Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Occasional haunts…

…that just keep on giving: there are certain small towns, mostly in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, that I visit quite often, and where I find myself staring at some architectural feature that I’ve not looked at closely before. Here’s an example in Witney: a probably 19th-century shop with a collection of ghost signs that I was aware of, but had not perhaps given the attention they deserved. Above the modern shop front one can see brick walls made up of a pattern of light and dark bricks – red or brown bricks with their long sides (the stretchers) visible and between them pale white or cream bricks laid so that their ends (the headers) can be seen. The resulting effect is pleasingly mottled, making the upper floors more appealing than the unfortunate shop front below. 

But what makes the building stand out for me are the painted signs. They’re faded, and when I first saw the building I noticed only the large letters across the front: GLO’STER HOUSE, the first word a once common contraction of Gloucester, in which the apostrophe, not always included, is just about visible here (clicking on the image should make it larger and clearer). The words on the corner are more informative, however. The fourth word down, just above the lamp, foxed me at first, because I thought it was HOTEL. But what the words on the corner actually say is, I believe: VINER’S FURNISHING STORES NOTED HOUSE FOR Bedsteads, MATTRESSES, BEDDING, TIN TRUNKS, CARPETS. I think there may once have been more – is that an AND below CARPETS? Even without the missing bit, we get a picture of a home furnishing and bedding store.

I’ve not found out much about Viner’s except that a photograph with the ghost sign in place and the business still open can be seen online, with a suggested date of c. 1964. It’s very blurred and looks as if it may have come from an old newspaper. Perhaps Viner’s, then, were in business through the first half of the 20th century and well into the 1960s. That decade marked my first personal knowledge of Witney, when I remember as a boy being driven by my father along the A40 road, which then passed straight through the middle of the town. I vaguely recall being struck by various shop signs, including, on a butcher’s a board painted with the slogan, PLEASED TO MEET YOU – MEAT TO PLEASE YOU. The locally made blankets were also featured on signboards – I expect Viner’s stocked them too. How good to be reminded of such things by the fading ghost sign of Messrs Viner. Though their wares are no longer sold here, the sign is still doing worthwhile evocative work.

Aston Somerville, Worcestershire

Looking more closely

I like to think I’m good at taking in a building when I visit it, at getting straight not just the overall architectural history§ but also the details – all those tombs and carvings and incidental oddities that fill my numerous blog posts on country churches. But when I found myself near Aston Somerville in Worcestershire and stopped to have a second look at the church, I found something I’d not noticed before. Aiming a long lens at the grotesques at the top of the church tower, I found the creature in my photograph. I say ‘creature’ because I’m not sure what it is – if those protrusions at the top are ears, then it’s not human, something that the muzzle-like face also suggests. Is it a bear? An ape?

But the species doesn’t particularly matter. What matters, of course, is the pose. This is what’s described in serious writing about this sort of thing as a ‘male exhibitionist carving’, the masculine equivalent of the Sheela na gig.* To modern eyes it’s odd, to say the least, to display this sort of sexually explicit imagery on a church. But anyone who has visited a lot of medieval churches will know that the grotesque is far from unusual in medieval church decoration. Dragons, monsters, foxes dressed as bishops, people showing off their private parts – it’s all there, whether we like it or not. Mostly, this kind of exhibitionist carving is outside the church, but there’s the occasional example inside, including one in a church roof in Hereford.†

Various reasons have been suggested for this sort of thing. To some, it’s a protection against evil spirits. To some, it’s a warning against lust. To yet others, exhibitionist carvings and other grotesques form a more general reminder of the wicked ways that threaten us when we allow ourselves to veer away from the protection of the church. There’s also undeniably a sense of humour here too – people could laugh at this sort of carving while also appreciating the moral message, just as monks could giggle at the lewd or humorous images in the margins of otherwise highly serious medieval manuscripts. People knew the difference between what was on the ‘margins’ of a building and what went on in the sacred spaces inside.¶

If there were lessons here for the original medieval users of the church, there are lessons today’s church-crawlers too. Look more closely, look up, take a pair of binoculars or a camera with a long lens on your travels. And if you’ve done all these things, revisit anyway, because everybody misses things first time around. You may be surprised at what you find.

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§ Well, fairly straight – unpicking the history of ancient buildings is rarely simple.

* See my post from back in 2009 on the famous Sheela na gig at Kilpeck. There are some interesting further remarks and interpretations in the comments to this old post too.

† This is a human figure and is now easy to see because a mezzanine floor, part of a church café, has been installed, brining the viewer closer to the roof.

¶ My go-to reference for medieval ‘marginal’ imagery is Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019), which I have recommended before on this blog.

Beverley, East Yorkshire

 

Friars and their successors

Anyone alighting from the train at Beverley station should find it easy enough to locate the remains of the medieval Dominican friary in Friars Lane – we stumbled on them straight after arriving in the town. The friars followed a teaching and preaching vocation and so their friaries are generally sited in towns and cities and this fact means that most of them have disappeared because of property development in the centuries after Henry VIII dissolved them in the 16th century. So standing friary buildings are scarce and, in my book, worth a look. At Beverley, the friary church has long gone (its foundations are in part buried beneath the nearby railway), but there is a substantial remaining building that may have originally housed the friars’ dormitory and library.*

The surviving buildings became a house after the dissolution, and its owners, the Warton family, preserved and enhanced them. One glimpse into their world is a series of fragments of wall painting visible in the surviving rooms. Some of this decoration (inscriptions on trefoil-shaped backgrounds surrounded by twining foliage, below) may in fact date to the time of the friars. But some particularly delightful, if now flaking, floral paintings (above), are post-Reformation. The geometrical pattern of bands in which the flowers are set have a Jacobean (i.e. 17th-century) look about them.

It’s good to be reminded that coloured decoration in the early-modern period was not limited only to the grand houses of the super-rich, with their coats of arms and mythological subjects. Here in a Beverley side street is evidence of the floral sensibilities of a middle-class family, who enjoyed bringing images of nature inside their house. I wonder if they were enthusiastic gardeners.

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* Today, the friary is a Youth Hostel. The building survives as a result of a campaign by preservationists when it was threatened by the expansion of a nearby factory that produced shock absorbers.

Beverley, East Yorkshire

Moved but not shaken

The Resident Wise Woman and I had not been in Beverley long before we started spotting interesting details and evidence of an enthusiasm for preserving the old structures in which this town abounds. As we walked along Eastgate, this brick doorway stood out, as did the fact that its historical context was helpfully explained on an accompanying iron plaque. It was originally a gateway in the perimeter wall of the nearby Dominican friary, a foundation of 1240 that lasted until Henry VIII closed it in 1539. The gateway itself, however, is not as old as the original friary. The plaque puts its date in the ‘early 16th century’, but I detect a hint of the ‘artisan mannerism’ of the 17th century about it. Whatever its age, it’s a striking design, with its flattened arch complete with an inner order of knobbly bricks, a triangular pediment and a studded door.

Apparently, the gateway was originally on the other side of the street, closer to the friary, and was moved in the 1960s when Eastgate was widened, a welcome bit of preservationism in an era notorious for knocking old buildings down. The wall in which it is now embedded is itself made of an interesting array of old materials – bricks, stone rubble, and better quality ashlar masonry. Anyone seeing this as they are walking around Beverley, if they’re interested in the history of the friary, should head to Friars Lane and look at what remains of the building itself. A couple of details from this structure will be the subject of a future post.

Manchester, Portland Street

One for Cottonpolis

Some of Manchester’s commercial buildings are so vast that they defeat the photographic efforts of a mere amateur with an iPhone. You really need skill and a camera with a good wide-angle lens to do justice to the 1850s monster on Portland Street that is now the Britannia Hotel. The whole thing is around 300 ft in length and the seven storeys reach about 100 ft in height. A structure with clearly palatial aspirations, it began life as a warehouse for the textile merchants S & J Watts, Manchester’s biggest wholesale drapers. It was a home trade warehouse, in other words a place where British clothing and haberdashery retailers would come to inspect and order stock for their shops. Inside were grand showrooms, where customers could examine the goods, plus floors for storage and offices for the administrative staff.

Architectural historians such as Clare Hartwell* have detected a similarity in the overall shape of the building to the Fondacho dei Turchi in Venice. That’s true enough, but let no casual user of AI be foxed into thinking that this hulk of a structure is ‘in the Venetian style’.† Apart from anything else, something as weighty as this would surely sink into the lagoon. As for the stylistic treatment, Manchester architects Travis and Mangnall threw the kitchen sink at it. Each floor is treated differently, and there is a mixture of Italian and English Renaissance detail, plus the rather baroque heavily rusticated entrance floor, where the deeply cut masonry and big voussoirs of the arches are combined with more delicate carved detail, some of which is visible if you look closely.¶ At least the detail is all classical, one muses…until one looks up to the skyline, where the four towers have wheel windows that could have come from a Romanesque cathedral.

The differences between the treatment of the floors, together with the fact that there seems to be a lot of variation in ceiling height, give the warehouse a satisfying vertical rhythm, but the overall effect from street level is the simple one of overwhelming size. It’s an enormous lump, for sure, but one that reminds us of the chutzpah of the Manchester cotton traders, of the scale of their activities, and of Manchester’s justified pride in its status as Cottonopolis.

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* Clare Hartwell, Manchester (Pevsner City Guides), 2001

† An AI-generated description saw while looking up various accounts of the warehouse online: caveat googlor.

¶ It’s worth clicking on the images to enlarge them. 

Manchester, London Road

 

When size matters

I have marked my recent visit to Manchester with a series of posts on three of the city’s small architectural gems – a cinema, a chop house and a library – structures that many people might miss in a city full of buildings that are on such a large scale that they command the view. For my next couple of posts, then, I turn to some seriously big Mancunian buildings.

Hardly has the visitor emerged from Manchester Piccadilly station than the parade of architectural juggernauts begins. In London Road, straight opposite the railway hub, is this Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century. It’s an enormous structure, and the part visible in my first photograph is just one facade of a building with four unequal sides surrounding a large courtyard. In 1906, when it was completed, Manchester was a prosperous city that wanted to give the emergency services a home that was architecturally magnificent and the design, by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham,* fits the bill. There’s the full Edwardian panoply of towers, turrets, domes, classical columns and grand entrances, all in a combination of red brick and glazed terracotta. Rows of windows are testimony not only to the various offices occupied by the emergency services and the coroner’s staff, but also to the many apartments provided. Workers such as firemen, on call night and day, often lived on site, in this case in homes that were better than most of those in the surrounding, rather poor, area. Whatever one feels about the design as a whole, the architects made a noble effort to compose the diverse elements – the large entrance arch, the rows of windows, the recessed section with its pairs of columns, the various towers – to create a convincing composition.

The decorative details, for those with the time to give them the attention they deserve, are likewise impressive. Among the best are above the largest entrance on London Road. Above the great central arch are two groups of allegorical figures. On the left are three figures representing fire: they bear torches and thunderbolts, and their hair is aflame. Opposite are three water-carriers, who offer the solution: at their feet are fishes and foliage grows prolifically above their heads, representing the life that can thrive when the danger of fire has been averted. Figures with similar iconography are set above the central window and within the arch, near the ‘FIRE STATION’ plaque.

This extraordinary building served the emergency services through much of the 20th century, most of it closing when the fire-fighters moved out in 1986. With the closure of the coroner’s court in 1998, the place was finally empty. In spite of a plan to convert it to a hotel, it was left abandoned and deteriorating until recent years and now a new scheme is underway for a mixed-use conversion. I believe work on this is still ongoing.

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* A short-lived local partnership of three architects who practised with various partners and in different groupings. Manchester, a large and growing metropolis, was able to sustain numerous architects – most of the Manchester buildings that I’m posting were designed by firms based in the city.

Manchester, Kennedy Street

 

Venice in the North

Drawn along Manchester’s Kennedy Street by the sight of an interesting looking pub, I followed my nose and ended up in front of one of the most surprising bits of 19th-century Venetian Gothic architecture I’d seen in a long while. The least Venetian part of the facade, the stone band about three-quarters of the way up, is the most informative. It bears the words ‘MANCHESTER LAW LIBRARY’, which are emblazoned across the building to tell us the place’s original purpose: it was, in fact, one of the first specialised law libraries outside London when it opened in 1885. It must have been a boon to local solicitors and barristers who needed to look up a bit of obscure law. It continued in its original use until relatively recently.

The architect was Manchester man Thomas Hartas, a young architect for whom this was his first major commission – and, alas, his last since he died in his early thirties, about a year after it was built. The front is virtually completely covered in Gothic tracery – a mixture of tall, cusped windows and roundels expressed as quatrefoils or divided up into a number of flower-like tracery patterns. At the centre is an oriel window, which lights the large first-floor space that made up the library’s reading room. 

The facade is divided vertically into three bays, each made up of trios of windows. These bays are separated by stone uprights that project towards the street, making them more substantial, as they must need to be to support this lace-like frontage and the floors behind. Within, there are no doubt various columns and load-bearing walls that hold the structure together, as well as helping to bear what would have been a considerable weight of shelved books.

As the light began to fail on the winter afternoon when I took my photograph, the interior lights shone out, revealing ceilings and supporting arches within. Back in the 1880s, the effect of the whole building lit up at night must have been striking: a beacon of law and of Venetian architecture, although no canal laps in front or behind and this mock-Venetian palace is book-ended by more conventional Victorian office buildings. A welcome sight, now and then.