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that the very first human homes were in caves and that these were clearly damp, dark, unpleasant places to live, soon superseded by tents, wooden huts, and other such shelters.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.

The Lee, Buckinghamshire

Geological pudding

Enjoying coffee one morning at the Cock and Rabbit, by the village green at The Lee, my eye caught what looked like some sort of prehistoric standing stone. A little later I stepped outside to have a look. It’s clearly not a menhir, but in fact three chunky stones piled one on top of the other, and a further stone on the ground in front of the three. The Resident Wise Woman, a quick hand with online maps, has already identified them as ‘the Pudding Stones’ and was busily reading about them online as I took a photograph.

I’m no expert in geology, but I’d come across puddingstone when reading about building materials. It’s a form of conglomerate stone, in which numerous small pebbles are fused together by a kind of natural cement made of sand and silica. The result resembles a geological plum pudding, hence the name. The stone is not uncommon in Hertfordshire and in the Chilterns (where we were at the time), and often occurs in the form of large lumps, moved around aeons ago by glaciers. Big pieces of the material have sometimes been left in place as landmarks, or heaped up to make a still more striking effect.

Puddingstone looks unusual and must have been puzzling to people in earlier times. This has led to nicknames such as ‘witch stones’, suggesting magical or healing powers, or an ability to ward off evil spirits. People have carried bits of puddingstone around with them, or placed them at the thresholds of their houses to protect themselves or their family. Now puddingstones are treated mostly as attractive local curiosities. When I’d taken my photograph, the Wise Woman reported that she’d even found an online review of The Lee Puddingstones – apparently they’re perfect for a family day out|! I doubt if most families would spend a day looking at four stones, but it you combined them with a meal at the Cock and Rabbit and a walk around the local paths and lanes taking in the delightful countryside, you could perhaps do worse.

The Lee, Buckinghamshire

 

Distinctiveness at the fingerpost

In 1964, the Warboys Committee, led by Sir Walter Warboys, reported on traffic signs on the roads of Britain. The committee concluded that the existing signs were no longer good enough – increased traffic levels and the speed of traffic on the roads meant that signs could be difficult to read. New signs were developed that are still used today. They included everything from the triangular warning signs with their clear symbols and minimal use of words, to the rectangular direction signs on primary and local routes, which were adapted from the direction signs on motorways introduced in the late-1950s. One result was the disappearance of many of the old fingerpost signs, with their pointing arms bearing place names and distances in miles (sometimes down to the nearest quarter or even one-eighth of a mile).

Fortunately for people like me who care about historical artefacts, a number of the old fingerposts were kept in some areas, and when one looks at them it becomes clear that something was lost with their large-scale disappearance. It’s not just the demise of those very precise distances, it’s also their quality of local distinctiveness.* Roads and their signs were largely a matter for local government – county councils particularly – and counties produced their fingerposts in similar ways, but with subtle differences. In places where a number of the old sings remain, you can find, for example, in Somerset, numerous iron posts with a pyramid-shaped finial, each of its four faces bearing the initials S.C.C. (Somerset County Council). Parts of rural Oxfordshire retain wooden fingerposts with rather broader arms than usual. In East Sussex there are also some of the old wooden fingerposts, with their scalloped-cornered arms and tapering posts with an octagonal finial.

In Buckinghamshire recently, I noticed this one near the village green at The Lee, with its white ring bearing the words ‘Bucks County’.§ It seems to be in someone’s garden, though it still points usefully in the right directions. I wonder if it is an example of a private individual preserving a bit of history. While I understand the need for modern signs, I’m glad these early ones are preserved in some places, to remind us of the various local ways in which fingerposts were designed and made.† The quality of local distinctiveness is frequently eroded away in the often worthy cause of standardisation. But it’s something that makes places what they are, just as much as the brick and tile of the house behind the sign, or the weatherboarded former outbuilding in which we were staying when we were in Bucks. Let’s celebrate local distinctiveness when we can.

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§ Click on the picture to enlarge it for a clearer view.    

* This concept is discussed and encyclopaedised in the excellent England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)

† And to be reminded of such resonant place names as Swan Bottom

York, New Walk

Well built

York’s New Walk is a tree-lined path running south along the bank of the River Ouse that was new in the 1730s. It was laid out as a recreational path, a pleasant route for visitors who fancied leaving behind for an hour or so the hustle and bustle of the city centre. In the recent heatwave, the Resident Wise Woman looked at her map and found the path and thought it would be just the route for us after a hectic morning in the city centre. The shade alone (provided by a mixture of original trees and ones planted to replace elms killed in the Dutch elm disease outbreak of the 1970s) meant that we were glad to follow in the footsteps of our 18th-century forebears.

Soon I was surprised to find a chunky stone archway set to one side of the walk. The plain semi-circular opening was set in quite rough masonry, with battered side walls and buttresses adding strength. The structure is small but somehow imposing and the roughness of surface seemed to be calculated to create this effect by someone who knew what he was doing. We’d stumbled upon a well house, originally designed by the eminent architect John Carr of York, although it’s said by some to have been wholly or partly rebuilt a few years later by the City Surveyor, Thomas Pickersgill. Whoever was responsible for the structure we can see today seems to have based the design on the grottoes commonly found in country house parks and gardens, and the masonry is said to be made up of medieval stones reused from the demolished part of a medieval church. A damaged 12th-century capital was salvaged from this material and placed as the finial in the centre of the parapet.

The well-head, locally known as the Pikeing Well (I have not seen a plausible explanation of this name), is slightly later than the New Walk itself, and was built in 1752. This was a time when spas were becoming increasingly popular – many people flocked to spas that dispensed mineral-rich waters and cities such as Bath grew rich on the income from visitors who prized the water’s healing powers. Although York has no such mineral spa, the water from the spring at New Walk did have a reputation for curing eye diseases. So the authorities commissioned Carr to build this structure over an existing well, to form a kind of spa. Inside, Carr paced steps down to a stone-lined pool, giving access to the reputedly healing liquid. Whatever the facts about the water, the well was officially closed in 1929. Only the striking well house remains.

This is the last of my current series of posts about buildings in York. I have more to say about the city, and will no doubt write more posts in the future, but variety is the spice of this blog, and regular readers may appreciate some variation in the diet. So stand by for something different, architecturally and geographically, soon.