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