Ledbury, Herefordshire

 

Old, with later facilities

Church Lane in Ledbury is one of those streets that features in books with titles like ‘Beautiful Britain’ or ‘England’s Historic Towns’. The combination of a narrow lane, houses, a pub, and other buildings dating from the 15th to the early-19th century in a mix of brick and timber-framed construction, has an irresistible pull, the eye drawn unerringly to the spire of the town’s medieval church that closes the view.

Taking in the rich architectural mix, but with minds fixed firmly on a destination – the church perhaps, or the painted room – many visitors fail to notice the most modest structure. This is a former outbuilding, now forming a public lavatory. It combines the two building materials most common in the town centre – red brick and black and white timber framing – with dormer windows in the tiled roof, to delightful effect. Metal signs denoting the building’s two entrances are the only things that make it different from its neighbours.

I wasn’t altogether surprised to find that the building is listed at Grade II. The reason for this is the contribution it makes to the overall group of buildings – it’s so much better than some concrete blockhouse of a structure, built to keep thew town up to date in the 1960s. As it is, a probable 17th-century structure has been retained, to the overall benefit of the townscape. Or rather, ‘Probably of 17th century date (although with newer facilities)’, as a blog post from Historic England wryly puts it. There’s no need to expect wooden loo seats or garderobes. Picturesque and convenient, this is one of the most charming public loos I know.

Avenbury, Herefordshire

The journey and the arrival

I read somewhere that there’s a ruined church in a field somewhere near the village of Avenbury in Herefordshire. Checking in Pevsner,* the church seems to have been abandoned in 1931 and left to the elements, with just the walls of the tower and chancel left above ground. This sounds sad, but I like ruins, and next time I’m in the area I find the rough location and drive up and down a lane, looking for signs of the tower in the loop of the River Frome that Pevsner mentions when describing the location. Seeing nothing, I find somewhere to pull in and get out a useful online map called mapy.com, a Czech enterprise that seems to have a lot of detail and has very clearly marked footpaths. There it is, St Mary’s church, marked with a ‘ruin’ symbol, about one field away from the lane.

I find a small gap in the hedge with a footpath sign and head into a barely discernible defile through foliage that’s almost as tall as me. In this fashion I pick my way through the leafage until I reach a corner of the field where the wild has more or less taken over. The most common plant here seems to be the stinging nettle, and they’re monsters, five feet tall. I feel them doing their worst at various points on my arms and legs. Through these aggressive herbs I find a way through to another area where there’s some barer ground among trees. I can see a tiny clearing with some evidence of human activity (Dumped rubbish? A kid’s den? Who knows?) and nearby a fence beyond which a gravestone sticks up.

I must be near, then, but I can still see no sign of a building among all the undergrowth. Finding my way past the gravestone I finally spot the tower, rearing up amid dense underbush and practically covered in ivy. I can’t get any nearer, and what evidence there might be of either the tower’s appearance or approximate age escapes me. According to Pevsner, there are lancet windows somewhere, and an arch that linked tower and nave suggesting a date of the early-13th century.

Having taken the photograph above and one or two more, equally uninformative but evocative perhaps of the atmosphere of the place, I retraced my steps to the field and the car. Reading further when I got home, I found that the church had been sold to an archaeologist in 2009 and that work was underway to conserve the ruin. This does not seem to have happened, however, and the structure is on the Buildings at Risk Register. It’s a category A priority building: ‘Immediate risk of further rapid deterioration or loss of fabric; no solution agreed’.† Something needs to be done before nature takes a further part in continuing the decline.

It’s said that sometimes the goal may be elusive, but the journey makes everything worthwhile. In this case, the journey was far from straightforward, the destination might have been more rewarding to a botanist than an architectural explorer, and the condition of the ruin was cause more for anxiety than pleasure. There was still a large part of me that enjoyed the effort of finding this hidden ruin. I am happy to confirm, too, that my skin still puts up a good resistance to nettle rash. The itching was gone by evening.

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* Alan Brooks and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Herefordshire (Yale University Press, 2012)

† The English Heritage description is here.

Naunton, Gloucestershire

 

Across the fields

This is one of those buildings I’d seen for years across the fields, but hadn’t got round to a proper visit until comparatively recently. Maybe at the back of my mind was the fact that I’ve featured dovecotes on this blog several times – perhaps another was a dovecote too far. But having a further look at my pictures, I’m inspired to share them, especially as this one is a little different from the others because of its history.

As many readers will know, dovecotes in England were restricted in use in the medieval period – only lords of the manor or members of the clergy were allowed to keep doves or pigeons and take the birds’ young as food. Many villages had one dovecote for lord or priest, but most of these fell out of use – if not earlier, then in the 19th century, when corn prices soared and birds ate more grain than the value of the meat they produced. The dovecote in the Gloucestershire village of Naunton was one that survived because it was converted for another use.

As you can see from my first photograph, this dovecote is square and built of Cotswold limestone. The roof has four gables and is covered with local Cotswold stone ‘slates’. At the apex is a tiny turret with entrance holes for the birds. The location of this entrance is such that a bird could get a good view of the sky and possible predators before venturing out. That gabled roof design is very typical of the Cotswolds, and the resulting valleys where the sections of roof meet show the skill of the skill of the Cotswold roofer. What I’d not considered until I looked this building up online* was that these sections of roof provide attractive perching surfaces for the birds. At any time of day, at least one part of the roof will be sheltered from the wind and when the sun is out, there’s always one section of the roof that its rays can meet.

Inside there were originally about 1200 nesting holes, which makes this a very large dovecote. At some point the bottom five layers of holes were blocked, perhaps because of incursions of rats, but there are still 903 holes, which would have provided meat for a very large household.

By the 19th century the building was used as a mill. This may have been the time when the lean-to extension was added. Photographs from the 19th century show narrow streams connecting this building with the nearby river, acting as the head- and tail-race for the waterwheel within. So instead of housing wheat-eating doves, the building ground the grain into flour. I don’t know how long the mill operated – several decades probably. The lean-to is seen without a roof in a photograph of 1949. Now both dovecote and lean-to remain empty, accessible to visitors and cared for by the Naunton Dovecote Trust. Empty, that is, apart from a few avian inhabitants, a couple of whom can be seen perching on a high beam in my second photograph.

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* I’m indebted to the excellent website of the Naunton Dovecote Trust for this and other information.

Kinver, Staffordshire

At the rock houses

When I first went to school we were taught that the very first human homes were in caves and that these were clearly damp, dark, unpleasant places to live, soon superseded by tents, wooden huts, and other such shelters. Today, we have a great deal more knowledge of early human habitations around the world, from houses built on frames of mammoth bones to bark-walled dwellings. But along with this knowledge goes an awareness that we are in fact ignorant of the lives of many people thousands of years ago…and of more recent communities.

What’s perhaps surprising is that in some places people were living in caves – or at least houses made by modifying caves – well into the 20th century. One of the most remarkable places where this happened was on the sandstone ridge known as Kinver Edge in Staffordshire. People hacked out large volumes of rock to make shelters and then deeper caves and built permanent brick or stone walls in front, to keep out the elements. The National Trust has done a good job of preserving a group of these houses at Kinver Edge, and the Resident Wise Woman and I did what we’d been meaning to do for ages and visited them the other day.

It’s extraordinary to look at a sandstone cliff and see a series of walls with windows and front doors set into its surface. Inside are living spaces divided into rooms – at least one room for the day and one for the night. Inside a few rooms are furnished in typical rural working-class style of the 19th or 20th century – simple wooden furniture, rag rugs, a kitchen range that combines the functions of heating, cooking, and producing hot water. The furnishings in the case of the rock houses are based on early photographs and a painting, After Dinner Rest Awhile (c. 1900), by Alfred Rushton, which hangs in the Kinver Constitutional Club. With the range fired up, the rooms seem pleasantly cosy, particularly I suppose to people like me, whose grandparents lived in a cottage kitted out in a similar way.

My grandparents’ cottage, however, had several advantages over a rock house. Because the rock is porous, the houses are perpetually damp. We were told that residents would have had to keep a fire on the go 24 hours a day to maintain an acceptably dry atmosphere. In addition, light and fresh air entered each house only from the front window and its adjacent door. This was not a recipe for healthy living.

So who lived in these houses, and when were they occupied? It’s hard to say how far they go back. Flints found just outside some of the rock shelters and houses suggest that there may have been people living nearby, perhaps in the caves themselves, in the Neolithic period (c. 4000–2500 BCE). But documentary evidence of inhabitants is of course much more recent. The earliest is of a woman known as Margaret of the Foxearth (aka Meg O’Foxholes), who lived in a shelter or house at Nanny’s Rock, about a kilometre from the houses in my photographs, and who died in 1617. Most of the surviving records concern people in the 19th or 20th centuries, when some local people must have toiled in the adjacent stone quarries or iron workings. The last inhabitants toughed it out here until the 1950s or 1960s, according to different versions of the houses’ story.

Thanks to the National Trust for looking after these traces of a forgotten way of life – without their care, the dwellings would deteriorate quickly. Even during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, algae began to grow on the damp cave walls when no-one could come to ventilate the dwellings and light a fire. Though the rock of the walls is very solid, the interiors are as delicate as threads in the fabric of a rag rug.

Manchester, Kennedy Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 3

The third and last, for now, of my series on Art Nouveau lettering from Manchester. If you look up the architectural history of the Vine Inn on Kennedy Street, you’ll find out how it occupies two buildings, one originally an 18th-century town house and one part of an adjoining 19th-century textile warehouse. The town house is recorded as a pub by the 1880s, but the joining together of the two buildings occurred, according to CAMRA, as recently as the 1970s. And yet this panel of coloured glass, which seems so typical of the Art Nouveau period (c. 1890–1910) is set over one of the doors in the textile warehouse section, which was not part of the pub at that time.

Maybe the panel was moved, or CAMRA is wrong about the date this part of the building began part of the pub, or the panel is simply much more recent than it looks. In a way, this doesn’t matter to the aesthetic appreciation of the panel. It uses ornamental lettering in a very Art Nouveauish kind of way, with big curving strokes in the Ns, and smaller fancy flourishes to the V and E, to give the panel a sense of decorative swagger that’s wholly appropriate for a pub. The swirling stems and flowers that surround the pub name add an additional flourish without distracting from the lettering, which is helped by being glazed in white, in contrast to the surrounding red and green. The round flowers bear some resemblance to the stylized roses devised and used by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald. But they’re very much simplified, and certainly not direct copies – under the influence of Mackintosh perhaps. Whatever its date, this is a striking and attractive bit of glazing.

Manchester, Bloom Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 2

Next in my series of three bits of Art Nouveau lettering is Albert House, a building in Manchester’s Bloom Street that once housed offices, although for what company or organization I’m not sure. It’s a building of brick and red sandstone, relieved by ornament in terracotta. Panels of terracotta decorated with stylised foliage and other curvaceous motifs sit beneath the windows. There are more very Art Nouveau curves in the metal grille on the double doors (and in some coloured glass panels in the windows).

However, my particular interest here is the terracotta lettering just above the door. In these panels, the tendency of Art Nouveau designers to stylise letterforms and to distort their shape for ornamental effect has been taken to extremes. The changes to the shape of the letters (to fit the space above the arch), the oddities in the positioning of some of the letters (look at the placing of the O in the left-hand panel), and the use of decorative foliage wrapping in and out of the word and date, make this at once highly ornamental and hard to read.

When I first looked at this, I could make out the word FOUNDED easily, and the AD and the first two figures in the date. But AD 18-what? It seems to be 1829, but the intertwined 2 and 9 take a fair amount of work to see, or at least they did for me. It’s a bit of fun, then, this date inscription, but also rather over the top. Full marks for effort, but also high marks for effortfulness.

Manchester, Deansgate

Letters from the turn of a century, 1

From around 1890 and for the first ten or so years of the 20th century, a new decorative style, Art Nouveau, arrived in England. English designers* drew on the work of graphic artists, architects, and product designers in France and Belgium. The hallmarks of their work included curved lines (and curvaceousness generally), ornament based on the natural world, especially plants and flowers, and a preference for pastel shades.† The curvilinear features of Art Nouveau spread to the way lettering was handled, and in this and two following posts, I’d like to illustrate this by signage on three Manchester buildings.

First, the Sawyers Arms Hotel on a corner in Deansgate. Corner sites were a favourite location for pubs, especially sites, like this one, on a crossroads – they gave you maximum passing footfall, and two frontages on which to display your sign. This site has held a pub almost continuously since the 1730s and the current building dates to the end of the 19th century.

The name stretches all the way around the curving corner of the building and the script in which it’s written is typical of the style and period – that’s to say expressive, curvy, and a little bit eccentric. Some of the letters break out of their ‘normal’ positions and proportions with great swagger – look at the way the S plunges beneath the base line and displays a noticeable difference in the size of its two loops – small at the top, huge at the bottom. The R likewise has an exaggeratedly large upper bowl, leaving the ‘leg’ of the letter to kick out to the right, invading the lower area of the next letter along. The upper strokes of the W and Y have ornate tops, while the middle parts of the W and M have small strokes, but are still very decorative.

These fancy details, all done with an ornamental curve where this is possible, make the lettering showy and eye-catching. Some elaborate lettering can defeat its own purpose, ending up muddled and hard to read. But that’s not the case here – the sign is both wonderfully clear and brightly eye-catching. It’s just the thing for a grand city pub, a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. Exemplary, I’d say.§

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* English rather than British: the history of this development was rather different in Scotland, for example, where there were closer ties to the Austrian and German version of the style, known there as Jugendstil and characterised by a more straight-lined, geometrical approach.

† See, for example, the advertising work of the great Czech artist Alfons Mucha, active in Paris, and architects such as Hector Guimard, famous for his Parisian Metro stations.

§ Grammarians will note the cop-out when it comes to the lack of an apostrophe.