Friday, August 11, 2017

Farley, Wiltshire


A twinge of nostalgia

Making a trip to Salisbury the other day, I decided to divert and look at the church at Farley, a rather beautiful bit of rural classicism that I hope to share with you soon. I seem to remember reading an account of it somewhere that praised the church while decrying the ‘ugly village hall’ next door. When I got there, this is what I found.

Ugly? Well, it’s hardly rural classicism, but as a lover of corrugated iron I found something to admire in the simplicity of this structure, which has clearly been serving the local community for many decades. It looks like something a bit more, too, than the standard off-the-shelf corrugated-iron building from one of the many manufacturers that allowed you to order up a church, village hall, or isolation hospital from a catalogue and have it delivered to you local railway station as a kit of parts. The curvy bargeboard is a nice ‘extra’, while the window at the front, which looks as if it wants the angled portions to be glazed but instead opts for more wriggly tin, is an eccentric touch.

There used to be a hall rather like this a couple of villages along the road from where I live. It didn’t have quite the same pattern to the bargeboards, and it certainly didn’t boast such an unusual front window, but the shade of faded green was exactly the same, and the paintwork was peeling in a similar way. It has gone now, and I looked at the one at Farley with just a twinge of nostalgia.

4 comments:

  1. I've not been able to appreciate corrugated iron since spending lots of time as a child at my uncle's pig farm! However, I applaud your championing of it. I helped a friend in France build a shed for his three wheel Spyder motor-bike; that deepened the apathy!
    CLICK HERE for Bazza’s loquacious Blog ‘To Discover Ice’

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  2. I love this and like you, Philip, I'm really into corrugated buildings. This one's fabulous. There's a bright red corrugated bungalow just on the outskirts of Colyford village in East Devon along with it's other, more subtlely hued neighbour. I keep forgetting but I must take a walk up there and get some photos of them.

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  3. Nope. This time you lost me. It looks too much like gussied up trailer trash. You have to be an American to appreciate what I just wrote. You do, however, have a marvelous ability to make it sound interesting and rather attractive on paper. This time you should've left the photo out.
    The Castle Lady

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  4. Thanks you all!
    Evelyn: I've had enough American colleagues over the years to know more or less what this means (although I'm sure you have to be American to appreciate the true awfulness of it)! We'll be back to civilization soon, I promise!

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