Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Warm and cool, rough and smooth

There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the bricks have been used to build a country house of delightful proportions, so much the better – even if, as is the case at beautiful Wallsworth Hall, those proportions have been somewhat skewed by the addition of an off-centre turret and a protruding bay (in harder, later brick) on the left-hand side. But houses grow and their owners have changing ideas about what they want, and I’m happy to accept these changes as interesting bits of history, revealing developing needs and new tastes. They don’t, for me, wholly destroy the beauty of the mid-18th century original, in which old brickwork is complemented by sash windows, stone dressings, and a rather pleasing row of three circular windows to the central attic.

More recent changes have had a less obvious effect on the exterior of the house. It has been for some decades the home of Nature in Art, the first museum and art gallery dedicated to art inspired by nature. It celebrates such art (both fine and applied) through a growing permanent collection, a programme of special exhibitions covering everything from botanical illustration to wildlife photography, an artists in residence scheme, and a range of courses.

Architecturally, what particularly caught my eye, as I approached the house, was the doorway. Here too, the sun played its role, bringing out the details of the bold pediment, with its chunky dentils creating a pattern of light and shade. It’s this detail, and the extraordinary columns that are striking. Just as the sloping sides of the pediment are broken by chunks of carved stone, so the columns are raised to a greater level of decorative splendour by three cubic stone blocks, again chunkily carved, which punctuate their Roman Doric smoothness.

What these bits of carving do is take us from the rational, 18th-century mode of classical symmetry to a the world of caves and grottoes. Look at one of the square sections of the blocked column closely and you see a cluster of rock-like lumps and facets, many of which have the chisel marks clearly visible to emphasize their roughness, interspersed with what look like icicles or stalactites. It’s the sort of thing that would be at home in a grotto in the garden of a great house like Stourhead, and translates us from the balmy sunshine to the shivering sound of the aria sung by the Cold Genius in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. What a place to end up on a warm winter’s morning: delightfully different, but still contained within the classical proportions of the house as a whole.

Toddington, Gloucestershire

 

Help at hand

This AA box has appeared by the roadside a few miles from where I live. They’re a dying breed, these AA boxes, and seeing one that was new to me set me thinking about their history.

In the post-war period there were over 1,000 AA telephone boxes scattered all over the country. They were originally built to provide shelter for sentries on the staff of the Automobile Association, who could offer help and directions to passing members; they also contained telephones, from which the sentry could call for further assistance. The first boxes were installed in 1911, and by 1920, AA members were themselves issued with a key to open the boxes, from which they could call for assistance if they had broken down. Maps, a light, a fire extinguisher, and other equipment were kept in the box for members’ use.

In spite of their shortcomings for those who broke down far from a box, they proved popular. When a box was manned by a sentry, he would salute the driver of a car bearing the AA’s distinctive badge, and a camaraderie built up between sentries and members. But with the development of communications technology, the increase in vehicle reliability and other factors, the boxes fell out of use, were replaced or supplemented by more modern roadside telephones, and this whole infrastructure of members’ telephones was finally rendered superfluous by the rise and rise of the mobile phone.

There are now only 30 or so boxes, without their original telephones, remaining,* some of which are in open-air museums such as Beamish and Avoncroft. The example in my picture has been restored by the volunteers of the Gloucester and Warwickshire Steam Railway, a heritage line whose whistles I can occasionally hear from the town where I live. It was originally sited at Andoversford near Cheltenham and apparently was in seriously damaged conditioned before the heritage railway acquired it and restored it. Now it’s a welcome sight as one leaves behind the Toddington roundabout in the direction of the climb up the Cotswold escarpment at Stanway Hill, on the way to Stow-on-the-Wold. As once it would have been welcome to motorists who were lost, or in need of mechanical help, as they went their way along the local steep, curvaceous and often chilly roads.

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* A website here lists 32 survivors, of which 12 are in museums and one is at the AA headquarters at Basingstoke.

Earl's Court, London

Time machine

Why can you never find a policeman when you want one? It was in part to provide a solution to this old question that London’s Metropolitan Police Force began to adopt ‘police boxes’ in the late-1920s. Police boxes contained a public telephone (accessible from outside the box via a small door), as well as a large door to admit a police officer and to give them access to a chair, a small table, writing equipment, an electric heater, and other bits of kit. Such boxes enabled an officer to contact his local police station to summon help. A flashing light on top of the box acted as a signal to a passing officer to contact his local station. These lines of communication were invaluable in the era before personal radios (let along mobile phones), when the only other way an officer could try to get help was to blow a whistle.

The design of the box used in London was the work of Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, surveyor to the Metropolitan force. These chunky boxes, taller and larger than standard telephone boxes and made of concrete with wooden doors,* became quickly familiar, although they were not the first of their kind. The idea of a police box was first taken up in Glasgow, where tall hexagonal boxes, painted red, were used from 1891 onwards. They became ubiquitous on the capital’s streets (and in some towns outside London), until the use of personal radios became the norm in the 1960s and 1970s. The boxes had slipped from my consciousness until the other week, walking around the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea with a friend, I was surprised to find this one outside Earls Court underground station.

Because of the use of such a box as the portal to a time machine in the British TV programme Dr Who, the design is still well known, so I wasn’t entirely amazed that at least the occasional box has been preserved to pay tribute to television history as well as to the history of policing and design. However, the Earl’s Court box is actually a reproduction – according to online sources it dates to 1996. I was nevertheless still pleased to have my memory jogged. Objects that remind us of past times are time machines in their own way, taking us back…but also bringing us forward to a time when communications are easier, when they work.†

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* The original design specified a wooden structure with a concrete roof, but concrete walls were adopted for durability.

† For my musings on a mobile phone dysfunction, see this blog post.

Beverley, East Yorkshire

Independent

When my mother was a young girl, she thought all telephone boxes were cream in colour. This is because she spent her first years in the city of Hull and did not travel far beyond its boundaries, except to nearby villages and the market town of Beverley, just a few miles away. When World War II began and the then great port of Hull was subject to regular bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, my grandfather found another job and my Mum and her parents moved across the River Humber to the comparative safety of rural Lincolnshire – where the phone boxes, to her surprise, were red. ‘But they’re all red,’ said my grandmother. ‘Except for the ones in and around Hull.’

The reason for this anomaly lies in the history of British telecommunications. In the early decades of the telephone in Britain, lines and exchanges were operated by various local and national companies; some 13 town and city councils also owned their own local telephone systems. By the early-20th century, all these local-authority systems had been sold either to the National Telephone Company or the Post Office – with the exception of the one operating in Hull. So when, eventually, the Post Office took over the whole nation’s telephone system, Hull remained independent and when the Post Office adopted the standard red colour for their telephone kiosks (to match their post boxes), Hull’s retained their own shade of cream.

To those unfamiliar with this particular part of East Yorkshire, Hull’s cream phone boxes come as a surprise. As more and more boxes are removed because, now that almost everyone has a mobile phone, they are not much used, these rare cream boxes become even scarcer than they originally were. And there’s less chance for people to notice other different details – the use of a different, sans serif, letterform for the word ‘TELEPHONE”, for example, and the lack of a crown (symbolic of the Post Office) above this lettering. However, a number of cream boxes are now listed, preventing this rare breed from becoming completely extinct, so that we continue to be reminded of this particular bit of Yorkshire independence.

Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

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* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.

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.