Late-flowering modernism
I’ve been passing by this building on Hereford’s inner ring road for years. I remember being vaguely aware of it as a teenager (when I was a teenager, I mean, although the building was probably in its teens at the time too). But thanks to a few long waits at the traffic lights I’ve started to look at it more lately. And now the building looks past its best, and the shops on its ground floor look closed, and I’m thinking I ought to share it with you, while it’s still there.
Looking at the Franklin Barnes building is also timely because, as many readers of this blog will know, the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain is being celebrated, and this looks like a building designed very much under the influence of the kind of modern architecture fostered by the Festival, the sort of modern design that didn’t mind playful use of colour, or sculpture, or whacky lettering – modernism with a human face, as it were.
There are so many typically 1950s things about this building. Look at the way the central block is arranged in a series of layers – a central white core, then two slabs of red bricks, then the two layers of boldly framed windows. This massing in layers or slabs is very 1950s, as are many other features – the railings on the block to the left, the use of small tiles of grey slate for some of the facing, and that bold lettering, which, if not actually lifted from the Festival Hall or the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, must have been influenced by the ‘Egyptian’ letters used there.
Architects Cecil Corey and Harry Bettington certainly knew how to pull all these elements together. But what was this building for, and who was, or were, Franklin Barnes? Furniture dealers? Electrical retailers? No. The sculpture in the niche gives the game away. It’s a stylized flower by Trevor Worton: Franklin Barnes ran a garden supplies business and florist’s. May their building continue to flourish.
How marvellous. That lettering for 'Franklin Barnes' looks like a variant of the once abhorred Profil, used once for 50s telephone exchanges.
ReplyDeletePeter: Yes, it is certainly something of that ilk. Profil, the FoB lettering, and their like were very popular in the 1950s, then went out of fashion, as such things do.
ReplyDeleteI, too, pass this building on a regular basis and pause to look at it always fearful that it's going to disappear amidst plans to modernise the cattle market area.
ReplyDeleteLOVE the lettering! Reminds me of Sid James for some reason...
I can't quite make it out Philip; is that a sculpture in the alcove above the door? It looks a bit like that multiple “Traffic Light Tree” scupture on the Isle of dogs!
ReplyDeleteGinger’s owner, Bazza’s Blog ‘To Discover Ice’
Murgatoryd: There's some fifties-looking building along the side of the cattle market too, if my memory serves me correctly. I expect that will go soon.
ReplyDeleteBazza: Yes, it's a sculpture of a stylized flower. You can see it a bit more clearly (not much) if you click on the photograph so that it opens in a separate window.
ReplyDeleteMany people hate this type of architecture but I absolutely love it (which is quite handy considering I grew up in plymouth)with the profil lettering the thing that I really enjoy is that 1950's thing about having that particular verdigris copper colour somewhere along with the white and the brick colours
ReplyDeleteWorm: You're quite right about that shade of green: it's very 1950s. I was born in the mid-1950s and there was still quite a lot of it about when I was a child. It's quite remarkable, and rather heartening, that there are still patches of this colour to found, some 55 years after the event.
ReplyDeleteThank you for using the correct English County boundaries as mentioned by you in a former posting.
ReplyDelete