Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Beauty of holiness

My interest provoked by hints in Pevsner that the church at Wilmcote might be eccentric or beautiful or possibly both, I crossed the road opposite Mary Arden’s Farm, walked back to the main street, and walked along the usefully named Church Road. There I found a small Gothic Revival church of c. 1840 designed by Harvey Eginton. The kind of Gothic chosen by the architect is Early English, the first phase of Gothic on these islands, sometimes chosen by early Victorians as representing the ‘purest’ form of the style with its simple lancet windows and plain but elegant deeply moulded arches.

On entering, though, it was clear that something unusual was up. This church is very highly decorated inside with wall paintings, lavishly supplied with statues of saints and of the Crucifixion, and altogether rather ornate – far from plain and simple, in fact. This was indeed one of the first churches to be built and decorated under the influence of the Tractarians, that group of clergymen and scholars (many originally based in Oxford and Cambridge), who believed that a church should be highly embellished, that the clergy should wear colourful robes, and that such ritual accompaniments as incense should be used. Worship in ‘the beauty of holiness’* was the aim, in sharp contrast to the plain style of the previous few generations. The person behind this aspect of St Andrew’s, Wilmcote was the Rev. Edward Bowes Knottesford Fortescue, a keen Tractarian who knew many of the movement’s leaders. However, it’s said that a later clergyman, the Rev. F W Doxat, may have been responsible for some parts of the decorative scheme.

The chancel glows in green and gold, its walls painted with stylised flowers and leaves. The decoration, if overwhelming, also does an excellent job of defining the chancel as the most sacred space. The nave is much darker, but when one’s eye adjusts, its possible to make out very different wall decoration: a series of paintings, mainly monochrome compositions showing saints, scenes from the life of Christ, and religious texts. Close examination reveals that these are actually done on panels that have been attached to the walls – in fact, they are on sheets of zinc, a material I don’t recall seeing used for church murals before. I’d been led to this church by the description in Pevsner’s Warwickshire volume in the Buildings of England series, and I’m indebted to the book for the information it contains. But it did not prepare me for the amazement I experienced inside. Such surprises are what keep me looking – and recording here what I find.

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* This phrase is a rewording of the verse in Acts 2:4, describing the scene at Pentecost. The King James Bible gives, ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost…’. For an excellent account of this change in Victorian worship and architecture, see William Whyte, Unlocking the Church, which I reviewed here.

Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Whose farm is it anyway?

Many decades ago, when I was in my early teens and starting to study Shakespeare seriously, my father took me on a visit to all the Shakespeare-related buildings in and near Stratford. As well as the poet’s birthplace, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Hall’s Croft (the house of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her husband John Hall), we visited the farmhouse at Wilmcote then known as Mary Arden’s House. Mary Arden was Shakespeare’s mother and her parents were farmers, and the house sits next to a cluster of farm buildings.

The building in my photograph is the house we visited. What a glorious building it is – a mixture of a close-studded timber frame and a diagonally strutted section at the right-hand end, its wooden structure charmingly warped in places, in spite of the fact that it sits on a substantial stone plinth. As far as I can recall, the house was filled with period furniture and the ceilings, especially upstairs, were very low. Back then, the outbuildings housed a large collection of old (pre-20th century) farm machinery ranging from carts to seed drills. This collection, nothing to do with Shakespeare, engaged us for some time. I don’t think the exhibits could have been labelled, because I remember that we had a good time working out what some of them were.

If the farm machinery had little to do with Shakespeare, neither, it turns out, did the house. Later research has revealed that the young Mary Arden and her parents actually lived in the house next door, a less impressive looking building, although it incorporates a timber frame that has been dendrochronologically dated to the early-16th century. These days the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns both properties, calls the whole site, both the houses and the farm buildings behind them, Mary Arden’s Farm.* Currently, it’s not open to the public, but is used as a site that primary school children can visit and learn about Shakespeare and the life of country people during his period. So now children still younger than I was all those years ago get to enjoy this lovely house and learn from it and, much as I’d have liked it to be open to adults too, that has to be a good thing.

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* Separately, the house where Mary actually lived is known as Glebe Farm, while the house in my photograph is referred to as Palmer’s Farm.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Health resort

To Malvern (again) for coffee, book browsing, exercise, and architectural appreciation. Malvern is one of my favourite nearby places, and not just for its magnificent hilly scenery. It keeps on giving me food for thought architecturally, with everything from medieval tiles to a rare Bini dome. It is, as they say in the trade, ‘well bookshopped’, boasting shops selling new books, a good vendor of second hand books, and a couple of charity bookshops. And its hilly terrain means getting around gives me good exercise.

It was ever thus, or has at least been thus for a long time. Malvern is, famously, a spa town. The health-giving qualities of the water at Malvern Wells were discovered in the 16th century, but the place really began to grow in the period around 1810, in part at least as a result of the great success of the spa at Cheltenham. Various wells were exploited, hotels were built – and more. Those who came to take the waters needed other things to do to. Cheltenham offered circulating libraries, a harp and pianoforte warehouse, assembly rooms, and so on. So in Malvern, next to the pump room and baths, the grand Royal Library was built.

The library is on a corner site, and turns the corner with some style. This corner is actually a junction at which two side roads meet the main Worcester Road towards the summit of the town centre’s hill. The setting gives the end of the library great prominence, and the architect, John Deykes, exploited this to the full with a full height semi-circular bow in the classical style of 1818, when he drew up his plans. The main ground floor, actually raised slightly above the ground because the land falls away so sharply, is particularly splendid. Tall, 9-over-9 sash windows are separated by Ionic columns that support a balcony above with a balustrade of pump uprights. Above this, the upper-floor windows are set back, but echo the semi-circular shape. It’s a striking composition, and must have impressed visitors as they slogged their way up the hill.

The library building was part of the same structure as the assembly rooms, so inside it was not all about the books. As well as a reading room and an extensive lending library there was also a music library, a billiards room, and a room for card playing. The building also contained a bazaar where, according to an information board down the street, ‘anything from a Bible to a firescreen could be purchased’. All this, together with increasing numbers of shops, gave the spa visitors plenty to do, and served the town well through the Regency and Victorian heyday of the spa. When I visit today, walking, browsing, and imbibing, not to mention admiring the architecture, I feel I’m following in those 19th-century footsteps.

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

 

Woodworkers

If you read one of those books about traditional English crafts by authors such as Dorothy Hartley or James Fox, you’ll probably find a section about the chair-makers of the Chilterns.* Some of these craftsmen were based in the local woodlands, where they made entire chairs. Others specialised in producing turned chair legs using a hand-operated pole lathe. They worked next to the trees that provided their raw material, and the chair legs they made would be sold to a wooden-chair manufacturer. Buckinghamshire was a centre of furniture-making and towns such as High Wycombe were famous for their wooden chairs, particularly Windsor chairs. Chair-makers like James Elliott and Son added hand-turned chair legs to wooden seats and other components to produce comfortable, elegant chairs that were popular and long-lasting. James Elliott and Son built their factory in High Wycombe in 1887 and ran their business there until 1974, making Windsor chairs there for the whole period except for the two World Wars, when they branched out into aeroplane wings (World War I) and furniture for the Royal Navy (World War II).

When their factory came to the end of its working life, the building was taken apart and rebuilt at the Chiltern Open Air Museum. Brick on the ground floor, wooden boards over a timber frame above, the building is roofed in slate. Its two floors are connected by exterior staircases that free up the space inside and provide an easy way of manoeuvring unwieldy chairs and raw materials in and out of the building. There are large windows, so the factory is very light inside, creating good conditions for the meticulous work of assembling chairs that workers and owners could be proud of. Today, a collection of chairs, other wooden products, and wood-workers’ tools are displayed inside.

Looking very neat in its shiny green paintwork, the furniture factory is an asset to the museum, preserving a building linked to an important industry in the area. It’s also one of a number of wooden buildings in the museum – Buckinghamshire is not rich in good building stone, so pavilions, workshops, houses, barns and all kinds of other farm buildings were often made by constructing a timber frame and cladding it with boards. The museum has several of these, and the furniture factory is one of the most striking.

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* See, for example, Dorothy Hartley, Made in England (first published in 1939; reprinted by Little Toller Books, 2018) and James Fox, Craftland (The Bodley Head, 2025). James Fox’s book is an excellent place to start, is beautifully written, and is one of the best books I read last year.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Perennial

There are some buildings I never tire of looking at, and some of these I have blogged about more than once. One of my favourites is the abbey church of St Mary, Tewkesbury, a large building that just keeps on giving, with its Norman and Gothic architecture, its wealth of carvings and its impressive monuments. There’s even some outstanding 20th-century stained glass, to bring the story of the church almost up to date. One of the best features is the large central tower, which has been called the best Norman tower in Britain.

The tower probably dates to the mid-12th century, at the end of the long campaign of building that brought the huge abbey church into existence. The abbey’s founder, Robert FitzHamon (a relative of William the Conqueror) initiated the building process in the late 11th or very early 12th century, but died in 1107. The church was consecrated in the early 1120s, but the structure was unlikely to have been complete by this date.* The architecture of this period is chunky, with thick walls, round-headed windows and doors, and enormous cylindrical columns. But there was also much carved decoration, as one can see on the outside walls of the tower.

The lower part of the tower is very plain, but very little of this would have been visible when the original, steeply pitched roofs were in place – the position of these is clear from the remains of old masonry that trace the old inverted-V-shaped lines of the roofs. Above this level, things get very ornate indeed. There are three horizontal bands of ornament. The upper band has tall arches (some with louvred bell openings, some blind), with sides and tops carved in a chevron or zig-zag pattern. Beneath these is a narrower band completed covered in arches that intersect, producing a geometric pattern of light and shade. Further down again is another band, this time with tall, carved arches, displaying a different pattern of bell openings from the one above. All of this is the work of 12th-century masons, apart from the battlements and corner pinnacles, which are later.

There was once a spire, made of wood covered with lead, on top of this tower, but this fell down in 1559. Even without the spire, the tower is a magnificent piece of architecture, drawing the eye as one approaches from the west (the approximate viewpoint of my photograph), making a striking landmark from across the fields to the north, or providing a pleasant distraction as one glimpses the top above the shops and houses that cluster nearby. It could so easily not be here today. The abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 16th century, but the locals bought the church from the king in 1542, and it has served as the town’s parish church ever since.† It still gives much pleasure, not just to worshippers, but also to those who attend concerts there, and to anyone who, as I do, savours its magnificent medieval architecture. 

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* Church-builders usually started at the east end (where the altar is placed) and worked their way westwards. The chancel, crossing, transepts, and maybe a small part of the nave were likely to have been completed by this date.

† The townspeople paid £453 for the church.

Down Ampney, Gloucestershire

Crockets

The architectural feature known as the crocket is something that is often viewed from afar. If you don’t know what a crocket is and can’t reach for a convenient copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, I’ll do that for you. ‘A decorative hook-like spur of stone carved in various leaf-shapes and projecting at regular intervals from the angles of spires, pinnacles, gables, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture.’* That’s how Penguin’s exemplary reference book defines a crocket, although in the vernacular, as it were, I might say, ’The knobbly bits that stick out of the edges of church spires’, and you’d get the idea.

The crockets on church spires are by definition far from the ground and it’s difficult to see their details. When you get your eye in, however, it’s quite often possible to spot crockets near to ground level, as is the case on the pinnacle in my photograph, which adorns a tomb recess in the church at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. Close-up, you can see that a well carved crocket is far from being a simple ‘knobbly bit’: it’s a flowing, organic-looking decoration that must have demanded considerable skill on the part of the carver. Great precision and a combination of delicacy and strength were required to carve the 20-odd crockets on this pinnacle and the matching finial on the top. To make the whole thing yet more intricate, the lower part of the pinnacle takes the form of a narrow, straight-sided arch, beautifully formed and set off with pairs of human heads that peer at us from the late-14th or 15th century.†  

There was a lot of this sort of thing about from the mid-14th century onwards, as English architecture entered the phase known to historians as Decorated Gothic. Much of it has been lost to the effects of iconoclasm and time – in particular, anything with an image of a human was likely to face the wrath of 17th-century Puritans and be defaced or simply lopped off. This makes the small heads on this example particularly precious survivals. Since much medieval stone carving was also painted in bright colours, there may have been another loss. However, light from the nearby stained-glass window has supplied a hint of colour, bringing a glow to a small marvel of the carver’s art.

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* John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penguin Books (5th edition, 1999)

† If you click on the image, a larger version should appear, making some of the details clearer.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

 

Top of the year

It’s my habit at this time of year to look back through my posts of the last twelve months and see which have been popular with my readers – in the sense of gathering the most page views. Top of the pile for 2025 was a post I did back in September about some medieval tiles in the priory church at Great Malvern. I’m aware that various accidents and coincidences can lead to a post’s having many views – someone with lots of followers might have linked to it, for example, or it might have been used as an illustration in a school or university history course. Whatever the reason on this occasion, the tiles are so beautiful in themselves that I thought they were worth posting again, together with what I wrote about them in September:

To Malvern, to browse in the secondhand bookshops, to look around, and to pay a visit to the Priory. It’s a terrific building with a tower resembling the one at Gloucester cathedral, some outstanding stained glass (both medieval and recent), and a superb collection of medieval tiles. The examples in my photograph began life as floor tiles in the 15th century, but during restoration work in the 19th century they were taken off the floor and mounted on the wall that separates the sanctuary from the ambulatory. This has protected them from further wear and makes them very easy to see and admire.

The selection in the photograph shows the delicacy of the designs that the makers (who apparently were based on site and also supplied tiles to other churches, including Gloucester cathedral) could achieve by combining red and buff clay. Many of the patterns contain flower or leaf motifs arranged in quatrefoil frames or in circles subdivided with designs that are similar to medieval window tracery. Yet more like tracery is an abstract design (the second tile in the top row, and another in the third row) that is reminiscent of a rose window. Other tiles bear inscriptions or heraldry. These were in a sense humble objects, designed to be walked on every day, but their sophisticated decoration marks them out as high-status items, of the sort you’d seen mainly in large churches and the houses of the royal family or aristocracy. Monasteries, according to tile expert Hans van Lemmen,* were some of the best customers of the medieval tile-makers.

The influence of these craftsmen lived on for centuries. When Malvern Priory was being restored in the 19th century, the tile manufacturer Maw & Co were commissioned to make copies of some of the church’s ancient tiles, so that part of the building could be paved as it had been 400 years before. Contemporary tile companies, such as Craven Dunhill use the same technique of combining colours to make tiles today.

I wish all my readers a happy new year.

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*See Hans van Lemmen, Medieval Tiles (Shire, 2004)