Somerton, Oxfordshire

 

A moment of confusion

Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare as hens’ teeth, I said to myself. And the figures are characterful and ooze charm – Jesus sits with the head of the apostle he loved best (normally said to be St John the Evangelist) on his lap; one diner seems to be refusing a drink; another pours from a jug; yet another gesticulates, as if in conversation. The faces, some with curly hair and beards, are delightful. The story is that the reredos was removed from its place behind the altar at the time of the Reformation and hidden away. It was, say different accounts, reinstalled during a restoration of the church in 1822, or after another in the later-19th century.

And in the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it probably is. Setting aside such normally authoritative sources as Pevsner and the listing description of the church, I do another Google search. This time I find a short piece on a website called The Antiquary. Here, the historian Dr Allan Barton gives a different story. That the figures, damaged beyond repair during the Reformation, was at some point restored. The restorer remade the faces and other details (handles, vessels, etc) using plaster of Paris attached to the surviving 14th-century stone (the arches, table, the bodies of the figures) by means of wooden dowels.

Barton does not give a source for his account, although it would no doubt be possible to tell the difference between stone and plaster on very close examination. But this version of events seems plausible. It would account for the style of the facial sculpture, which is rather more like Romanesque sculpture than 14th-century Gothic. And it would account for the good condition of the faces, which are surprisingly crisp for medieval survivors that had been removed, hidden and reinstalled.

There are problems with this kind of restoration. It is, of course, going against longstanding principles of historic buildings conservation to replace old work with new, and if damaged medieval carving was destroyed in the process, this would be cause for great regret. However, if the iconoclasts of the Reformation had hacked off whole faces and limbs, one’s attitude to a later sculptor adding new work would be more accepting. Even so, disguising the difference between old and new is also a problem. It should be clear what has been done and where the original ends and the repair begins. 

The usual 21st-century attitude to such items is to condemn them as fakes or forgeries. But we are where we are. Simple pleasure at what we are left with now is also a legitimate response.† It would be fascinating to know more, however. How does Barton know what material the additions are made of, and how they’re attached? Who modelled these faces and when, and was their intention to pull the wool over our eyes or just to renew something in their own way? What did the reredos look like in its damaged state? Oh to know more.

- - - -

* The Somerton in Oxfordshire; there are others.

† Albeit with questions about what if any medieval work was sacrificed during the restoration. 

Liverpool, St John's Lane

 

Liverpudlian Goth-ish

St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s eye with a very ornate corner entrance. It’s a phantasmagoria of arches, shafts, and Gothic details such as trefoils, stubby pinnacles, carved capitals and openwork parapets in a mixture of grey granite and buff-to-reddish stone. Over the door, a semicircular tympanum bears the name of the company in green and gold mosaic. Look up, and this entrance is crowned by a tower and spire. Beyond, four sets of office windows with gables above lead the eye down St John’s Lane while a slightly shorter facade of three gables stretches along Queen Square.

This building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1896–8. It’s a relic of a time when many large insurance companies had offices in large provincial cities as well as headquarters in London. Waterhouse’s bread and butter was designing such structures for Prudential – most of those are in bright red brick and terracotta and many, like the huge Prudential HQ in London are still there, occupied by other companies. For Pearl, Waterhouse used stone. Struck first by the entrance, I mentally filed the building under ‘Liverpudlian Gothic’, like the office block in my previous post. But a quick look made me realise that it’s more complicated than that. The details on the corner are Gothic, sure enough. But the arches are all semicircular, not pointed as one would expect in a Gothic building. And the side windows and gables seem to speak more of a Jacobean revival style.

View of the building showing the facades on St John’s Lane and Queen Square

By the 1890s, many architects were leaving behind the kind of strict, would-be accurate revivalism adopted by their predecessors earlier in the Victorian period – especially in secular buildings but even in churches too. The more vernacular building of the Arts and Crafts movement had arrived; Art Nouveau was just around the corner; and for designers like Waterhouse, working for clients who wanted buildings that were part landmark (the spire), part status symbol (the decoration), and part economical use of space, an eclectic kind of architecture was a good solution. Although Pearl Assurance has disappeared (after a takeover in the late-1980s), this building carries on, a tribute to an architectural blend of ideas and requirements that led to something practical, but hardly a visual compromise.

Note Thank you to my regular readers for indulging me in my splurge of Liverpool buildings over the last few weeks. I had not visited the city for years and it was even more architecturally rich than I remembered. My next few posts will be from elsewhere, but I plan to do more Liverpudlian posts in the future.

Liverpool, Bixteth Street

Liverpudlian Gothic

There are still a large number of good 19th-century commercial buildings in central Liverpool, and some of them are highly decorative, as if to emphasise the prosperity of the city in this period. Some of these structures are enormous, but even relatively small ones can be visually exciting, and Gothic, a style primarily but by no means exclusively associated with churches, lends itself well to showy facades. Here’s a good example, an office building, dating probably to the 1860s.

This building is called Lombard Chambers, but its architecture is the Victorian version of Venetian Gothic – polychrome masonry (red brick with stone dressings and a grey stone plinth), with lots of pointed arches and a distinctive gable with a row of tiny arches beneath the cornice. The central shafts of the pairs of windows on the second floor are made of iron although they could easily be mistaken for grey stone.* Some of the pale stone is carved with intricate foliage designs and creatures curled around one another (see my photograph below). 

I say it’s probably an 1860s design not only because that’s the verdict of the Pevsner guide to Liverpool,† but also because it was in the 1860s that this kind of highly ornate, rather jazzy, facade became fashionable. Venice, once the base of a maritime trading empire, appealed to businessmen in Britain’s big commercial ports like Liverpool. John Ruskin had compared the empires of Britain and Venice in his monumental book The Stones of Venice in the 1850s, and he loved the Gothic architecture of the city.

Ruskin’s admiration of Gothic architecture, and of Venetian Gothic in particular, was influential, and Venetian Gothic offices and even factories popped up in many English cities. Industrialists generally liked them not for Ruskin’s refined moral and aesthetic reasons, but because you could make a colourful splash with polychrome brickwork, pointed arches, and crisp carving. A building like this could act as a landmark and an advertisement for the owner. I don’t know who built this particular example, but the result still catches the eye and lodges itself in the memory.

- - - - -

* I count the floors upwards from the lowest visible level thus, in English fashion: basement, ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor; above the latter a modern attic floor, set back from the front, is just visible.

† Joseph Sharples, Liverpool (Yale University Press, 2004)

Lombard Chambers: carved details

Liverpool, Lime Street

Second among equals

The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas responded with an eye-catching round tower featuring a dome that seems to grow organically from the masonry below; both tower and dome are festooned with curvaceous frames around windows and pediment-like features that proclaim the design’s baroque heritage. The gables are fancy too, with more curves and finials – it’s a shame that neighbouring buildings mean that it’s hard to see much of this skyline against a background of sky.

Fireplace with beaten metalwork surround and panel depicting Viking ships.

Inside, the pub is very much a sibling of the Philharmonic, with much carved mahogany, polished metalwork, and a mix of stained and etched glass. Some of the metalwork is outstanding – the relief featuring Viking ships above the fireplace in my photograph is a good example.

Privacy screen with oval of stained glass. An original bell push is visible on the wall beyond. 

One feature of the layout is a number of wooden privacy screens with Art Nouveau stained glass panels and lamps mounted on metal uprights set into wooden columns. There are also telling memories of a kind of table service not seen in pubs much now (if at all): small bell pushes that enabled customers to call for service without getting up and going to the bar.

Copper-clad bar front, carved mahogany column and elaborate plaster ceiling

Dating from 1907, this pub is a few years later than the Philharmonic, but they clearly have much in common. One difference is the style of plasterwork in the ceilings. While the Philharmonic recalls the Jacobean era (early-17th century), that at the Vines looks to be inspired by designs from later in the same century. It’s no less impressive, and worth a stop to anyone seeking visual or alcoholic refreshment.†

- - - - -

* The name comes from one Albert Vines, who ran an earlier pub on this site.

Liverpool, Hope Street

Listed

When visiting a city I don’t know very well, I make lists of major buildings that I want to see, but once I arrive I’m constantly on the lookout for unexpected delights – the assorted unregarded shopfronts, pubs, sheds and shelters, many of which make up the subject matter for blog posts. In Liverpool, I made a bee-line for two pubs that can hardly be described as ‘unregarded’ – they’re among the most memorable drinking-places in Britain, a must for anyone who revels in the excesses of Victorian or Edwardian architecture and decoration.

The first is the magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a pub so ornate that my usual blog formula of one (or sometimes two) pictures and a commentary simply isn’t enough. You can see it’s a remarkable place before you enter. The exterior is a riot of freestyle details of 1900, the work of architect Walter Thomas for Liverpool brewers Robert Cain & Sons. Stepped gables, finials, turrets, balconies, and a big protruding corner feature all vie for attention – but somehow manage to cohere into a whole. You see the stand-out feature as you go in: a set of Art Nouveau gates in black iron and gleaming gilded copper.

Gates: by Henry Bloomfield Bare; Liver bird, gazelles, women’s heads, and the motto of Cain’s brewery, Pacem amo (I love peace).

Step inside, and you’re in another world. An intricate plaster ceiling, carved mahogany fittings, a mosaic-fronted bar counter and stained glass panels immediately catch the eye. The sheer quality is obvious at once – the crisp lines of those ceiling pendants, the beauty of the woodwork (many of the joiners also worked on the interiors of great ocean liners, swapping between architectural and marine jobs according to the availability of work). 

Mosaic-fronted bar, mahogany fittings, heraldic stained glass, and Jacobean revival ceiling. The interior work was supervised by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratton of Liverpool’s School of Architecture and Applied Arts.

Repoussé copper panel by Henry Bloomfield Bare, reflecting the pub’s musical links. 

Then as you grasp your pint and settle at one of the tables, you take in a variety of other decorative touches that go in quality and quantity way beyond what anyone has any right to expect in even an elaborate Victorian gin palace. Repoussé copper panels, etched glass, decorative mirror glass, tiles, a vast room (referred to as the Billiards Room, though some say it may have been a restaurant) with a plaster frieze, even the marbles and tiles of the gents toilets* – there seems to be no end to it.

Plaster frieze in the Billiards Room. Major figure work is by the sculptor Charles John Allen (his friend, a Mrs Ryan, modelled for the caryatid figures); other plasterwork was by a talented Irishman, Pat Honan.

This magnificent pub surpassed the expectations I had when I put it on my list. It’s a testimony to the huge prosperity of Liverpool, which was at its height in 1900 when the Philharmonic was built. I noted when I read about the building in Geoff Brandwood’s excellent book Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, that it was listed by English Heritage at Grade II* – an exceptional rating for a pub. However, I noticed on checking the current listing that it’s now actually listed at Grade I, the top listing reserved for the country’s most exceptional buildings. Rightly so. I’d encourage anyone who likes this kind of thing to put it on their personal list, head to Liverpool, stand themselves a pint, and toast Robert Cain & Sons and the team of architects and craft workers who made this place possible.

- - - - -

* There’s an old post about the lavatories here.

Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

 

The red and the grey

An 1840s complex of vast warehouses and numerous smaller structures around the water, the Royal Albert Dock is the masterpiece of engineer Jesse Hartley. Hartley designed it to be fireproof – the warehouses are constructed entirely of brick, stone and metal – there’s no structural timber, apart from over 5,000 beech piles sunk in the damp soil beneath on which the vast buildings rest.

The dock is so large that it’s hard to appreciate in a photograph, but a view across the water can take in the rows of mostly cast-iron orange-red Doric columns with four storeys of brick and stone warehouse space rising above them. Every so often the row of columns is broken by a broad arch, which provided extra height for cranes to operate, swinging items out of the ships’ holds and into the covered quay area. The design allows ships to birth and unload directly into the warehouses, most of the work taking place undercover in the space immediately behind the columns. Here goods unloaded from the ships could be sorted and hoisted up to the chosen storage area in the warehouse or loaded on to carts for transport elsewhere.

The brick outside walls are load-bearing, each level’s wall slightly thinner than the one below. Inside, however, the floors and ceilings (and indeed the weight of the stored goods) are supported by a grid of columns spanned by iron beams. At the top of each level, shallow brick arches span the spaces between the metal beams to form ceilings; these arches are built up to form a flat surface above, creating the floors. In adopting this layout, Hartley was drawing on the design of fireproof textile mills. He noticed that such mills sometimes collapsed because of the outward thrust of the ceiling arches, so he fitted plenty of iron tie-bars to counter this thrust.

This is a highly practical design, but it is also visually very attractive. When the docks fell out of use in the 1960s as container ships required a different kind of handling facility, various schemes were proposed to redevelop the site. Ideas to demolish the warehouses and build office towers were rejected, as was a plan to convert the warehouses into a new campus for what was then Liverpool Polytechnic. In the end, the current conversion was devised, accommodating several museums and galleries,† a variety of retail and restaurant outlets, the Beatles Story, two hotels, and other uses. Although as I write several of the attractions are temporarily closed for redevelopment, the dock still buzzes with visitors, drawn like me to this visually stunning structure steeped in British and international history. Long mays its bricks and its chunky red columns glow.

- - - - -

† Tate Liverpool, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum, all currently closed for maintenance and a major redevelopment project. Anyone interested in visiting. Tate Liverpool is scheduled to reopen in 2027, but dates can shift when alterations to complex historic structures are concerned.

Liverpool, Wapping Dock

Stand-out structure

Not far from the Albert Dock, whose gatemen’s shelters were featured in my previous post, stands Wapping Dock, and alongside this dock is an even more extraordinary small building. It’s slightly later (c. 1856) than the Albert Dock shelters, and stands by the site of the Wapping Dock’s entrance gates. It’s variously described in Joseph Sharples’ Pevsner City Guide to Liverpool (2004) as a policeman’s lodge and in the listing description online (c. 1975) as a gatemen’s shelter. Given the more recent date of the Pevsner guide, I’m inclined to accept its verdict, reinforced, to my mind, by the extraordinary architecture. The tall, spire-like roof seems to answer the old question, ‘Why can you never find a policeman when you need one?’ with a very visible point of contact. A reader has been in touch (see Comments section) to point out that the 1849 large-scale OS map marks two ‘Policeman’s huts’, one at either end of the dock. I think we have our answer.

If the tall roof and the unusual oval plan make this building stand out, so does the irregular stonework, laid like very high quality crazy paving, like the cyclopean masonry in my previous post. Other notable features are the horizontal protruding bands and the peculiar cross motif visible in my photograph. This cross is not unlike an arrow loop of the kind found in medieval castles, enabling an archer within to shoot at enemies outside. But this castle detail is very much an ornamental allusion to the old style of building – it’s not an actual opening and the lower part of the cross is not straight, but ends in a slight curve, diminishing in width as it tapers down.

Apparently this striking lodge or shelter once formed a central pier of a two-section gateway, making the visual reference to castle gatehouses and defensive architecture relevant in a way. The stone – tough granite – is also good for a gate or entrance. No wooden cartwheel, passing through, would do much damage to this hard stone. It must have done its job well, this tiny tower, eccentric as it looks.