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.