Hereford

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.