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.