Kelsale, Suffolk

Small mercy

The most dramatic aspect of the work of late-19th century architect E. S. Prior at Kelsale church (the building in my previous post) is not strictly part of the church at all. It’s the lychgate, the like of which I’ve not seen before. What an extraordinary, dynamic design. Rather than create the usual four-square structure, with a simple pitched roof above a stone or timber structure, Prior conceived something more organic. The wooden supports have a curved profile, so that they appear to lean inwards slightly. They’re massive and the roof they support overhangs deeply and curves round and up into a narrow termination shaped almost like a small spire. At the front of this spirelet is a mandorla-shaped niche, of the kind that sometimes frames the figure of Christ in Majesty. However, there is now no image in the niche, and the eye follows the roof line up to a simple terracotta finial.

This lychgate was built in 1890 and its curvaceous roof seems to point to the Art Nouveau style, just coming into fashion around that time. It also bears some similarity to the roofs of certain Thai Buddhist temples, which may or may not be a coincidence. It shows, at any rate, an architect’s ideas taking flight not in some high-profile job in a city, but in a small village far away from the limelight. A small mercy for which any building buff or church crawler can be thankful.

Season’s greetings to all my readers. May there be more mercies, small and large, in the coming year.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Hanley Swan, Worcestershire

Saints and flowers

Although as someone who writes about historic architecture, I make trips especially to look at buildings, it’s always been a feature of this blog that many of the structures I include have been seen by chance, viewed en passant, while I was on my way to somewhere else entirely. ‘When you’re shopping, look at the shopfronts. If you take the train, spare a few minutes to notice the station,’ as I’ve said more than once. Some of my buildings are ones I’ve often passed, like the church of St Gabriel at Hanley Swan, Worcestershire. I’ve glanced at its Gothic revival exterior many times as I’ve passed – precisely accurate 13th-century tracery, broach spire, chunky grey masonry. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that it was designed by George Gilbert Scott.

Finally the other day I stopped and looked inside. What drew and held my attention was not Scott’s architecture, but what lay at the focus of all this stone: the reredos behind the high altar. This is a very Victorian marble composition with a pair of mosaic portraits of saints. My photograph above shows one of these, the archangel Gabriel, revered as St Gabriel, richly robed in front of an architectural background, carrying the lily that is this most familiar attribute.This reredos, which also features lovely tiles embellished with stylised flowers (showing perhaps the influence of the aesthetic movement), was the work of two of the most prominent Victorian firms of craft workers, Clayton and Bell, to whom the design of the figures is attributed, and Powell & Sons, who actually constructed the reredos and put the whole thing – marble, mosaic, tiles – together.

So, in the early-1870s in a small Worcestershire village, a group of the most prominent artists and craftsmen came together with one of the most celebrated architects of the period to build a church and furnish it with style. They did this thanks in the main to Samuel Martin, a former Liverpool merchant who’d become a local grandee, who provided the funds. No doubt local stonemasons, carpenters, and others were responsible for the building work, too. A happy combination of local and nationally known talent.

Book round-up 3

Andrew Ziminsky, Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles

Published by Profile

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason who works on the repair and conservation of historic buildings, especially churches. He also visits Britain’s churches endlessly, and has met many fellow visitors in the process, noticing how many of them knew relatively little about the architecture, furnishings and fittings of the churches they were visiting. So he wrote this book to explain these things. CHURCH GOING guides the reader around the churchyard, the church exterior and the interior, describing the purpose and architecture of the different parts of the church (porch, nave, side chapels, chancel, vestry, etc), and of the fixtures and fittings (font, seating, altar, etc, etc). He covers everything from wall paintings to ancient graffiti.

But to summarise the book like this is to make it sound like a rather worthy handbook, and it’s much, much better than that. What makes this book so impressive (and often so entertaining) is that it’s written out of direct, practical experience. This is a guide written by a stonemason – Ziminski knows how these buildings work not just because he has visited thousands of churches (he has), not only because he has read about them (he has done that too), but because he has taken bits of them apart and repaired them.

Ziminski’s practical experience tells him that there are structural reasons why the doors of Irish round towers are set high up in the wall. He assures us that there are good structural reasons too for building a round tower when your building material is flint, as in many Norfolk churches. Contemplating the 89 carved Norman corbels on Kilpeck church in Herefordshire, he says that each one would have taken a single carver three days to create. Naturally, Ziminski shows a close familiarity with building materials, especially stone, and describes eloquently the explosive fizzing when water is added to quicklime to make lime mortar, and evokes the pleasing riven surfaces and undulations of stone church floors, whether of limestone, sandstone, granite or slate. Stone, of course, is everywhere in ancient churches, from the floor to the spire. Asked if he knows how to build a spire, Ziminski is pleased to be able to deliver a punch line he’s had ready for years: ‘Up to a point’.

One of the joys of CHURCH GOING is the author’s strong opinions. He dislikes much Victorian architecture and is particularly scornful of Victorian church tiles, with their ‘hard’ surfaces, so different from softer medieval tiles. He is against paying to enter a church. He is very much in favour of leaving in place even the most modest historic deposits. Working in a church roof he finds a pair of 19th-century shoes left by a Victorian roofer. When he shows the find to the vicar, she tosses them into the skip, declaring the idea of leaving behind such ‘offerings’ to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Ziminski continues, ‘It was uncomfortable to learn that she had broken her ankle the following day after tripping on an undone shoelace…only I know how it was that the shoes were returned to their original position.’

Whether writing about church bells, about animals in churches (bats, bees, doves), about the structure of fan vaults, about rood screens, or simply about the effect of the colours of medieval stained glass projected on to a church floor in York, Ziminski is engaging and informing and a pleasure to read. He brings details such as carved roof bosses, ‘green man’ or foliate head carvings, images of heaven and hell in wall paintings, and wooden misericords to life in his descriptions. Anyone who wants to find out more about Britain’s pre-Reformation churches will enjoy this book and learn a great deal. Those of us who think we know a lot about these buildings already will learn yet more.

Book round-up 2

Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Published by Yale University Press

Sir John Soane is widely considered one of the greatest of British architects. His work, his intellectual development, his country house designs, his biography have all been much studied and written about. But there has been no extended, scholarly account of the extraordinary collection that he amassed in his London house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This collection contains over 40,000 objects – paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural fragments, plus thousands of books. Among its many treasures are numerous works by William Hogarth (the series A Rake’s Progress and Humours of an Election), Reynolds, Turner and Canaletto; numerous ancient vases; sculpture by some of Soane’s most famous contemporaries; and countless architectural fragments. The latter especially are arranged with a theatrical flair that takes the breath away. This new book by Bruce Boucher, former Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, is the account we have been waiting for.

The great mysteries are why Soane collected so profusely and obsessively, what drove the arrangement of the objects, and what his collection was actually for. Soane himself saw it as consisting of ‘studies for my own mind’, a phrase that only inspires further questions. Boucher’s book begins with the context: Soane’s sad life – the death of his beloved wife Eliza, his falling out with his sons, the harsh criticism that a lot of his work was subjected to. It describes how he obtained the items and how he was inspired by the time he spent in Italy, by the collections of fellow architects, and by writers from antiquarians to Gothic novelists.

Separate chapters examine his antiquities, his ancient Greek vases, his sculptures, and his paintings. Additional chapters explore key themes. One such is Soane’s enthusiasm for items related to eminent British writers and artists such as Shakespeare and Hogarth – ‘British worthies’ like those celebrated in the famous garden temple at Stowe, a country house where Soane worked. Another theme is his interest in Gothic taste – not so much scholarly Gothic revivalism as the atmospheric Gothic of novels, of faux ‘monk’s parlours’, stained glass windows, and gloomy tombs. Yet another theme is Soane’s love of picturesque ruins, which fed his purchase of everything from paintings of ruins to architectural fragments and models of ruined buildings – he even imagined what his building for the Bank of England would look like as a ruin. One more thread is formed by the patterns of connections between the paintings he owned – their links to some of his friends, and the series of architectural paintings by his friend J. M. Gandy.

None of this was set in stone because, as Boucher makes clear, Soane’s collection was constantly evolving. As the number objects grew and as Soane’s priorities changed, the scope and arrangement of the house-museum changed too. So there is no single reason why the architect bought plaster casts, models of buildings, books, paintings and sculptures. His motivation altered and an account of Soane’s collection has to offer several different reasons why its owner sunk so much of his money into it.

Boucher teases out various reasons why Soane collected and parallel intended purposes of his collection. The motivation was part didactic (the architectural items were aids to teaching); part consolation for the various tragedies in the architect’s life; part expressive of his role as a patron of the arts; part a way of promoting Soane’s fellow members of the Royal Academy. As the collection grew, and because one of his two sons had died and one had become estranged from him, he decided to leave both his house and the objects in it to the nation, so that people could see it and benefit from it. Boucher explains the long process that eventually brought Soane’s wishes to fruition and also sets Soane’s museum in the context of other museums of the time. It was not quite an enlightenment museum, with objects carefully catalogued and arranged by period or type. Neither was it exactly like the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that Renaissance dukes and princes liked to display. But in its diversity, its lavishness, the place it finds for the curious, the aesthetics of its arrangement, its ingenuity, it is more like the latter – hence the title of this fascinating, rich, and superbly illustrated book.

Book round-up 1

 

Christmas is coming and with this in mind I am reviewing three recent books that will appeal to many who are interested in historic buildings. First, a book that debunks a number of historic buildings-related myths, while also taking pleasure in the stories that people tell about castles, churches, pubs, houses, and more...

James Wright, Historic Buildings Mythbusting

Published by The History Press

As I travel around looking at old buildings, I meet many people who tell me about the history of the places where they live, or shop, or worship. I’m always grateful to them and I often learn a lot from those with local knowledge. But every now and then a a story emerges which makes me sceptical. ‘There’s a secret tunnel that links the manor house with the abbey,’ they’ll say. Or, ‘This house was built using old ship’s timbers.’ Or, ‘Of course, this is the oldest pub in England.’ Why do I doubt such tales? Because I have known other places with similar stories where the evidence, once examined, is either non-existent or extremely flimsy. James Wright’s HISTORIC BUILDINGS MYTHBUSTING tackles several of these recurring stores head-on, looks closely at the evidence, and demonstrates why they’re more myth than reality.

Wright tackles ten or so myths and tests them against the available evidence. ‘Secret passages’ often turn out to be drains, ruined cellars, ice houses, wells, and the like. Many of the alleged tunnels are very long and would have to go beneath rivers, very unlikely given the engineering difficulties.

Spiral staircases in castles are the focus of another myth. They turn clockwise, it’s said, making it easier for a defender to swing his sword arm. Yet many turn the opposite way. The theory that the latter were built for left-handed castle owners seems wrong – in some castles there are examples of both types. Spiral staircases, Wright believes, are more important as signs of status: poorer people got to higher floors using wooden ladders. The very idea that spiral staircases were a defensive feature seems to date back only 100 years.

A small cluster of myths concern ancient churches. Rude carvings which upset the Victorians and intrigue us today, could not, as has been suggested, have been made by stonemasons cocking a covert snook at the clergy. The clergy took a close part in church building, collectiing the money and overseeing the work, and would have known what was being carved. A mason would probably not have dared to go against the wishes of priest or bishop and if they did, would have been made to redo the work. Another church mystery is stones in the walls that have horizontal grooves worn into them. These have been said to be the result of archers practising in the churchyard and sharpening their arrows on the church wall. There are many reasons why this cannot be true – most churchyards were too small for archery practice, portable whetstones were very common, and the ‘practice arrowheads’ used did not need sharpening anyway. Wright similarly disposes of stories about windows allowing lepers to see into church or from one part of the church into another, and ideas that blocked north doors in churches are ‘devil’s doors’, designed to keep Satan out.

Houses built of ‘old ship’s timbers’? Interestingly, Wright concedes that in a few cases this might be true. But it’s unlikely that the demands of the Tudor navy and ironworking, both often said to be responsible for a timber shortage in the 16th and 17th centuries, were the cause. Landscape historians seem to agree that the timber shortage came later, in the 18th century.

The suggestion that one public house or another is ‘England’s oldest’ is remarkably widespread. Wright comes up with a dozen pubs that are often claimed to be the oldest, six of which are said to date from before the Norman conquest in 1066. In each case, there simply is not the evidence that either the buildings as they stand are anywhere near as old as that, nor that they have been in continuous use as pubs for that length of time. Wright comes up with an alternative list of 12 with much better claims, the oldest of which go back to the 14th century.

In conclusion, Wright makes a good case for dismissing a selection of historic buildings myths. He argues that many of them have arisen out of patriotism or imperialism (England’s intrepid archers practising before winning such battles as Creçy and Agincourt), bolstered by local pride (our local’s the oldest pub), and upheld in popular films or social media. The result is a thought-provoking, entertaining, and sometimes very funny book that’s based on the scholarly research of a buildings archaeologist with deep knowledge of his subject.

Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Salt’s way

In the middle of the 19th century, Bradford textile manufacturer Titus Salt decided to move his factory away from the city centre to a new site. This move helped Salt, already rich from the production of good quality woollen cloth, to build not just a vast new mill but also an entire village to house his workers. This village was named Saltaire, after Salt and the River Aire, near which the settlement stands. Salt was the exemplary Victorian paternalist, who wanted to accommodate his workers well, in the conviction that this was both the right thing to do and likely to make them healthier and more productive. So Saltaire was provided with facilities that were well above standard for the time – not just a church, but also a school, institute (for adult education), baths, a park and a hospital.

The whole place was designed in an Italianate style by Bradford architects Lockwood and Mawson. The houses were impressive for the time. Salt did not want to provide the less than basic back-to-back houses that were increasingly the norm for workers’ housing.* Back-to-backs usually shared three of their four walls with neighbouring houses, which meant they were poorly ventilated, dark and insanitary. By contrast, Saltaire’s 800-plus terraced houses are pleasantly designed with classical details and have front flower beds and small rear yards, plus alleyways at the back. This gives a sense of space, as well as windows front and rear, meaning proper ventilation and a decent amount of natural light inside.

The day I visited Saltaire happened to be rubbish collection day, so I was instantly aware of the continuing usefulness of the alleys. I saw too how these utilitarian walkways, a little wider than they need to be, also open up the streetscape, making the housing slightly less dense, and offering views of the distant hills. Hill views probably weren’t at the top of Salt’s list of priorities. He must have been more preoccupied with transport links – river, canal and railway all pass close by. However, you’re never far from trees and patches of greenery in Saltaire and the sense of nearby nature is as exceptional as the Italianate architecture. Salt was a true pioneer in creating this kind of enlightened industrial village.† Where he went, the Cadbury (Bournville) and Lever (Port Sunlight) families followed. Today the mill’s transport links bring tourists rather than wool, and Saltaire, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, still repays appreciation.

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* Back-to-backs were especially widespread in Leeds and Bradford, so Salt would have been aware of them and their drawbacks.

† Although Salt was not the first to build decent workers’ housing, the thoroughness and scale of his development was unique for the time.