Kelsale, Suffolk

Small mercy

The most dramatic aspect of the work of late-19th century architect E. S. Prior at Kelsale church (the building in my previous post) is not strictly part of the church at all. It’s the lychgate, the like of which I’ve not seen before. What an extraordinary, dynamic design. Rather than create the usual four-square structure, with a simple pitched roof above a stone or timber structure, Prior conceived something more organic. The wooden supports have a curved profile, so that they appear to lean inwards slightly. They’re massive and the roof they support overhangs deeply and curves round and up into a narrow termination shaped almost like a small spire. At the front of this spirelet is a mandorla-shaped niche, of the kind that sometimes frames the figure of Christ in Majesty. However, there is now no image in the niche, and the eye follows the roof line up to a simple terracotta finial.

This lychgate was built in 1890 and its curvaceous roof seems to point to the Art Nouveau style, just coming into fashion around that time. It also bears some similarity to the roofs of certain Thai Buddhist temples, which may or may not be a coincidence. It shows, at any rate, an architect’s ideas taking flight not in some high-profile job in a city, but in a small village far away from the limelight. A small mercy for which any building buff or church crawler can be thankful.

Season’s greetings to all my readers. May there be more mercies, small and large, in the coming year.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Hanley Swan, Worcestershire

Saints and flowers

Although as someone who writes about historic architecture, I make trips especially to look at buildings, it’s always been a feature of this blog that many of the structures I include have been seen by chance, viewed en passant, while I was on my way to somewhere else entirely. ‘When you’re shopping, look at the shopfronts. If you take the train, spare a few minutes to notice the station,’ as I’ve said more than once. Some of my buildings are ones I’ve often passed, like the church of St Gabriel at Hanley Swan, Worcestershire. I’ve glanced at its Gothic revival exterior many times as I’ve passed – precisely accurate 13th-century tracery, broach spire, chunky grey masonry. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that it was designed by George Gilbert Scott.

Finally the other day I stopped and looked inside. What drew and held my attention was not Scott’s architecture, but what lay at the focus of all this stone: the reredos behind the high altar. This is a very Victorian marble composition with a pair of mosaic portraits of saints. My photograph above shows one of these, the archangel Gabriel, revered as St Gabriel, richly robed in front of an architectural background, carrying the lily that is this most familiar attribute.This reredos, which also features lovely tiles embellished with stylised flowers (showing perhaps the influence of the aesthetic movement), was the work of two of the most prominent Victorian firms of craft workers, Clayton and Bell, to whom the design of the figures is attributed, and Powell & Sons, who actually constructed the reredos and put the whole thing – marble, mosaic, tiles – together.

So, in the early-1870s in a small Worcestershire village, a group of the most prominent artists and craftsmen came together with one of the most celebrated architects of the period to build a church and furnish it with style. They did this thanks in the main to Samuel Martin, a former Liverpool merchant who’d become a local grandee, who provided the funds. No doubt local stonemasons, carpenters, and others were responsible for the building work, too. A happy combination of local and nationally known talent.

Book round-up 3

Andrew Ziminsky, Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles

Published by Profile

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason who works on the repair and conservation of historic buildings, especially churches. He also visits Britain’s churches endlessly, and has met many fellow visitors in the process, noticing how many of them knew relatively little about the architecture, furnishings and fittings of the churches they were visiting. So he wrote this book to explain these things. CHURCH GOING guides the reader around the churchyard, the church exterior and the interior, describing the purpose and architecture of the different parts of the church (porch, nave, side chapels, chancel, vestry, etc), and of the fixtures and fittings (font, seating, altar, etc, etc). He covers everything from wall paintings to ancient graffiti.

But to summarise the book like this is to make it sound like a rather worthy handbook, and it’s much, much better than that. What makes this book so impressive (and often so entertaining) is that it’s written out of direct, practical experience. This is a guide written by a stonemason – Ziminski knows how these buildings work not just because he has visited thousands of churches (he has), not only because he has read about them (he has done that too), but because he has taken bits of them apart and repaired them.

Ziminski’s practical experience tells him that there are structural reasons why the doors of Irish round towers are set high up in the wall. He assures us that there are good structural reasons too for building a round tower when your building material is flint, as in many Norfolk churches. Contemplating the 89 carved Norman corbels on Kilpeck church in Herefordshire, he says that each one would have taken a single carver three days to create. Naturally, Ziminski shows a close familiarity with building materials, especially stone, and describes eloquently the explosive fizzing when water is added to quicklime to make lime mortar, and evokes the pleasing riven surfaces and undulations of stone church floors, whether of limestone, sandstone, granite or slate. Stone, of course, is everywhere in ancient churches, from the floor to the spire. Asked if he knows how to build a spire, Ziminski is pleased to be able to deliver a punch line he’s had ready for years: ‘Up to a point’.

One of the joys of CHURCH GOING is the author’s strong opinions. He dislikes much Victorian architecture and is particularly scornful of Victorian church tiles, with their ‘hard’ surfaces, so different from softer medieval tiles. He is against paying to enter a church. He is very much in favour of leaving in place even the most modest historic deposits. Working in a church roof he finds a pair of 19th-century shoes left by a Victorian roofer. When he shows the find to the vicar, she tosses them into the skip, declaring the idea of leaving behind such ‘offerings’ to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Ziminski continues, ‘It was uncomfortable to learn that she had broken her ankle the following day after tripping on an undone shoelace…only I know how it was that the shoes were returned to their original position.’

Whether writing about church bells, about animals in churches (bats, bees, doves), about the structure of fan vaults, about rood screens, or simply about the effect of the colours of medieval stained glass projected on to a church floor in York, Ziminski is engaging and informing and a pleasure to read. He brings details such as carved roof bosses, ‘green man’ or foliate head carvings, images of heaven and hell in wall paintings, and wooden misericords to life in his descriptions. Anyone who wants to find out more about Britain’s pre-Reformation churches will enjoy this book and learn a great deal. Those of us who think we know a lot about these buildings already will learn yet more.

Book round-up 2

Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Published by Yale University Press

Sir John Soane is widely considered one of the greatest of British architects. His work, his intellectual development, his country house designs, his biography have all been much studied and written about. But there has been no extended, scholarly account of the extraordinary collection that he amassed in his London house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This collection contains over 40,000 objects – paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural fragments, plus thousands of books. Among its many treasures are numerous works by William Hogarth (the series A Rake’s Progress and Humours of an Election), Reynolds, Turner and Canaletto; numerous ancient vases; sculpture by some of Soane’s most famous contemporaries; and countless architectural fragments. The latter especially are arranged with a theatrical flair that takes the breath away. This new book by Bruce Boucher, former Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, is the account we have been waiting for.

The great mysteries are why Soane collected so profusely and obsessively, what drove the arrangement of the objects, and what his collection was actually for. Soane himself saw it as consisting of ‘studies for my own mind’, a phrase that only inspires further questions. Boucher’s book begins with the context: Soane’s sad life – the death of his beloved wife Eliza, his falling out with his sons, the harsh criticism that a lot of his work was subjected to. It describes how he obtained the items and how he was inspired by the time he spent in Italy, by the collections of fellow architects, and by writers from antiquarians to Gothic novelists.

Separate chapters examine his antiquities, his ancient Greek vases, his sculptures, and his paintings. Additional chapters explore key themes. One such is Soane’s enthusiasm for items related to eminent British writers and artists such as Shakespeare and Hogarth – ‘British worthies’ like those celebrated in the famous garden temple at Stowe, a country house where Soane worked. Another theme is his interest in Gothic taste – not so much scholarly Gothic revivalism as the atmospheric Gothic of novels, of faux ‘monk’s parlours’, stained glass windows, and gloomy tombs. Yet another theme is Soane’s love of picturesque ruins, which fed his purchase of everything from paintings of ruins to architectural fragments and models of ruined buildings – he even imagined what his building for the Bank of England would look like as a ruin. One more thread is formed by the patterns of connections between the paintings he owned – their links to some of his friends, and the series of architectural paintings by his friend J. M. Gandy.

None of this was set in stone because, as Boucher makes clear, Soane’s collection was constantly evolving. As the number objects grew and as Soane’s priorities changed, the scope and arrangement of the house-museum changed too. So there is no single reason why the architect bought plaster casts, models of buildings, books, paintings and sculptures. His motivation altered and an account of Soane’s collection has to offer several different reasons why its owner sunk so much of his money into it.

Boucher teases out various reasons why Soane collected and parallel intended purposes of his collection. The motivation was part didactic (the architectural items were aids to teaching); part consolation for the various tragedies in the architect’s life; part expressive of his role as a patron of the arts; part a way of promoting Soane’s fellow members of the Royal Academy. As the collection grew, and because one of his two sons had died and one had become estranged from him, he decided to leave both his house and the objects in it to the nation, so that people could see it and benefit from it. Boucher explains the long process that eventually brought Soane’s wishes to fruition and also sets Soane’s museum in the context of other museums of the time. It was not quite an enlightenment museum, with objects carefully catalogued and arranged by period or type. Neither was it exactly like the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that Renaissance dukes and princes liked to display. But in its diversity, its lavishness, the place it finds for the curious, the aesthetics of its arrangement, its ingenuity, it is more like the latter – hence the title of this fascinating, rich, and superbly illustrated book.

Book round-up 1

 

Christmas is coming and with this in mind I am reviewing three recent books that will appeal to many who are interested in historic buildings. First, a book that debunks a number of historic buildings-related myths, while also taking pleasure in the stories that people tell about castles, churches, pubs, houses, and more...

James Wright, Historic Buildings Mythbusting

Published by The History Press

As I travel around looking at old buildings, I meet many people who tell me about the history of the places where they live, or shop, or worship. I’m always grateful to them and I often learn a lot from those with local knowledge. But every now and then a a story emerges which makes me sceptical. ‘There’s a secret tunnel that links the manor house with the abbey,’ they’ll say. Or, ‘This house was built using old ship’s timbers.’ Or, ‘Of course, this is the oldest pub in England.’ Why do I doubt such tales? Because I have known other places with similar stories where the evidence, once examined, is either non-existent or extremely flimsy. James Wright’s HISTORIC BUILDINGS MYTHBUSTING tackles several of these recurring stores head-on, looks closely at the evidence, and demonstrates why they’re more myth than reality.

Wright tackles ten or so myths and tests them against the available evidence. ‘Secret passages’ often turn out to be drains, ruined cellars, ice houses, wells, and the like. Many of the alleged tunnels are very long and would have to go beneath rivers, very unlikely given the engineering difficulties.

Spiral staircases in castles are the focus of another myth. They turn clockwise, it’s said, making it easier for a defender to swing his sword arm. Yet many turn the opposite way. The theory that the latter were built for left-handed castle owners seems wrong – in some castles there are examples of both types. Spiral staircases, Wright believes, are more important as signs of status: poorer people got to higher floors using wooden ladders. The very idea that spiral staircases were a defensive feature seems to date back only 100 years.

A small cluster of myths concern ancient churches. Rude carvings which upset the Victorians and intrigue us today, could not, as has been suggested, have been made by stonemasons cocking a covert snook at the clergy. The clergy took a close part in church building, collectiing the money and overseeing the work, and would have known what was being carved. A mason would probably not have dared to go against the wishes of priest or bishop and if they did, would have been made to redo the work. Another church mystery is stones in the walls that have horizontal grooves worn into them. These have been said to be the result of archers practising in the churchyard and sharpening their arrows on the church wall. There are many reasons why this cannot be true – most churchyards were too small for archery practice, portable whetstones were very common, and the ‘practice arrowheads’ used did not need sharpening anyway. Wright similarly disposes of stories about windows allowing lepers to see into church or from one part of the church into another, and ideas that blocked north doors in churches are ‘devil’s doors’, designed to keep Satan out.

Houses built of ‘old ship’s timbers’? Interestingly, Wright concedes that in a few cases this might be true. But it’s unlikely that the demands of the Tudor navy and ironworking, both often said to be responsible for a timber shortage in the 16th and 17th centuries, were the cause. Landscape historians seem to agree that the timber shortage came later, in the 18th century.

The suggestion that one public house or another is ‘England’s oldest’ is remarkably widespread. Wright comes up with a dozen pubs that are often claimed to be the oldest, six of which are said to date from before the Norman conquest in 1066. In each case, there simply is not the evidence that either the buildings as they stand are anywhere near as old as that, nor that they have been in continuous use as pubs for that length of time. Wright comes up with an alternative list of 12 with much better claims, the oldest of which go back to the 14th century.

In conclusion, Wright makes a good case for dismissing a selection of historic buildings myths. He argues that many of them have arisen out of patriotism or imperialism (England’s intrepid archers practising before winning such battles as Creçy and Agincourt), bolstered by local pride (our local’s the oldest pub), and upheld in popular films or social media. The result is a thought-provoking, entertaining, and sometimes very funny book that’s based on the scholarly research of a buildings archaeologist with deep knowledge of his subject.

Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Salt’s way

In the middle of the 19th century, Bradford textile manufacturer Titus Salt decided to move his factory away from the city centre to a new site. This move helped Salt, already rich from the production of good quality woollen cloth, to build not just a vast new mill but also an entire village to house his workers. This village was named Saltaire, after Salt and the River Aire, near which the settlement stands. Salt was the exemplary Victorian paternalist, who wanted to accommodate his workers well, in the conviction that this was both the right thing to do and likely to make them healthier and more productive. So Saltaire was provided with facilities that were well above standard for the time – not just a church, but also a school, institute (for adult education), baths, a park and a hospital.

The whole place was designed in an Italianate style by Bradford architects Lockwood and Mawson. The houses were impressive for the time. Salt did not want to provide the less than basic back-to-back houses that were increasingly the norm for workers’ housing.* Back-to-backs usually shared three of their four walls with neighbouring houses, which meant they were poorly ventilated, dark and insanitary. By contrast, Saltaire’s 800-plus terraced houses are pleasantly designed with classical details and have front flower beds and small rear yards, plus alleyways at the back. This gives a sense of space, as well as windows front and rear, meaning proper ventilation and a decent amount of natural light inside.

The day I visited Saltaire happened to be rubbish collection day, so I was instantly aware of the continuing usefulness of the alleys. I saw too how these utilitarian walkways, a little wider than they need to be, also open up the streetscape, making the housing slightly less dense, and offering views of the distant hills. Hill views probably weren’t at the top of Salt’s list of priorities. He must have been more preoccupied with transport links – river, canal and railway all pass close by. However, you’re never far from trees and patches of greenery in Saltaire and the sense of nearby nature is as exceptional as the Italianate architecture. Salt was a true pioneer in creating this kind of enlightened industrial village.† Where he went, the Cadbury (Bournville) and Lever (Port Sunlight) families followed. Today the mill’s transport links bring tourists rather than wool, and Saltaire, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, still repays appreciation.

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* Back-to-backs were especially widespread in Leeds and Bradford, so Salt would have been aware of them and their drawbacks.

† Although Salt was not the first to build decent workers’ housing, the thoroughness and scale of his development was unique for the time.

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Victorian Cromwell

Wondering around the centre of Bradford, I spent some time staring at the huge City Hall (designed as the Town Hall in 1869 and completed in 1873), trying to take it all in. The tall central clock tower, the grand iron-gated entrance, the rows of Gothic arches, the decoration, the heraldic shields, the many of statues of kings and queens, there was so much for eye and brain to take on board. Here was a building that was the equal of other Victorian town halls I’d seen on previous northern forays – Gothic pinnacled Manchester, classically columned Leeds, for example. It may well be that the choice of the Gothic style was in part due to the wish of the town’s authorities and their architects Lockwood and Mawson to do something different from the gigantic town hall at Leeds. The influence of John Ruskin’s eloquent boosting of Gothic would also have been in influence – he had lectured in Bradford a few years earlier. The tower, modelled on Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, and the abundance of carving, certainly feel Ruskinian.

The range of architectural detail made it feel perhaps still more engaging than either Leeds or Manchester town halls, and I was absorbed in examining the statues of monarchs – Elizabeth I and Victoria at either side of the main doorway, a run of others up above, all larger than life-size,* when I became aware of a man standing next to me. ‘Can you see who they’ve put up there?’ he said, and there was surprise in his voice. ‘Well, pretty much everyone,’ I answered. He replied: ‘Look next to Charles I. There’s Oliver Cromwell. How did they get away with that?’ The man who presided over regicide and became the leader of England’s only republic seemed an odd – even outrageous – choice to my interlocutor.

Thinking about this afterwards, it didn’t seem so strange. From the late-17th to the early-19th century, Cromwell had widely been regarded as a nasty piece of work – a hypocrite who had mouthed Puritan religious views and denounced (and obliterated) the power of the monarchy, only to seize power himself and wield it ruthlessly. In the Victorian period, however, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Thomas Carlyle,† Cromwell had been rehabilitated as a sincere Protestant, whose religious beliefs had underpinned his actions, who had thwarted tyranny, and who fought, in a way Victorians could understand, on God’s side.

Whether we agree or not with Carlyle’s view of Cromwell (or the extent to which we admire the monarchs whose statues surround his) matters little. The extraordinary array of 7 foot tall statues is not just impressive. It’s an attempt to put the building and the place it represents, I think, on a footing of national importance. Let other town or city halls have statues of local bigwigs or rulers who had a specific local connection. Bradford proclaims its connection with the entire country, and through monarchs such as the prominently displayed Elizabeth and Victoria, with British imperialism and the world. So rich was Bradford’s cloth trade, and so wide-reaching, that this was a connection that was to the Victorians entirely credible.

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* They were made by ta London firm of architectural sculptors, Farmer & Brindley, who were responsible for a wide range of projects including the Albert Memorial and statues on the exterior of Manchester Town Hall.

† Thomas Carlyle’s influential Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches came out in 1845.

                                   Statue of Oliver Cromwell, centre

 

Halifax, West Yorkshire

Wool and stone and dancing light

They would not have called it a trading hub in the 1770s, when it was built, but the Piece Hall in Halifax was just that: a place where hundreds of textile makers could come from the surrounding countryside to sell pieces* of cloth. Its construction was a huge collaborative effort by the small business people who had to raise the money for the building and it gave each of them a small part of a market that’s constructed on the grandest scale. We don’t know the architect of this remarkable structure, but whoever it was incorporated 315 individual rooms, each for a single manufacturer and each with its own door on to one of the open arcades that run around the upper floors of the quadrangle. The ground within the courtyard – all 66,000 square feet of it – was paved to provide a magnificent gathering space, a benefit to the city as a whole as well as an asset for the manufacturers.

From its opening on New Year’s Day 1779, hundreds of cloth-makers came to the Piece Hall and it became a key market for the West Yorkshire wool trade for almost a hundred years. However by the middle of the 19th century the textile business was changing, with the opening of more and more large mechanised mills. The new mills produced cloth on such a vast scale that a room in the Piece Hall was no use to their owners – and in any case, it was worthwhile to the buyers to travel direct to the mills. So by the 1870s, the Piece Hall was no longer needed for its original purpose. For the next century it was home to a food market, until in the 1970s this in turn was in decline, and the building was converted for mixed use. More recently, a thorough conservation programme has taken place, so that the beautiful stonemasonry and the paving of the courtyard look well and, one hopes, good for another couple of centuries. It is now, in modern parlance, a cultural hub, housing cafés, bars and shops, and forming an outdoor venue for music, other entertainments, and seasonal markets. 

Standing in the centre of the courtyard today, or looking out from under one of the arches to the opposite range of arcades, the structure is almost too big to take in. Its impact in 1779 must have been enormous – classical architecture on an almost Roman scale in a town of small houses and workshops. Walking along an arcade and looking at the continuous rhythm of the rusticated columns, windows and doors makes the place feel more knowable, more human in scale. But there’s still a sense of how vast it is as the columns and their shadows stretch to a distant vanishing point. And then the sun and stone combine to make patterns of light and shade that raise everything to another aesthetic level. This sense of small elements coming together to make something vast, and also creating dancing patterns of stone and light that visually transcend mere scale seems to me to be of the essence of this building. And of art in general, one might say.

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* A piece was a standard 30-yard length of cloth, woven on a hand loom.

Halifax, West Yorkshire

Looking up in Halifax

Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale in the late-Victorian period. I was particularly struck by a number of streets such as Southgate and Market Street. The clue is in the latter name – this is a block that contains the town’s covered Borough Market. From the streets (especially the two streets I’ve named) the architecture is very imposing, punctuated as it is with turrets, big semicircular windows, tiny windows topped with pediments, variations on the classical orders, and arches with rusticated stone blocks. There’s more than a touch of French Renaissance about all this, but it’s pumped-up French Renaissance, and Nikolaus Pevsner, in the first edition of his Buildings of England volume on West Yorkshire, was rather snooty about it: ‘in an undisciplined French Renaissance style,’ he noted.

And yet Pevsner was a greater invoker of the Zeitgeist. He often praised architecture than reflected the moods and manners of its time and this building surely reflects the confidence and flamboyance of the era in which it was built. When you get inside the market, though, the place lacks the size and theatricality of, say, the great arcades in Leeds. Everything is on a smaller scale, but there’s still an impressive iron and glass roof, with a dome in the middle, which does a good job of getting light into the market, bounded as it is on all four sides by the French Renaissance shops. Those who look up see clear glass (5850 square metres of it), fan-shaped windows with iron tracery, the octagonal dome itself, and a small forest of iron columns holding everything up. This is where the discipline is in this building – the discipline of good engineering that makes everything fit together in a neat and well balanced way and where the Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty) are very much in evidence. The local architects, Leeming and Leeming, did a good job in the 1890s, and their building has stood the test of time: it still seems well used.*

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* There’s more on the history of the market here.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Attention! Authority!

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the signs of yesteryear are one of my perennial obsessions. Old signage, especially in the form of signs attached to buildings, has cropped up in my posts many times over the years, whether on shop fronts, in railway stations, or down dark alleys. As a pendant to my previous post about the goods warehouse next to Huddersfield station, then, here is a sign (clicking on it should enlarge the picture) attached to that building.

As on previous occasions, I’m struck by the design and materials as well as the language of the message. Here the material is cast iron and the letterform is a plain, bold, sans-serif, all in capitals. That’s just what one expects on a blunt, no-nonsense Victorian notice, and the language too is in some ways very much of its time. Only the ‘PROPERLY APPOINTED COMPANYS SERVANTS’ (no bothering with apostrophes here, no pausing to question whether some of the company’s servants are improperly appointed) may work all the impressive machinery used in and around the station. The company’s servants may operate the capstans and cranes, but if the rest of us go anywhere near them we’ll be interfering with them, and woe betide us. And this decree is made ‘BY ORDER’, the once all-pervasive invocation of nameless and imperious authority. No point in asking (as I remember doing as a small boy, ‘Whose order?’). That sign-off means ‘obey, or else’. The sneer of cold command. The shadow of the omnipotent factory owner or railway company director. I took my photograph and withdrew with dignity, looking most unlike someone who would dream of interfering with a hydraulic crane.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

The great and the goods

Huddersfield station (see my previous post) had imposing buildings for passengers, but a lot of its traffic carried goods. As a result, its goods yard acquired two warehouses, the first, a plain stone building, conventionally built with load-bearing stone walls, and the one in my picture, an enormous structure held up by internal cast-iron columns with an outer ‘skin’ of red and blue bricks.

This monster storage facility was built in 1885, cost £100,000,* and came with its own built-in wagon hoist. The part of the building that protrudes from the facade at the far end, supported by large cast-iron Doric columns, contained this hoist. The mechanism used hydraulic power to raise railway wagons to an upper floor for loading and unloading. Once at the upper level, the wagons could be moved around on internal tracks using electric power, thanks to overhead wires like those supplying modern electric trains. There were also internal hoists and capstans for moving the unloaded goods around, and separating it on to the different floors, each of which was allocated to a particular commodity – textiles, grain, potatoes, miscellaneous goods.

The building has an interesting past but a challenging future. Recent years have seen a roof replacement, and works such as window and door replacements to conservation standards, and work on the interiors with the aim of making them fit for office accommodation and other uses. Marrying such diverse requirements as UK Net Zero targets, thermal efficiency and conservation standards is part of the challenge. But at least the building is being cared for and plans are being made for its future life.

 
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* There are different ways of calculating the value of historical sums of money, but the Bank of England’s inflation calculator puts the value of goods and services costing £100,000 in 1885 at £10,764,769.09 in 2024.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Statement station

Railway station architecture developed during the rail boom of the 1840s and its heyday ended as the 19th century came to its close. It thus spanned the high Victorian period, when British architecture was at its most varied and eclectic. So railway stations, which after all range from vast termini in major cities to tiny halts in the middle of nowhere, can be in any style, especially when we think of the buildings beyond the standard railway structures of train sheds and platform canopies, which developed their own kinds of shapes and forms. Stations can be Gothic extravaganzas like London’s St Pancras or pared-down engineering masterpieces like King’s Cross; they can be cottagey creations like Matlock Bath, fantasias of decorative ironwork like Great Malvern, or tiny corrugated-iron huts like many stations on Great Western branch lines. Or they can be like Huddersfield, statement stations, pinnacles of proprietorial pride in the most correct classical style.

John Betjeman called the front of Huddersfield station the most splendid station facade in England. It was designed by the York-based architect J. P. Pritchard, and opened in 1847. The frontage is actually much longer than what can be seen in my photograph above: on either side of the grand porticoed central structure are nine-bay Corinthian colonnades to which are attached end pavilions, much smaller than the central bock and of one storey, but still impressively classical (see photograph below). The central block itself, with its giant Corinthian columns and rows of windows, would not look out of place as a country house surrounded by acres of parkland.

There are two reasons for the size and elaboration of this station. Firstly, it originally served two separate railway companies whose lines met here: the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.* The end pavilions were built as booking offices for these two companies, while the central section was originally a hotel. Eventually the combined booking offices were accommodated in the central building and the pavilions were given over to buffets and bars. Second, the centre of the town was being largely rebuilt when the station was being planned, and the owners of the manor of Huddersfield (the trustees of the Ramsden family), apparently wanted a grand station to complement the large square that was planned – the facade extends all the way along one side of this open space. Its neighbours on the square include Britannia Buildings, a palazzo-like block designed as a warehouse, showroom, and offices for woollen manufacturer George Crosland, and the Italianate George Hotel, built soon after the station, no doubt as it became clear that the accommodation in the station building was not adequate to meet the demand. The station’s other famous neighbour is a statue of celebrated Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson – a local man portrayed striding purposefully along. He’s in silhouette in my photograph,† because on this blog, it’s the architecture that matters.

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* For the full story of the amalgamations and taker-overs involved as these lines evolved, see standard reference books. One of the most helpful for those interested in railway architecture is Gordon Biddle, Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2003).

† There are plenty of photos of the statue online, for example here.

Newport, Shropshire

In the sun

As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s another shopfront, this time from the 20th century. The building behind and above the shopfront is interesting in its own right, but for what is hidden from the street as much as what can be seen. The brickwork above the shop window is Georgian, as in my previous post, but this time it’s an 18th-century refacing of an earlier building. What is behind is apparently a 17th-century structure that incorporates an earlier, 16th-century, timber-framed building – a palimpsest of periods that’s typical of English towns, though the accumulation is often hidden from the casual passer-by.

But as I’ve already hinted, it was the shopfront that made me stop and stare. This seems to be a shining example of Art Deco, the style of decoration and architecture that flourished from about 1925 to the start of World War II. So we have a glazed door with a pleasing pattern of panes, all neatness and straight lines. But what’s going on above is more remarkable. The transom, the glazing bar that separates the large lower part of the shop window from the part at the top, rather than being a straight horizontal as is usually the case, describes a gentle continuous curve, reaching its highest point in the centre of the shopfront, above the doorway.

The glazing in the upper section of the window (the transom light, as it’s called) makes three very graphic patterns of clear glass, frosted glass, and leading – in the centre, a sunburst (a classic Art Deco motif) and on either side a more angular, geometrical version of the same design. How revolutionary and modern this must have looked in around 1930. How redolent of its era, a time of glamorous cinemas, brightly coloured fabrics, and Clarice Cliff ‘Bizarre’ coffee sets, it seems today.

Abingdon, Berkshire*

Theme and variations

I was reminded the other day of how I first found out about a late-17th century house in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire. My friend Peter Ashley¶ told me to glance in my rear view mirror as I drove around a bend in the village – I’d see something I’d like, he informed me. The house, which I had to stop to have a look at, features in a blog post of years ago. It’s one of those typical late-17th century houses – symmetrical, with a hipped-roof, dormer windows, classical doorway, of brick with stone dressings. This theme, of a box-like, symmetrical house, was repeated and developed for over a century. It’s the basis both of grand country houses and of many smaller houses in towns and villages.

By the 18th-century, there were many variations on the theme. Casement windows were replaced with sashes, roofs were sometimes gabled rather than hipped, there were endless varieties of doorway design and decorative carvings on keystones. I was reminded of the town of Abingdon (once in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire), which has several such houses. Looking in my picture files, the best photograph I have from Abingdon is not of the grandest such house, but a good one nonetheless. It’s in East St Helen’s Street in the centre of town and dates to 1732.

The front elevation feels a little squashed, as if the unknown architect was determined to get in the full complement of five windows across the first floor. There are virtually no stone dressings – but there are several such houses in the town that lack this feature, making do, as here, with variations in the brickwork – the chequered pattern and the use of banded brickwork for the quoins and of bricks for the arches above the windows. The keystones to the window arches must be stone, but have been painted white to match the woodwork.

The effectiveness of this design has its roots in a very pragmatic use of elements of classical architecture – symmetry, quoins, pilasters, and so on, without the full-blown apparatus of a portico with columns and a pediment (as in the library building in Stamford that I posted recently). Much 18th-century British architecture uses this vocabulary as a kit of parts that can produce visual harmony. I’d argue that the result is often even more characterful when, as here, it’s combined with elements of local style and material, such as the red and silvery bricks that make up the facade. It’s not trying to be grandiose, rather creating polite architecture on a modest scale. To my mind, the house achieves this very well. It has the quality of elegance but also a sense of strength – there’s nothing about it of what the Resident Wise Woman calls the frou-frou. I hope it’s as pleasant to live in as it is to look at.

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* I use the old county to remind myself and readers that Abingdon is in the Berkshire volume of such guidebooks as Pevsner's Buildings of England series. 

¶ Author and photographer of the Unmitigated England series of books and many others; see his Instagram feed @unmitigatedpete

Chester

Strangely compelling

Back in August, I posted about an extravagant garden ornament at Peckforton, Cheshire in the form of a large stone carving of an elephant bearing a turreted castle on its back. I mentioned that the symbol of the elephant and castle was a medieval motif (which survives, for example, in the names of some pubs) and that one example of the medieval period was a wood carving in the choir stalls of Chester cathedral. Going through my photographs today, I found an image of this carving and thought it was worth a post of its own.

The stalls at Chester were made in the late-14th century (1380 is the usual date given by historians) and, although they were restored in the Victorian period by George Gilbert Scott, still retain much of their medieval woodwork, including misericords and striking carvings at the ends of the rows of seats. It’s clear straight away that whoever carved the elephant in my photograph knew a lot about contemporary stonework and fortifications – as how could they not, working on high-status buildings such as Chester cathedral. The carved castle has a clearly delineated entrance arch with portcullis and corner buttresses; this rests on a substructure adorned with a pair of cusped blind arches – just the sort of forms that the carver could see all around him in the cathedral. Beneath this a strap extends around the animal’s girth to secure everything place. If you were a medieval artist carving the castle-like howdah on an elephant, this is pretty much what you’d come up with. But how would you think an elephant should look if you’d not seen one, and had been told that it was a beast of burden big and strong enough to carry a castle on its back? This carver conjured up a body that looks rather horse-like, a strange smallish head with an outsize eye, and a trunk looking like an overgrown worm. The creature is bizarre, but not quite in the way that an elephant is bizarre.

How did contemporaries see the elephant? No doubt the monks who commissioned the carving knew how medieval bestiaries describe the elephant as chaste, courteous, and helpful to mankind. He was also seen as a symbol of Christ because of his ability to raise men up, but he was a worldly helper of humankind too, because he could carry men at arms into battle in his castle. Chester’s elephant keeps good company with the dragons, wyverns, unicorns and wodwoses that can be found nearby, placed there either for instruction or simply for delight.

Grantham, Lincolnshire

Everywhere in chains

Where William Henry Smith (stationer) and Jesse Boot (chemist) began, the other chain retailers followed. In the late-19th and 20th centuries, countless high street shops belonged to chain store companies, who aimed to have a branch in every town and to corner the market in their specialist area, ensuring that a shopper in Brighton could travel to Bradford and find some* if not all of the same familiar names: Montague Burton (‘the tailor of taste’), Freeman, Hardy and Willis (shoes), MacFisheries, and the various grocers and dairymen – Sainsbury’s, Lipton’s, Home and Colonial, Maypole. So many have gone now, victims of takeovers or losers in the wars of commercial competition. But now and then a bit of a shopfront, a sign, or a threshold mosaic like the one in my photograph hangs on to remind us of their former presence. Not just ghost signs, wall-emblazoned faded phantoms of former glories, but also these resilient threshold brandings. Look down in any high street, and you’re likely to spot one or two.

So here in Grantham is a reminder of Maypole Dairy, The company began in 1891 and by 1918 they had 889 branches. Their formula was simple: stock a very small range of the dairy products that ordinary people bought all the time: milk, butter, margarine, eggs, tea. At first they did well, but profits fell after World War I and they were taken over by Home and Colonial, although the stores kept their old name; there were still Maypole shops until the end of the 1960s.

The shops were small but stylish. They had tiled interiors (sometimes with pictorial tiles) and gilded lettering in the name signs. Most of that has gone, but a number of these threshold mosaics can be found. The one in Grantham is typical. The letterforms, with their forked terminations to the strokes, have a touch of late-Victorian whimsy about them, even a touch of Art Nouveau. If you look at those terminations closely you can see little ovals, as if they are made of tree branches that have been sawn to size. Arranging the tiny tesserae to make the letters (each of which has a surrounding border of even tinier tesserae), the central flower and leaf, and the background pattern, took both skill and time. But a century ago and more, this was a standard way of branding a shop exterior. Over 60 years after the last Maypole closed, this one is still putting recent shop entrances to shame.

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* Although not all chains had nationwide coverage: some stuck to their local area, some covered the north but not the south and vice versa.

Stamford, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire Tuscan

‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is plain and empty and about as simple as you can get, with a ‘dentil course’, widely spaced, either made up of the ends of supporting timbers or suggesting their presence.

Why such plain Tuscan architecture for a library? Not, I thought, in some kind of tribute to great Tuscan poets (Dante and Petrarch, for example). But when I researched the building, I found that it didn’t start life as a library at all. What you can see in the photograph was originally the entrance to a market and shambles,* built to designs by local architect William Daniel Legg† in 1804–8 and converted to make the front of a library in 1906. Those windows and the walls that surround them are additions of the latter phase.

So the Tuscan portico was no doubt a simple and relatively inexpensive choice to create a strong statement at the market entrance – an entrance that’s easy to see from a distance among the shops that surround it. It stands out, while providing a generous central span to allow not only people but also goods to pass in and out with ease.There’s no fancy ornament to get damaged by barrows or carts, just good plain building. It’s a landmark on the street. And now it’s a library, its stand-out design is still valuable in what I’m sure is a much valued community asset.

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* A shambles, in this sense, is a row of stalls selling meat, or a row of butchers’ shops often built on the site of former market stalls.

† Casewick Hall, the stables of Panton Hall, and Vale House in Stamford itself are among Legg’s Lincolnshire works. He also designed some gate lodges for Burghley House near Stamford.

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

A last resort

Taking some brisk urban exercise in Chipping Norton, I decided to walk up the gentle rise on the Banbury side of town, aiming for a building I’d often passed in the car, the attractive wooden cupola in my eye corner, but never paused to look at properly. If I tell you that the cupola tops an octagonal roof and that there are two further wings projecting from the octagon on the other side, some of you will guess what this building originally was. It was a Victorian workhouse, a place designed to house the poor and homeless in a structure so spartan, and under a regime so harsh, that only the most desperate would take refuge there.

Workhouses in their most familiar form came about in the 1830s, when a combination of bad harvests and unemployment reduced large numbers to dire poverty. Under an Act of Parliament passed in 1834, support was only given to the poor if they would enter the workhouse, where accommodation was given in return for arduous and soul-destroying labour, such as picking oakum for ships or breaking stones for road-building. This law led to the construction of large numbers of workhouses, many designed by the young George Gilbert Scott, who built up his architectural practice with this work.

The Chipping Norton Union Workhouse was designed by George Wilkinson* of Witney in 1836. The layout follows the panopticon principle, devised† originally for prisons, with a central office area with wings extending outwards. The wings contained the accommodation,§ the central block was where overseers could keep watch on the inmates inside and in the courtyard. The interiors would have been very plain and basic, although there’s a separate administration block, which is altogether more classical and ‘civilised’ in style, for the offices of the union that ran the institution.

Workhouses declined in importance with the gradual development of the welfare state in the 20th century. Chipping Norton’s was eventually converted into housing in the 1990s. The place now exudes the quiet atmosphere of middle-class life in a country town. During a chance encounter with a resident, walking her dog, I learned that the houses form a pleasant enclave in which to live. A transformation indeed.

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• No relation

† The panopticon concept is often attributed to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham himself gave his brother Samuel credit for the idea.

§ Men and women (even married couples) were accommodated in separate wings. The enforced separation of married couples, many of whom had been together for decades, was one of the most inhumane features of workhouse regimes. Radical journalist, social reformer, and M.P. William Cobbett tried to introduce an amendment to the Poor Law Act to permit couples to be accommodated together, but this was rejected in parliament. The conditions of workhouse life were purposely designed to make it a last resort for the poor.

Newark, Nottinghamshire

Temple to temperance

The temperance movement of the 19th and 20th centuries found many followers who were so convinced of the evils of alcohol that they gave it up completely, often swearing an oath or ‘signing the pledge’ to steer clear of the demon drink. It was a movement not without controversy (both pub landlords and barmaids protested loudly), but it produced many buildings, such as billiards rooms, cafés, and hotels, designed to provide entertainment or hospitality without alcohol. Few of these could have been be as grand as the Ossington Coffee Tavern in Newark. Its name comes from its founder, Lady Charlotte Ossington, who gave around £16,500 of her money to buy the site and erect the building, employing the architects Ernest George and Harold Peto to design it. Much more than a restaurant, this building of 1882 contained, in addition to the ‘general coffee room’ and kitchen, assembly rooms, a reading room and library, a club room, a billiard room, accommodation for travellers, and stabling for horses. There was also a garden where, in summer, customers could listen to music – a facility that was compared to a German beer garden, but without so much as a sniff of beer or any other alcoholic drink.

George and Peto were a fashionable firm of London architects. The mix of materials they employed, and the assortment of dormer gables, oriel windows, tall brick chimneys and elliptical arches suggest an eclectic range of styles – parts of it evokes Tudor revival, other details, such as the glazing pattern in the windows, brings to mind the early Stuart period. The official listing description calls it ‘Vernacular Revival’, others call its style ‘free old English’. The building certainly has some of the asymmetry of the vernacular, garnished with the timber-framing that is associated with ‘old English’. The mixture of sources, forms and materials is handled with flair.

There’s also quite elaborate plasterwork decoration outside, although much of the original interior decoration, which featured carved wood, panelled dados, and fine plasterwork, does not survive. Both the high level of decoration and the grand architecture suggest that both Lady Charlotte and her architects wanted to emulate the flashy exuberance of contemporary pubs, with their tiled walls and bar fronts, etched and mirror glass, rich woodwork, and so on. In one nickname of the building, the Ossington Coffee Palace, we can perhaps hear echoes of the phrase ‘gin palace’.

The Coffee Tavern was aimed particularly at farmers and traders who came to Newark on market days, as well as other customers who were visiting the town or who lived nearby. However, this potentially large customer base did not fulfil its potential. It seems that the temperance hostelries that were most successful were those that did not try to imitate pubs but presented themselves as cafés pure and simple. A ‘dry pub’, on the other hand, reminded many customers that what they wanted was a real pub, complete with beer pumps or gin bottles. In any case, the temperance movement slowly declined in the early-20th century and the temperance venues that did not vanish completely became more conventional hotels, cafés or restaurants. After a few years serving the temperance cause, the Ossington Coffee Tavern became a regular hotel and is now a café and bistro.

Decoration, Ossington Coffee Tavern, exterior

Chester

 

A good front

A couple of posts ago, I noticed an early building serving the automotive industry in Clifton, a structure of 1898 that showed how swiftly architecture began to adapt to house the new business of selling and maintaining cars. This facade in Chester is what remains from another early automotive building, the Westminster Coach and Motor Car Works of 1914. The front that remains shows a combination of practicality (big arches for the easy toing and froing of coaches and motor cars) and lavish display – terracotta cladding bearing rich decoration in the sort of Renaissance revival style popular at the time, with semicircular rusticated arches, dentil courses, balusters, and lots of ornament including scrolls, foliage, fanciful beasts and the occasional human face. The building’s name and purpose are displayed in fancy lettering in the pediment.

The building was actually a replacement of another, similar in design and purpose, which was destroyed in a fire; there had been a coachworks on the site since 1870. Its owners, named Lawton, built their own cars and carriages, as well as selling Mercedes and other vehicles, together with Michelin tyres. Lawton’s also ran a motor cab company. Their building remained a car showroom until the 19709s, after which a new city library was built behind this facade, a structure that was itself recently replaced by the current shopping arcade.

I’m usually pleased when an old building finds a new use – the alternative is so often decay then demolition then the construction of a new building of poor quality and short life. Hanging on to an old facade and erecting a new structure behind it is rarely an ideal solution either. But here I think it works. The current arcade has a landmark for a frontage, with a central arch that provides a grand entrance. The signage could have been handled better in my opinion, but that terracotta extravaganza has been kept, and Chester is the better for it.

Clifton, Bristol

Life force

All Saints church, Clifton, was a Victorian building that was hit by an incendiary bomb in 1940. After World War II, a plan to rebuild the church ran out of steam after delays and the death of the architect, W. H. Randoll Blacking, and in the 1960s, Blacking’s partner, Robert Potter, produced a new design for a nave and sanctuary connecting the surviving parts of the old church (the tower, sacristy and narthex). I was especially eager to see the interior of the building when I read that it contained a large window by John Piper.

The Piper window, at the west end of the church, is huge and magnificent. It shows Piper’s familiar use of strong colours, but is different from other Piper windows I’ve seen – the design is very simple and bold, portraying two powerful symbols, the Water of Life and the Tree of Life with a directness that reminded me a little of the late work of Matisse. In the Tree image, especially, there is a lot of almost-flat colour – red, blue and yellow mainly – together with a slightly more varied range of green shades. The Water of Life, which emerges from a stylised yellow urn, flows down the window in a blue stream to the right of the urn and two sinuous orange rivers to the left. These orange streams, particularly, have a rich variation of hue and texture that I associate with the more typical work of the artist. The combination of flat and varied colour, together with the contrast between the upward thrusting branches and the downward flowing water, all on a background of deep blues, is to my eyes very successful.*

There’s something unusual about these windows that’s not at all obvious from my photograph above. They are not made of glass at all, but of translucent fibreglass, to which Piper applied coloured resins. The artist worked on the panels in situ, making the process completely different from the production of stained glass. The usual method in stained-glass work is for the artist to produce a drawing (the cartoon) and pass this to the glass-worker, who creates the window in their workshop before assembling it on site. The very different process with fibreglass – one artist working on site directly on the material of the window – may well have emboldened Piper to create this image of sweeping gestures and vivid colours, which suits the plain interior so well, a space that might have felt rather austere without it.

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* One area in which the window is less successful is that its material s not as durable as glass. There are already some signs of deterioration, and I hope these do not create a maintenance headache for the church.

Clifton, Bristol

In the vanguard

I like to wander around towns and cities, finding interesting buildings, rather than relying too slavishly on guidebooks, but before our most recent visit to Clifton I did consult the excellent Pevsner city guide to Bristol, to check whether there was anything I should be looking out for. The guide sent me to the memorable 1960s church of All Saints and hinted that there was a late-Victorian baroque garage nearby. Even the book’s enthusiastic description did not quite prepare me for this modest but highly ornate building.

Catching sight of it from some distance, I could make out the combination of brick, bands of stone, shallow arches and fancy finials that told me that I was approaching something special in that distinctive, rather frantic baroque style that was popular from the end of the 19th century into the Edwardian period. Getting closer, and taking in the elaborate decoration above the central entrance, I could appreciate the full effect: scrolls, face masks, cornices, circular window, pediment with extra large mouldings, and foliage draping down and springing up everywhere. Mr E. Edwards (his name lettered in clear, plain capitals but with a hint of the raffish in the curved crosspiece of the ‘A’) must have been proud of his premises. His architects, Drake & Pizey,* did him proud,

Remarkably, this building is dated 1898: that’s about a decade on from the German petrol engines of engineers Daimler and Benz that enabled the earliest vehicles we’d recognise as motor cars, but only three or four years after the first cars were seen on British roads.† The firm of Edwards, who both sold and maintained motor vehicles, were pioneers. Their building was in two parts: showroom on the left, workshop on the right. There are photographs from little more than 20 years ago that show the workshop still in use (as an MoT test centre). The showroom section is still used to display cars. Few late-19th century automotive buildings have outlasted the Daimlers and de Dion Boutons, the Lanchesters and Austins, that were sold or serviced there in the 1890s and early-1900s.

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* A Bristol partnership who also designed a baroque bank in Bristol, which I must also seek out.

† The National Transport Museum now awards the honour of the first car in Britain to a vehicle produced in 1895, but stresses that there are many conflicting contenders. It also depends what you mean by a car. But the point is that cars were very few in these early years and Edwards were true pioneers.

Newport, Shropshire

Gilded glamour

The time-honoured advice to ‘look up’ when walking down a street in a town or city seems spot-on for the centre of Newport, Shropshire, where one can see good quality Georgian and earlier buildings standing proud above much later shop fronts. It’s also worth pausing to look at the shop fronts, though. This is one of the best. I don’t know its exact date, or what the business was that put it there, but I’d say it’s 1880s or 1890s, and the building’s listing descriptions concurs, with an estimate of ‘late 19th century’. By the end of the Victorian period, many High Street shops were being fitted with quite lavish fronts, as retailing became highly competitive and shopkeepers vied to catch the eye of everyone who passed by. Increasingly too, shopping was becoming a leisure activity for the middle classes and, as some of this leisure was window-shopping, the people behind the counter liked to put on a good show to lure the window-shoppers inside. Part of this tendency was also about glamour or exclusivity – a fine shop front projected an upmarket image.

The designer of this shop front was given the scope to produce something outstanding. Polished pink granite, a popular material in the 1880s and afterwards, was used for the pilaster running up the front on the left – the stoneworker added vertical flutes to the upper part for extra visual interest and an elaborate cartouche design above with scrolls and a green oval. Polished grey stone lines the sloping stall riser (the strip beneath the bottom of the windows) and the windows themselves are large and lined with only slender metal columns. The panes would have been smaller in the 19th century – the big sheets of plate glass that we see today are modern.

The really special part of the front is the central section, with a dark wooden glazed door and a stunning panel above. This panel with its gilded scrolls and putti, plus the ironwork, also partially gilded, beneath, oozes quality. I wonder if this was a jeweller’s shop, or if it belonged to a seller of some other type of luxury goods. My photograph of this centrepiece also shows another telling detail., The ceiling of the entrance lobby has a dark wooden frame holding four pieces of mirror glass. This was a cunning trick to make the doorway a little lighter, while also giving those entering the odd sensation of seeing the reflection of the tops of their heads. I’ve seen this trick at least once before, above the entrances to what was originally the big ‘flagship’ store of Boot’s the Chemist in Nottingham. In combination with the gilded putti and scrolls, this makes a stunning shopfront that must have impressed the people of Newport in the 1890s and still impresses me today.

The complete frontage: Georgian above, Victorian below