Corrugated irony
Regular readers will not be surprised to see me posting a brightly coloured corrugated iron garage. I have a weakness for corrugated iron buildings, and as I drove along the A49 at Church Stretton, this one, big, blue and busy, could not fail to catch my eye. I don’t know anything about its history, though, so if any reader knows how old it is, I’d be interested to know.
As I looked at it – blue painted walls, full-height sliding doors, big windows, plentiful signage, and all – it struck me that, while I admire its purposefulness, this is just the kind of building that used to annoy writers about the countryside 50 or 80 years ago. As car use began to spread and garages and filling stations were on the increase, many were erected on highways, and they were often rather makeshift-looking structures of corrugated iron. When fitted up with big enamel signs for Castrol oil or Ferodo brake pads, they often looked untidy, unplanned, and unkempt. Writers and architects like Clough Williams-Ellis inveighed against them and I noticed a while back an example that provoked the scorn of one of the writers of the famed Shell Guides. The Reading branch of the CPRE even encouraged motorists to boycott garages with features such as ‘garish multi-coloured petrol pumps, corrugated iron and asbestos construction or the advertisements with which they were regularly covered’.
Most of these corrugated constructions have long gone. But a few hang on, like this one at Church Stretton, which is clearly very well used, a car servicing and repair business at the front end, a motorcycle company at the rear. Its paintwork is spruce, the inspection hoists are busy, and the whole structure is a delightfully different from the corporate sheds and plastic filling stations that we’re mostly used to today. A refreshing difference too, I’d say.
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In addition: Jane Brocket's Yarnstorm blog has a lovely post about corrugated iron roofs on Skye, here.
The things that annoy one generation bore the next and fill the one after that with nostalgia...
ReplyDeletePlease forgive my ignorance but "CPRE"?
ReplyDeleteWith many thanks, as ever, for your wonderful blog.
François-Marc Chaballier
Francois-Marc: My apologies. Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England.
ReplyDeleteNeil: You put it with admirable brevity. Tony Benn had a similar (less concise) line about political ideas, which began, 'First they think you're mad,' and finished with orthodoxy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this: I suspect a lot of these buildings survive, if they can be found. Big corrugated iron barn on the back lane near Kilpeck - most visitors don't go to see that!
ReplyDeleteI share your enthusiasm for corrugated iron, Phil. Buildings likes this, scruffy and ramshackle as they are, have grown into the landscape like the allotments you glimpse from trains with their random, neglected sheds.
ReplyDeleteNeil is absolutely right, of course, and puts it well, though there are more timeless distinctions also between beauty ugliness (in the eye of the beholder, at least). Buildings of both kinds are currently going up all over London, and examples of both survive from previous generations.
Joe: Yes. It's quite possible to appreciate this building in a way that's not to do with nostalgia Рsomething I tried to imply in my allusion to its 'purposefulness', a term that I intended to be a workable synonym for the current clich̩ 'fit for purpose'. Vitruvius distinguished three qualities that a building should have: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (solidity, utility, beauty). It was the utilitas that I was thinking about.
ReplyDeleteJoseph: Thanks for the Kilpeck tip. I, too, have had my eye on other things when visiting Kilpeck.
ReplyDeleteAh, now then. when I first saw this the blue paintwork reminded me of a haulage company called Swains of Stretton. Their lorries were (and indeed still are) painted in just this blue. With yellow and red shadowed lettering. In the beautiful BBC film The Combination (1982), set in 1950, one of the contemporary trucks appears. The film, written by actor Tim Preece, was shot in and around Church Stretton. I wonder if this film and the corrugated iron are related?
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, Peter. I had a look at the Swains trucks and they do seem to be a very similar colour. I shouldn't be surprised if there's a link.
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