Woodville, Debyshire

For sore eyes

I’d always fancied visiting Swadlincote – just because of the name, I admit. And because of the bizarre entry on the place in Henry Thorold’s 1972 Shell Guide to Derbyshire. This piece is mostly an extended quotation from René Cutforth’s book Order to View, which describes the ugliness of the place, which, he says, is in a district made up of ‘a loose assemblage of gigantic holes in the ground, some of them half a mile across, where clay was dug’ for various potteries. Cutforth opines, ‘It was so ugly it made you laugh.’ Woodville, which adjoins Swadlincote, is tarred with the same brush. Surely, I thought, it can’t be quite as bad as he says – not now at any rate.*

In truth, when I passed through the other day the weather was so gloomy I couldn’t possibly comment. It wasn’t the day for stopping and looking around, so I pressed on. But I did see one sight that made me resolve to return: the 1930s Clock Garage, which sits at a roundabout on the A511 at Woodville. What I could see through the gloom impressed me.† As the weather was too poor to take a decent photograph, I share one from the public domain, to give you an idea of the Art Deco glory of this building. The white walls, flat roof line, curving corner towers, glass bricks, and sans serif lettering are just the thing one thinks of when someone utters the phrase ‘Art Deco garage’. This is a structure almost up there with long-lamented 1930s landmarks such as Golly’s Garage, a lovely design with flat roof and strip windows once in London’s Cromwell Road, and Collier Filling Station, Sheldon, Birmingham (1936, by Harry Wheedon, circular, with a tall mast).§ The Clock Garage is just as much of its time as these, and one half expects to see someone standing outside dusting an Alvis Speed 20...or at least a Jowett 8. Clearly, the building’s paintwork and rendering could do with some attention, but it’s good that this place is still there and still serving a useful purpose not to dissimilar from what it was built for, when the motor car was for most a luxury and the idea of travelling on the open road, even in the industrial area that so amused Mr Cutforth, still held a measure of glamour.

- - - - -

* Cutforth’s book was published in 1962, but is a volume of reminiscences. Cutforth (b. 1909) was born in Woodville, so the description must refer to a time a few decades before the 1960s.

† What I didn’t see was that there seems to be a bottle kiln behind this building. Its top is just visible behind the left-hand part of the garage in the photograph.

§ For more about such joys, it is work seeking out Julian Holder and Steven Parissien (eds.) The Architecture of British Transport in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2004) and Alastair Forsyth, Buildings for the Age (HMSO, 1982).

Photograph by Anthony Parkes, shared under this Creative Commons licence.