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.

York, St Sampson's Square

 

Scene with cranes

As regular readers of this blog will have noticed, I’m rather fond of pubs decorated with tiles. There was a great fashion for tiled pubs in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when pub owners liked the tiles’ wipe-down surfaces and their colourful appearance – if you’re offering hospitality, it pays to stand out on the street, to catch the attention of passers-by as well as locals. The Three Cranes in York’s St Sampson’s Square has a tiled ground floor that certainly fulfils the easy-care and easily spotted requirements, but it’s also clearly a popular place to gather. Rather than photograph the whole building, and a whole lot of people, I looked up at the beautiful tiled sign.

So here are the three cranes in their watery and reed-surrounded habitat, an elegant trio indeed. They must have been a satisfying job for whichever artist produced them at Doulton’s, say, or Minton’s or one of the other factories that produced architectural ceramics.

When I researched the pub’s history I got a surprise. It turns out, if a York Press article of the year 2000 is to be believed, that the pub goes back a long time. There was certainly a public house on the site in the 18th century – the sign is clearly a later addition and a photograph from earlier in the 19th century shows it with the same name but a sign without a picture. The same article says that the pub’s name does not derive from wading birds at all. Apparently the square in which the pub stands was once the city’s Thursday Market, where cloth was sold. A trio of wooden lifting cranes were installed to load and unload goods, and these are said to have given the pub its name.

The three birds, then, are a later reinterpretation of the name. But given my weakness for architectural ceramics and the sheer quality of this tiled sign, I for one don’t grudge this change from mechanical to ornithological.

York, Feasegate

Iron on display

Look up in central York and, above the shopfronts, you’ll see all kinds of evidence of the city’s architectural and social history. Georgian brickwork and sash windows are quite frequent (I think there are some Georgian sash windows reflected in the upper-level glazing of the building in my photograph). Tudor or earlier timber framing can also be found with ease – with great ease as its black and white patterns readily catch the eye. Here’s something different, a legacy of York’s later history. Above the frontages of the Yorkshire Building Society and Motto Sushi is a facade that’s nearly all glass, held together with iron beams and slender columns and punctuated with still more slender glazing bars.

The generous iron eaves cornice at the top allies the building to classical culture, but the proportions of the rest are not at all classical – this is a structure of the industrial age, and it shows. Its builders have put the technology of the railways and factories to use in a shopping street – this was a substantial multi-storey shop, with upper windows in which large goods such as furniture could be displayed. It’s the shop as showroom, and 100 years ago made a bold architectural statement amongst the brick and timber facades, although most people now barely notice it.

The building was completed in 1885. The architect was called W. Brown* and the framework he specified was manufactured by York’s Thomlinson Walker foundry – the foundry incorporated their name into the structure’s right-hand upright, where it can still be seen (albeit made less distinct by successive coast of paint), low down on the base.† The presence of the founder’s ‘signature’ draws attention to the fact that in spite of the modern shopfronts, the whole structure, from pavement level to cornice, is still very much intact.

Iron foundry name on base of column

The other key element in this facade is of course the glass. This is plate glass, the production of which had come on in leaps and bounds since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a huge quantity of the material was produced for London’s Crystal Palace. So the technology was well up to speed by the 1880s. Even so, using such large sheets of glass with such slender supports was unusual – Pevsner refers to the facade as ‘a remarkably radical piece of work’. True. It’s well worth craning one’s neck to take a look, though many will draw the line at getting down on one knee as I did to take a picture of the founder’s name.

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* I wonder if he was the William Brown listed as ‘architect and sanitary engineer’ in York in the late-Victorian period.

† This foundry’s reach extended far beyond York – they made the railings at London’s National Gallery.

York, Rowntree Park

 

Gate of peace

I thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.

Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about the park does, however, confusingly refer to it as a lychgate, the structure traditionally marking the entrance to a churchyard, where at funerals, the bearers may rest with the coffin, before proceeding on to the church (‘lych’ being an old word for corpse).

In fact it is a gateway from the outer part of the park, where the café stands, to a quieter inner area, a garden with a water feature, a statue of Mercury and an ample supply of benches, where one might rest and indeed remember those who laid down their lives in war, as the Rowntree family clearly intended. I have begun to think of it as a lychgate to a memorial garden, that garden being the horticultural equivalent of a cenotaph.

The gateway’s simple vernacular structure does this job well, aided by two further powerfully suggestive elements. Inside are two brass plaques, describing the donation of the park after World War I and the further donation of some fine wrought-iron gates after World War II. The first plaque is in retrospect very sad, expressing at it does the hope that the first conflict might be the ‘end of war’ and that the creation of the League of Nations might be the crowning post-war achievement. In the light of subsequent events, a further suggestive symbol is perhaps more powerful: in the roof of the lychgate is a dovecote – the entrances for the birds are just visible in the gable end – and white doves still flutter in and out. At least these delicate creatures endure, living symbols of peace, both peace in general and the peace of the garden that the Quaker Rowntrees shared with those of us who survive.