Nantwich, Cheshire

Resurrection

Readers who would like to see some older timber-framed architecture, after two posts on half-timbered buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries, look no further.

Equally at the top of my list of priorities when visiting a town that’s new to me are historic buildings and local bookshops. Here in Nantwich then was nirvana: a bookshop in a historic building – the Nantwich Bookshop and Coffee Lounge. For the refreshments, I can forgive the fact that part of the lovely 17th-century facade is obscured by the tented gazebo out front – customers of the Coffee Lounge need to be accommodated and there were plenty on the day we were there. We could still revel in the dazzling patterns of the posts, beams, struts and braces of both the bookshop and the premises to the right. The ornate design of the timberwork is typical of the region, as are the front-facing gables that protrude over the street, the transition between the two surfaces made by a plaster cove. What’s more, there’s a delightful hand-made quality to all this, which, together with a hint of a little structural movement here and there, confirms that this is a building of the 16th or 17th century, not a Victorian imitation.

This is a jazzy building, a bit like a three-dimensional 17th-century equivalent of the paintings of Bridget Riley, and would have cost a lot of money to produce. The owner of the bookshop part when it was built was Thomas Churche, linen merchant, nephew to the still more prosperous William Churche, who built the portion to the right, and who was also the owner of the large Churche’s Mansion in Hospital Street in Nantwich. Both of the buildings in my photograph were almost certainly rebuilt after the great fire that destroyed much of the town in 1585. Investigations when the building was restored found that there had been some structural movement, probably soon after construction, and samples of the earth beneath the shop were taken. These revealed unconsolidated soil to a depth of 7 feet, and stretching back some 15 feet from the front of the shop. It’s suspected that the building was erected over the former castle moat.*

Another surprising discovery during the restoration was that the rear of the building is actually older than the front portion, and apparently by a different carpenter. Could this be because part of the structure escaped the fire? Or because the rebuild was done in two phases, perhaps as money became available?

While I was occupied in pondering these and other matters, the Resident Wise Woman got talking to a member of the shop staff. As a result I was permitted to climb the stairs into the attic (not normally open to the public) to inspect the substantial roof timbers of those impressive gables. On the way up, I passed through the middle floor (UK first floor, US second floor), where I saw Jacobean panelling on the walls and a beautiful piece of decorated plaster ceiling (see the photograph below).

Finding such interest and beauty on the inside as well as the outside of a building made my day, and I felt all the better because this had happened in a bookshop. I can say with the politician and writer Michael Foot that some of my happiest moments have been spent in bookshops.† This one was no exception. Thank you to the staff of the Nantwich Bookshop and Coffee Lounge for hospitality and coffee. And yes, of course I bought a book while I was there.

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* I’m indebted to a report by the architect Jim Edleston, a copy of which is available for consultation in the bookshop.

† Michael Foot (1913–2010), Labour politician, journalist, and author of books on Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, and Lord Byron, among many others.

Detail of plaster ceiling, Nantwich Bookshop

Northwich, Cheshire

When wood works

This building stands out on Northwich’s main shopping street like no other. It’s very large and exhibits the timber-framed structure that is so often seen in other Cheshire towns, such as Nantwich and Chester itself. It has the typical Cheshire elaborate magpie pattern of posts, beams and struts, and there’s a jetty, the arrangement by which an upper floor sticks out above the storey below. It doesn’t take long, though, for one to realise that this, like the pub in my previous post, is not an ancient structure of the Tudor period or earlier. The regularity of the timber work, the windows with their pivoting openings, the tell-tale uniform quality of the timber work – all point to a building of the 19th or 20th-century timber-frame revival, a way of building sometimes called ‘Tudoresque’.

It’s a pub now, but whatever was this dazzling structure originally built for? The clue is in the pub’s name, the Penny Black, the name of the first adhesive postage stamp. This building was originally the the town’s Post Office and it was built in 1914, although it did not actually open until the end of World War I, in 1918. The timber frame was not only a visual homage to this traditional Cheshire style of architecture. It was designed this way so that it could be ‘liftable’.

If liftability is a new concept to you, I should explain that Northwich was one of the centres of England’s salt industry. Underground brine was extracted and boiled in vast pans so that the water evaporated and the remaining salt crystals were gathered and processed for sale. Removing the brine caused voids to appear beneath the ground, and buildings subsided as a result. Suitably built timber-framed structured could be jacked up – lifted – and stabilised, whereas masonry buildings were at risk of severe damage or even complete collapse.

What a triumphant building for an early-20th century Post Office. How unlike Post Offices today, which tend to share space with other retail premises – even in large towns the Post Office occupies some counter space at the back of a shop such as a branch of W. H. Smith. This trend to downsize happened before the current scandals surrounding the false prosecutions and convictions of hundreds of Post Office staff, but these days it looks almost as if the organisation is trying to hide away in these low-budget, low-profile locations. How unlike the situation in 1914, when a building like this could act as a landmark on the high street, a three-dimensional piece of publicity and a premises that was built, in the most challenging geological situation, to last.

Farndon, Cheshire

In black and white

There are countless timber-framed black and white buildings in Cheshire, some of them late-medieval, some much later. This one, The Raven in Farndon, is said on some websites to have been ‘originally built’ in the 16th century, but the excellent Farndon history website points out that the earliest documentary evidence for the pub is in 1785 and that it does not appear at all on a map of 1735. It’s likely to have 18th-century origins, then, but the present building is clearly late-19th century. Its ‘timber frame’ is actually decorative, being attached to solid walls of brick. People will say it’s a fake, but it’s a very engaging fake, with its pattern of cusps on the three sections between the upper windows (and elsewhere on the building) and its jazzy diagonal timbers in the gable.

My favourite part, though, is the sign. The pattern of plasterwork scrolls and straight lines around the name panel suggests similar patterns in Jacobean ceilings and above 17th-century fireplaces. The stylised raven, though is something else, the plasterer’s or architect’s own idea of conjuring up the eponymous bird in a simplified but graphic form. In its stylised, almost cartoon-like quality, t’s unlike anything I can remember in an inn sign, though my readers might know similar examples. It’s clear, simple, and effective, and it’s odd with such a distinctive sign that after a refurbishment in the late-20th century, the building should have had its name changed to The Farndon. Now it The Raven again, and its sign, not to mention its half-timbered design, look the business.

Farndon, Cheshire

Small mercy

‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ my mother would say, keeping her spirits up in the face of what was sometimes a hard life. Perhaps she learned such maxims in the succession of small nonconformist chapels that she attended in her youth, where the architecture – sober, dignified, but often a bit dull – could match the sermons preached within. But now and then a sermon could take off into more exciting realms of eloquence or even passion, and that’s the case too with the architecture of chapels, which can afford much more than sober appreciation.

So it is, I feel, with this example in Farndon. Its name is Chapel House and it was built in the mid-17th century as a house – for a minister, presumably – with a chapel room at the rear. Nowadays it’s a house pure and simple, but the design of its facade is neither entirely pure nor merely simple. What caught my eye of course was that curly gable, with its mixture of concave and convex curves, straight lines and steps. On the east coast of Lincolnshire this sort of thing would elicit comments about trade with the Low Countries influencing the local architecture. Here in Cheshire, there’s not that direct contact, but news travelled, as did pattern books, and someone in Farndon liked this style as much as I do.* The addition of a circular window in the attic, a dentil course across the middle, and an assertive round-headed doorway, and you have a composition that turns heads in a street of small houses. If you want a label for the style of this kind of building, it’s artisan mannerism, a fashion in which builders took motifs from more pretentious buildings (especially ones in places like Haarlem, Antwerp, and French chateaux) that they knew from pattern books and reproduced them, usually in brick.

Villages like Farndon have more spectacular buildings than this – a church, a striking pub, and a medieval bridge across the river that divides England and Wales are the kind of structures that guidebooks will direct the visitor towards. But small mercies like this building are things that also make me thankful.

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* Maybe more than one person. There’s at least one other similar gable in this village.

Chaddesley Corbett, Worcestershire

Polite but pragmatic

The buildings that attract me are sometimes the ones that don’t quite obey all the rules. Here, for example, is an example of an early-18th century house with many of the standard features of Georgian domestic architecture: sash windows, symmetrically arranged, brickwork with stone quoins, keystones and sills, a canopy over the door supported on scrolled brackets. The central ‘blind’ window may have been blocked at some point in its history or may simply have always been like that – blind windows are not unusual in this kind of architecture, because they look more interesting than blank stretches of wall and keep up the rhythm of rectangles across the facade.

What’s not quite from the pattern-book of ‘polite’ 18th-century architecture is the roof line and the ‘extra’ upper window. More standard would be a very low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, the whole facade ending roughly at the level of the top of the quoins. However, here a higher-pitched roof leaves attic space beneath, and the attic is lit by the central window. This lonely sash window, with an expanse of blank brickwork and sloping parapets on either side, looks odd, but fulfils a practical purpose – the extra accommodation squeezed into the roof space.

The side elevation displays another oddity – the lintel of another doorway, subsequently blocked, is visible between the ground-floor windows. The removal of the doorway is clearly an alteration – and whether the surviving lintel looks awkward or charming is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I like it, for its charm and for the way it reveals a stage in the building’s history. The whole house, I think, is a pleasant-looking building, with a seasoning of quirkiness that makes it, to this viewer at least, all the more appetising.

Reading, Berkshire

 

Tea and biscuits

Walking around the centre of Reading, I was struck by the occasional architectural gem that survives among a crowd of tawdry modern shop fronts. One particular pleasure was this glorious facade of brick and terracotta, the W. I. Palmer Memorial Building in West Street. It is named for William Isaac Palmer, who became one of the partners in the firm of Huntley and Palmer in 1857, a company that was soon to be the world’s largest manufacturer of biscuits. Biscuits (along with the town’s two other principal industries, beer and bulbs*) brought many jobs and much wealth to Reading. W. I. Palmer became personally very rich, and spent some of his money on civic and philanthropic projects, from helping to fund the new Town Hall and library to his enthusiastic support of the temperance movement.

The Palmers were Quakers and although Quaker beliefs do not forbid alcohol, its followers in general either do not drink or do so very moderately. William Isaac Palmer was a leader of the Reading Temperance Society for much of the second half of the 19th century (he died in 1893) and this meeting place for the movement was rebuilt in 1880s and 1890s and dedicated to his memory. The architect of these improvements and embellishments was F. W. Albury, a local man who was elected Fellow of the RIBA in 1875, when one of his proposers was Alfred Waterhouse, himself a great exponent of this kind of terracotta decoration. Much of the terracotta on this building – moulded into the forms of leaves, classical columns, and inscriptions – was made to Albury’s specifications by Royal Doulton in London.

The temperance movement was successful in steering many away from ‘strong drink’ in the Victorian period and later, but by the 1950s was much more concerned with educating people about the dangers of alcohol. In Reading, the society also sold non-alcoholic drinks and started the Temperance Building Society to provide home loans. Eventually the society moved to different premises and the upper floors of the W. I. Palmer hall were converted to apartments. From the outside at least, it must make a splendid building to come home to.

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* The horticultural kind, cultivated by Sutton’s Seeds.

Terracotta name plaque, W. I. Palmer Memorial Hall, Reading

Totnes, Devon

The attractions of Gothic

Again and again I feel drawn to houses with Gothic elements in their design – pointed windows, filigree tracery, battlements, and so on. Why should this be? Partly it's simply the delicacy of these designs – they seem have a fragility that’s wonderfully at odds with solid walls of bricks and mortar; Horace Walpole called his Georgian Gothic house Strawberry Hill a ‘paper house’, so fragile did it seem. Partly the attraction is that this aesthetic of pointed doors and windows is so different from the norm, which is all about straight lines, rectangles, box-like forms and sash windows.

The majority of these delicate Gothic houses date to the Georgian or Regency periods, from the 1740s to the 1830s. There are plenty of later examples too, but they tend to have a heavier, less filigree feel to them. Their inspiration, of course, comes from the Middle Ages, where we see Gothic most often in parish churches and cathedrals. The domestic architecture of the medieval period is now much rarer. Most small houses were rebuilt long ago, those that survive often altered beyond recognition. Medieval houses that do survive are frequently much plainer than churches, with square not pointed windows, although there are exceptions, like the wonderful Gothic hall of Stokesay Castle in Shropshire.

The truth is, of course, that Georgian Gothic houses aren’t really based on medieval houses at all – they take their inspiration from church architecture (from its dazzling variety of window tracery, for example) and from a refined and repurposed idea of what Gothic architecture can be: Gothic, if you like, seen through Georgian spectacles.

The small spectacle that results in this house in Totnes is delightful. The tall proportions, the ornate ground-floor bay window, the upper bays with their matching glazing bars, the battlements, even the cream finish of the walls, all elegant and pleasantly different from what surrounds it, as the array of sash windows on the building to the left shows. It’s also a welcome corrective to the current conception of Gothic as dark, gloom-laden, and possessed with death. Gothic can be light and bright and lively, and none the worse for it.