Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Beguiling tiling

I’ve posted before about the wonderful shop fronts built by the W H Smith chain in the 1920s and 1930s, most of which have now vanished. My recent post about a tiled shop front in London reminded me that I meant to return to this subject, to look at a favourite example of W H Smith tiling, still in situ in Malvern.

Smith’s shop front in the hillside town centre of Great Malvern is recessed slightly from the building line, leaving two narrow strips, like exterior window reveals, at right-angles to the street. The two wonderful tiled panels in my photographs are set at the top of these strips, and so are rather easy to ignore. How typical of the painstaking design of the time that such trouble should be taken with these easily overlooked spaces.

And what amazing images their ceramic artist produced. The car rattling along in the ‘Road maps’ panel conjures up all the optimism of the open road in the 1920s. There’s little hint of where the scene might be set (it could just as well be France as Worcestershire), but the sun is out and the road, we feel, is empty ahead. The driver has read his road map and he’s opened the throttle.


On the other side of the shop front. the bridge, gatehouse, and castle keep that advertise ‘Post cards’ are rendered in an extraordinary palette of purples, browns, and blues. The great tower seems hugely out of scale and oddly positioned in relation to the bridge. But who cares? This expressionist architecture lit by the stars (and the moon, which is presumably somewhere over the artist’s right shoulder) is simply stunning, the buildings reminiscent of the fantasy townscapes of F L Griggs, but with colour poured in, for good measure.

How fortunate that these two images have survived, while the rest of the frontage has been adapted and painted over. Their light is from another age, but still it shines.