolnshire coast, c 1959), except that I played a lot in the sand making sandcastles using a spade that was much too small (in my opinion my parents should have brought me the next size up). And one other thing. The gallopers. The carousel with horses and roosters that I was, to my great pleasure, allowed to ride.

I already knew about roundabouts – from books I suppose. They were meant to have mirrors and fairground organ music and flashing coloured lights and garish paintwork and brightly caparisoned horses to ride on and roosters to ride on too and the horses and roosters went up and down as well as round and round and they had these twisted columns like pieces of barley sugar and every one had a name. Even then, having perhaps sensed that the Lincolnshire coast wasn’t exactly the last word in sophisticated holiday destinations, I thought the reality might be a let-down. The horses’ ears might be broken or the lights might not flash or it might be closed or there might not be roosters. Well, it wasn’t a let down. The lights flashed, the gallopers really galloped and, yes, there were even roosters.

So these days, when I see a carousel, or even a picture of one like Clarke Hutton’s 1945 cover illustration for Popular English Art in the King Penguin series, I do experience a certain nostalgia and I’m thankful that the showmen of England still give me the chance for such feelings. People, for example such as the Noyce family, owners of the wonderful carousel in the photograph below. Dating from about 1895 and made by Savage’s of Kings Lynn, it was refitted in around 1900 with 30 horses and 6 roosters carved by Anderson of Bristol. In those days it was owned by one John Cole, from Yate, not far from the Bristol home of the horses, but it has been in the Noyce family since 1950. The photograph shows it at Nottingham’s renowned Goose Fair in the 1980s, but I think I remember it at St Giles’ Fair in Oxford a few years earlier too.

Though this ride has no doubt been repainted a few times since its first outing, its ornate lettering, bands of golden decoration and scrollwork, dazzlingly carved and mirrored centre drum, and of course magnificent horses certainly speak of the turn of the century period. It’s heartening to think it has been giving pleasure for well over a century. I hope it’s still doing so.

Noyce’s Gallopers at the Nottingham Goose Fair
Photograph courtesy of Simon Garbutt, used under Creative Commons license

Wingrave, Buckinghamshire

2011-10-23T20:07:00.006+01:00

On the hoof

The previous post about Spiegeltents set me thinking about the other kinds of “portable architecture”, from caravans to yurts and gers, that one sometimes sees in the English countryside. I found this example among some pictures I took a while ago in Buckinghamshire. It’s apparently a version of the classic shepherd’s hut,* the movable shelter traditionally used by shepherds on the downs and wolds when they needed to be near far-flung flocks. These wheeled huts, then, are the opposite of the wonderful lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh, about which I’ve posted in the past.

The heyday of the shepherd’s hut was probably the 19th century – one thinks of films of Hardy novels. But their history goes back much further. One website on the huts traces it back at least to the late-16th century, when an agricultural writer described how in some places the shepherd “hath his cabin going upon a wheele for to remove here and there at his pleasure”.

The huts were originally made mainly of timber, with a wooden body, wooden wheels, and a curved canvas roof, waterproofed with tar, on a wooden frame. Later, corrugated iron was often used for the roof, and now versatile corrugated iron sheeting is generally used to clad the walls too, which may be finished with timber tongue-and-grooved panelling inside. Spoked metal wheels on wide axles are common. This variation seems to have a wooden body on some modern wheels. The stable door, curved roof, and chimney are all features that hark back to the traditional hut.

People are still making shepherds’ huts, and finding uses for them as home offices, summerhouses, even shops at visitor attractions. They’re an inspiring example of how a traditional structure can find new roles, its wheels helping it to migrate from the downs to the backyard.

* Or perhaps a road-menders' hut: see the comments on this post

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

2011-10-19T17:13:00.006+01:00

Loitering in tents

The Cheltenham Festival of Literature has just been on. A large tented village appeared – or rather two tented villages, filling two of the gardens lined with terraces of Regency houses that are among the highlights of Cheltenham’s town centre. As the canvas was alternately heated by the sun and buffeted by the wind, thousands of us sat around while hundreds of authors got on their hind legs to entertain and instruct us on every subject from the Spanish Civil War to the history of the bathroom, from Charles Dickens to Eric Gill. Most of the tents used at the festival are standard-issue white canvas jobs of various sizes but, as I discovered when I went in search of a coffee between events, one of them is nothing less than a Spiegeltent, one of those early-20th-century rococo confections imported from the Low Countries as palaces of entertainment or boudoirs of burlesque.

Spiegeltents originated in Belgium and now a number of these antique structures have been restored and are on hire to those who want a venue a cut above the usual marquee. As I went for my coffee I understood the attraction. Gilded fronds and curlicues run up and down the walls, putti and scrolls hang from columns, surfaces are covered with bits of mirror or painted in a fairground palette. Carefully positioned light fittings accentuate the glitter. The richly coloured canvas roof completes the exotic ensemble. Now, I was here in the morning, so did not experience the joys of Kiki de Montparnasse or the provocatively named Ophelia Bitz, two entertainers I believe were billed to appear later in these seductive surroundings. But the rococo environment still delighted my eye as I sipped my coffee and waited to return to the more elevated matters on offer in the rather puritanical white marquees.

* * *

Apologies for my quick-fire iPhone photo, taken on the hoof and somewhat blurred, but atmospheric nonetheless, I hope.

You can find more about Spiegeltents and see more images of them here.

Brixworth, Northamptonshire

2011-10-14T14:20:00.003+01:00

Not dark yet

I have never forgotten an early school history lesson during which we moved from the Romans to the period after they left the shores of Britain: the Dark Ages. Except, as our history teacher insisted, they weren’t really dark. Illuminated manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon sculpture and jewellery, the vigorous beginnings of English literature, and the very origins of England as a united kingdom – all of these belonged to the post-Roman period and told us that there was really quite a lot going on, some of it wonderfully illuminating.

Forty years on, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told that Dark Ages weren’t really dark. TV historians and archaeologists seem unable to abandon the term, or the notion that, in telling us that the Dark Ages weren’t really dark, they are letting us in on some newly discovered secret about this remote and mysterious period.

And yet, reading of the hail-battered and rain-sodden landscape portrayed in Anglo-Saxon poems like The Seafarer, or grubbing about in dark little Saxon churches, some of them almost windowless, the Dark Ages in England do seem somewhat crepuscular. Where are the polychromatic churches of Ravenna, glittering with mosaics? Where are the marble-clad walls of Byzantium? Where the great spaces of early Christian basilicas of the kind we find in Rome?

Well, there’s one English church that still gets near to this kind of light, spacious, early Christian architecture: All Saints’, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, though not a glittering jewel box like the churches of Ravenna, is large, light, airy – and Saxon. With its large nave and rows of imposing arches, it has been described as the most impressive 7th-century structure north of the Alps. And it’s an indication as clear as any in England, that the Saxons, builders of small churches like Odda’s Chapel in Gloucestershire or the one at Bradford-on-Avon, could also build big.

Churches like Brixworth were regional religious centres, and on another level from small, privately endowed chapels like Odda’s. They were monastic foundations – Brixworth was apparently built for monks from Peterborough – and also no doubt places of pilgrimage. They are testimony to the wealth and faith of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon Midland kingdom, in around 675.

The other remarkable thing about this church is the arches. They originally opened on to aisles or side rooms known as porticus, the use of which is unknown (side chapels? homes for holy relics? ossuaries? the jury it out). The porticus have gone, and the arches are now filled in, but their striking construction is still clear. They are made from bricks, and those are Roman bricks, reused from some earlier structure. It’s an inspired bit of recycling, the bricks fulfilling their role both structurally and visually. And it’s a reminder that these Dark Age buildings, which look forward to later churches and cathedrals, are also close to the preceding Roman era. It’s good that these Roman bricks are still enjoying their time in the sun.

Round-up 1918–1955

2011-10-10T08:18:00.004+01:00

The latest, and, for now, final, installment in my very brief and partial history of English architecture can now be found here, or accessed from the link in the PAGES menu on the right. As with previous installments, this round-up uses examples from this blog with links in the text to the original posts. The cut-off point is 1955, the approximate date of the most recent building I've written about in the English Buildings blog. It covers briefly the various styles of the first half of the century, both the backward-looking (for example neo-Georgian) and the various forms of interwar "modern" architecture, from Bauhaus-influenced functionalism to jazzy Art Deco. It concludes, appropriately in this anniversary year, with buildings designed under the influence of the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Winchester, Hampshire

2011-10-07T11:57:00.004+01:00

A chronicle of years gone by

Admiring the front of the picturesque and presumably 18th-century offices of the Hampshire Chronicle in Winchester – dappled brickwork, bow windows, dentil course, tiled roof – I was irritated at not being able to photograph it without also including road signs, railings, and other irrelevant street furniture. So I decided to walk away. As I did so, I passed the end wall and was delighted to find this remarkable selection of bits and pieces amongst its collage of stone and flint.

A small iron plaque records that these stones were uncovered in 1959 when the building was being restored, but I expect a lot of people miss them even though the plaque is there to tell them that the stones probably come from the church of St Ruel, which once stood nearby. The selection includes a bit of Norman moulding and chevron, another piece of carving that resembles part of a classical acanthus leaf but may also be Norman, and the piece on the right. Is this a very eroded small figure, or am I imagining things?. There are also some fragments of brick that look Roman, and the larger block below, which bears interlaced Saxon carving. A wonderful group, making one wonder what the church was like, though the collection is not quite as richly eccentric as another wall full of fragments that I posted long ago. Here’s to recycling!

Stanway, Gloucestershire

2011-10-03T16:55:00.004+01:00

Green thoughts in a green shade

The other night I and a small group of neighbours went to visit a local water mill that has been beautifully restored. While I was walking around the outside as the evening light faded, I noticed this shed, and especially its roof, which is covered with corrugated iron – regular readers will know this is one of my favourite materials. Whether by accident or design, the corrugated covering of this roof has become home to a green carpet of moss, grass, and other plants. An informal green roof is the result.

Green roofs are quite fashionable these days. Their construction usually involves several layers of different materials to protect the roof structure from vapour, water, and roots, as well as a substrate in which to grow the plants. This one, as far as I can see, is just a sheet of corrugated metal with plants growing on it – hence my use of the word ‘informal’. It’s not going to last for ever, but this roof with its covering of greenery is a happy addition to this workshop down a secluded lane surrounded and shaded by trees.

Commercial Road, London

2011-09-30T17:15:00.001+01:00

Hybrid eyecatcher

Walking around East London in search of buildings taking part in London Open House Weekend, my eye was caught by this vast structure on Commercial Road. Now known simply as The Mission, it began as the Empire Memorial Sailors’ Hostel and was originally built in 1923–4 to designs by Thomas Brammall Daniel and Horace W Parnacott, with 1930s additions by George Baines and Son.

Pevsner’s London 5: East volume, my source for the architects’ names, describes the building as having ‘A stripped Perp exterior on a cathedral-like scale’. In other words the tall windows, long upright mullions, and those stone turrets at the end all show the influence of ‘Perp’ – the English Perpendicular Gothic style of the 15th century. This is very true, but there’s more to the building than that. The very plain rectangular windows on either side of the turrets owe something of their proportions to the neo-Georgian architecture that was much used for office blocks and town halls in the early-20th century. And those low, segmental arches – four along the side and one on the end, forming the entrance – have nothing to do with ‘Perp’ or Georgian. They have a hint of the Art Nouveau architecture of c 1910 about them, the sort of thing that the architects of London’s Mary Ward Settlement might have specified.

This hybrid design concealed simple rooms for sailors, men who’d arrived in the nearby docks and needed a bed (Limehouse Basin is just across the road). A big bold building for such a basic purpose, it caught the eye of the Situationists, who held their conference there in 1960. In 1989 the building’s owners, like many others at the time, were prepared to turn their backs on this proletarian and revolutionary history: they converted the place to flats. Its cathedral-like exterior is still as eye-catching as ever.

Pevsner and Oxford: Part Two

2011-09-20T07:55:00.006+01:00

This is the second of two guest posts by Susie Harries, author of the acclaimed new biography, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life. Having introduced Pevsner’s attitudes to Oxford in her first post, Susie now shows how his appreciation of Oxford developed in the 1940s, and how this appreciation was bound up with the idea of the ‘picturesque’, which became a key concept in planning as architects turned their thoughts to reconstruction after World War II.

Pevsner’s ideas on Oxford were set out long before the publication of the Buildings of England volume, most conspicuously in an article published in the Architectural Review in August 1949 entitled ‘Three Oxford Colleges’. The article appeared as the fourth in a series of ‘reassessments’ in which the Review attempted to persuade readers to look differently at familiar buildings. In Pevsner’s case, the aim was to look not at individual buildings but at the layout of colleges as a whole, and of the university as a whole. What would later delight him in St Catherine’s – a uniformity of mood and style, the sense of an engineered unity embracing every detail – was quite absent from the three colleges he had chosen, and yet there was no lack of plan. ‘It can safely be assumed that those who added new to old buildings, and new to old quad were fully aware, as a rule, of what they were doing, and delighted in the same surprises, contrasts and incongruities as we do.’

Corpus Christi College, Oxford, front quad

Each of the three colleges – Christ Church, Corpus Christi, St Edmund Hall – is a man-made landscape, wrote Pevsner, of a quintessentially English kind, deriving its harmoniousness from the English virtues of tolerance, humour and flexibility rather than from any superimposed order – displaying the instinctive manners by which Oxford, it seemed, set such store. There is little that is symmetrical about Christ Church: it was Wren’s enjoyment of the ‘free mixing of contrasts’ that prompted him to create Tom Tower. The ‘dramatic rough mass’ of the Library contrasts sharply with the smooth Palladian finish of Peckwater Quad. Again, at Corpus a ‘comfortable, businesslike’ quad leads into one that is compressed and intricate, classical leads into Tudor and the cosy into the forbidding. St Edmund Hall, ‘the epitome of collegiate picturesqueness’, is a jumble of different colours, textures and heights. ‘One’s curiosity never flags as one walks from one court to another, coming suddenly, for instance, from a dark passage into an open square,’ and, concluded Pevsner, ‘the same experience can be had in most of the other colleges, unless they are as exceptionally unlucky as Balliol’.

‘Three Oxford Colleges’ was one of the few finished products of some thinking that Pevsner was doing for a book in these immediate post-war years. At the instigation of the Architectural Review’s proprietor, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, he was exploring ideas on the English tradition in planning with a view to advocating the principles of informal picturesque planning as a guide in post-war reconstruction. The book never appeared, but in 2010 Pevsner’s draft was edited and filled out from his notes by Mathew Aitchison and published as Pevsner’s Townscape: Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

Oxford features prominently, and to support the book Aitchison and the Getty Institute have wonderfully recreated online the Oxford perambulation which Pevsner recommends to anyone wanting to get the full effect of a very English form of planning. (An interview with Mathew Aitchison elaborates.) Using the photographs by Hans Gernsheim which were taken to illustrate the original ‘Three Oxford Colleges’ piece, a slide show helps us to replicate ‘the spatial experience, an experience undergone in time, as one walks along and looks this way and that’, an experience which, in Pevsner’s words, ‘reveals some of the qualities that the 20th century, with its deeper understanding of the English landscape tradition, is beginning to appreciate as the result of something more than happy accidents.’

Pevsner in Oxford: Part One

2011-09-17T17:06:00.006+01:00

This is the first of two guest posts by Susie Harries, author of the recently published Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, that I’m honoured to publish. Pevsner’s work is indispensable to students of English art, architecture, and design. His An Outline of European Architecture has introduced countless students and amateurs to the subject; books such as Pioneers of the Modern Movement and A History of Building Types still engage specialists; above all, his monumental survey of The Buildings of England (over 40 volumes, county by county) is the guide and one of the most important art-historical projects ever. And yet Pevsner was an outsider to England, a German who showed the English what to look for in their architecture and helped shaped the culture he described. Susie Harries’s fascinating biography explores this remarkable character and his work. It’s one of the best biographies I’ve read in the last few years.

In this post, Susie Harries looks at Pevsner’s reaction to Oxford.

Nikolaus Pevsner was never at home in Oxford as he was in Cambridge, a more austere and Protestant place, although he learned to come to terms with what, on his first encounter, he called Oxford’s ‘ghastly miasma of humanism’. As a congenital outsider, in his own mind at least, he always had a deep-seated desire to belong, and Oxford is notoriously a hard place to infiltrate. ‘Every sentence, every lecture, every book, every conversation here means something quite different from what it would mean at home,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘The words mean something different, the brain itself is wound differently.’

On his first visit to England in 1930, three years before he was obliged to leave Germany for good, Pevsner had been a guest of the 2nd Viscount Harcourt at Nuneham House, a Palladian mansion in grounds landscaped by Capability Brown with views over the water meadows to the towers and spires of Oxford. Its park was the setting for several scenes in Through the Looking Glass, and Pevsner –who was spending the rest of his English stay in low-grade B&Bs – found himself frequently as bemused as Alice by the customs and conversation of the natives. ‘One Oxford college has a motto – Manners Makyth Man’, he told his wife, implying that this was a rule of life in the locality. Not only was his own appearance at lunch at Nuneham ceremoniously announced by the butler, so was the arrival of every course, and dessert was interrupted by a liveried servant to enquire whether the hostess would care to send a wreath for Lord Birkenhead, who had passed away. ‘Just like the films,’ Pevsner told his wife, ‘and I’m in the midst of it. I have to be very careful not to make any faux pas.’

Forty-four years later, when his Oxfordshire was published in 1974, he was, it seems, still afraid of the faux pas. ‘To an Oxford man no doubt gaffes of nomenclature and gaffes in the little snobbery concerns which one disregards at one’s peril have been left in my text, apart from more serious mistakes.’ His social unease may perhaps have jaundiced his overview of the city in his introduction, where he is very bracing indeed about the image of the ‘dreaming spires’: ‘Nonsense in every respect. Surely, in spite of St Mary, All Saints, and the cathedral, and now Nuffield, Oxford is remembered less for them than for Tom Tower, the Camera, and Magdalen tower. It is the variety of the shapes which makes the skyline. And as for “dreaming”? Stupor say the enemies, inertia say even some of the friends, serious search for truth among the undergraduates, search for knowledge among the dons, less serious search for publicity – single out what you will, dreaming is not a figurative Oxford quality, by criteria either of the mind or the eye.’

Pevsner’s opprobrium was, of course, directed more against the people than the place. Oxfordshire does contain some of his most scathing epithets – ‘elephantine’ (Sir Thomas Jackson at the Examination Schools), ‘retardataire’ (Sir Edward Maufe with his Dolphin Quadrangle at St John’s), ‘totally unrousing’ (G.G. Scott in his additions to Magdalen) but equally it is full of loving descriptions of buildings – not least, his favourite of all contemporary university buildings, Arne Jacobsen’s St Catherine’s College. ‘Self-discipline is its message, expressed in terms of a geometry pervading the whole and its parts and felt wherever one moves or stops... It has a clarity of structure and at the same time a serenity such as no other new college building has.’

What appealed perhaps most to Pevsner about Oxford, however, was less the individual college buildings, ‘incomparably beautiful’ as they were, than their relationship to one another. Again and again he would take Oxford as a prime example of the Picturesque planning he so much admired – a place that had evolved organically, but not without design.

The university as it had developed over the centuries now possessed all the key qualities of the Picturesque – surprise, variety, intricacy, irregularity, with formal quadrangles set next to narrow, twisting lanes, Baroque college buildings next to workmen’s cottages and Victorian chapels. Set pieces like the Sheldonian Theatre and the Radcliffe Camera were not designed to dominate, as they might have done in a more rigid, classicising layout, but were placed as accents in an informal composition. The High (above) achieved its effect not as a single triumphal statement but as a series of small disclosures, making it ‘one of the world’s great streets. It has everything. It is on a slight curve so the vistas always change.’

Romney Marsh, Kent

2011-09-14T08:47:00.006+01:00

Another look at the lookers' huts

Just over a year ago I posted about the lookers' huts of Romney Marsh in Kent, those small and simple buildings used for shelter by the shepherds of the marsh. Mark Duncan, the photographer who over the last few years has been making memorable images of these modest buildings, has a new exhibition of the results. The show marks the construction of a new looker's hut – the first to be built in many decades.

I was attracted to Mark Duncan's photographs because of their concentration on these unregarded buildings – plain, brick-built structures, just big enough for the looker and his tools and belongings and for a stove to keep him warm in the chill of the lambing season. But I also admire these pictures because they capture the special atmosphere of the place. Romney Marsh, flat, remote, dotted with churches, weather-boarded houses, and poplars, has caught the eye of many artists, from John Piper to Derek Jarman. Mark Duncan's photographs, with their big skies and their variety of weather conditions and light, capture the place as well as any.

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Mark's exhibition is at the Romney Marsh Visitor Centre, New Romney, from 15 September to 9 October.

There is more about the exhibition here.

South Parade, London

2011-09-11T12:23:00.001+01:00

Turnham white

It’s a surprise to come across this tall pale house of 1891 amongst the deep red brickwork of Bedford Park, not far from Turnham Green underground station in west London. Architecture buffs will recognise it as the work of Arts and Crafts architect C F A Voysey, a rare town house from this master of country houses (another of his London buildings is here). Reacting against the ornate brick gables, red tiles, and wooden window frames of the surrounding houses, Voysey covered the walls of this house, which he built for the artist J W Foster, in pale render, adding stone-framed windows that are arranged in horizontal bands to counterpart the vertical emphasis of the building as a whole. A few other touches – the roof of the bay, the little round window, and the brackets at the eaves – add some curves to relieve the straight lines that prevail.

Some early observers were nonplussed. They found the leaded-light windows and pale walls old-fashioned – perhaps they expected an architect who flourished in the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century to be flirting with the French curves of Art Nouveau. What they got was Voysey reworking the Arts and Crafts style that had been developed by William Morris and his colleagues a generation earlier. With hindsight it also looks rather modern – the minimal ornament, white walls, and strip windows would become familiar in a different form a few decades later. Not that Voysey would have seen it that way. Living on into the 1940s, Voysey disliked modernist architecture and remained committed to organizations, such as the Art Workers’ Guild, that supported the Arts and Crafts. His work showed that it is possible to be traditional and striking at the same time. And that white walls can look good next to red brick and green grass.

Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire

2011-09-08T09:38:00.002+01:00

Compton in the Hole

At last, from the hill that’s home to the windmill in the previous post, I got my glimpse of Compton Wynyates. This north front is not, I have to say, the most spectacular side of the house, but still gives a good impression of the character of the place – the mostly Tudor brick walls, the tall chimneys, the dormers in the roofs, the purely ornamental crenellations, the different levels. Above all, this cluster of brick wings and pitched roofs gives an impression of the way the house must have grown over the years with bits added here and there before a major revamp of the eastern part of the building – the part of the left of the picture is an addition of 1867 by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt in a style in harmony with rest of the house.

Looking at the house in its tree-lined valley one can understand what has usually made people enthusiastic about it. John Russell, in Shakespeare’s Country, noticed how the surrounding hills and trees rise up around so that ‘the house is seen as if in the bowl of an enormous spoon’. W H Hutton, in Highways and Byways in Shakespeare’s Country, called it ‘a wonderful picture of rose-tinted restfulness’. Pevsner, with his eye more focused on the ball, found in it the picturesque mode that so attracted him: ‘the perfect picture-book house of the Early Tudor decades, the most perfect in England of the specific picturesque, completely irregular mode’.

Writers are apt to get lyrical about this place, but Hutton reminds us that Camden, referring to its setting, called it ‘Compton in the Hole’ and records a local ‘rustic’ showing a visitor around, remarking, ‘Did ye ever see sich a hole?’ Some hole.

Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire

2011-09-06T21:55:00.005+01:00

Hill and mill

Having looked at Compton Pike, I decided to follow a footpath up the nearby hill towards another local landmark. I was heading towards the windmill that I’d seen on top of the rising ground behind Compton Wynyates, the country house that seemed to be hidden from onlookers – hidden, that is, apart form a tantalizing glimpse of Tudor brickwork through the gate and through the trees.

When I got to the top of the hill and recovered my breath, the mill was a surprise. It’s a stone tower mill, but, unlike the imposing stone- or brick-built tower mills one is used to seeing, it is not a very tall structure – clearly the hill gave it most of the height it needed to catch the wind in its working days. The mill is said to date from the 18th century and to have been restored twice in the 20th, but has no proper sails, only the stocks. But apparently there is machinery inside, and with sails installed maybe it would turn again. For now, though, this picturesque little mill seems destined to remain a hilltop landmark, admired by travellers along the lanes between south Warwickshire villages such as Tysoe and Brailes, most of whom probably buy their flour from Sainsbury's in Banbury or the Co-op in Shipston on Stour.

Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire

2011-09-05T11:56:00.004+01:00

A Spaniard in the works

I recently spent a day bumbling around Warwickshire wondering if I could see the wonderful country house at Compton Wynyates from the public roads or public footpaths that surround it. Years ago this house was open to the public and I remember being enchanted by its forest of raspberry brick Tudor chimneys, Gothic windows, and gables. I seem to remember that the house could be seen from the nearby road, but its owners, who no longer open their home, now guard their privacy with trees, putting a spanner in my works.

So I had to be content, for now at least, with some interesting neighbouring structures, such as Compton Pike. My first sight of this curious landscape feature was a glimpse of the very top just beyond the crest of a hill. Walking along the edge of the field reveals an elongated pyramid of local ironstone, topped with a ball finial.

Compton Pike was probably put up in the 16th century as a signalling beacon – an iron hook protruded from the finial, and this supported a flaming lantern. It may have been used in 1588 as part of the chain of beacons that warned of the arrival of the Spanish Armada. It has remained ever since as a landmark and an obstacle to farm workers with combine harvesters, one of whom was about to negotiate it when I took this picture before bumbling on with my search.

Oxford

2011-09-01T08:11:00.003+01:00

A rich mix

There are perhaps a few people who have been reading this blog for several years, and some of them may remember that I once posted about Frank Cooper’s grocery shop on The High in Oxford, the original home of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. The marmalade, which Cooper made first in the 1870s, became so popular that by the beginning of the 20th century it was necessary to build a dedicated factory to meet the demand.

Cooper’s marmalade factory was built in 1902 to designs by Herbert Quinton. It’s in that late-19th-century hybrid mode which is not too far from Queen Anne and is often referred to by architectural historians as ‘Free Style’. Red brick and Bath stone masonry; big windows, carefully treated; neat details like the little Tuscan columns that divide some of the windows – this is the mix of features that typifies Free Style, and which makes this building catch the eye.

The central carriage entrance is especially ornate. The carved ornament above the entrance, the banded masonry on either side, the whacky bulges above them, not to mention the fancy iron gates all add up to something special. And up at the top of the building, the curvy (echoing the curvy tops of the second-floor windows) is a nice touch too, concealing the roof and, with its ball finials, adding some interest to the skyline.

It’s quite a rich spread of a building, then. But also, one imagines, quite practical – those big windows make for a light and well ventilated interior. Part of it is now used as The Jam Factory, a combined arts centre, restaurant, and bar, and its light, spacious interiors seem well suited to this role too.

Hereford

2011-08-27T22:02:00.003+01:00

Late-flowering modernism

I’ve been passing by this building on Hereford’s inner ring road for years. I remember being vaguely aware of it as a teenager (when I was a teenager, I mean, although the building was probably in its teens at the time too). But thanks to a few long waits at the traffic lights I’ve started to look at it more lately. And now the building looks past its best, and the shops on its ground floor look closed, and I’m thinking I ought to share it with you, while it’s still there.

Looking at the Franklin Barnes building is also timely because, as many readers of this blog will know, the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain is being celebrated, and this looks like a building designed very much under the influence of the kind of modern architecture fostered by the Festival, the sort of modern design that didn’t mind playful use of colour, or sculpture, or whacky lettering – modernism with a human face, as it were.

There are so many typically 1950s things about this building. Look at the way the central block is arranged in a series of layers – a central white core, then two slabs of red bricks, then the two layers of boldly framed windows. This massing in layers or slabs is very 1950s, as are many other features – the railings on the block to the left, the use of small tiles of grey slate for some of the facing, and that bold lettering, which, if not actually lifted from the Festival Hall or the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, must have been influenced by the ‘Egyptian’ letters used there.

Architects Cecil Corey and Harry Bettington certainly knew how to pull all these elements together. But what was this building for, and who was, or were, Franklin Barnes? Furniture dealers? Electrical retailers? No. The sculpture in the niche gives the game away. It’s a stylized flower by Trevor Worton: Franklin Barnes ran a garden supplies business and florist’s. May their building continue to flourish.

Faringdon, Berkshire*

2011-08-24T20:25:00.004+01:00

Moving on

So solid, buildings do not generally move. Permanence is one of the conditions of architecture, and when we hear of a building moving, we are apt to get excited, because it’s being dismantled and re-erected stone by stone (like London’s Temple Bar), or because it’s being transported on an overgrown truck, or because it’s suffering from “structural movement”, the bugbear of surveyors and the owners of houses, meaning it’s subsiding, and may fall down. “The crack is moving down the wall, We must remain until the roof falls in” are the relentlessly repeating lines in an eerie poem by Weldon Kees, the American poet who disappeared one day in 1955, not about to let his own house fall down around his ears.

Statuary, especially anything made of stone and larger than life-size, also tends to stay put. But sometimes, under the influences of circumstances, accidents, and strong wills, buildings and statues move, or even move together. London’s Crystal Palace, of course, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was taken apart and its miles of iron framework and acres of glass were re-assembled in a slightly different form in South London. Later, it burned down, leaving only vast and trunkless legs of stone, or foundations of stone at any rate.

Other survivors of these vicissitudes were a pair of statues personifying the continents of Africa and Asia. These figures were bought in 1966 and placed in the park of Faringdon House by Robert Heber-Percy, heir and former partner of Lord Berners. Berners, the “versatile peer”, who had written music, painted, dyed his doves in bright colours, and generally been entertaining, made your standard English eccentric look staid and unproductive. Eccentricity can be fragile, crumbling with the passing of the eccentric, But Berners lives on in his music, his folly tower overlooking Faringdon, and his writings.

I like to think there’s something of his spirit in the importation of these statues, one of which, Africa with her sphinx, is generously made visible to the passer-by over the park wall. Made, no doubt, to symbolize Britain’s dominion over the world’s continents, its original meaning is irrelevant in today’s world. Rather than smash it up, though, why not preserve it to remind us how we once saw ourselves and others, in the days before these bulky traces of the Crystal Palace moved from London to a corner of a garden on the edge of an English country town?

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*I use the old-style English county boundaries.

Bristol

2011-08-20T18:15:00.002+01:00

Sailing to Byzantium

Bristol, an important port for centuries, enjoyed a great expansion in the 19th century, with the arrival of the Great Western Railway and the building of many warehouses, shops, offices, and factories of various kinds. One of the most outstanding buildings from this period is the Welsh Back Granary, built in 1869 to the designs of locally based architects Ponton and Gough. The architects chose a Byzantine revival style, though the multicoloured brickwork (courtesy of the Cattybrook brick pit at Almondsbury) owes a lot to the influence of Venetian architecture too. This is a style, sometimes known as Bristol Byzantine, that may have developed after Ponton and Gough got to know John Addington Symonds, literary critic and historian of the Renaissance, who was born in Bristol. The use of a mix of Venetian and Byzantine elements, though, which recalls the architecture of some other Bristol buildings I’ve posted in the past, also suggests tbat the Bristolians were trying to associate their city with two of the world’s most famous maritime cities, Venice and Istanbul.

Built to store grain, the Welsh Back building was highly functional – all those pierced openings were to ventilate the grain as it was dried by the heat from fires on the lower floors; the round holes close to the ground-floor arches contained chutes through which grain could be released to waiting carts. But what high-octane decoration – polychrome bricks, pointed Venetian battlements, natty pointed arches, restless patterning – cloaks this functionality. Part palace, part silo, this building is designed to dazzle. In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a jazz club here, which metamorphosed into a rock venue in the 1980s, all of all seems rather appropriate for this loud and colourful structure. There’s a more sedate restaurant in the base of the building now; the dazzling brickwork remains.

Leominster, Herefordshire

2011-08-18T13:48:00.002+01:00

Mystery

I took these pictures a couple of years ago in one of the main streets in the town of Leominster, Herefordshire. I was inspired to have another look at the photographs when I saw an interesting post on the blog Caroline’s Miscellany about a printer’s shop in York.

At that time I first saw these figures, the shop was a delicatessen and, although I wanted to go inside and ask about the charming figures on either side of the shop sign, the place was full of people buying olives and unsalted butter, and the last thing the staff would have wanted was someone going on about the shop front. So I thought, ‘I’ll come back another day, at a quieter time, and ask then.’ So I returned a few months later to find that the place was no longer a deli, but an antiques shop. ‘Aha, I thought, just the people to be interested in my antiquarian enquiries.’ But the shop was closed, and was still closed when I came back later the same day. I made a third visit, a few months later still, and the shop was completely empty.

So I can’t tell you how old these figures are, or what they’re meant to represent, although clearly no printer’s devilry has been at work here. Some of the features of the frontage (the rosettes, for example) give it an early-19th century feel, but it could equally be a 20th-century design in homage to the earlier period. And as for the figures – I was going to compare them to classical caryatids, until an architect I know, when I showed him one of the pictures, pointed out that they’re more like ship’s figureheads, which indeed they are. But the age of these figures doesn’t matter so much as the facts that someone took trouble over them and that they still make us smile.

Sherston, Wiltshire

2011-08-13T19:11:00.002+01:00

Survivor

In the large village of Sherston in Wiltshire, roughly east of Malmesbury, this graceful medieval church stands at one end of the town. The church has a Norman core and was extended in the 13th and 15th centuries. The tall tower at first glance looks like one of the 15th-century additions, its style not a million miles from the more ornate church towers of Somerset. The openwork parapet at the top, the pointed openings with pierced stone panels to let out the sound of the bells, the niche for a statue – all these are things you can also see on 15th-century Somerset towers. Only the two little windows right at the bottom of the tower beneath the niche strike an odd note.

And those windows give a clue to what is different about the tower at Sherston: it dates not from the 15th century but from 1730. It was the work of a master mason called Thomas Sumsion, who came from Colerne, which, although in Wiltshire, is quite close to Bath and the world of those stunning Somerset towers. Sumsion worked very much in the medieval tradition. In 1730 George II was on the throne and classical architecture in the vein of St Martin in the Fields was all the rage. So the Gothic style of Sumsion’s tower here at Sherston was unfashionable in 1730 – maybe 250 years out of date.

But this kind of work was what Sumsion had learned, perhaps from his father, who had learned it in turn from an earlier generation. They’d no doubt continued building country buildings in the Gothic style through the Elizabethan period, through the Classical age of Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, and into the Georgian period. This phenomenon is known to historians as the Gothic survival. At Sherston it makes you feel pleased that Gothic survived in this way. Thomas Sumsion produced a tower of particular beauty and grace.

Sezincote, Gloucestershire

2011-08-10T16:28:00.003+01:00

Nabobbery

Walkers of the Heart of England Way going south through Gloucestershire leave Bourton on the Hill confident that their path is well named. The stone houses of Bourton, the rolling terrain, the sound of English birdsong, and even the smell of English cowpats: it’s all there. A few fields along the way, the farming landscape changes subtly. The pasture is punctuated with mature trees, giving the sense that we are entering the park of a big house. And beyond a small wood, there it is on the crest of a rise: a most surprising and un-English country house – Sezincote.

Sezincote was built for Charles Cockerell, who inherited the estate in 1798 on the death of his elder brother, John. Both were nabobs, men who had made their money in India, and Charles asked another of his brothers, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, to build him a house in the Indian style. The plump central onion dome shows instantly what they were about, but there are many other telling details lifted from Indian Islamic buildings – the little corner turrets with their own tiny onion domes, the bracketed cornice that runs around the building, the chimneys on either side of the main dome, the flattened central arch, the ornate windows on the little pavilion on the far right (there are similar ones on the curved greenhouse wing just visible on the left). Even the stone has what is said to be an authentically Indian orangey tinge (specially stained, according to some authorities).

This astonishing house was begun in 1805, and in 1807 the Prince Regent came to visit. No doubt his stay at Sezincote partly accounts for the prince’s enthusiasm for the Indian style, which John Nash adopted for the remodelling of the prince’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1815. Brighton’s Pavilion, so outré with its cluster of domes and intricate fretwork, so famous because of its owner’s character and colourful life, is now far better known than Sezincote. Which is good in a way because the nabob’s house* still has the power to surprise us and to remind us that here in the heart of England there are still things that pull us up short with an architectural jolt and remind us of the multifarious cultural and economic links that make up British history.

*This building is celebrated as "the nabob's house" in John Betjeman's autobiographical poem Summoned By Bells.

The London Nobody Knows

2011-08-08T22:12:00.002+01:00

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an interesting short programme tonight by Dan Cruickshank, in which the writer and broadcaster celebrates the work of Geoffrey Fletcher, author and illustrator of such as books as The London Nobody Knows. Fletcher's books, published between 40 and 50 years ago, explored and vividly evoked unregarded bits of London – pubs, markets, public lavatories, hostels, and other dark but lively corners – many of which have vanished now. Cruickshank visited some of the survivors (including a Deptford pie and mash shop, Wilton’s Music Hall, and Ridley Street Market) and talked to Iain Sinclair about Fletcher and his need to go “off-beat”. The short programme is worth catching on BBC’s iPlayer where it will be for about a week. In addition, my earlier post about Fletcher is here.

Trafalgar Square, London, and beyond

2011-08-05T20:12:00.003+01:00

A new view (2)

Having taken in the view of St Martin in the Fields described in the previous post, I turned through 90 degrees and saw in the distance the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, the structure popularly known, after the great bell it contains, as Big Ben. A touch on the zoom ring and there was another photograph of a familiar building from a new viewpoint.*

The clock tower is of course the most famous part of maybe our most famous building. The Houses of Parliament, built after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1834, took decades to complete. The basic design was by Charles Barry, but Barry enlisted the aid of A W N Pugin as a specialist in the Gothic style, and Pugin became more and more involved in the design to the extent that it became as much his own as Barry’s. Burning the candle at both ends, Pugin poured out drawings of decorative details of all kinds, creating the glorious interior of the House of Lords, designing wallpapers, mouldings, carvings, and furniture, and bringing Barry’s scheme to full Gothic life. The clock tower seems to have been completely designed by Pugin, who based its distinctive shape and refined details on a tower he did for Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.

By 1852, Pugin, sick with what was to be his final illness, was still overworked with drawings for Barry. His biographer, Rosemary Hill, quotes an extraordinary letter, which veers from lucidity to incoherence, in which Pugin describes his overwork: “I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful & I am the whole mechanism of the clock.”† He meant to write that he was to design the mechanism of the clock, but his slip seems apposite – Pugin was doing drawings at a relentless and mechanical pace, although the content, full of artful touches, was far from mechanical.

A few months after his frantic letter, Pugin was dead. He never lived to see the tower that would become his most celebrated work. We take it for granted now and see it everywhere, reproduced on news programmes, sketched in the background to political cartoons. But glimpsing it from the National Gallery steps made me see it anew: its artful vertical lines, its distinctive roof, the way the tower swells slightly to emphasizes the clock, the manner in which the gilded details catch the light of the sun. My new view of the tower revealed something else too: the structure’s lightness of touch in contrast with the grey ventilation towers of Portcullis House, the 2001 parliamentary office building across the road from the tower. It rises above them as a medieval church spire might against a background of dark, Satanic mills.

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*In spite of the marked difference in the cloud cover, this photograph was taken just a few seconds after the one in the previous post. England’s skies are ever varied, ever changing.

†Rosemary Hill’s book, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) is one of the best and most enjoyable architect-biographies of recent years.

St Martin's Lane and Trafalgar Square, London

2011-08-03T21:40:00.002+01:00

A new view (1)

For many years I worked in London’s Covent Garden, and day after day I passed Trafalgar Square and the Georgian church of St Martin in the Fields on my way to and from the office. I’d always admired St Martin’s, which is one of the most influential churches in the history of English architecture. It was created in the 1720s by James Gibbs, who in his design tackled headlong the question of how to build a church with both a columned classical portico and a steeple. These two elements, the one Greek or Roman, the other English, didn’t rightly belong together, and Gibbs combined them by simply sticking one behind and above the other. It ought not to work, having a tower emerging out of the top of a Roman portico like this, but it does, somehow, or we are so used to St Martin’s, and the many churches built in imitation of it, that we don’t see any incongruity any more. And the whole thing is now a London landmark, its steeple – with its square tower and octagonal spire and its marvellous rhythm of arches and circles – dominating its corner of the great square.

Having admired this church for years, I’d never photographed it, partly because there seemed to be no adequate viewpoint. Too near, and you can’t get it in the frame; farther away and you end up with a picture full of red buses and dashing pedestrians. Then the other week I was coming out of the National Gallery and at the top of the gallery steps spotted this view, which encompasses the whole façade without letting the buses spoil one’s view of the architecture. Finally I appreciate the National Gallery for something other than the paintings.

Duntisbourne Rouse, Gloucestershire

2011-07-30T07:56:00.004+01:00

On the green hill

It's not far from the A417 (formerly the Roman Ermin Street) that roars its way between Gloucester and Cirencester, but you could be in another world. You drive along a remote lane past dry-stone walls and sloping sheep pastures. Here and there a still narrower lane branches off to a farm or a couple of houses, but there is little hint of a community that might support a church, indeed little hint of a church, if you miss the discreet sign and gateway. But for those who see the sign and stop, there’s something very special. A path of grass, the quietest of approaches, leads down to the church, and as you gasp at the tiny tower, you realise that the land slopes steeply away towards one of the streams that cuts its way into the limestone hereabouts. You make a sharp right turn after the second gate at the end of the grass path, and take in the way this little building clings to the slope.

The walls have fragments of herringbone masonry – the angled arrangement of stones favoured by the Saxons – suggesting that this building was put up before the Norman conquest. The minute round-headed window in the chancel may well be Saxon, whereas the two slightly larger, taller lancets to the right of the porch were cut into the existing wall in the 13th century. The Saxon builders took advantage of the slope to build a tiny barrel-vaulted crypt beneath the chancel, and a later generation, probably in the 12th century, decorated the walls of that chancel with a simple pattern resembling masonry blocks, semicircular arches, and stylized flowers.

The porch and tiny tower are later though. The tower actually bears an inscription telling us that it was built in 1587 by a mason called John Haden. It’s unusual for a church of this date to bear the name of its mason, and this is a far cry from the grander architect-designed “signed” buildings of later centuries. Part of the satisfaction of this place, indeed, comes form its very modesty and simplicity. And continuity. The idea that people have been coming hear for maybe 900 years to worship on the slope of the green hill, or to contemplate the cutting of stone and the passing of time.

Fin de Siècle round-up

2011-07-27T07:57:00.005+01:00

I have produced another in my series of round-up pages, telling briefly the story of architecture at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth, illustrated with links to posts on this blog. This round-up of architecture in England between 1880 and 1918 covers the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and the collection of revivalist styles fashionable in this period, including 'Queen Anne'. It also draws together a number of posts on the architectural decoration of the era, covering buildings from shops to pubs, offices to public libraries. To read this overview of late-Victorian and Edwardian building, or just to catch up on some past posts, you can access this page from the PAGES menu in the right-hand column, or from here.

Greycoat Place, London

2011-07-24T13:47:00.004+01:00

Architectural pyrotechnics

Nowadays, fire stations are often seen as utilitarian buildings and most of us don’t give them a second glance. But in the Edwardian era, when the idea of purpose-built fire stations across the capital was still quite new, they could be built to stand out. A number were built in the early years of the 20th century when the architect to the London Country Council was William Edward Riley, son of a fireworks manufacturer. Riley got the LCC job in 1899 and stayed until his retirement 20 years later. He had a busy time, building slum-clearance housing schemes, continuing a programme of school building, and providing the capital with utility buildings such as fire stations.

The most famous of these is the fine Arts and Crafts inspired one at Euston, but here’s another good one, the Westminster Fire Brigade Station in Greycoat Place. The brickwork of the upper floors with its stripy stone dressings, sash windows, pilasters, and tall chimneys, is typical of the revivalist style called “Queen Anne”, a kind of loose imitation of a way of building popular in around 1700. But Riley placed this above a lower storey of granite, treated with banded rustication and big key stones above the openings. Details like the semicircular window to the side elevation and smaller round window on the front façade add to the interest.

This is a mix of styles and features that, although we could call it “Queen Anne”, defies classification. Architectural historians often resort to the term “Free Style” for this and other Edwardian mélanges. There’s certainly a freedom about the mix of styles and materials, and the various sizes and shapes of windows and doorways, all of which belie the stolidity of the classical granite and the sober but elegant lettering of the fire station’s name. But what we call it hardly matters. It’s a monumental building with some telling touches – a cracking display from the fireworks-maker’s son.

Hingham, Norfolk

2011-07-20T17:40:00.006+01:00

Hunting the hart

Spotting my recent posts on unusual inn signs, and anticipating that I’d soon be moving on to post a three-dimensional sign, Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England sent me this picture of the White Hart at Hingham. Hingham is known for its fine collection of Georgian houses, built apparently when local gentry moved in to reduce their reliance on the area’s inadequate roads during the winter, giving them elegant town houses and Hingham itself the nickname ‘Little London’. The White Hart sign is a real winner, a visual asset where a conventional hanging sign, or maybe a row of wooden letters attached to the wall, would have been expected. I like the way that Peter’s photograph catches the beast as if it is just becoming aware of the pursuing hunter – a hunter equipped of course with a weapon no more deadly than a Leica.

When not wielding his Leica, incidentally, Peter Ashley has had his paintbrushes out. The result is a rather lovely capriccio depicting a selection of the most notable buildings in the town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. It’s an artful image, containing lovely examples of architecture from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, plus a number of picturesque inclusions, from a railway train (steam-hauled, naturally) to street furniture. Prints of the image have been made and some of the proceeds from their sale will go to the Stamford Civic Society. You can find out more about the prints here and there’s a short film about them here.

Peter Ashley, Unmitigated Stamford

New Cavendish Street, London

2011-07-17T22:02:00.003+01:00

Full rig

The Ship is a pub of the 1880s in a brick and stucco Italianate style that fits well with the look of late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century London. But, in true public house fashion it stands out from the crowd with ornate pilasters, capitals, pediments, scrolls, and other details that make the building shine.

And, as a business that was part of the massive construction boom that hit the capital in the late-19th century, a pub certainly needed to stand out to attract custom. What above all helps this building achieve this is the plaster sign, showing the ship in almost full sail, slicing its way across the waves in front of a pale but grimy sky. It’s carefully framed by the architecture, vigorously modelled, and an eye-catching alternative to the conventional hanging pub sign. Splice the mainbrace!

Newbury, Berkshire

2011-07-13T19:42:00.004+01:00

Hart warming

The traditional pub sign hanging from its iron bracket is one of the most familiar highlights of England’s towns and villages. Even in these times of pub closures and corporate domination, there are still plenty of good ones, painted with vigour and originality, to stimulate our eyes and our taste buds. But I’ve recently noticed one or two less conventional signs that take different forms and are also eyecatching. Sadly, some are on buildings that are public houses no more.

This example is in the Market Place in Newbury and marks a building that was the White Hart Inn from 1627 to 1951, when it was converted to offices. In the early-20th century the building was emblazoned with lettering in big capitals, declaring that this was a ‘FAMILY AND COMMERCIAL INN’ and a ‘POSTING HOUSE’ with ‘LIVERY STABLES’ round the back. Now just the pictorial sign remains, not hanging from a bracket but fixed to the wall.

I don’t know how old this elegant hart is. I’ve seen an image of the building dating from around 1900 that shows the creature facing the other way, so he must have been painted some time in the 20th century. He makes a charming landmark, enlivening a plain white wall, near a corner of the Market Place, a visual reward for those who look up as they pass by.

Clayton, Sussex

2011-07-09T11:03:00.004+01:00

Wonders within

It’s a small church up a lane not far from Lewes, and from the outside, it’s charming but unassuming. A few gothic windows, a wooden bellcote, a low porch. This is the kind of exterior that makes one expect rustic charm inside rather than great architecture. None of which prepares one for the wonders within. Because inside, although the architecture itself is indeed very plain, there is a stunning set of very early wall paintings. Their exact date is unknown, but the best guess is around 1100, which is probably also the date of the semicircular chancel arch.

The clearest painting, above this arch, shows Christ in Majesty, apparently flanked by apostles and angels. The painting immediately to the left of the arch, beneath the band of ornament and above the niche, depicts Christ handing the keys of heaven to St Peter; that in the corresponding position to the right of the arch, much more fragmentary, is said to show Christ giving the Book of the Law to St Paul. The left-hand wall shows part of the Last Judgement, with the souls of the good being led to heaven; there is also a painting of a hexagonal arcaded structure thought to be the City of God. The right-hand wall (not visible in my photograph) continues the last judgement theme and includes what is thought to be souls of the damned being led by a devil riding a beast.

These paintings are much less bright and distinct than they would have been when first painted, and they are fragmentary and often difficult to interpret. But it is remarkable that they have survived at all – survived, that is, some 900 years, during which time they were covered in whitewash in the 17th century, to be rediscovered by restorers in the 1890s. The frescoes of Clayton are a wonderful reminder that the churches of the Middle Ages were buildings full of art and imagery, alive with spirits and angels, vibrant with colour and light.

Lewes, Sussex

2011-07-05T15:07:00.003+01:00

Fossils and flutes

Every architectural history and glossary will tell you about the classical orders, the sets of rules defining how columns, capitals, and the structures they support should be designed. They will tell you that there are five orders – three (the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) invented by the Greeks, and the other two (Composite and Tuscan) added by the Romans. They were imitated and adapted by the architects of the Renaissance, and became fashionable in England thanks to classical architects such as Inigo Jones and the legion of classicists who came after him, from the 17th to the early-20th centuries.

But this is not quite the whole story. Regular readers of this blog may remember a post about the curious ‘Gothic order’, invented in the Georgian period and used on a building in Ludlow. There’s another variation on the orders in Castle Place, a house in the High Street in Lewes. The porch is in the Ionic order – the capitals, with their pairs of spiral volutes, are straight from the builders’ pattern books of c 1810 when this house was built. But what is this on top of the fluted pilasters that bookend the façade? Not spirals in the Ionic mode, but pairs of fossils, ammonites in fact!

The ‘ammonite order’ was the brainchild of George Dance, who used it in London in 1789. It was taken up enthusiastically by Amon Wilds and his son, also called Amon, builder-architects who did a lot of work in Sussex, especially Brighton. Perhaps they liked ammonites because the name afforded the opportunity for a visual pun. Fossil-collecting was already a popular pastime by 1810, and ammonites, or ‘snake stones’ as they were often called, were prized by collectors. Their likeness fits wonderfully, if eccentrically, on top of the pilasters on this Lewes house, and no doubt acted as a kind of advertisement for the builders. In 1816 Castle Place was bought by a Dr Gideon Mantell, who was a geologist. No doubt he liked the ammonites too.

Lewes, Sussex

2011-07-01T13:43:00.004+01:00

Doing the math

Lewes is full of houses with beautiful brickwork, but sometimes the ‘brickwork’ is not what it seems. Many of the fronts of houses in this town are not built of brick at all but covered with a kind of tile designed to look like brick. These tiles, called mathematical tiles. became popular during the 18th century and were usually used to clad timber-framed houses so that they looked as if they were built in brick. There are lots of them in Lewes, and in other places in southeast England, such as Brighton.

Although mathematical tiles are usually the same colour as regular red bricks, they are quite easy to spot when you get your eye in. They’re a different size from bricks and, because of their slender profile, they look different at joins and at the corners of the building. Sometimes the tiles are not red at all, but black. There are quite a lot of these black tiles in Brighton and they also feature on this Lewes building, Bartholomew House, near the entrance to the castle.

At a quick glance you might think this house was built of black glazed brick. But when you look more closely, there are several odd things about it that give the game away. Here’s a house with the sash windows and fanlights of the 18th century, but the proportions are all wrong. An 18th-century house would not normally have the ground-floor window in the middle: this window would line up with those on the upper floors. The pair of doors is unusual too. And the fact that none of the windows has the classical number of panes. And the way in which the three lower windows almost touch at the corners. And the lack of arches and keystones above the windows.

Put all this together, and it looks as if this is a framework building. In other words, what’s holding it all up is not a brick wall, but a timber frame, and this frame dictates where the windows and doors can be. Some time in the 18th century, the owners decided to upgrade it, following the fashion, using glazed black tiles. If you look at the corners (photograph below), there’s a narrow wooden band covering up what would be an uncomfortable join if the edges of the tiles had been exposed: a neat solution to a major headache with mathematical tiles. The moulding around the windows is probably wooden too (I was so taken with the look of this house that I forgot to kick or tap these parts to find out.)

Why tile a house like this? It is sometimes said that mathematical tiles came into favour as a way of avoiding a tax on bricks that came in in 1784. But mathematical tiles were in use well before this date – and were taxed too†. It was more to do with fashion. Timber was out; brick was in; tiles gave the appearance of brick without the expense of a complete rebuild. Fashion – and finance – ruled the day, and the builders of 18th-century Lewes did the math.

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† As pointed out by Alec Clifton-Tailor in his chapter on Lewes in his Six More English Towns (1981). I’m indebted to his account in this post.

Glynde, Sussex

2011-06-28T17:40:00.002+01:00

Palladian geometry

Coming along the main village street of Glynde, past cottages and an almost absurdly quaint smithy with horseshoe-shaped doorway, there is an abrupt change of gear when you reach St Mary’s church, a Palladian structure of the 1760s, which itself acts as a kind of prelude to the cupola-topped Georgian stables of the big house, Glynde Place, just a little further beyond. The west front of St Mary’s is all triangles and semi-circles. It would be a rather severe exercise in Palladian geometry, but its small size tempers the severity and gives it charm.

The architect was an amateur, Sir Thomas Robinson, and he made good use of flint for the main walls and neat ashlar for the porch and the triangular pediments. Like virtually every church architect using this kind of classical architecture, Robinson found no real solution to the problem of combining a “classical temple” frontage with a bell turret. So the turret looks a bit odd atop the pediment, but its triangular top and semi-circular arch echo the triangles and arches below, giving the design some consistency.

The charm continues inside, with an interior full of box pews that features a wooden west gallery and other Georgian furnishings. Best of all is the plasterwork around the east window, with its rosettes set in octagons. This is a lovely touch and isn’t quite spoiled by the stained glass by Kempe, in a sort of Renaissance revival style of the 1890s, which would look better in a Victorian church. But even it includes semi-circles and triangles, continuing the geometrical theme and maintaining a certain harmony.

Onibury, Shropshire

2011-06-23T22:31:00.006+01:00

Art and craft

As a final post in this short series about buildings in the Ludlow area of Shropshire, here’s the interior of the parish church of St Michael at Onibury, a mainly 14th century church, but with older portions, such as the very plain chancel arch, surviving from the Norman period. Still more visual impact, though, comes from the restoration at the beginning of the 20th century. And, unlike many church restorations, this was very much for the good, because the job was done in the Arts and Crafts tradition by Detmar Blow.

It’s the furnishings that catch the eye – oak pews and stalls, lights on upright posts with simple metal and glass lampholders, and the elegant west gallery, its front a grid of oak verticals and horizontals. Blow’s fittings beautifully set off the pale plastered interior with the semi-circular chancel arch and the rough but beautiful woodwork of the nave roof, just visible beyond the arch in my photograph.

A finishing touch is provided by the royal arms of the then new king, Edward VII, with their characterful lion and unicorn supporters. There’s so much going on in these arms – don’t miss the king’s monogram, ‘ED VII’ on either side of the helm and crest at the top; or the elegant black and white uprights (I’m not sure of the correct heraldic term) on which the lion and unicorn lean; or the foliage on either side of the date at the bottom. It’s an accomplished design carried out with painstaking attention to detail: art and craft indeed.

Craven Arms, Shropshire

2011-06-20T20:23:00.002+01:00

Stokesay Castle (2): The seventeenth century

Although Stokesay Castle (see also my previous post) is a 13th-century building, some major alterations were carried out in the 17th century, when it belonged to the Craven family. In about 1640–41 they built the charming gatehouse (above). This timber-framed building is very like a lot of the houses in the nearby town of Ludlow – generously timbered, with added carvings.

The decoration here have an Adam and Eve theme – there are ‘Fall of Man’ carvings along the lintel as well as portrayals of Adam and Eve on the brackets on either side of the main archway. There are other figure carvings, and also dragons, elsewhere amongst the woodwork, making this a one of the most richly ornamented buildings of its type.

The other 17th-century part of Stokesay Castle is the decorative scheme in the solar (above), the main upstairs living room. This room, part of the original medieval house, is accessed by the outer stairs between the main hall and the south tower. In the 17th century it was panelled in oak and a very elaborate carved overmantel was installed above the fireplace. If the carving on the gatehouse is impressive, the overmantel is riotous. On the pilasters, bare-chested human figures look out across the room; between them are intricate patterns of carved oak, with grotesque heads as centrepieces; more high-octane carving fills up the gaps.

This piece of show-stopping display is broadly classical in its proportions – see the architrave above the figures – but this is the kind of homespun classicism popular in the 16th century. Architecture textbooks will tell you that the real action by the mid-17th century was with much more correct and Italy-aware kinds of classicism – Inigo Jones facades and hipped-roofed houses. But not here at Stokesay. There’s some evidence that this carved decoration was brought here from elsewhere, so it may have started life a few years before being installed here. Even so, a high-status family wanted to install it in one of their most important, showy rooms. This remarkable overmantel shows that, in the far west of England in the mid-17th century, this older kind of expressive, eccentric carving was still alive and vigorously kicking.

* * *

A number of people have asked me, in comments on this blog and personally, about why the term “solar” is used for a room in a medieval house. The word goes back a very long time, variants on it being used in this way in Old English, i.e. before the Norman Conquest. This isn’t immediately apparent from the Oxford English Dictionary, though, because the dictionary does not list this use of the word with the various familiar modern sun-related uses of “solar”; instead, the OED lists it as a variant spelling of “sollar”, which means the same thing as our architectural “solar”: an upper room or apartment in a house or other dwelling. The OED says that the word was originally used for a room “open to the sun or receiving much sunlight”. Medieval solars in my experience aren’t particularly sunny, but they’re always upper rooms, so at least they are a few feet nearer to the sun than those on the ground floor.

Etymologically “solar” is an interesting word because it might have been introduced into the English language twice. There are words like “solor” and “soler” in Old Saxon and Old High German, from which our Anglo-Saxon ancestors got the term before 1066. But the Normans might have brought it with them too, because it’s present in various early Romance languages, in Old French as “solier”, and in Anglo-Norman as “soler”. There is more information in the OED entry on “sollar”, for those with access to the great word-hoard.

Craven Arms, Shropshire

2011-06-18T08:14:00.003+01:00

Stokesay Castle (1): A Gothic room

Stokesay Castle is one of my favourite buildings, and has been since when I first visited it, long ago when I was a teenager, in the pouring rain. I’m pleased to say the weather was much better for my most recent visit, and the bright light inspired me to take some photographs not just of the exterior of the building but also of a couple of the interiors.

As many of you will know, Stokesay Castle is not a castle at all, but a fortified manor house. Although has a crenellated tower and a defensive moat, it lacks the strong fortifications and tiny windows of a true castle and would not have withstood a full-blown siege. Stokesay was built in the 1280s and 1290s by Laurence of Ludlow, a wool merchant who had done so well that he had become one of the richest men in England. He built this house to give him a degree of security and to act as a status symbol. Slightly showy, but not vast enough to make the aristocracy jealous, this house was built to show that the Ludlow family had arrived.

Remarkably, much of Laurence’s house of the 13th century, including the chunky polygonal south tower, the solar block, and the hall with its linked north tower, survives. In the picture above of the south tower and hall, only the big buttresses and the outer stairway up to the solar are later additions. The big Gothic windows light the most important medieval room: the hall.

Here, beneath this glorious roof – many of its original timbers are still in place – Laurence and his family would have gathered for meals with their household of maybe 25 people. Laurence and his family and their guests would have sat at the high table at the far end of the room; the rest of the household would have used two long tables placed at right-angles to it, running along the length of the hall. Their food was prepared in a kitchen nearby (no longer standing) and wine and beer came up from a buttery on a lower floor, just off the hall.

This room would have been the social centre of the house, heated by a hearth in the middle of the floor that was the symbol of commensality and hospitality as well as the literal source of heat and light. For several centuries the hall was loud with conversation and, probably, music, and alive with the comings and goings of servants. But the bustle is long gone. The house has not been lived in for some 200 years, although it was kept in good repair by benevolent Victorian owners who lived in a more modern house not far away. They ensured the survival of this spacious hall, lit by its two rows of tall Gothic windows, its roof is supported by great cruck timbers tied together by pairs of horizontal collars and curving braces. This structure creates a beautiful space and even in its emptiness, the hall at Stokesay is one of the most evocative rooms in England.

* * *

Having been cared for by the Allcroft family from 1869 to 1986, Stokesay has since been under the guardianship of English Heritage.

Bromfield, Shropshire

2011-06-14T08:39:00.005+01:00

In the high and holy place

It’s the 1670s. The English Civil Wars have come and gone and the Stuart monarchy has been restored. In London, the great fire of 1666 has left its trail of damage, but the capital is being rebuilt. Wren’s new city churches are showing people how a kind of plain classical style can be adapted to church design. People are used to simple interiors, a minimum of imagery, and texts on the wall. If there is ceiling decoration, for example, it’s plasterwork not a million miles away from the kind of thing found in country houses of the period.

But English architecture can always produce something against the grain, something that throws away the rulebook. In the unlikely setting of the Shropshire countryside near Ludlow is a startling example. St Mary the Virgin, Bromfield, is a medieval parish church, once a Benedictine priory, originally built in the mid-12th century with later additions from the 13th and 16th centuries. There’s a solid-looking stone tower at the northwest corner, a nave, an aisle, a chancel – nothing unusual-sounding about all that.

What is unusual is the chancel ceiling, a celestial phantasmagoria of angels and clouds, each angel with a scroll bearing a Biblical quotation. This heavenly host was painted in about 1672 by Thomas Francis of Aston-by-Sutton, Cheshire. It combines the period’s taste for texts with a kind of angelic imagery that’s like little else. The angels are a varied bunch, some apparently naked, others draped in rural homespun. The scrolls bearing the texts curl this way and that across the sky.

At the centre, amongst the English country angels, the fluffy clouds, and the eccentrically scrolling texts, is a bit of Latin. It’s a diagrammatic explanation of one of Christianity’s greatest puzzles: the Trinity. If you follow the diagram, which is often known as the Shield of the Trinity, you will read, around the edge, that the Son is not the Father, who is not the Holy Spirit. But if you read inwards towards the centre you will discover that each of these is God. The whole ceiling is a remarkable combination of English and Latin, angels and clouds, folk art and exegesis. It’s mixed up but wonderfully surprising. And its charm is unique.

Another round-up

2011-06-11T20:27:00.003+01:00

I've added another page to this blog, accessed as before either from here or via the PAGES menu in the right-hand column. It covers the architecture of the first three-quarters or so of Victorian period – roughly up to 1890. I plan to deal with the end of the Victorian era and the first two decades of the 20th century together on another page.

As with previous round-up pages, you'll find a brief description of the key features and styles of English architecture during this period, with links to examples that I've included on posts in this blog. Because the subject is the 19th century, this round-up is necessarily very sketchy: this was a period in which so much was going on, with buildings of almost every type being built in almost every style. So this is a brief and selective summary, but one that points in many directions that I hope will be interesting.

Bewdley, Worcestershire

2011-06-08T07:49:00.003+01:00

Rain, steam, and tin

As one recent commenter remarked, I do seem to have noticed quite a lot of corrugated iron in the last few weeks. I can’t resist sharing one more example, even though it is in a way going over ground covered by this blog before. The Severn Valley Railway runs between Bridgnorth and Kidderminster on track that originally formed part of a line linking Hartlebury in Worcestershire with Shrewsbury. The line became part of the Great Western Railway in the 1870s and was closed in 1963 (it had already been scheduled for shut-down before the wholesale closure of British railway lines that took place in that year). Part of the line was reopened as a heritage railway in 1970 and an extension to Bewdley followed in 1974.

In the early 20th century the Great Western Railway used small corrugated-iron buildings as stores, as lamp rooms, or as shelters on the platforms of some of its smaller stations and halts. I previously posted about a pair of these pagoda shelters at Denham Golf Club station in Buckinghamshire. Here’s another – but instead of an original example from the early 1900s, it’s a modern one dating from the "heritage" phase of the Severn Valley Railway. Northwood Halt was originally open between 1935 and the line closure in 1963 and during this period waiting passengers sheltered in a wooden hut. When the revived Severn Valley Railway was extended to Bewdley in 1974 the halt was reopened, and this pagoda shelter was put up in 2006 to replace the dilapidated hut. It is said to be the first all-new pagoda shelter to be erected since 1948. The platform sign is new too, but its cut wooden letters are very similar to those on its predecessor. The ensemble makes a welcoming sight for those who wait in rain or shine for one of the Severn Valley Railway's steam- or diesel-hauled trains.

Bewdley, Worcestershire

2011-06-05T15:18:00.003+01:00

Bewdiful

A recent post at The Dabbler dealt with plotlands, a form of development that became popular in the early years of the 20th century as a way of offloading unprofitable farmland. Estate agents and speculators parcelled up fields as small plots, on which people – often city-dwellers who wanted a place in the country – could build a home, knock together a chalet, or start a smallholding. Plotland houses were often self-built of timber; corrugated iron was frequently in evidence, too; some were even cobbled together from old railway carriages. Detractors referred to them as shacks, but they provided a rare opportunity for people with a tight budget to build (and in the days before the “property-owning democracy” own) a home – their buildings form a fascinating if unspectacular vernacular.

Probably the best known plotland developments were in Southeast England. Peacehaven in Sussex is a maybe the most famous. The Dabbler mentions Jaywick and other Essex plotlands. There are also examples in the Thames Valley and, as I was reminded yesterday when my travels took me through Bewdley, in the Severn Valley too. I knew about this particular development from a memorable film by Jonathan Meades, Severn Heaven (1990), part of his Abroad in Britain Series. Meades revelled in the rich bricolage that the owners of these houses had created, the melange of corrugated iron sheds, garden ornaments, chain-link fences, and boskage, both old and imported. Back in 1990 the houses themselves looked crudely but lovingly hammered together – now many have been replaced by slick tongue-and-groove structures that could almost be part of a pine-lodge holiday park. But some of the old houses remain. Here’s one, lovingly painted in green with fancy white bargeboards, clinging to the slope below the Severn Valley Railway, which swishes and hoots in the background.

* * *

There’s more about this plotland development at the Liberal England blog.
Jonathan Meades’ film is available on DVD as part of The Jonathan Meades Collection, BBCDVD2601

Richard's Castle, Herefordshire

2011-06-02T21:11:00.004+01:00

On the edge

Border country: Wales a short distance beyond the nearby ridge. Thick pasture. Black and white villages. Castles on hills. And also, here at Richard’s Castle, a church on a hill, with a solid square tower a few feet away. Herefordshire has a number of detached church towers like this one of around 1300. Their plain architecture – here there’s just that Y-traceried window to suggest a date and a style – quite different from what we normally expect of a church tower, different too from the carved and pewed church next door. It’s a bell tower but also a lookout and a refuge – no doubt the priest needed somewhere safe to go when the tensions between English and Welsh broke into violence. It’s a small building that looks as if it means business. No doubt the Welsh and their English opponents meant business too.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

2011-05-26T17:34:00.003+01:00

The ice man returneth

In 1626 the great writer and polymath Francis Bacon discovered that he could preserve a fowl by packing it with ice and snow. Tragically, the philosopher caught flu and died after his experiment with the fowl, but soon after this sad episode the use of ice caught on in the kitchens of the rich. Ice was used not just for food preservation, but also to make chilled desserts and to cool wine. If you had a country house with a lake (or special ice ponds), you had a ready source of ice in the winter. To keep the ice for use in the warmer months, you needed dedicated storage: enter the ice house.

Ice houses were small structures built to keep in the cold. A typical design consisted of a brick-lined chamber sunk partly into a hillside (or into an earth mound) and roofed with thick thatch. Some architects specified a double wall, for extra insulation; there was generally a drain to carry away surplus water; and there might also be a brick-vaulted entrance corridor with a door at either end, to cut off the ice chamber from the warm outdoors. Ice was packed carefully into the ice chamber, a job supervised by the head gardener, who would ensure that there were only the tiniest of gaps between the blocks of ice, to minimize air pockets and discourage thawing.

The ice house at Compton Verney, built in 1771–2, recently restored, and resplendent under its round thatched roof, is a beautiful example. It has a well constructed brick-lined interior and even though visitor access is to the entrance corridor not the ice chamber itself, it’s pleasantly cool in there. And one can see that, if Osbert Sitwell, comparing his family’s ice house at Renishaw to one of the vast stone-vaulted tombs at Mycenae, was laying it on a bit thick, he had a point – they really are very imposing interiors.

It was a bonus, when visiting Compton Verney to see their current exhibition of pictures by Ben Nicolson and Alfred Wallis, to find this ice house restored, a reminder of the time when Compton Verney was not an art gallery but a flourishing country house and an indication of the ingenuity of those who supplied its inhabitants with food and wine.

Above Entrance corridor, Compton Verney ice house

* * *
There is more about the restoration of the Compton Verney ice house here, and more about Compton Verney itself here.

Guilsborough, Northamptonshire

2011-05-22T18:35:00.005+01:00

Down to earth

Cob is one of the oldest and most basic of English building materials. It’s basically earth, with added straw, manure, and often small stones, built up in layers a foot or two thick and a foot or two high, which are then left to dry before the next layer is added. Building up a wall like this takes time, but, provided the cob wall is kept dry by constructing it on a stone plinth and protecting it with an overhanging roof, it can last for centuries.

Devon and Dorset have many cob buildings, but cob has been used in many other parts of England too, from Cumberland to Hampshire. This example is on the village green of the Northamptonshire village of Guilsborough. It’s known as a stable, but Alec Clifton-Taylor, in his classic book The Pattern of English Building, says that it was used to keep a supply of coal for the poor of the village. Its cob is reinforced here and there with brick and has the orangey colour of the local stone. Cob in sandstone areas can have a pink tinge, while in chalk districts it is paler – although cob walls are generally colour washed, so the colour of the earth is often hidden.

The shed or stable at Guilsborough probably dates from the 18th century, although the lower side wing was added in 1897 and is built of brick. Since the lettering I featured in the previous post was admired by several of my readers, I include a photograph of some painted lettering on this extension. This bit of sign-writing (“DIAMOND JUBILEE BUILDING 1897”) must date from a recent repainting, but its letterforms’ curvaceous As and Es and carefully detailed J, evoke the late-Victorian period perfectly, an added bonus to a little building that's already full of interest.

Chadlington, Oxfordshire

2011-05-18T17:07:00.005+01:00

Word and worship

This is the archetypal form of nonconformist chapel: a pair of round-headed windows on either side of a central door, a hipped roof, and, sometimes, quoins and window-surrounds picked out in dressed stone to make the building look more substantial and important. It’s a form that was created in the 18th century, but was still in use well into the Victorian period, by which time thousands of towns and villages had at least one chapel or meeting house belonging to the Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, or Quakers.

In rural areas, many of these places of worship never had large congregations, and thousands of them have fallen out of use to be demolished or, like this one, to benefit from sympathetic conversion. It’s good to see this example preserved because it’s a small local landmark and because, like so many of these small buildings, it is both typical and different. Typical because of the windows, hipped roof, and so on. Different because it’s built of local stone rather than the brick so often favoured for country chapels.

And also because of the inscription. Often on chapels there is a rectangular date stone above the door that gives the name and date of foundation. Here the builders inscribed the date over the door and the purpose of the building in elegant capitals along the string course. It’s nicely carved if slightly rustic work (look for the slight difference in the two Ps, for example). But it also has real vigour. I especially like the kicking angled serifs at the top of the S and C. In letter-cutting on inscriptions, date stones, and gravestones the Victorian nonconformist churches often employed craft workers of great skill and sensitivity. Their typography and printing – on items such as circuit preaching plans and the small tickets with Biblical texts handed out at Sunday schools – was often very good too. As ever for the dissenters, what mattered was the word.

* * *

Thanks to Emma Bradford for telling me about this building.

18th-century round-up

2011-05-16T15:48:00.003+01:00

I've now added a page to my blog, accessed here or via the PAGES menu in the right-hand column, which covers the architecture of the Georgian and Regency periods – roughly from 1700 to 1837.

As with previous round-up pages, you'll find a brief description of the key features and styles of English architecture during this period, with links to examples that I've included on posts in this blog.

Chrisp Street, London

2011-05-12T08:41:00.000+01:00

Festival Britain (3): Built to last

Looking back, people are apt to think of the South Bank Exhibition as ‘The Festival of Britain’. But what went on by the Thames was just the centrepiece of a much larger Festival. There was an Exhibition of Science at South Kensington, an Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow, a Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast, and a travelling exhibition that visited Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, and Birmingham. Smaller communities put on special events, and in towns that already held some form of annual festival, this event in 1951 was subsumed into the national celebrations. And then there was the Live Architecture Exhibition, tucked away in Poplar, East London, in the area that became known as Lansbury.

It was an exhibition, but not as we know it. The idea was to rebuild a section of still war-damaged London and present it as an exemplum of the way Britain could be rebuilt after the bombing. There were temporary pavilions too, containing displays on architecture, planning, and building science. But the idea was that, unlike most of the Festival structures, Lansbury would be permanent. The principal architect was Frederick Gibberd (now better known as the designer of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral) and a group of other architects were commissioned to design areas of housing and a primary school. Gibberd himself did the market place.

The development gave architects the chance to show what they could do when it came to designing housing and to produce something that was more lasting and less flashy than the exhibition buildings on the South Bank. The focus of Gibberd’s market place was the clock tower, shown in the picture. Gibberd proposed making this into an observation tower containing a pair of staircases, one to go up and one to come down, and the concrete framework of the landings and staircases was exposed on the outside, to make a pattern of pale diamonds up the sides of the tower. The spaces within the diamonds were left clear, so that those ascending and descending could look out.

Gibberd somewhat ruefully described what happened to his building: ‘It was a practical folly that gave pleasure, but only for a short time. The fear was suicides; the base was surrounded with spiked railings and the viewing platform enclosed in wire mesh.’ At least now the tower is home to some dramatic lighting, ensuring that it remains a visual focus for the area, night and day.

Photograph by Louise Joly
Used under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 Unported license

South Bank, London

2011-05-09T18:44:00.003+01:00

Festival of Britain (2): Festival Games

I’m particularly pleased that Abram Games’s Festival of Britain symbol survives on the Oxford Street building in the previous post, as it’s good to be reminded of the flair of Games’s design – especially as the symbol has been simplified – and in my opinion sorely mangled – in the current reworking for the Festival anniversary celebrations. For those who don’t know the symbol, or don’t recall its details, here it is reproduced on the original guide to the South Bank Exhibition, and, in another 1951 iteration, on the Festival Souvenir Weather Forecast, provided so that people knew what to wear as they strolled, or dashed, from the Dome of Discovery to the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion.

The symbol is very much of its time, of course. It’s patriotic, its stylized Britannia presiding over the points of the compass rendered in red, white, and blue. It’s celebratory and bunting-bedecked. It could be stuck into a Festival map like a pin; or be placed like a finial at the top of a stylized maypole to advertise the Festival pleasure gardens; or float in space like a presiding spirit. Its combination of flatness and solidity, in tandem with that very 1950s Festival lettering, helped it exemplify the kind of modern design the Festival embraced – up to date and whacky, but with more than a toe planted in tradition. And such a combination of modern and traditional is worth celebrating, it seems to me.

For those who are interested in such things, I got my copy of the weather forecast when I bought the exhibition guide secondhand (I’m not quite old enough to have gone to the original Festival). The forecast is for 28th May 1951, when the outlook for the London area was “Mainly cloudy, Chance of some showers later. Rather cool.” Quite so.

* * *

There's more about Abram Games here.

Oxford Street, London

2011-05-07T22:22:00.004+01:00

Festival of Britain (1): For these reliefs much thanks

Of all the streets in London, or anywhere else for that matter, Oxford Street is probably the place where it’s most difficult to follow the instructions I’m always giving people: “Look around you, and look up.” With a footfall this dense, it takes me all my time to dodge my fellow pedestrians and look where I’m going on the rare occasions when I walk along this street. But, since it’s sixty years since the Festival of Britain kicked off in 1951, it’s time to share with you one of Oxford Street’s highlights: number 219, now part of the Zara store.

This corner block was designed in a neat strip-windowed moderne style by Ronald Ward and Partners (who were also the architects of the Millbank Tower), and was presumably built in 1951. Its simple façade, with long windows, pale masonry, and wonderful corner curve, picks up where pre-war Art Deco and moderne architecture left off. But the frontage is just that bit different because it’s enlivened by three relief plaques celebrating the Festival of Britain. At the top is the Festival Hall*, next is Abram Games’s festival symbol†, and at the bottom are the highlights of the Festival’s South Bank Exhibition, the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon.

Lots of people are remembering the Festival at this anniversary moment, such reminiscences ranging from memories of modernistic aspiration (the Skylon) to evocations of sheer whimsy (the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway). So it’s good to be reminded of the Festival architecturally by these reliefs, especially as so little remains on the ground at the main London focus of the Festival – there is the Festival Hall, of course, but little else on the South Bank or at Battersea, although there are other buildings elsewhere in the capital, as I hope to show in another post soon. Meanwhile, all praise to John McAslan and Partners for their refurbishment of this little gem when building Zara’s main store beside and behind it.

*indistinct in my pedestrian-dodging quick-fire iPhone photograph: apologies
†of which more soon

* * *

There are some clearer photographs of the plaques on this building at the fascinating Ornamental Passions blog.

Charlbury, Oxfordshire

2011-05-05T20:34:00.003+01:00

Western light

When taking the train home from London, I’ve often seen the light of the setting sun on the old station of Charlbury before my train pulls out and heads into the Cotswolds along the Adlestrop line. Passing by in the car the other week, I decided to stop and take a photograph, as this simple wooden building is worth a closer look.

Charlbury Station was built in 1853 on what was then the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway. This was a line engineered by Brunel, so shared the broad gauge with Brunel’s Great Western Railway. But on this line money was short, so many of the stations, such as Charlbury, were built of wood. Brunel, though, was not one to produce “railway architecture lite”. He had an Italianate mode – round-headed windows and doorways picked out with a surround in a contrasting colour, a coloured band running around the building like a string course, a broad overhang with undulating brackets – that worked well in wood and gave these humble buildings a touch of class.

So the well-heeled denizens of Charlbury and the villages of West Oxfordshire can feel that Brunel has done them proud. Charlbury has been serving passengers for more than 150 years, and catching my eye for more years than I care to remember as the train moves ever further away from London and Oxford, deeper into the Cotswolds, and out again towards what they used, in the days before computerized announcements, to call “Evesham, Capital of the Vale”.

For steam men

2011-05-02T19:57:00.003+01:00

On 1 January 1948, British Railways came into being: Britain’s railways were nationalized and the four regional railway companies (themselves amalgamations of a yet larger group of companies that had existed before) were drawn under the umbrella of the new national giant. A few months into the year the Architectural Review ran this cover by Osbert Lancaster, celebrating the old railway companies and their varied colour schemes. Inside the magazine an article pointed out that the new national colour scheme was about to be revealed, and put in a plea for a rethink, reviving colours that represented the different regions.

The cover beautifully illustrates some of the old liveries. I’m no railway expert and I expect others will put me right and fill in the gaps, but I think I recognise the polished teak carriages of the GNR, the blue locomotive of the Caledonian Railway, southern Railway green, and Midland Railway red.

Since the magazine was aimed at architects, the cover's background is filled with interesting bits of architecture and engineering – a stone wall (millstone grit?) behind the top GNR train, the Caledonian’s viaduct, the lovely trackside house admired by the pipe-smoking guard of the GNR goods (Gothic windows, bargeboards, ornate roof ridge, tall Tudorish chimneys), the row of suburban houses lining the Southern Railway, a green signal box (on a lower storey built of bricks in Flemish bond), the jagged valence above the Midland platform, and so on. Enamel advertising signs abound, too, for Barley Water, shoe polish, soap, and Nestlé’s milk. It’s heartening to think that in the post-war period of austerity, Britain could still look as colourful and varied as this.

Round-up time

2011-04-27T12:04:00.003+01:00

Some of you will have noticed that a new page link has appeared in the list headed PAGES in the right-hand column. This takes you to a short and selective history of English architecture in the 16th and 17th centuries and the few years on either side – roughly speaking, the Tudor and Stuart periods. As with the previous page on Medieval architecture, links within the page take you to relevant posts from this blog, to illustrate the development of the architecture. There are rather fewer links than in the previous page, which covers the vast sweep from the Saxon period to c 1500, but enough, to give a broad idea of some key developments.

Kings Stanley, Gloucestershire

2011-04-24T11:11:00.004+01:00

Industrial classical

We get into the habit of pigeon-holing the areas and counties of England. It’s too easy to think of Cornwall as all picturesque fishing villages (forgetting the widespread poverty) or to imagine Staffordshire as consisting only of decayed former industrial towns (ignoring the rural beauty). The popular view of the Cotswolds, of course, is of a rural idyll full of the country houses and cottages of the stars. Stone villages do a great deal of “nestling” and green valleys their fair share of “girdling” on a thousand chocolate boxes and souvenir calendars.

It’s easy to forget, therefore, that most of these picturesque villages once had a mill, and that a thriving cloth industry made the region what it was in the Middle Ages. And in later centuries there was industry on a larger scale too, as shown by the wealth of larger textile and other mills scattered around, especially in the Stroud valleys, but also close to such towns as Chipping Norton, Winchcombe, and Painswick.

This cloth mill at King’s Stanley is a case in point. Stanley Mill’s brick-walled grandeur marks it out as different from the usual stone of the Cotswolds and its large scale sets it apart too. Built in 1812–14, it was designed to house spinning mules, looms, and other textile-manufacturing equipment, all powered by five water wheels fed from a 5-acre mill pond across the road. The identity of the mill’s architect is unknown, but he gave the building a certain grandeur that fits with its large size, from the rich red brickwork to that row of round-headed windows on the top floor.

It’s the interior, though, that makes it really special. This is a metal framework building, in which most of the weight of the structure is taken by a system of iron columns and trusses made by Benjamin Gibbons of Dudley. These trusses in turn hold up the shallow brick vaults that make up the floors and ceilings – the whole creating a fireproof structure of the kind that was more and more current in factory construction since 1779, when Abraham Darby showed the potential of cast iron by building the first iron bridge at Coalbrookedale

The columns are designed in an elegant form, something between classical Doric and Tuscan. The trusses form a delicate openwork pattern of pointed arches, semicircles, and circles. This layout makes for a spacious interior, with the narrow “arcade” of columns flanked on either side by more generous spaces, which were no doubt once loud with the racket of spinning mules. The “fireproof” construction was put to the test too. In 1884, part of the building caught fire. The roof was destroyed and the upper floors damaged, but much of the structure survived.

It all makes a wonderful and quite unexpected sight just a few miles from the baaing inhabitants of the hill farms that supplied the wool that made it all possible. For farming and industry, the known and ignored aspects of the region, were in the 19th century inseparable.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

2011-04-20T16:09:00.003+01:00

Have you got the scrolls?

Pevsner’s Dorset volume says that the old Greyhound Inn, in the centre of Blandford Forum, takes façade decoration to ‘Bavarian extremes’. Although there’s a hint of Saxon (or even Lutheran) hauteur about that comment, he doesn’t mean that the gloriously named John and William Bastard, architect-builders of Blandford who reconstructed the town after the fire of 1731, had been at the beer when they conceived this building, but that the decoration is less restrained than the norm in this town and more like the ornate baroque pastel and white facades of Central Europe.

English Georgian architecture can come over as rather plain, getting its effect not from decorative curlicues but from order, proportion, and restrained classicism. We think of Georgian building in terms of simple brick walls and rows of sash windows, relieved by the occasional pilaster, stretch of rustication, or fancy fanlight, and given form, in the best examples, by craftsmanship of the highest quality – meticulous brickwork, fine carpentry, and so on.

The facade of the Greyhound seems indeed to come from a different world. The decoration around the triangular pediment is from the top drawer, an encrustation of classical details. The Corinthian capitals below it, too, are exceptionally ornate and full of delicate fronds and curves. And then there’s that central window: the big plain keystone at the top and the protruding ‘ears’ at the upper corners are the kind of things seen on many a Georgian window. But the generous scrolls up the sides, the lavish moulding around the sides and top, and the fancy-shaped apron below the sill set this window apart. Even better is the small face in the middle of the apron. Is it a drunken satyr, bearing grapes and welcoming us to the inn? That’s the answer, then: it was wine that the builders were drinking that day.

Broughton, Oxfordshire

2011-04-17T07:55:00.004+01:00

Across the fields and through the trees

To walk across green fields up to the beautiful Elizabethan front of Broughton Castle on a sunny morning is a real pleasure. Even if the sun is lighting up the other side of the house, the building still looks well, ringed by its moat and surrounded beyond by pastures full of baaing sheep and lambs. The place seems the essence of continuity of landscape, settlement, and building. And so it proves. The core of the house dates from the 14th century, but there was a major remodelling in the 16th century, since when not a great deal has changed – even the ownership: Broughton came into the Fiennes family in 1451, and it remains with them today.

The north front, shown in the picture above, is from the 16th-century, and it’s typically Elizabethan. The large mullioned windows, tall ornate chimney stacks, prominent gables, big bays, and central oriel are all typical of Elizabethan architecture, as is the general overall near-symmetry of the layout. If this had been a completely new build, there would most likely have been perfect symmetry and a central door. But because the original medieval room layout was preserved, with a great hall with an entrance passage at one end, things don’t match up perfectly, and the door is set to one side, cunningly concealed in the side of one of the window bays.

At the left-hand end, a battlemented wing protrudes. This is part of the earlier fabric, as the Gothic window suggests. There are more Gothic details on the east front, visible through trees from the main road and seen in my second photograph. In spite of the battlements, though, this was never a true castle. It was a fortified manor house protected by a gatehouse, moat, and minimal military features, and a very fine one too.

A Czech interlude

2011-04-15T10:43:00.003+01:00

i m Hannah Kodicek 1947-2011

A brief detour from my usual territory, as I remember a dear friend who died last week.

* * *

Walking around the back of Prague castle, we make for a small baroque church. Hannah pushes at the door: ‘It’s not always open.’ The oak yields and the group of us make our way in for another dose of the outsize baroque statuary that Prague churches specialize in. But the church is filled with sound. High in a balcony, so far up that we can’t see the music stands and work out what’s being played, a tiny group is rehearsing what sounds like an 18th–century cantata. Just a couple of string players, the organist, a flautist, and a soprano. The singer and flute duet, producing a series of cascading runs, Italian syllables echoing across the church and tumbling down towards us, aping the apparent movement of group of gilded putti that seem to be falling headlong from the ceiling.

There is no way we can interrupt these musicians, totally absorbed in what they are doing, to ask them what it is they are playing. So we keep as quiet and still as we can, and listen as they play on, their notes as light and bright as the sun shining on the gilded statues and candelabra. It’s a wrench, finally, to leave, but we have had, at least, an experience of that perfect marriage of music and setting, of sight and sound, that is typical of this place and typical of the woman who has brought us here.

She liked this coming together of the arts of music and architecture, this Gesamtkunstwerk, as too she loved opera, and the joys of a well restored, well decorated house, and the pleasures of being immersed in nature (in southern Bohemia especially) or being surrounded by beautiful buildings (in her beloved Cesky Krumlov, the southern Bohemian town that she made her home, above all). And when it came to a joining together of the arts, she knew what she was talking about. A pianist trained in Prague and London, a painter, a successful actress, a writer, a restorer of houses, there seemed to be little she could not do. But hers was not the planetary ego of the star. It was typical of her that she should work as a story editor, toiling in the background to help bring focus and credibility and pace to film scripts written by others, including that of the oscar-winning The Counterfeiters.

The generosity with which she threw herself into the task of working on a script, only complete focus and commitment being acceptable to her, was mirrored in the generosity with which she gave time to her friends. She introduced us to so many aspects of her beautiful, baffling, sometimes exasperating central European country. We were and are enriched by her insights into everything from alchemical symbols on buildings in Krumlov to Czech social customs, from the structure of Czech words to the behaviour of a litter of kittens on her sitting room floor.

As I look back I realise that the times I spent with her were often quite short. But at each meeting she would throw revelatory light on whatever it was we talked about, and that light and the warmth associated with it drew one into the field of her insight and creativity. And they remain, these feelings, now that she is gone, and make one believe in the truth of what Michael Bywater wrote at the end of his meditation on loss, Lost Worlds: ‘Loss sheds its light on what remains, and in that light all that we have and all that we have had glows more brightly still.’

* * *

An obituary can be found here.

Sherbourne, Gloucestershire

2011-04-11T09:23:00.003+01:00

Tin among the trees

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’m a fan of corrugated iron, which I like because it can be bent to form interesting shapes and because its undulating surface looks good in the sun. I hope I’ve shown by now, in posts about corrugated iron "tin churches" and other buildings, that this is not a substance that should be consigned to the bottom of the hierarchy of building materials, and that can be at home in both farm and village, by both road and railway.

I didn’t expect, though, to find a corrugated iron building in a quiet valley in the Cotswolds, fitting in amongst the water, grass, and trees. And I have to admit that I’d been along the road that passes this small boathouse many times before I even noticed it. In a way, that’s the point. This unassuming green building is in part designed to blend into its surroundings. But its builders took the trouble to give it a curving, pagoda-style roof, so once you do notice it, there’s that extra touch to admire. As I did one evening recently, as, interrupted by only the occasional quack from the water, the sun slid silently down behind the trees.

Lamport, Northamptonshire

2011-04-08T14:01:00.002+01:00

In the shadow of the great house (2)

The predominant building type in the English countryside is the cottage. As we travel around, we’re used to seeing them, clustered together in villages, occupying isolated positions at junctions or even, like the cottage my maternal grandfather lived in, set in fields full of ruminating cows. Many of the older, more picturesque ones, are vernacular cottages, built by local builders in local materials. But some cottages are designed in a more self-conscious way, with a deliberate “look”. Houses built for the workers on the great country estates, especially in the 19th century, are often like this. They might be built in brick rather than local stone, or have uniform ornamental bargeboards, or a particular kind of glazing, or the coat of arms of the lord of the manor. They stand out from the norm, and locals known instantly that they belong to such and such an estate.

Few estate cottages stand out, though, like these polychrome houses in Lamport , done in three shades of brick. They date from the 1850s, when the Victorian Gothic revival was well underway, architects like William Butterfield were dreaming up elaborate brick churches such as All Saints’ Margaret Street, London, and when the writer John Ruskin was promoting the idea of “structural polychromy” – in other words multicoloured buildings in which the colours were derived from the actual materials, rather than being merely skin-deep. Not that Butterfield or Ruskin had in mind quite the jazzy approach of this pair of estate cottages. Part of me sees them as uncomfortable aliens amongst the toffee-coloured lias stone of Northamptonshire; part of me admires their sheer nerve.

Lamport, Northamptonshire

2011-04-04T09:23:00.004+01:00

In the shadow of the great house (1)

The village of Lamport in Northamptonshire is dominated by Lamport Hall, a vast country house of various dates, designed principally by John Webb in the 17th century and the Smiths of Warwick in the 18th. Looking away from the hall’s long, sash-windowed facades, I began to notice interesting smaller buildings in the main village street, all of them related in some way to the great house.

This one was built as the rectory in c. 1727–30 for Dr Euseby Isham, who was rector and a member of the Isham family who owned the hall. The architect was Francis Smith of Warwick, principal member of a renowned family of architects and builders who came to prominence (rather like the Bastards of Blandford Forum) when their home town burned down at the end of the 17th century. The Smiths built many buildings in the Midlands, especially with striking distance of the home town.

The rectory was actually the first work that the Smiths did at Lamport – Francis Smith started to extend the hall a couple of years after this house was built – and it displays the typical features of its time and of Smith’s work: limestone quoins, sash windows with limestone eared architraves, a pediment above the door, and so on. Its design is very much of its time, its materials – especially the toffee-coloured lias stone – very much of its place: it is a gem of an early-18th century house.

Victoria, London

2011-04-01T22:07:00.003+01:00

Capital!

When it comes to architecture, Victoria is not the most illustrious of the great London railway termini. It lacks the great iron and glass conservatory-like sweep of Paddington, the very resolved design of King’s Cross, or the restored glamour of St Pancras. It’s also structurally slightly confusing, partly because of its history of serving two railways – the South Eastern and Chatham and the London, Brighton and South Coast. It’s still a station of two halves, with the old South Eastern and Chatham platforms on the left as you stand on the concourse looking towards the tracks, the London, Brighton and South Coast platforms on the right.

There are still some little noticed but still notable details at Victoria, though. My picture shows one from the London, Brighton and South Coast side of the station, a cast-iron Ionic capital from 1898, when the LB & SC rebuilt their side of the station in red-brick Renaissance revival style. The roof is held up by impossibly tall Ionic columns, each terminating in a capital like this one beneath the arches that support the metal and glass roof.

This is a Victorian interpretation of a Greek capital: the curvaceous spiral volutes and egg-and-dart moulding are variations on what would be found on a Classical temple or Renaissance palace, the swags below them are a more fanciful addition, though probably copied from some Renaissance source. The capital and its cousins are hardly visible from down on the station concourse, but as I dashed up the escalator towards Victoria Place on my way to the Passport Office this morning, I found myself quite close to the roof and face to face with this capital. Trying to ignore the mystified glances of passing commuters, I aimed my mobile phone to record a bit more unregarded architecture for your delectation.

Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire

2011-03-30T11:05:00.002+01:00

Leaves, Wilts

I wanted to visit the parish church of St Mary at Bishops Cannings because I’d read it was an interesting example of Early English Gothic, the style of architecture that became fashionable at the end of the 12th century and remained current for much of the 13th century. And, with its array of lancet windows and stone vaulted chancel, the church certainly is a wonderful example of the style. But, as is often the way, something different caught my eye. This bit of carving, worn but still enjoyable, is on the entrance to the porch. Its leaves are typical not of the 13th but of the 14th century – the kind of architecture the Victorians called Decorated, and that was characterized by, amongst other things, lovely naturalistic carvings of foliage. Below the leaves, there are also some ballflowers, of the type I noticed recently at Ledbury, although the ones in my picture are so eroded it’s difficult to make them out at first.

So the people of Bishops Cannings, having built a substantial and elegant church in the 13th century, carried on improving it and adding to it in the next century, these leaves being among the results. They could afford to do this because the church was at the heart of a large and rich parish held by the bishops of Salisbury. It’s even possible that some of the masons who had built Salisbury Cathedral also worked here – the main body of the cathedral was built between 1220 and 1258, with the famous tower and spire completed later, around 1330. Whoever was responsible for them, these graceful carvings form a delightful addition to the building.

Medieval round-up

2011-03-23T13:29:00.003Z

I've now added to the 'round-up' page I began a couple of weeks ago, taking my very short history of English architecture up to the year 1500, so that it now covers the Saxon and Norman periods, plus the various phases of medieval Gothic architecture. Links in the text of this page lead to posts in the English Buildings blog that cover typical buildings and features of the various style.

You can access the page from here or from the link in the 'PAGES' section in the right-hand column.

Alcester, Warwickshire

2011-03-20T22:08:00.003Z

Colour again

Wandering around Warwickshire today, I ended up in Alcester, admiring Church Street, and it occurred to me that the combination of pale colourwashes here wasn’t too far away from the effect John Piper admired in Launceston, as recalled in my previous post. There are big differences of course. This is a row of houses, not a square of shops. And the Cornish town’s granite, brick, and colourwash, is replaced in Alcester by timber framing, brick and colourwash. But I like the effect of these pastel shades on this range of mostly Georgian and early-19th century facades.

In the foreground on the right is a house dating to the beginning of the 19th century with banded stucco on the ground floor and windows topped with curvy consoles and cornices on the middle two floors. Next come two stunning houses. First an off-white Greek revival frontage of about 1830 decorated with a quartet of tall Ionic pilasters and a trio of patterned panels in the style of the great architect Sir John Soane. The chaste triglyph frieze over the door is another Grecian allusion. Next to this house is the grey one with a pair of canted bay windows, plus a round-headed window with Gothic glazing above the door. It’s mid-18th century, but altered a century later. Beyond the rather plain red-brick house is a pale green one. Together with the one beyond it was originally part of an inn, the Angel – the shallow carriage arch is the giveaway. It’s a building of various dates, the frontage perhaps early-18th century but again altered in the 19th. Beyond the inn, just visible at the far left of my picture is a 16th or 17th-century timber-framed house, one of many in Alcester.

And timber-framing, the ‘black-and-white’ effect, was what I’d expected to find in Alcester. The place is indeed full of it, as are many towns and villages in the West Midlands. But as often happens, a different aspect of the town caught my eye. As usual, exploring English buildings is a source of unexpected pleasure and surprise.

Launceston, Cornwall

2011-03-18T13:29:00.004Z

Colour in buildings

Working on the book of the series Turn Back Time: The High Street last year focused my mind all too clearly on the plight of the British High Street today. Not simply the fallout from the global economic crisis but also the more chronic erosion of distinctiveness and character in the wake of the rise and rise of multiple retailers, with their standardized, and often tacky, approach to shop-front design. I was reminded of this once more by something that happened the other day, when a friend generously gave me a heap of copies of the Architectural Review from the 1940s.

These journals make fascinating reading, and among the first things in them to catch my eye was a series of pieces by John Piper dealing with subject of colour in buildings. These articles are illustrated with a number of drawings by Piper, and the words and pictures alike raise some interesting issues, as relevant today as they were in 1948. Piper’s main point is that the colour of buildings, although generally ignored, makes a huge contribution to the character and distinctiveness of our surroundings, especially town centres. We would do well, says Piper, to look at and look after local architectural colour. Already, in the 1940s, it was being threatened by the standardized colours and designs of chain shop fronts.

Launceston is one of Piper’s examples. It is a town he, says, ‘part granite, part brick, part colour wash’. Granite is represented by the churches (you can see a slender spire and a tower poking up above the shop fronts in Piper’s drawing), the castle (a Norman motte and bailey design rebuilt in stone in the 13th century), and the war memorial. I think the Gothic building to the right of the war memorial (it’s now a bank and maybe was when Piper drew it too) is also granite. There are several brick shops, picked out by Piper in pink, including the turreted building on the left (a Co-op in the drawing, now a Boots), and the tall building four doors along with its two imposing round-headed windows on the upper floor (another bank). Most of the other shops have upper floors colour washed in cream, with the exception of the café next to the Co-op, which has a white art deco frontage, the most outwardly modern thing there in Piper’s time.

A recent photograph (below) shows that the brick fronts, stone bank, and art deco café sign remain. Most of the cream colour-washed walls have been redone in white or, in one case, refaced with modern brick. The older structures – churches, castle, war memorial – survive. At street level, the shop windows and signs are mostly recent. So Launceston has lost some of its mid-century character – the colour wash, the shop fronts – but is still recognisably itself. It could be still more itself if Piper’s advice about standardized shop fronts had been heeded and if some of the expanses of white were broken up by the cream wash of the 19040s. It’s remarkable that familiar complaints about clone towns and standardized high streets should have been made more than sixty years ago. If only we had listened more carefully then.

Photograph John Baker
Used under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike License 2.0

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

2011-03-14T09:57:00.004Z

Beguiling tiling

I’ve posted before about the wonderful shop fronts built by the W H Smith chain in the 1920s and 1930s, most of which have now vanished. My recent post about a tiled shop front in London reminded me that I meant to return to this subject, to look at a favourite example of W H Smith tiling, still in situ in Malvern.

Smith’s shop front in the hillside town centre of Great Malvern is recessed slightly from the building line, leaving two narrow strips, like exterior window reveals, at right-angles to the street. The two wonderful tiled panels in my photographs are set at the top of these strips, and so are rather easy to ignore. How typical of the painstaking design of the time that such trouble should be taken with these easily overlooked spaces.

And what amazing images their ceramic artist produced. The car rattling along in the ‘Road maps’ panel conjures up all the optimism of the open road in the 1920s. There’s little hint of where the scene might be set (it could just as well be France as Worcestershire), but the sun is out and the road, we feel, is empty ahead. The driver has read his road map and he’s opened the throttle.

On the other side of the shop front. the bridge, gatehouse, and castle keep that advertise ‘Post cards’ are rendered in an extraordinary palette of purples, browns, and blues. The great tower seems hugely out of scale and oddly positioned in relation to the bridge. But who cares? This expressionist architecture lit by the stars (and the moon, which is presumably somewhere over the artist’s right shoulder) is simply stunning, the buildings reminiscent of the fantasy townscapes of F L Griggs, but with colour poured in, for good measure.

How fortunate that these two images have survived, while the rest of the frontage has been adapted and painted over. Their light is from another age, but still it shines.

Pulling it together

2011-03-12T10:19:00.001Z

The joy of blogging is its randomness and variety, and I hope that this blog is no exception. But since the number of posts I’ve done is now up in the hundreds, embracing structures from post boxes to cathedrals and buildings from the Dark Ages to World War II, I thought it might be interesting to organize some of them in a different way. So I have hatched a plan: to write a series of short introductory pages to different periods of English architecture, illustrated with links to relevant posts from this blog.

The first of these currently covers buildings of the Saxon and Norman periods – from the centuries leading up to the year 1200 – and you can access it from here and from a link in the PAGES section over in the right-hand column. As you read it, you will ifnd links to buildings from this era included in past posts.

In a week or two I’ll add to this page, extending the text and links to cover the rest of the medieval period up to around 1500. If this works, I’ll later add further pages on the Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian periods, and so on. I hope what emerges is interesting, and a worthwhile way of linking together some of the posts. Meanwhile, the day-to-day randomness continues.

Vauxhall Bridge Road, London

2011-03-09T19:54:00.005Z

Traditional decoration

The shop front of the former premises of Frederick E. Gillett in Vauxhall Bridge Road is clad in deep green tiles and looks as if it dates from between the two World Wars. Beneath the shop window are these two tiled panels, one of a timber-framed bungalow that looks a world away from inner London and the other of some workmen – a carpenter, a decorator ascending a ladder with a paint kettle, and a man carrying what looks like a wallpaper sample book.

These tiles, with their simple messages of a rural idyll and a job carefully done are evocative. I especially like the interior with its telling touches – the downward glance of the standing man as he appraises the carpenter’s saw cut; the latter’s dangling braces; the handmade wooden ladder. It takes you back to another era as you lean down to shin level to admire the panels while the red buses swish past between Vauxhall and Victoria.

So what did Frederick E. Gillett sell in his shop? My guess was ironmongery and the tools of the decorating trade: saws and ladders, brushes and paint kettles, the kinds of things used by the men in the picture – plus, no doubt, a multiplicity of others kept in drawers and sacks and boxes. But in answer to my query a reader (see comments section) has found a Frederick E. Gillett, 'oil and colourman' , with eight shops mainly in southeast London in 1914. Makers and sellers of paint, then, who by later in the 20th century had expanded north of the river. With beautiful decorative consequences for their shop front on Vauxhall Bridge Road.

* * *

With thanks to Shui-Long for information about Gillett's premises south of the river.

Victoria Tower Gardens, London

2011-03-05T18:01:00.004Z

A little roguery

Having admired the façade of St John’s Smith Square the other day, I glanced away from Smith Square towards the river and this wonderful little structure caught my eye. It’s the Buxton Memorial Fountain, and I’ve often noticed the way it adorns the Victoria Tower Gardens near the Houses of Parliament. But I’d not seen it from this angle before, its ornate Gothic arches and pointed roof aligned with the end of the street.

This little building was commissioned in 1865 by an MP, Charles Buxton, to commemorate the work of his father, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the group of colleagues who had campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade. It originally stood in Parliament Square but was taken down in 1949 and moved to its current happy location in 1957.

The fountain was the work of Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812–73), a Gothic architect who designed a multitude of churches, vicarages, and allied buildings and who was designated by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel as one of the ‘Rogue architects’ of the Victorian era. What Goodhart-Rendel meant was that these architects were original to the point of eccentricity, designing buildings that were Gothic, but not as we know it. They would combine styles from different sources, introduce jazzy patterns, and use vibrant, sometimes brash colours.

The Buxton Memorial Fountain begins like a conventional, if highly ornate, structure of Gothic arches. But the roof is something else – a brightly coloured extravaganza of enamelled iron tiles that sings in the sun and enlivens a dull day. In this part of central London, with its familiar mixture of brick and stone buildings, this jewel-like roof comes as a surprise, and a welcome dose of colour. Sometimes a little roguery is not such a bad thing.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

2011-03-02T21:34:00.004Z

Architecturally incorrect

It’s a happy coincidence that I visited Sunningwell, in the previous post, within a few days of going to Chipping Campden, where in the large 15th-century parish church I found this memorable monument in the chancel. Although quite large, it’s easy to overlook in a church that contains still bigger, more eye-catching tombs not far away. What links the monument to Sunningwell is that it’s from the Tudor period and is another example of the arrival of a particularly eccentric architectural classicism in England.

It’s the monument of Sir Thomas Smyth, who died in 1593, and what concerns me here is not his effigy, recumbent on its tomb chest, the head resting on the knight’s metal helmet, nor the figures of his two wives and 13 children arranged around the base, charming as they are. What I’m interested in is the canopy.

You can tell straight away that this is a classical structure – there are Corinthian columns with their capitals of curly acanthus leaves, holding up a canopy topped with a triangular pediment. But look a bit more closely and the design breaks all the rules. The pediment does not run the whole width of the frontage and is far too high – and there’s half of another pediment on the short side. The carving in the triangle depicts not classical scenes but a coat of arms. Around the frieze beneath run designs that are neither Greek nor Roman but Elizabethan patterns including, near the corners, motifs that look a bit like interlaced strips of leather and are known as strapwork – there are also large versions of these on the underside of the canopy. And another thing – at the front there are three columns, one at each corner and one in the centre. True classical design does not use odd numbers of columns – an even number is used, so that there’s a gap, not a column in the middle.

All of which is enough to tell you that this monument has not been built according to the rules laid down by the architects of ancient Greece or Rome, or of their Italian Renaissance imitators. And this is not surprising, because English builders of this period got their knowledge of classical architecture not from Greece or Rome, where virtually none of them had been, but from France and the Netherlands, where the classical style had already been adopted and developed with the addition of different kinds of ornament. When the English took it over, they put their special spin on it too. The result: architectural hybrids like this tomb canopy.

But what a glorious hybrid! The monument is carved with vigour. It makes you look, but it doesn't dominate the entire church. The blend of Roman details and English ornament is happy. The whole thing has a liveliness that later English Classicism sometimes lacks. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare, its contemporary, who had ‘small Latin and less Greek’, but who put what he had to good use, in order to make something out of it that was special and rich and, occasionally, strange.