Deddington, Oxfordshire

This is the creature that was never seen…

Looking rather soulfully down at potential customers is this three-dimensional sign on the Unicorn Inn in the Oxfordshire town of Deddington. I’m kicking myself for not having noticed it before, as it’s an appealing sign. But perhaps these days it’s not as affective an eye-catcher as it was – driving past, you are apt to be dodging other vehicles in the town’s busy market place, which is made narrow by parked cars. Walking along the pavement, the sign is easy to miss as you pass, being tucked on its ledge, its white body set against the pale background of the wall behind.

When you do see it, though, it’s arresting, the golden bits helping its white body to stand out against the white wall, and it’s one of those bits of folk art that’s worth admiring. And what a fine and distinctive creature to put on your inn – mythical, enigmatic, elusive (‘This is the creature there has never been,’ begins Rilke’s sonnet on the beast, in J B Leishman’s translation), and yet instantly identifiable all the same.

I’ve managed to miss the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of Folk Art in London, but intend to catch it at Compton Verney soon. I’m hoping that it includes some pub signs – both painted and three-dimensional – along with the marvellous ships’ figureheads, shop signs, felt pictures, and other delights I’ve seen illustrating reviews of the show. Traditional inn signs, it seems to me, offer a terrific opportunity to display works of art out of doors, and the nature of the genre dictates that they be clear, easy to read, and characterful. Even though I found it hard to spot, Deddington’s unicorn makes up in character what it lacks in other ways: it seems to fit the bill.

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If you like this sort of thing, I’ve noticed a few other three-dimensional inn signs on my travels. They include: the uniquely named Dying Gladiator at Brigg, Lincolnshire; the splendid, gold-maned White Lion at Upton on Severn, Worcestershire; the Old Sugar Loaf at Dunstable, Bedfordshire; and the Swan at Wells, Somerset (with musical bonus).

Clifton, Bristol

Old orders changing

Over the years that I have been writing blog posts about England’s buildings I’ve naturally come across a huge number of buildings in the classical style, using one or more of the orders that were originally developed, as the basis of an adaptable architectural and decorative vocabulary, by the builders of ancient Greece and subsequently borrowed, adapted, and added to by later generations. On the blog in the past I’ve shared my appreciation of English versions of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders in buildings as diverse as shops and railway stations. I’ve also come across some more unusual versions – Borromini’s baroque, inverted form of the Ionic capital, for example, and the peculiar but decorative ammonite order developed by the appropriately named architect Amon Wilds.

Strolling around Clifton one evening not long ago, I came across another, with a capital that has two rows of leaves – acanthus at the bottom, and taller leaves rising above them and curling over at the top. It does not belong to the accepted group of orders, but with its mouldings and acanthus leaves is unmistakably classical. What can it be? I took it to be a version of the Pergamene order, an uncommon order named after Pergamon in Turkey, where it’s used on the Temple of Trajan; it’s also found on the Stoa of Eumenes on the Acropolis at Athens (Eumenes was a king of Pergamon). In its rare ancient outings, this order usually has a capital with one ring of gently curving leaves; these are said by architectural writers to be like palm leaves, but, like many architectural leaves, they are very much altered and stylized.

Now I think this order is another less well known neo-classical order, the Spalato order, derived by Robert Adam from the buildings of the emperor Diolcletian at Spalato (now known as Split) in Croatia. This was one of the details Adam drew from Diocletian's palace, where he was also much influenced by the spatial handling of the interiors (especially the use of adjoining rectangular and semi-circular spaces). Adam published his Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalato in 1764, and the book helped spread these ideas. These Clifton columns, and the frieze they support with its band of swags, is very Adam-like, but presumably post-Adam in date.

Well, whatever the date, the order is decoratively used on this building, harmonizing well with the swags above it. Also these curved forms – leaves, capitals, columns, swags, and so on – help the structure turn the corner gracefully and gave masons and stone carvers an interesting opportunity to show off their skill. On a sunny evening – how classicism benefits from a dose of sun! –  they come crisply into their own.

Louth, Lincolnshire

Fifty years on

Looking at a cast-iron street sign in Bridgnorth recently, I was reminded of other places where I’ve seen such signs and one of these is the market town of Louth in Lincolnshire, a town that still retains a lot of its Georgian and Victorian buildings as well as a late-medieval church which boasts what I think is England’s most graceful spire. Something that struck me when I visited relatives in Louth as a child was not the buildings but the street names – Louth is one of the places, like York, that has many names ending in ‘gate’, a suffix that derives from a Nordic word for ‘street’ and dates back to Viking times. Louth has streets called Eastgate, Northgate, Upgate, Kidgate, Chequergate, and Gospelgate. I’m sorry I don’t have a photograph of one of the signs to share with you, but anyone who has a copy of Peter Ashley’s More From Unmitigated England will find a couple reproduced there.

Gospelgate was where as a small boy I went to visit an elderly great aunt, who lived in one of the Bede Houses, a small group of tiny dwellings around a courtyard on a corner. I did not know it at the time, but these houses for the aged were designed by James Fowler, one of Lincolnshire’s most celebrated Victorian architects. Fowler of Louth designed churches in numerous Lincolnshire villages and restored still more. Many local vicarages, houses, hospitals, and schools also began life on his drawing board. He liked Gothic, and did shops and houses in a vigorous Gothic, as well as churches.

For the Bede Houses, though, Fowler turned to a kind of brick Tudor revival style, with tall chimneys and stone dressings, matching the nearby Grammar School, which he also designed. The upper houses are accessed via very un-Tudor balconies held up on slender columns. Are these columns made of cast-iron? I think they might be. I remember the interiors of the houses as very small, but adequate. I hope they have been modernised inside by now, but I’m pleased that the exterior is very much as it was. It reminds me of visits long ago, plentiful supplies of sweets produced from my aunt’s cupboards, and puzzling over odd street names, some fifty years ago.

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Photograph of the Bede Houses by Richard Croft, used under this Creative Commons licence.

Malmesbury, Wiltshire

What we see, and when we see it

Standing next to a friend who’s a professional photographer, I know he’s aware of everything that’s going on in front of him – and quite a bit that’s happening behind, too. The wind is blowing this way, which means that in a minute the clouds will part and the sun will shine. It’s worth waiting, even if you're backed into a prickly bush to get the right viewpoint. When it comes, the sun will shine over there, setting this door surround into rich and picturesque shadow while making the paintwork of the door shine beguilingly. There’s a telephone wire over there, so we’ll move a little to the left so that it doesn’t form a distraction in the frame. On the other hand, there’s a woman in a red polka-dot dress up the road: in a minute she’ll walk into shot and her dress will make that green door glow all the more as she passes it. The pulse increases. Sun, shadow, door, dress, all in perfect alignment. The decisive moment. The Leica makes its barely audible click. And on we go to the next shot.

Naturally I try to learn from this example, but it’s slow going. I am still apt to make the beginner’s mistake of concentrating too closely on the main subject, to the exclusion of all else, and ignoring intrusive distractions at the edges of the frame. Of course, back in the studio (formerly the darkroom) even the professional photographer discovers unexpected things lurking in the shadows or on the edges, as the film Blow Up showed.

Not, I’m glad to say, that I’ve ever discovered anything as sinister as the corpse that the David Hemmings character in Blow Up discovers when he starts enlarging his prints. But even so, odd things crop up. One freezing afternoon in Malmesbury, my thoughts frankly on finding a warming cup of coffee or getting back in the car, I couldn’t resist defying the bitter wind and pointing the camera at this Gothic gateway, leading into the abbey churchyard. A bit of Georgian semi-gothic, with Y-tracery in the windows but a semicircular archway: a picturesque mishmash, in fact. Very satisfactory. Click. When I got home I saw, in the right-hand side of the frame, on this bone-chilling day, a chap erecting a folding chair. It really is remarkable what you see in photographs.

Worcester

More of the black stuff

As a brief follow-up to my post of a butcher’s shop from Ashby de la Zouch, here’s a jeweller’s in Worcester in a similar style. Again black cladding has been combined with these rather classical letters – here surviving in full apart from a pesky detached bracket. There are very effective and no doubt early display units in the window too. And I especially like the black and white striped blind that complements the colour scheme of the shop front.

The whole ensemble – which continues around the corner – creates a facade that is eye-catching, drawing in the window shopper to admire the watches and jewellery on display. Perhaps this attractive and shiny frontage, which must surely be very effective at stopping passers-by and drawing them in, is one reason why the business has survived so long.

Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire

Hygienic, high-style

As the traffic moved slowly along Ashby’s main street, my eyes raked the side of the road, looking for a parking space, and found one slot with just enough room to get in. And when I parked, straightened the wheel and glanced beyond the cars front and back, I caught a glimpse of shiny black on a shop front.

This is what it turned out to be. A lovely shining example of a black-clad art deco style frontage. I don’t know whether this is 1930s deco or if it dates from just after World War II.* The shiny cladding is probably the black glass called Vitrolite, which was very popular in the 1930s, not just because of its contemporary look but also because it maintained its shine, didn’t craze, and was easy to keep clean. Food retailers especially liked its hygienic qualities and the kind of treatment here – with a narrow frame of stainless steel, a contrasting grey band at ‘skirting board’ level, and a recessed central doorway – is typical of the style, but rare now.

The lettering of the shopkeeper’s name is in that classical-influenced style that one might otherwise associate with neo-Georgian buildings such as Post Offices. I’ve noticed a similar letter form before, above the window of a bookshop-library in Wantage. It looks effective against the black background, but it’s sad that it is starting to come adrift from its moorings. I hope the missing O has not been lost, and that the N can be reattached. Even in its current precarious state, it’s effective and elegant and better than most of the poorly designed plasticky signs seen on High Streets now.

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* I’d be very interested if any reader can tell me the age of this shop front.

Portland Place, London

The essence of place

‘Who,’ people sometimes ask me, ‘is your favourite photographer?’ Maybe Eugène Atget, with his photographs of Paris, hailed as pioneering works of documentary but with an atmospheric stillness that helps them transcend that label. Or Henri Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moments. Or Walker Evans, especially his images of run-down buildings, usually empty of people but full of their former presence. But great as all these are, I keep a special place for British photographer Edwin Smith, whose work I’ve loved for years.

Much of Smith’s work was architectural, and was commissioned to illustrate books on subjects such as parish churches, cottages and farmhouses. Smith’s wife Olive Cook often wrote the text and publishers Thames and Hudson ensured that Smith’s images got the airing they deserved. His work was in other places, too, from Vogue to the Shell Guides. And yet Smith, who worked between the 1930s and 1960s, is not that well known today – his photography seems to have been overshadowed by the contrasting kinds of work (street photography, different modes of documentary) that came along in the 1960s and 1970s. All to the good, then, that the RIBA, who hold Smith’s vast archive (20,000 prints, 60,000 negatives), have put on an exhibition of his photographs.

Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith looks good in the RIBA’s new architecture gallery at 66, Portland Place. It embraces his early commissioned work (some fashion shots, portraits, wonderful photographs of the circus), but is soon on to the typical stuff, the images of places and buildings that he made from the 1950s onwards, using old large- and medium-format cameras and black and white film. They reveal his obvious virtues and talents – a flair for composition, an eye for detail, a penchant for capturing the way shafts of sunlight illuminate things and make us look anew.

More important, though, is Smith’s genius for showing us the essence of a place. Similar qualities to those that I try to hold up for examination and comment on this blog – the texture of stone and its regional variations, the differing qualities of walls and fences, the lettering on an old Irish shop front, or the regional variations of roofing (slate, stone, tile…) – fascinated Smith. And above all the unregarded details that summon up a place and seem to paint a portrait of it. How typical, for example, that Smith should turn his back on the lovely Georgian box pews in a church like Didmarton and produce a photograph of the transept with its wooden stair. Likewise how moving that he should photograph, as well, no doubt, as the statuary and garden buildings at Rousham, some nettles growing through the slats of a bench – they make a beguiling pattern of leaf and timber.

For Smith, this portrayal of places was the heart of the matter. It was the kind of thing, he felt, that we needed, if we were to save things from the planners. In the 1950s, when Britain was being rebuilt after World War II, such bits of local distinctiveness and traditional craftsmanship were vanishing, fast. A raft of movements and publications, from the Victorian Society to Pevsner’s Buildings of England books, were coming along in the 1950s to put the case for preservation. Smith was there, alongside them, with his bellows cameras. Robert Elwall, author of the excellent book Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith, put it well:

‘The recurring themes of Edwin Smith’s work – a concern for the fragility of the environment, both natural and man-made; an acute appreciation of the need to combat cultural homogenisation by safeguarding regional diversity; and, above all, a conviction that architecture should be rooted in time and place – are as pressing today as when Smith first framed them in his elegantly precise compositions.’

That message is tied up, not just with the great compositions, but also with the telling details. Often, these are human traces – washing on a line, farm equipment in a barn, a milk bottle on the table in Furlongs, Peggy Angus’s house in Sussex – traces of people who, apparently, have just walked out of shot. They’re humble traces – ‘Ordinary Beauty’ indeed – but full of significance, and they produce an effect that’s not dissimilar to that in some of Eugène Atget’s Parisian photographs: a generosity, a lost past captured, a haunting presence hinted at, a gentle but revealing light. Atget’s was the one photographic influence Smith would admit to. I can see why.

Top photograph: Edwin Smith, Great Coxwell Barn, Berkshire
Lower photograph: Edwin Smith, Didmarton, Gloucestershire
Note: These images are taken from books. Readers should refer to original prints – in the exhibition and in the RIBA Library – to appreciate the true quality of the work. Smith's photographs are
© Edwin Smith / RIBA Library Photographs Collection


Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith is at the Architecture Gallery, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1, from 10 September to 6 December 2014.

Bridgnorth, Shropshire

On the wall, on the ball

There are certain small towns that I’ve ofter visited and that, no matter how many times I return, seem to yield further visual interest, and the occasional wonder. Cirencester, Malmesbury, Ludlow, Stroud, are all examples. And there are others, further from my home patch, like Uppingham in Rutland and Louth in Lincolnshire, that I always find rewarding when I get there. Bridgnorth, a characterful hill and valley town with a distinctive townscape overlaying its hilly landscape, is becoming another favourite.

My last visit to Bridgnorth was on the train, and this took me into the town by an unfamiliar route, taking me straight past this cast iron street sign. It was probably the sunshine that made me notice it – the light, producing just the right shadows, was showing off the letters to their best advantage and making them look bright and crisp.

And pretty good letters they are, too. They’re quite well proportioned, there’s plenty of contrast between thick and thin strokes, and they stand out well (helped by the good natural light when I took my photograph) from the background. Maybe a lettering maven would adjust the spacing slightly here and there, but I think they do their job well. The corners of the plate, with their concave curves, are a nice touch too.

I’m always pleased to see these old – often 19th-century – street name signs surviving. They are simply many times better than modern, mass produced signs, fit well into historic settings, and have an elegance of their own. I suppose some councils don’t like them because they need painting periodically, but I’d say that they’re worth the effort. I hope Bridgnorth hangs on to them.

Yarnton, Oxfordshire

The real thing

After Jacobean revival doorway of the previous post, here’s an example of a genuine Jacobean manor house. It’s Yarnton Manor, not far from Oxford, and it was built in around 1611 by Sir Thomas Spencer, altered in later centuries, and restored in 1895. The facade that’s visible today is restrained – curvy gables,* but quite small ones, projecting bays that don’t project very much, minimal classical detailing around the doorway – but lovely. It looks an attractive, welcoming house, without aspiring to the grandeur or extravagance of the great ‘prodigy houses’ of the 16th century.

The building was not always home to lords of the manor. By the 19th century it was a farmhouse and it then passed through various owners, institutional and individual. One owner well known around Oxford in the mid-20th century was George Alfred Kolkhorst, university Reader in Spanish, who moved in after he came into his family fortune, having previously lived in rooms in Oxford itself, where he famously entertained students at Sunday-Morning salons. Kolkhorst was known to generations of undergraduates as ‘Colonel’, though he held no such rank: the name was probably applied ironically because he was the least martial of men. The writer and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, in his autobiographical book With An Eye To The Future, recalls his time at Oxford, when he attended Kolkhorst’s salons in the Oxford rooms, which were full of questionable antiques, or, in Lancaster’s words, ‘objects of dubious virtue’. Lancaster goes on to say that when the ‘Colonel’s’ father died, Kolkhorst ‘moved into what he hoped was a Jacobean manor house’. Clearly, in spite of the later modifications, the hopes were justified.

After Kolkhorst died in 1958, the house was used as a dormitory by a local school before becoming the home of Oxford University’s Postgraduate Centre for Hebrew Studies. The Hebrew Studies centre is now relocating, and the manor house was put on the market earlier this year. In its quiet setting, so near the city but removed from it, it looks good for another 400 years.

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* Some sources say that these are the result of later remodelling.