Saltaire, West Yorkshire

Well schooled

The industrialist Titus Salt planned his workers’ village with public buildings that were both visually impressive and well designed for their intended purpose. If they proved less than adequate, Salt and his descendants tried to put things right, something that’s exemplified by one of the most impressive of all the village’s structures, the school on Victoria Road, built in 1869. From the outside, the architecture is palatial – there’s a statement being made here about the importance of eduction. Inside, the classrooms were well appointed and there was space for 750 pupils, with the older girls and boys taught separately in rooms on either side of the building and ‘mixed infants’ in a room in the middle, in accordance with the ideas of the time.

The Italianate architecture is kitted out with a full complement of columned loggias, round-headed windows, overhanging eaves, and an imposing bell turret (with a rather small but no doubt effective school bell). What’s more, this structure is richly carved. The central section displays Salt’s coat of arms within a roundel surrounded by laurel leaves and scrolls; to left and right of these elements are relief carvings of woolly creatures. These are alpacas, a reminder that Salt was one of the first in Britain to work with alpaca wool, creating alpaca cloth that became much sought-after. The use of this wool was the key to Salt’s success. No wonder he wanted to celebrate the Peruvian creatures, but in doing so he was providing an instant lesson for the school’s pupils – that’s where the wool comes from, that’s what gives your father employment, that’s why you live here. The bell turret is also richly carved – a boy, a girl, and a globe can be made out beneath its roof.

This imposing building with its lovely carvings was soon outgrown by Saltaire’s burgeoning population. The Salt family lobbied for a new school, and by 1878 a new one had been built, not as magnificent architecturally, but big enough to cope with the demand. The original school remains in use and is now part of Shipley College.

Saltaire school, detail of bell turret and pediment

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Packing a punch

Among the merchants’ buildings of Bradford’s Little Germany, the Thornton, Homan warehouse in my previous post stands out as one of the most imposing and ornamental. I thought I’d post a slightly less ornate, but still impressive, example, now known as Caspian House but originally built as the headquarters of Delius and Company. The Delius family had lived for several generations in the German Rhineland before Julius Delius moved to Bradford to develop his career as a cloth merchant, going into partnership with Charles Speyer to form Speyer, Delius & Co in 1853. Julius is best known today as the father of Frederick Delius, who gave up a place in the family firm to become one of England’s most famous 20th-century composers. By the early 1870s, Julius was a successful businessman who could build a substantial new warehouse* on a corner site in East Parade. It was constructed in 1873 to designs by Eli Milnes (1830–99), a local architect who, with his partner Charles France, was responsible for numerous buildings in Little Germany and the wider city of Bradford.

Like several of the Little Germany warehouses, the Delius building has a corner door embellished with rich carving – a roll-moulded arch covered with carved leaves, a tympanum with a fan-like design, and scrolls filling the spandrels above. The door itself has seen better days, but its scale gives one an idea of how impressive the entrance once must have been.† The doorway is by far the most ornate part of the building and the upper floors are very plain indeed. But a considerable effort was expended on the masonry of the lowest floor, in effect a semi-basement that diminishes in apparent size because of the building’s sloping site. This masonry is made up of alternate courses of pulvinated (i.e. convex-profiled) and reeded (vertically marked) stone. This is very striking when viewed from the pavement. Because the street is narrow, it’s actually not easy to look at the upper floors without standing in the middle of the road, so, as in many Little Germany buildings, the architect concentrated on the lower levels, which are most able to make a visual impact. The geometrical designs of the wrought-iron window grilles add to the effect. From the pavement level, Mr Delius’s building packs a punch.

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* I call these buildings warehouses, although they actually also included office accommodation.

† Click on the image to enlarge it. Yes, that seems to be Mr Bean on the door. I think he is left over from a time when the building was used for exhibitions and installations.

Delius building, Bradford, lower wall detail

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Palace of commerce

Architecturally one of the most rewarding areas of Bradford is the enclave in the city centre known as ‘Little Germany’. This is a network of narrow streets lined with Victorian warehouses that were originally occupied by companies in the textile business. Many of these buildings are five or six storeys high, so they make a dramatic impression in the narrow streets; their size also makes them difficult to photograph. Many of the owners were of German heritage and sent cloth across the Channel to their homeland and to other European countries. But this was not always the case. The corner block in my first photograph was the premises of Thornton, Homan, a local firm that was proud of its extensive trading network – its goods went as far afield as America and China.

Thornton, Homan’s building is typical of the more imposing warehouses in this part of the city. They commissioned Bradford’s most prominent architectural firm, Lockwood and Mawson, to design it and it was built in 1871, towards the end of the main building phase in this district. The style is broadly Italianate, producing something of the effect of a Renaissance palazzo, with a carefully detailed ground floor, reducing amounts of ornament further up, and a heavy overhanging cornice at the top.

The doorway is the most outstanding feature. This was not only a utilitarian building for storing cloth, but also a showcase, where customers could come and inspect the wares, and so the entrance is designed to impress. As in several other buildings in Little Germany, this entrance is set on the corner, making it highly visible as you approach it. The doorway is dominated by the semi-circular tympanum above the door with its large carved eagle, a reminder of the company’s close relationship with the USA. But the rest of the entrance is a riot of carved decoration – vine leaves in the panels on either side of the entrance, classical columns next to these panels, massive blocks making up the arch above the door (partly obscured by carved swags of fruit and flowers), foliate scrolls and a coat of arms in the curved pediment above.

My lower picture also shows the way in which the ground floor walls are built with large rusticated* blocks of stone punctuated by horizontal bands carved with vermiculation.† The windows have massive blocks to the arches (smaller versions of those above the doorway) and a band of Greek key decoration lower down. Not all the Bradford warehouses were as grand or as decorative as this one – the example in the foreground is much plainer. The Thornton, Homan building shows what Bradford’s architects are builders could do with a generous budget and a client who wanted to make their architectural mark. They succeeded.

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* Rusticated: masonry with extra deep joints between the blocks of stone.

† Vermiculation, part of the vocabulary of classical architecture: carved ornament designed to make the stone look as if parts of it have been eaten away by worms.

Thornton, Homan building, Bradford, main doorway

Burford, Oxfordshire

 

Street-facing

When you turn into the Oxfordshire town of Burford from the A40, you descend the High Street, the first part of which is called The Hill, towards the centre of town and the shops, the Tolsey (the market house and also, now, the town’s museum), and the parish church. The Hill is lined with houses of various dates, and one that I admire is Glenthorne House, the one on the left in my first photograph. This has a handsome 18th-century front with sash windows arranged in pairs, each window with a prominent keystone, each pair surrounded by a raised band of stone. There’s a central door with a pedimented surround and above it a blocked window, and the whole front is book-ended by stone quoins and topped with a plain parapet. It’s as pleasant a Cotswold-stone late-18th century composition as you could wish for and one might suppose that the whole house dates from the same period.

Perhaps the roof, however, is a bit of a giveaway. It’s not low-pitched and hidden behind the parapet, but higher and with an asymmetrical bow to its ridge that suggests something older. If you walk a little further up The Hill and look at the side of the house, the picture is very different. The building is emphatically not the symmetrical box implied by the street front. From the side, it can be seen how far back the house goes and how it has mullioned windows that suggest a rather earlier date – much of this probably represents a 17th-century remodelling of a medieval house. Pevsner reports that there’s a 14th-century stone archway inside the building. This side view also shows that the street front is an add-on, built against the house to present a once-fashionable Georgian face to the street.

Many house owners smartened up their street frontages like this. Often the position of the windows or proportions of the facade are incorrect, betraying a building of irregular or asymmetrical design behind. In this case, the proportions are just about right, and the makeover has been achieved with some style and grace. No doubt the house attracts as many admiring glances as it must have done in the 18th century. A few of the glancers, looking at the side elevation as well, will reflect that the human habit of responding to changing fashions has been around almost as long as architecture itself.

Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire

 

Industrial Gothic

Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) is best known today as the author of a book with the lengthy title of An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, first published in 1817 and reissued many times. This work was the first to use the names Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular for the different phases of English architecture between 1066 and the beginning of the Tudor era, names that are still often used today.* Rickman stumbled into his deep interest in medieval architecture after two disastrous events in his life, the failure of his business and the death of his first wife. He took to taking long walks in the English countryside and became fascinated by the many medieval churches he saw on his travels. His studies and drawings of these buildings led to his book and to his career as a designer of buildings – houses, at least one town hall and numerous parish churches.

I visited Hampton Lucy to see St Peter’s church, built to designs by Rickman and his architectural partner Henry Hutchinson in 1822–26§ for Rev. John Lucy, a member of the family who owned the nearby country house, Charlecote Park. I found a church that’s surprisingly large for a small village and built in glowing Cotswold stone. The style is what Rickman called Decorated, the idiom of the first half of the 15th century, characterised by rich carved ornamentation and elaborate, curvaceous window tracery. The south elevation in my photographs shows the tracery of the aisle windows with its two different patterns, using a range of curvy shapes. The pinnacles and parapets above create a skyline that’s typical of Decorated carving.

The stonemasons of the 14th century, and their successors in the 19th century, handled stone beautifully. But Hampton Lucy has a trick up its sleeve. That window tracery is not stone at all – it is actually made of cast iron. Thomas Rickman, a stickler for reproducing medieval details, did not mind using ‘modern’ materials to achieve this. He developed a fruitful working relationship with at least one ironmaster,¶ which allowed him to use high quality ironwork in several of his churches. This use of one material to look like another is the kind of architectural ‘dishonesty’ that many Victorian architects and writers rejected – if it looks like stone, they’d have said, it should be stone. However, Rickman died before this kind of purism became not just fashionable but morally axiomatic. And the results here at Hampton Lucy are impressive. I’m sure most people who see the church assume that this tracery is stone, like most other window tracery, in spite of the fact that the paint is slightly paler in colour than the true masonry. Personally, I respect the craft of the stonemason,† and when one looks closely at hand-carved work, there are always minute variations between apparently ‘identical’ windows that give pleasure to those with eyes to see it. I do find, however, that 19th-century handwork is often much more mechanical in appearance than medieval carving and in this case I’m happy to find the cast-iron tracery of Hampton Lucy not only acceptable but also ingenious.

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* I own a battered copy of Rickman’s book and admire its many engravings of medieval architecture; the book is well worth looking out for. Rickman’s four styles and their names, though not perfect for the shifting modes and evolving patterns of medieval building, are still useful.

§ The chancel was built later, after a request for a still more elaborate setting for the church’s high altar in the 1850s. Its design is by Scott.

¶ John Cragg of Liverpool, who worked with Rickman on several churches, including St George’s, Everton, which I hope to see on my next visit to Liverpool.

† Much of the stonemason’s art and craft is visible in this church, not least in the parapets and in other windows made the conventional way.

Detail showing aisle windows, Hampton Lucy

Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025

Saintbury, Gloucestershire

Relic of the Arts and Crafts movement

St Nicholas’s, Saintbury, is a medieval church sitting high up in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. As well as its medieval architecture, which includes a spire, unusual in the region, it’s known for its beautiful setting and some interesting 17th-century wall inscriptions. In spite of all this I’d not visited it before – on one occasion, I found the building closed because some restoration work was underway; one two others I couldn’t park nearby. It seemed the moment to try again. This time I found a space in the tiny parking area near the churchyard, left a note in the windscreen to explain where I was in case anyone needed me to move, and climbed the steps towards the church and its welcoming north door.

As usual when looking at a medieval church, my eye was caught by a few things I wasn’t expecting: some pleasant early-19th century pews with Gothic carving, a beautiful medieval font with an 18th-century cover (a potential subject for another post), a mysterious stone panel carved with flowers and crossed bones. There was also evidence that this church had been touched by the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1902 the church was restored by the Arts and Crafts architects Arthur S Flower and Guy Dawber, who worked widely in the Cotswolds.

Saintbury is not far from Chipping Campden, a cradle of the Arts and Crafts and home to the Guild of Handicraft led by architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee. Ashbee also worked at Saintbury, reroofing the building and adding some gilded bosses and designing a fine chandelier, which is now on display at the admirable small Court Barn Museum in Chipping Campden. Ashbee’s follower Alec Miller carved the relief figure on Saintbury’s north door, shown in my photograph. Miller studied at the Glasgow School of Art and when he left in 1902, came to Campden to join the Guild of Handicraft. He taught his art in Campden and carved this small figure of St Nicholas in 1911. It’s a 20th-century version of the carvings of dedicatory saints (common in the Middle Ages), most of which were destroyed during the Reformation.* Nicholas is dressed as a bishop (his see was Myra in Lycia, on the southern coast of Turkey) and holds his crozier and his symbol, a ship in full sail, indicating that he is patron saint of sailors and those who travel by sea. The carving is unassuming but crisply executed and it’s a delightful touch, an indication of the dedication of the church and a reminder of both how important the Arts and Crafts movement was in the northern Cotswolds in the early 20th century and how the movement’s artists and architects saw themselves as working in a tradition stretching right back to the Middle Ages.

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* A figure of the dedicatory saint was often on display in the chancel.

Chichester, West Sussex

Townhouse Doric

Chichester has a variety of 18th-century houses with admirable doorways designed using the classical orders. Many have Ionic or Corinthian columns, the two most ornate and showy of the Greek orders, but some employ the Doric order, with its very simple capitals and columns. The ‘standard’ Greek Doric has fluted circular columns without bases. Here they are framed by a pair of flat pilasters, plain and unfluted, a common device that sets off the inner columns well and, combined with the Doric entablature above, makes a pleasing, balanced whole.

Whoever restored the house has painted the broad brick strips on either side of each window white, to emphasise the way in which the proportions of the windows and surrounds mirrors those of the doorway – a nice touch although the bricks were probably originally unpainted. The quality of the brickwork is clear from the wedge-shaped blocks that form the arches above each window.

This is a sizeable town house by today’s standards, and it presents a pleasant face to the street, but its architecture is modest rather than showy. My photograph does not show its facade’s agreeable symmetry – to do so would have reduced the amount of detail visible in the doorway.* It would also have meant including more parked cars in the frame. Their presence in the street is not ideal, but they are part of modern life and one can see just about enough between and above them to give an impression of the beauty of the building.

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* Click on the picture to get a better, larger view.

Euston, London

They have their exits and their entrances

I don’t often go to London’s Euston station, because my travels don’t take me along the line that terminates there and the station itself has little to attract me architecturally. Indeed among people interested in historic architecture one of the main points of interest is something it lacks, the great monumental gateway or propylaeum, popularly known as the Euston Arch,* that formed the entrance of the station but was demolished in the redevelopment of 1962. On the face of it, a grand gateway in the classical style might seem to have little to do with a world of tracks, points, locomotives and big iron engine sheds – classical architecture seems a world away, in fact. And yet Philip Hardwick, the architect of the arch, knew that it could be powerfully suggestive. This was a grand gateway not just to a major railway station, but to all the places to which you could travel – Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and so on. The grandest of entrances thus formed the beginning of a world of travel possibilities, all reached at a speed that was impossible by horse-drawn transport. Only the most monumental architecture, the classical style and especially the Doric order, was a worthy symbol of something of such import and amplitude. The arch was not only a symbol but also an advertisement for and a signpost to this array of journeys and destinations.

The demolition was controversial from the start – there was a campaign to save it, spearheaded by experts and enthusiasts including John Betjeman. But the campaign was unsuccessful and Philip Hardwick’s grand entrance of 1837 was removed. The tortuous story of the various attempts to save the arch, either in situ or reconstructed elsewhere, have often been recounted.† But, even though the demolition contractor numbered all the stones so that the arch could be rebuilt, there was no stay of execution, no rebuilding. More recently, campaigners have put plans in place to rebuild the arch if and when Euston is again reconstructed as the terminus of the HS2 line, but the redevelopment of the station has been delayed.

Meanwhile…I discovered when cutting through the station to get to Drummond Street the other day that there’s a pub in the station complex called the Doric Arch, complete with a sign commemorating the vanished monumental gateway. It’s not a bad image of it, as pub signs go.¶ There it is, with its fluted Doric columns, its architrave bearing the name of the station, its frieze with its pattern of triglyphs, its triangular pediment. The huge size of the gateway is made clear by the way it dwarfs the cabs that pass through it. ‘This railway,’ it seems to say, ‘is really something’ – as it was in the 1830s, when the ability to travel at speed for tens or hundreds of miles was nothing short of astounding. The inn sign is modest compared to the piece of architecture it represents, but it too is both advertisement and symbol. Look on my works, ye mighty…

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* It’s not, strictly, an arch. An arc h is usually made up of a number of wedge-shaped stones or bricks held together in compression to form a curve (although it is also possible to build a horizontal arch). The Euston entrance, like other classical structures, is made up of straight vertical sides bridged by a horizontal lintel. And yet, the designation ‘Euston Arch’ has stuck, and I do not shy away from it in this blog post.

† See, for example, the Wikipedia entry and this blog post.

¶ I can’t see the gates, though.

Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire

 

Making it special

When I was in the Warwickshire village of Hampton Lucy the other day, my main aim was to seek out the large and imposing 19th-century parish church but, as so often happens, something else got my attention as well – this red-brick house. It is not large, but it’s not modest either. Wedged between the local pub, the Boar’s Head, and a single-storey building that started life as the village reading room, it stands out even when partly hidden by a parked van.

Built probably in around 1840, the house is made special first by the diamond glazing pattern and the bright white glazing bars of the windows. The usual thing in the early-19th century would have been to fit windows with square panes of glass (this was before larger plate glass panes became widely available) – diamonds, especially picked out in white like this, would have stood out originally nearly as much as they do now. A group of four diamond panes has been combined ingeniously to make a larger opening diamond in the left-hand part of the bay window, adding a quirky but practical touch to the design. Sometimes, fancy glazing like this was used as a signal that cottages belonged to a particular estate. I don’t know whether that was the case here; the only other building I saw in the village in a similar style was the early part of the village school, next to the churchyard.

The other stand-out feature of the house is the bargeboards fitted to the three gables.These twist along in a curved pattern, rising to ornate finials at the top, the icing on the cake of this building. Lower down, the front door of the house, a battened design with fancy strap hinges, is also attractive, if without the swagger of the bargeboards. To the right, behind the van, is a pair of modern garage doors that front what seems originally to have been a carriage entrance. Above it, a pain stone panel looks as if it might have been intended for an inscription, but it’s blank, leaving a tantalising question hanging over this notable building.

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Memories of empire

It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them. Close to the seafront is Marina Court Avenue, a row of dwellings built in the early-1900s. These houses have Moghul-inspired details including windows with horseshoe arches (like those on the bandstand in my previous post), together with a minaret and an array of chimney stacks in the form of miniature onion domes. The nearby Marina Arcade, with its copper-domed entrances, is clearly a development of the same period and style.

The Maharajah of Cooch Behar moved into one of the houses in 1911 to convalesce when he became ill after attending King George V’s coronation. However, the presence of the maharajah does not seem to have inspired the architecture of these houses – they were built several years before he arrived. Back then, however, this style of architecture looked less out of place in this English seaside town, because Bexhill had a major building partly in the Mughal taste: the kursaal.

Kursaal is a term derived from two German words meaning ‘cure’ and ‘room’, and a kursaal was a prominent feature in Central European spa towns, places where you went to be cured of your ills. In fact such buildings were more about entertainment than medicine – they usually had a large hall for concerts and assemblies, together with side rooms for other functions, including at Bexhill separate reading rooms for ladies and gentlemen. More to the architectural point, Bexhill’s kursaal was adorned with large ‘oriental’-looking domes and a minaret. Built in the 1890s, they survived until the building of the De La Warr Pavilion, with its theatre, café, and sitting areas, led to its demolition.

In this context, the smaller buildings ofMarina Court Avenue and Marina Arcade would not have looked out of place, creating a small cluster of onion domes, horseshoe arches, and ornate glazing to give an impression that would have seemed exotic to British visitors. This kind of architectural borrowing of foreign styles is now looked down on as ‘cultural appropriation’, but back in the 1890s and early-1900s, Britain had an empire, having appropriated not just the culture but also the land of numerous foreign powers. Buildings influenced by the architecture of India would have reminded people of British global power. They might also have reminded the people of Bexhill that if Brighton, just along the coast, could have an outstanding ‘oriental’ building in the Royal Pavilion, Bexhill too merited its share of the action.

Dome-like chimney stacks and ‘oriental’ windows, Bexhill

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Multifaceted

My liking for small, unusually shaped buildings meant that I was immediately drawn to this one, an octagonal structure near the sea at Bexhill. I wasn’t at first sure exactly what it was – a café? a meeting-place? a seaside shelter? It turns out that it is known as the Bexhill Coronation Bandstand, and was commissioned by the 8th Earl de la Warr in 1895, as part of various improvements that he made to the town, most of which his family owned. The listing description, however, suggests that it may originally have been a seaside shelter and became a bandstand later – apparently it is described as a bandstand on a photograph of 1927 and there are other early photographs of musicians playing inside it. The window back then looked slightly different, openable and with less woodwork, to let the sound out to listeners on the surrounding paved areas. Musicians still sometimes play in front of the bandstand, but these days it’s a multi-use building fulfilling all kinds of needs. When I was there, it seemed that its main purpose was to shelter people who were enjoying an ice-cream and admiring the view.

The structure looks good after its recent restoration, and its colourful paintwork is just the kind of thing that seems right for the seaside. Some of the decorative touches hint at an Indian source – the horseshoe arches of the window frames and the repeating star-like motifs that run along the lower walls. This reflects a number of buildings nearby in a similar, Mughal-inspired style, which I’ll cover in a separate post. But the bandstand is not a purely Mughal-style building. The roof tiles are typically Sussex in appearance, and the wavy bargeboard beneath them are the sort of thing one sees on ornamental buildings of many different styles Seasides need buildings like this, structures that provide a bit of decoration and a dash of the unusual. This one manages to achieve this by finding a middle way between the tawdry and the dull. Hoorah!

Chester

Alas: Smith and Jones…

In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things in and trying not to focus too much on the obvious. This involves looking up, as we’re always told to do (by people like me, for example) above shop fronts, but also looking down towards semi-basements and cellars, and looking horizontally, down alleys and along back streets. Drifting is not easy in a busy city centre in the middle of summer, but when looking up I did manage to catch sight of some interesting details without bumping into too many people. One such was this old sign for W. H. Smith, newsagents and booksellers, a name about to disappear from Britain’s high streets after more than 200 years.

Smith’s was founded by Henry Walton Smith in 1792, but its great expansion occurred under his grandson, William Henry Smith, who had the idea of station bookstalls during the railway boom of the 1840s and turned the business into a nationwide multiple retailer. By 1905, when this hanging sign was designed by artist Septimus E. Scott, there were branches of Smith’s in hundreds of locations, both high streets and stations. The sign shows a Smith’s newsboy, who sold newspapers, magazines and the occasionally book from a large basket, crying his wares as he went along, as did many other on-street newspaper sellers in days gone by.*

There are still a few newsboy signs hanging above what are still, at the time of writing, branches of Smith’s. They’re not all exactly the same – many were standard enamel signs but others seem to have been hand-painted – so it’s worth giving each one a good look. The brackets vary too, with different combinations of wrought-iron curlicues, some also featuring the name of the business, others incorporating the company’s oval-shaped ‘WHS’ device. Now the shops they adorn and advertise are being sold, as W. H. Smith undertakes the most drastic of the various restructures that have marked its recent decades. Because selling books, newspapers and magazines from high-street locations have all been hit by online sales, the role of a bricks and mortar newsagent is a tough one to play. Smith’s say they make most of their money from their travel agency business (mostly in separate shops). So another owner is buying the traditional Smith’s stores and they’ll be rebranded as ’T G Jones’.†

It’s a sad end to a long history and one hopes that the new owners are able to run the stores profitably. In spite of the effects of rival online trading, there seem to be plenty of customers in my local branch, some buying newspapers, books, or stationery, some using the Post Office counter the store contains. I also hope that the signs that still hang above such shops as those in Cirencester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Worcester, Chester and elsewhere, are retained and looked after, to remind us of the long history of retailing by this once-pioneering business,.

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* I remember as a boy listening to a street newspaper seller in Lincoln repeatedly chanting a mantra that sounded to me like ‘Hurry up, folks’. When I got nearer, I saw the name of the newspaper he was selling: the Nottingham Post.

† T G Jones (which will probably be written ‘TG Jones’), is not named after a real person. It’s a name chosen, according to a piece in the Financial Times, to reflect ‘these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street’. Hm.

Lullingon, East Sussex

At home on the Downs

I turn south off the main road between Lewes and Polegate, through Wilmington and on to the Downs. After about a mile I see a sign to the church I’m looking for, but there just seem to be two houses and some garages with cars parked in front of them: there’s nowhere obvious to stop. So I carry on down the hill to a farm where there’s somewhere to pull in. There’s one of those reassuring Sussex fingerposts with the name of the location written up the shaft: Lullington. There does not seem to be much more to Lullington than a couple of houses and a farm. I walk back up the hill to the church sign, find a brick path past the garages and into a copse, and eventually I’m rewarded with a view of the tiny church.

I came here because the church was small and picturesque and, I thought, would probably be a pleasant and peaceful spot to break a morning journey. It was all of these things. Its small size (it’s widely noised as the smallest church in Sussex and one of the smallest in the country) is because it is merely the chancel* of what was once a larger church – part of the vanished section has been left to buttress the building at the front. The destruction of the rest of the building is attributed locally to the army of Cromwell in the 17th century, but I’ve not found any concrete evidence for this. Documentary evidence cited on the Suffolk Parish Churches website seems to point to destruction in the 1670s or 1680s, possibly as the result of a roof collapse. The fact that it was not rebuilt suggests that by that time the community had shrunk to something like its current size, possibly because of the Black Death or for some other reason.† The history of this place seems so elusive that not even the church’s original dedication was known. In a ceremony of 2000 it was rededicated to the Good Shepherd.

What’s left is indeed tiny – I counted 17 seats that one could comfortably sit in – and charming. The flint and stone walls are pierced by windows that look 13th and 14th century and there’s a very simple rough-hewn font that may be Norman. The use of flint is typical of the region and the 19th-century bell turret’s walls are weatherboarded, another local building material. Even the church’s modern dedication seems right for its location, paying tribute to the sheep farming that has been a mainstay of the economy of the Downs for hundreds if not thousands of years. This is a building that feels thoroughly at home.

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* Or just part of the chancel

† Plague is often given as the reason for the desertion or depopulation of medieval villages, but causes just as common were to do with convenience (villagers sometimes ‘migrated’ to another site), the vagaries of landholding, or enclosure. 

Lewes, Sussex

 

Glowing in the sun

For a small island, Britain has a large number of local building styles, in large part as a result of the bewilderingly diverse geology. For most of human history, most buildings (with the exception of some churches and the houses of the rich, where funds were available to cover the cost of transporting stone) were made from locally available materials. Most of my readers will have travelled across England and noticed how the styles and materials of older buildings vary from one region to the next, a phenomenon I noticed for the umpteenth time driving from the limestone country of the Cotswolds to the very different architectural landscape of Sussex.

In southeastern England, where good building stone was limited, timber-framed houses were common. Towards the end of the 17th century, however, brick and clay tile became increasingly popular – for their cheapness, appearance and weather-resistant qualities. In counties such as Sussex and Kent, people took to hanging clay tiles vertically on the walls of houses, to protect the wood, wattle and daub from driving rain. Attaching the tiles was relatively easy – the builder nailed horizontal oak laths to the timber framework of the wall and attached the tiles to these.

Tile-hung houses are still common all over this part of southeastern England. My photograph shows a couple in High Street, Lewes, a street that boasts stone, brick, timber-framed and tile-hung buildings in diverse profusion. I noticed these two because they’re so different from each other (and because one of them houses a second-hand bookshop, which of course I had to visit). The two-gabled building on the right is the bookshop, and I admired its bright orange tiles and the way in which the sun has not only brought out the warm colour but also cast shadows between the rows of tiles, giving the surface of the wall form and pattern. The eaves of the roof now hardly overhang the wall at all, presumably because of the amount of room needed to accommodate not only the tiles themselves but also the wooden laths on which they hang.

The tile-hanging on the building to the left is altogether more showy. The two colours of tiles have been used to create diamond patterns and the shapes of the tiles themselves vary – there are curved, pointed and straight tiles, producing a more complex effect than in the simpler, all-straight tiled wall next door. A lot of trouble has been taken with this patterning, and it’s impressive, but personally I prefer the plain tiles, which, with together with their glowing orange hue, add something special to this delightful street.

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.

Hastings, East Sussex

Local heroes

I have strolled around Hastings on numerous occasions, on my own and with local friends, but in a town of any size there are always things you miss, or things that for what ever reason, your hosts don’t show you. So it was that this time, I was ushered into an unassuming pub, the General Havelock, where I had not been before, to find some of the best Victorian pictorial tiling you could hope to see anywhere. There must have been lots of pubs once with tiled interiors, just as there were many butchers, fishmongers and grocers who favoured this kind of decoration. But changing fashions have seen most of them undergo remodelling and redecoration. The General Havelock has seen many changes too, but four outstanding tiled panels survive.

These pictures in ceramic were produced by a firm called A. T. S. Carter, of Brockley, southeast London, who helpfully signed their work in more than one place. One is a portrait of General Havelock himself, who was well known in the 19th century for his role in recapturing Cawnpore during the Indian Rebellion in 1857. As a result of this action he became a Victorian hero, and there are quite a few streets and pubs named after him. The other panels take local themes, with depictions of the ruined Hastings Castle, of the Battle of Hastings, and of a sea battle between French and English forces, the latter represented by the crew of a Hastings ship called Conqueror.

In the image of the Battle of Hastings, swords, spears, and axes are wielded and arrows fly through the air. Saxons and Normans confront one another fearlessly, and when we look towards the ground we see that they are trampling on those who have fallen. The pub’s layout has changed since the tiles were fitted, with a corridor and small rooms being knocked into one large space, as is so often the case. I believe the tile panels (with the exception of the portrait of Havelock, which is at the entrance) were originally in a corridor. Now they’re the dominating feature of one long wall in the bar and not everyone will find this dramatic stuff entirely relaxing to contemplate when downing beer. But the draughtsmanship and the sheer teaming richness of it is impressive. I’d urge anyone who likes late-Victorian art and decoration to take a look.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Public utility

My last post about Kidderminster for now shows a Victorian drinking fountain against the background of one of the town’s carpet buildings. That background structure was built as the offices for H. R. Willis’s Worcester Cross carpet factory in 1879. Birmingham man J. G. Bland was the architect and he chose a plain red brick that looks sober in comparison with some of the town’s polychrome brick structures, albeit given interest by a very large central window and some curvy Flemish gables; behind was the usual single-storey north-light shed for the carpet looms. Willis’s business did not flourish and the building was sold to another Kidderminster manufacturer and carpet production continued there until the beginning of the 1970s.

In contrast to the big red-brick offices is the small stone Gothic drinking fountain, which was given by John Brinton, one of the town’s most successful manufacturers and donor of Brinton Park in the town. In 1876, when the fountain was built, supplies of clean drinking water were still not always reliable and generally in private hands. Then, as now, people complained that water companies were more interested in profit than in the public good and in 1876, cholera epidemics were recent history and germ theory only recently established. People everywhere welcomed reliable sources of clean water. Architect J. T. Meredith gave the fountain enough height, with its tall, spire-like roof, to make it into a landmark, and a touch of colour comes from the red granite shafts that support its pointed arches. Quatrefoils, small ornate gables, and Gothic arches abound. A detail shows the bands of ball-flower ornament, a motif drawn straight from English 14th-century Gothic, together with one of a series of grotesques that cling to the eaves.

All this rich detail, together with the clock faces on four of the eight sides, make this into a delightful little building that was once truly useful too. Now we’re less in need of public clocks and drinking fountains (although many are dissatisfied with our current water companies’ management of their pipe networks, supply, and changing regime). But a structure that affords a bit of beauty in a Midlands town that’s not universally beautiful cannot be altogether bad.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

 

Ghosts’ stories

I have spent my working life writing and editing illustrated books. Doing this meant paying attention not only to the form and content of the text but also to the appearance of the printed volume – its layout, typeface, paper, cover, and so on. Though not myself responsible for these visual aspects, I would work closely with the designers who were, and my interest in graphics was nurtured by these collaborations. A fascination with fonts on the page turned into a preoccupation with lettering on signs, and the relationship between signs and buildings is one that is revealed now and then in this blog. Ghost signs, those fading painted signs that have hung on after the people who put them there have moved on, are now fashionable, but I was captivated by them before they became popular things to post on social media.

People can get overly romantic about ghost signs – the elegant letterforms, the flaking paint giving us a faint glimpse into a past world, the enticement of what John Piper called ‘pleasing decay’. But this attitude can make us forget an important truth. Take this sign on a door in Kidderminster. By the look of the fading paint and the very closed doors, it’s unlikely that lorries are loaded very much, if at all, hereabouts. The building to which this sign is attached is, I think, the former Chlidema* Mill, named for a method of producing bordered squares of carpet invented by the proprietors of what was, from 1887 to c. 2000, one of Kidderminster’s numerous carpet factories.

By the turn of the millennium, the town’s carpet industry was in steep decline and mill after mill closed. In many cases, the large weaving sheds at the rear of each works were demolished, leaving only the office and warehouse buildings that fronted the street. These were often architecturally impressive, although that at the Chlidema Mill (or what is left of it) is actually quite modest, of two and three storeys with plain red and white brickwork and plain stone window sills. Go around the back and you find parked cars, temporary safety barriers, and (photograph below) an even plainer brick wall. This has been painted to show the outline of the roof of the demolished weaving shed, with its saw-tooth profile – sloping tiled sections and vertical windows, to provide even north light to aid the workers who wove luxurious carpets below.

It’s sad that the sheds found no further use and that no other industry arrived to take advantage of these work spaces. Though some of the old carpet factories in the town have been found roles (in retail, in vehicle repair, and other areas), many of the weaving sheds have gone, job opportunities have vanished, and it’s easy to see that the town lacks the prosperity it once had: the fate of so many implied by the flaking paint of a redundant sign.

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* Chlidema comes from a Greek word meaning ‘luxurious’.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

A small glory

Yesterday some inner imp in me made me decide to visit Kidderminster. It’s a sad place, hardly designed to improve one’s mood, where Victorian civic buildings abut large-size charity shops, where once magnificent Victorian carpet factories overlook vacant lots, where an inner ring-road slices through the townscape. And yet there is magnificence (not least those carpet factories, one of which houses the Museum of Carpet), if you look for it.

Here’s one building stuck between shopping centres and car parks that deserves a second look. It’s currently behind a locked gate and signs warning one to keep out, but I could still see enough to make me stare. A church, clearly, but of what denomination? I found myself speculating whether it might be Catholic or perhaps rich carpet-manufacturers’ Methodist. But no, this place of worship, originally built in 1782 but given this impressive front in 1883, is actually Unitarian. What a splendid display of Gothic revival with its 14th-century touches – those pointy buttresses, the horizontal band of quatrefoils running below the big windows, and all those curvy ogee canopies (mostly adorned with crockets) above every opening. All particularly effective when the sun chooses to shine on it, bringing out the ruddy colour of the rock-faced sandstone walls.

It was once more magnificent still – there was a stone parapet running along the top of the gable and that lump of stone in the gable’s centre, as well as bearing an inscription with the dates of foundation and rebuilding, supported a central turret that has gone. What a pity those elements have bitten the dust. I also mourned the closed gate and doors. I’d have fancied a look inside (the church contains a 17th-century pulpit once in the parish church and some late-Victorian stained glass, among other things. Maybe one day.

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Hot hut

Here is another look back at a building I saw at the ChiItern Open Air Museum back in last summer. It is, as many of my readers will know, a Nissen hut, a kind of building that could be erected quickly to provide anything from storage space to accommodation for troops. Indeed it was an army officer who came up with the idea, and here’s what I wrote about these simple but ingenious buildings in an earlier post:

It was in 1916, that Lt Col Peter Nissen had the idea of combining a metal frame and sheets of corrugated iron to produce cheap, easily assembled huts for the Allied armed forces. The army acted quite quickly on Nissen's idea because they needed huts: like many a good inventor, Nissen had seen a pressing need – for cheap buildings that could be made quickly to house an expanding army – and set out to find a way of fulfilling it. Although the idea of the hut is very simple, the finished design was not done in a day, because Nissen had to refine it, thinking of everything from an easy, watertight way to joined the iron sheets to a set of simple illustrated assembly instructions that could be followed by unskilled men working at speed.

I might have added that another refinement was constructing windows in the curved walls of the building. The Nissen hut al the museum shows the dormer window design that was the usual solution. It was easy enough, as here, to include extra windows in the flat ends of the hut – the end wall was usually of wood, although masonry end walls were also sometimes built.

This hut’s original use is not known. When the museum acquired it, it was at a farm near Dunstable, where it had been used for storage. At the museum it has two uses. The front part is fitted out as an air force briefing room from World War II; a room at the other end is used by educational groups that visit the museum. It may be almost 100 years old – no one is sure of its exact age – but it’s still a practical little building.

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Still flushing

As I am not quite ready to post any recently visited buildings, this is a structure from a trip to the Chiltern Open Air Museum last summer. It consists of a number of standard manufactured parts that are designed to be shipped to the site where they can be assembled. What the original owners got when they assembled the building was a rather large public lavatory. It was built in 1906 in Caversham,. at one end of a tram line that terminated near the River Thames by Caversham Bridge.

I have posted before about metal lavatories or ‘public conveniences’ as they used to be called in Britain,* in cities such as Bath, Bristol or Lincoln. However, the loos in my earlier posts were quite small – ideal for tucking away in a small space where demand would not be too high. The Chiltern Open Air Museum’s example, on the other hand is really large. It’s made up of 451 panels of cast iron and a series of iron uprights with slots in them into which the panels slid. For privacy, there are no windows in the wall panels, but light comes in through clerestory windows in a ‘lantern’ feature that sticks up in the centre of the roof. The upper parts of the wall panels are pierced with numerous holes arranged in an ornamental pattern, to allow smells out and fresh air in. The building is divided in two, with separate parts for men and women, and the original users (from 1906, when the building was erected) inserted one penny into the slot on the door of one of the cubicles.

Now the public loo is at the museum, it is still used for its original purpose and still seems to contain the original plumbing and sanitary ware. It’s the first of these metal-panel public loos I’ve seen that is still fulfilling its original function. Impressive, it seems to me, after some 118 years of service. Most of the buildings in open-air museums are no longer used in the way that was first intended – they’re displayed as houses, shops, workshops, churches, toll houses, and so on, and very interesting they are. This example of continued use deserved to be celebrated – and not only when one is feeling the need for it after much refreshment in the museum’s tea shop.

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* British English: lavatories, public toilets, public conveniences, loos; American English: restroom, bathroom.

Gents: interior showing clerestory grilles to admit light and air

Halesworth, Suffolk

Not quite lost

My interest in medieval art and architecture has taken me into churches by the score, from cavernous cathedrals in big cities to tiny, unregarded parish churches, sometimes in remote locations up tracks or in fields. So often in these buildings, I’m reminded of the numberless images that have been lost or partly lost to the depredations of the Reformation, to vandalism, to time. The paintings and carvings in English medieval churches, fading to nothing or brighter, but with faces hacked or scratched away, are some of the most tantalising works of art anywhere. Now and then, however, I’m pulled up short by secular imagery in a similar state, like the woodcarvings on the exterior timbers of medieval houses, from Stratford-upon-Avon or Tewkesbury in the west to Lavenham in the east, or, also in the east, at Halesworth.

What a shock to the innocent shopper in Halesworth is the carving on this otherwise unremarkable shopfront. A pair of lions, stretched out horizontally to fit both the available space and heraldic convention, flank a shield that must have borne a coat of arms (please click on the image to enlarge it). On either end are smaller scenes with beasts. The small carving on the left (in my picture below) depicts an eagle holding in its talons a human figure with something in its right hand. This scene may be the abduction of Ganymede, cup-bearer to the gods, by Zeus. The corresponding subject on the right looks like an episode out of the story of Reynard the fox and has been interpreted as Reynard n his role as physician, holding a basket of herbs, while the goose holds a flask. One theory about the coat of arms is that it was that of the de Argentein family – Margaret de Argentein was said to have been a medieval resident, and the family held the role of cupbearers to the royal family until 1424, which gives relevance to the image of Ganymede.

The combination of high-status heraldry and more folkish images of foxes and geese is interesting, but should not be surprising to anyone who has visited a few medieval churches. Church art often combines or juxtaposes carvings or paintings of saints and angels with imagery that’s earthy, comic, or sometimes simply lewd. All human life was there, along with heavenly life too. Cherished survivors like these Suffolk carvings add yet more to the diversity.

Bungay, Suffolk

 

Oddly enough…

On our recent visit to Bungay in Suffolk we found much to satisfy our architectural curiosity – medieval churches, a market cross, a castle (closed and with the builders in at the time of our visit). But as usual, a casual stroll around the town threw up many less spectacular pleasures. Even so, it was a last-minute impulse that sent me down Chaucer Street, and I’m glad it did, because I found this building in the full-blown polychrome brick style that was popular in the 1860s and 1870s. In that period of architectural showing-off, even a minor building could be as jazzy and eye-boggling as a shopfront from the 1960s.

The frontage bears a large sign saying ‘Masonic Rooms’, giving no doubt about its current purpose. Freemasons have met in Bungay since 1862, when the warrant for the local lodge was issued. Most of us are used to thinking of the Freemasons as a secretive group (though that is much less the case today than it used to be), but the secrecy does not extend to their architecture. In this case, the building stands out proudly from its rather plain red brick and painted brick neighbours. It would be difficult to miss, with its striped archers and patterned stretches of wall in three shades of brick – red, buff, and the shade of grey known in bricky circles as ‘blue’. There’s some stone too, in the gable especially, to add to the rich mix, and the roof is covered in pantiles of two colours. The stone roundel in the gable encloses an octofoil that framed a symbol (perhaps a hand or a coat of arms) that has now worn away.

This building was a small surprise to me, but a bigger surprise ensued when I looked it up in the Suffolk: East volume of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. According to Pevsner, the structure was ‘apparently built for the Oddfellows in 1910, but its exuberant polychromy looking a good forty years earlier’. So this building, not originally masonic at all, was put up when the architectural fashion was for the curves, swirls and plant motifs of Art Nouveau. Who cares now, though, that the building was behind the times? A big ‘thank you’ to the Oddfellows for being exuberant and colourful.

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Portal wonders

As a pendant to my previous post about the little church of Ampney St Mary, which sits in a field between Cirencester and Fairford, here’s a post about things one can miss near doorways. Eager as always to get inside and look at the wonders within, I pushed open the church door and stepped inside to look at the wall paintings in the nave. When I had examined those I went into the chancel where I was immediately struck by the lintel above the small priest’s door in the south wall. Above the priest’s head as he enters is a profusely carved stone that is obviously recycled – the carving continues at either end into the mortar joint. This seems to be part of a cross slab, although what has survived does not include the cross that would have been carved on the stone, just the foliage that surrounded it.

How long has this been here? I don’t know. The chancel was extended in the 13th-century and as the carving looks early medieval, the lintel could have been fitted then. Maybe, however, it’s evidence of the church’s late-19th century restoration (again, see my previous post for more on this). Whatever the case, it’s a lucky survival that preserves a layer of history and adds a touch of charm. If I’d been less hasty when entering, I’d have seen a piece of a different cross slab at the church’s main entrance. Here it’s set in the floor and this time the cross is on the part that has been kept. Here the carving is very worn – it must have been trodden on many times – and looks as if it was always in much shallower relief than the other example, but the arms of the cross, with their decorative lobes, are plain to see (see image at the end of the post).

And there’s one more thing at the same doorway, among so many small and telling details in this building that many people will not notice. Incised on the door jamb one can make out graffiti – a pair of initials, a series of overlapping circles, and a design of a branched structure, perhaps a stylised tree, perhaps something else. The overlapping circles are almost certainly medieval and form the kind of design used to make a ‘daisywheel’ – a circle containing several overlapping arcs that seem to form the petals of a flower. Except in this case the circles are inscribed in their entirety, so the flower design Is hard to see. Seeing this at all is not easy in a photograph, but clicking on my image to enlarge it might help. 

Daisywheels are usually interpreted as apotropaic (or protective) marks. Designed to keep out evil spirits, they are often found at or near entrances; in houses, one can also see them near fireplaces, another potential entrance for malevolent forces. I posted about a clearer example of a daisywheel here. Ancient graffiti are fascinating, and one of the insights that buildings can give into the way religion and the supernatural were regarded in the Middle Ages. But they take some spotting. Here, they’re just one more reason to stay alert when you visit an ancient building.  

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* Why did the graffitist do it this way, then? I wonder if they intended to highlight the daisy wheel by colouring in this relevant lines.  

† For more on medieval graffiti, it’s worth seeking out Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015) 

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Beaten tracks

Anyone who happens to glance to their right at a particular point when driving along the A417 from Cirencester to Fairford is rewarded with a glimpse of St Mary’s church, Ampney St Mary. This tiny medieval building is isolated in a field – you reach it via a path, which curves around the building from the north to the south side, where you cross a small bridge across a stream to access the churchyard. The church is actually about half a mile from the village – it’s slightly closer to Ampney St Peter, which has a church of its own. There’s always something striking about a church in the middle of a field. Why is it there, we ask, and where is the community it serves? The answer in this case seems to be that an outbreak of plague, presumably the Black Death of 1348, led to the abandonment of the church by the 15th century and the wholesale movement of the village to a hamlet called Ashbrook, which is where it remains to this day.* The building had to wait until 1907 for a restoration  (with further work in 1913–14), by which time church repairs were often a good deal more sensitive than those of the high Victorian period. Ampney St Mary was fortunate in that the architect doing the work was F. C. Eden, a man with Arts and Crafts interests indicated by his membership of the Art Workers’ Guild.§ Unlike many of his forbears, Eden did not try to “improve” the architecture of churches he restored, proceeding with a light and tasteful touch. A number of interesting medieval features therefore survive at Ampney St Mary.

In this post, I’l look at one feature in particular: the medieval wall paintings. As is so often the case with such paintings, they are fragmentary and hard for today’s visitors to interpret, but there is one survivor with more detail than most. This is an image of a man apparently sighting along something looking rather like a pole; a wheel floats above. The “pole” is probably the spoke of a wheel, making this character a wheelwright. The context seems to be an image painted as a warning to Sabbath-breakers. The ,medieval Catholic Church was insistent that Sunday was kept as a holy day. You were expected to go to church and people were generally forbidden to work. There are lots of documentary records of churchmen encouraging priests to insist that their parishioners attend church on the Sabbath. In 1213–14, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton ordered the parish priests in his archdiocese to tell their parishioners to attend church on Sundays and not to go to markets. Other orders went out to ban people from working on Sundays. There were exceptions – farm workers looking after their animals, merchants travelling with their goods, pilgrims and others were exempt from the ban.† The Ampney image of the wheelwright at work seems to be part of a “Warning to Sabbath-breakers” painting.

A friend of mine noticed the very individual style of drawing in this painting, and asked whether medieval artists copied one another, or learned from books or manuscripts that were passed around. I replied that they would start as apprentices, as stonemasons did, and that they would first of all learn from their master (who might well be their father or another family member). They’d see his work, and the work of others, at churches on which they worked. Some might well have collected reference drawings too, and if they got the chance to visit a monastery, or even to work on a monastic church, they would take any opportunity they could to examine the illustrations in the monks’ books. For all this, no combination of heart, hand and head is the same, so a painter would evolve his own style of drawing, as this one did, as he provided a bit of social comment and moral instruction for the people of a remote Cotswold village perhaps 600 years ago.

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* Plague is a common explanation for deserted or transplanted villages, but it is by no means the only reason for tghese phenomena; a move to be nearer to good agricultural land, destruction of buildings by storms, and land enclosure are among other reasons why villages were deserted or moved.

§ Eden also designed church furniture and fittings, and stained glass hence his connection to the guild. He became a Fellow of the RIBA in 1922.

† For more examples of clerics complaining about sabbath-breaking, see Nicholas Orme’s excellent book, Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021).