Cotehele, Cornwall

An ancient place

Cotehele is one of the most romantically beautiful houses in the care of the National Trust.* It was built by three generations of the Edgcumbe family during the Tudor period† and its interiors were upgraded in the 1650s. However, in 1547–53, when Cotehele was still unfinished, the family built another dwelling, Mount Edgcumbe House, about 12 miles away.§ Mount Edgcumbe became their main home, Cotehele was second in importance. Mount Edgcumbe was remodelled in the 18th century and its old, now unfashionable furnishings, were moved to Cotehele, where they have been ever since. As a result, Cotehele gives the impression of a rambling Tudor and Jacobean house, full of tapestries, oak furniture and four-poster beds, a perfect and apparently untouched upper-class country house of its period.

In fact there were later alterations, notably in 1862, when Cotehele became the home of the Victorian owner’s widowed mother. But these were done in harmony with the Tudor fabric. The right-hand end of the east range (lower photograph), dates to 1862, but you’d hardly know. It’s a house of local granite walls and chimneys, a mixture of tiny windows and large mullioned ones, of courtyards and towers. It covers a large footprint with architecture on a modest scale – there are no grand entrances or big architectural gestures. Even the towers are low-rise and only the hall has a high ceiling. The setting – terraced gardens, a steeply sloping valley garden, old orchards – is perfect. Inside and out, the place is uniquely atmospheric.

Cotehele seems a world apart from modernity or business, let alone industry. But it’s near the River Tamar, once a great highway for Devon and Cornwall, the counties of which it forms the border. The varied fruits of market gardening and mining were not far away. Perhaps that story will be the subject of another post.

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* The house passed to the Trust in 1947. They do, it seems to me, a fine job in looking after it and presenting it to the public. Electric light is kept to a minimum, which presumably helps preserve the contents and enhances the atmosphere. The volunteers who stand in each room are particularly enthusiastic and helpful in answering queries. There’s information, but nothing is over-interpreted. I’m indebted to the Trust’s guidebook for details about the house’s history.

† Specifically 1485–c. 1560

§ I’m not sure why they built this second house so close. More research is needed.

Cotehele, the east range, with 19th-century addition at the far end

Callington, Cornwall

Built to last

I didn’t want to leave Dupath well, the subject of my previous post, before commenting on the stone it’s built of – large blocks of hard, intractable Cornish granite. Although difficult to work (and punishing to the chisel) because of its hardness, granite is the material of many Cornish buildings, because in many places it is the most easily obtainable stone. In the Middle Ages, local stone was usually relatively cheap. What did cost a lot was transport: stone is heavy, roads were poor, and even river transport was laborious. So masons accepted the huge effort needed to shape granite into usable pieces and to smooth it enough to make an acceptably flat surface.

When you look at granite masonry closely, though, in the right light, its surfaces are rarely very smooth at all. Attracted by the view, I raised my camera to take the photograph above and paused to take in the rough stone. Each piece is a miniature landscape of lumps and bumps and irregular edges, the very opposite of the almost perfectly flat surfaces that can be obtained when a skilled mason works a piece of limestone in my native Cotswolds.

And yet, what character! It’s extraordinary stuff, this stone, and seems to embody physical strength. It may be a far cry from the immaculately smooth ashlar of most cathedrals, but when you look at the wall of this tiny chapel, it has a distinctive character of its own and certainly looks as if it has been built to last.

Callington, Cornwall

Well hidden

To a dedicated church-visitor like me, Cornwall is full of evidence of ancient piety. Not only are there many medieval churches, but these are often dedicated to local saints, obscure figures who are little known outside the country. There are also many holy wells, tiny structures erected near or over springs, which were built or maintained by the medieval church and whose water was said to have healing properties. One of the most beautiful of these small buildings is the Dupath well east of Callington.

It was built almost entirely of local granite – even the roof is made of granite slabs – in the early-16th century, and the shallow arch of the doorway is typical of the period. Its architecture is made more elaborate by pinnacles at each corner and the striking structure, topped by a cluster of pinnacles, above the entrance. This is a small bellcote, an unusual feature of a well house, but perhaps there because the well house performed some of the functions of a church – according to certain accounts, the building was sometimes used for baptisms. Most pilgrims came here for the water’s healing qualities, however. Inside the well house is a trough into which the water flows, suggesting that visitors might have bathed in it, rather than drinking the sacred fluid.

Holy wells were among the institutions (like monasteries and chantries) that were suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. The working life of this well might therefore have been very short. But the building survived and spring water does not stop flowing at the whim of monarchs. So it may be that those who believed in the water’s healing properties (it was said to cure or ease whooping cough, for example) still came here.

Travel was slow and difficult in the Middle Ages. To get here, you’d have had to walk or possessed a horse. Even now it seems remote, and part of the charm of the place for today’s travellers is the approach and the setting. You park in a farmyard – the farmer apologised for the amount of mud in the yard and joked that there hadn’t been enough rain to wash it away. Across the yard there’s a sign and a very short track to the well, which stands against a background of trees and fields. It’s a magical spot, we might say today, and no doubt medieval believers felt it was magical too.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Artisans at work

At the time of my visit to Hull in the summer, there was building work going at the Wilberforce House Museum, making photography difficult. So I honed in on a detail of the entrance, excluding as many distracting objects as possible, to give an idea of the extraordinary architecture of this house of the 1660s. It was built for a merchant called Hugh Lister, later became the official residence of the Governor and Deputy Governor of Hull, and still later, in 1730–1832, was owned by the Wilberforces, the family of the celebrated anti-slavery campaigner.*

The elaborate architectural style is known as Artisan Mannerism, a fashion created not by architects but by stonemasons and bricklayers, drawing on pattern books of classical architecture (some of which were produced in the Netherlands and France, where the merchant Lister had spent time on business) but disposing the decorative features in unconventional and naïve ways. Popular elements and motifs included curvy Dutch gables, exaggerated mouldings, unconventional arrangements of pediments and other details, and a disregard for the conventions of proportion. Although they disregard many traditional rules or guidelines of Classical architecture, Artisan Mannerist buildings can still have much vigour and charm.

A glance at the entrance of this building will reveal what I mean. Lister’s builder, who was probably a Hull bricklayer called William Catlyn, threw the kitchen sink at his design, incorporating not only round-topped niches on either side of the doorway, but crowning these with triangular pediments, outlined in pale stone. The round-arched doorway is also crowned, not with a triangular pediment but with a stone moulding that breaks into a semi-circle, topped with a carved feature a bit like a plinth or bracket for a statue, above which is no statue but a window lighting the next floor up. Elsewhere on the facade, ornamental stones bearing various geometrical carvings (here a diamond, there a square), are inserted. The undecorated runs of brickwork are laid with deep horizontal bands every half-dozen courses, to give the effect of rustication.

It’s a matter of taste whether one regards this effect as a provincial offence to Classical taste or a rich mélange. I belong to the latter camp, and can find much to like in the energetic effect produced by a local worker who was happy to pick up some motifs and run with them. Hull would be a poorer place without such a display.

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* William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was a hero of my childhood, partly because my mother came from Hull, where he was born, and partly because he was one of the people championed at my primary school. History in those days was often taught as a succession of great individuals (mostly, but not all, men) who had a major influence on the history of Britain. Such people included the engineer James Watt, the nurse and nursing reformer Florence Nightingale, the social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, and William Wilberforce. These historical stars were seen mainly in terms of specific shining achievements, and any negative aspects were ignored or played down. Wilberforce’s support for socially conservative moves such as limitations on gatherings of more than 50 people, the suspension of the right of habeas corpus, his opposition to trade unions, and his opposition to holding an enquiry about the Peterloo massacre, were quietly ignored. To recognise these views is not to devalue Wilberforce’s abolitionism, but to see the man whole. Neither is it an example of today’s so-called ‘woke’ attitude to history; contemporaries such as William Cobbett pointed these things out in the 19th century; today it’s still vital to realise when one’s heroes are not plaster saints.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.

Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

Hull, East Yorkshire

 

Names and textures, 2

Now for a sign that contrasts with the one in my previous post and makes a good excuse to look at one of my favourite street names. Yes, The Land of Green Ginger is the name of a street, a narrow one off Silver Street in the centre of Hull. There are various theories about the origin of this curious name. Some say that it is a corruption of ‘Lindegroen jonger’, referencing a junior member of the Dutch Lindegreen family, who lived in Hull in the early-19th century. Others suggest it derives from ‘Landgrave Granger’, because the Landgrave family nearby. I am always suspicious of derivations that are said to be ‘corruptions’ of ‘difficult’ words and prefer the simpler explanation that, in this great shipping and trading city (a cosmopolitan place where ‘unusual’ names must have been common), valuable spices like ginger were sold nearby.

The sign itself is an elegant one that uses a serif letterform which fills the name plate so that there’s very little free space around the words. Such is the clarity of the letters, though, that the sign doesn’t look crowded and is perfectly legible. The size of the sign has been well specified to sit comfortably on its strip of masonry. The dark background of the name plate and the thickness of the material mean it stands proud slightly as is easy to spot.

But what an extraordinary wall it’s set on. This building was designed in 1907 by Dunn and Watson for the National Provincial Bank. Built in 1907, its Portland stone walls are finished with an effect called banded rustication – the masonry is arranged in bands that have deep grooves between them, giving a striking stripey look in full sun. But this rustication goes further than most. Many of the bands are pulvinated – in other words they have a convex curved profile. The gaps between the bands are very deep and there are concave mouldings within each band; the ends of the bands are carefully chamfered or curved. A lot of trouble has been taken with this masonry, including the way the bands turn to embrace the keystone above the window. Another striking feature is the Celtic knot design on the square block above the keystone. Once more in Hull, name and texture, surprising for different reasons, sit well together.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Names and textures, 1

One of the first things I noticed on arriving in Hull back in July is that the city has some attractive old street name signs. I quickly learned that it also has an extraordinary variety of styles of these signs, probably representing every period from the 19th century to the current decade. This is hardly surprising. For one thing, Hull sustained severe damage from bombing during World War II. For another, it has been a dynamic, developing place, responding to highs and lows, for much of its history. Here’s one example of an early sign in a street I walked along very soon after I arrived.

What a characterful sign this is, and how well it complements the texture of the brick wall to which it’s attached. Its shape, a long rectangle (naturally), cut off at the corners by concave curves, is one that was popular in the 19th and early-20th centuries in many British towns. I’ve noticed signs of a similar shape in places such Louth in Lincolnshire. But signs like the one in Louth are heavy objects, made of thick cast iron, which project visibly from the wall surface and are attached to it by screws that pass through the sign into the brickwork. This one in Hull, by contrast, is much flatter and is fixed in place by screws and washers set around the edge of the sign.

What really caught my eye, though, was the lettering, Most of the letters are of a standard form used by the Victorians on signs, capital letters that have serifs* with a slight curve where they join the main strokes of the letter. The letters also display a notable contrast between the widths of the strokes – thick verticals and thin horizontals. This style gives the letter-designer or sign-writer a particular challenge when it comes to the most curvaceous letters, especially ’S’. In this sign both examples of the letter ’S’ have small serifs that rest slightly above the base line while the lower part of the curve sits a fraction below, giving the letter a slightly free-floating look that I find charming.† The whole sign, I think, looks good on a background of brickwork and sash windows, providing a small asset that’s worth more than a passing glance.

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* A little lettering terminology. Serif: the tiny strokes at the ends of the main strokes of letters. Base line: the imaginary line on which the bottom of each letter sits.

† It’s traditional in sign-writing it was and is normal to place the bottom of a curvy letter such as S or O very slightly below the base line; if it sits on the base line itself, it looks in practice as if it’s floating a little too high. The details of the sign will be clearer if you click on the image to enlarge it. 

Hull, East Yorkshire

Suit you, 2

In the centre of Hull, strolling around on my visit back in the summer, I found Hepworth’s Arcade, a small shopping development of 1894–5. It’s modest, but well detailed, from the glass roof in the form of a barrel vault supported on openwork iron arches (one such arch is visible in my photograph), through the decorated frieze and fluted pilasters of the upper floor, to the small shop fronts at ground level. The name of the arcade is displayed inside as well as out, to remind us that the development was built for Joseph Hepworth, the tailor from Leeds who pioneered the business of supplying reasonably priced made-to-measure suits using a national network of shops.

This is not a grand interior like the magnificent one in Hepworth’s home city designed by the theatre architect Frank Matcham, but local firm Gelder and Kitchen did a good job that has stood the test of time. The development was no doubt a business venture for Hepworth, but he would also have liked the idea that his name would be remembered for more than his large chain of clothes stores. Perhaps this was shrewd, since in the 1980s the Hepworth business metamorphosed into the chain now called Next, while the arcade still bears the Hepworth name.

There is still a men’s clothes shop in the arcade too. It’s called Beasley’s and it has a separate hat shop opposite its main premises. A hat shop: these are rare beasts nowadays. I celebrated its presence by buying myself a straw hat to replace one I’ve had for about 40 years. On my way out into the street I noticed a bit of Hepworth memorabilia: the large and colourful sign advertising their company. I don’t know the age of the sign but its range of traditional letterforms, its lavish scrolls, and the pointing hand (neatly jacketed and shirted of course), suggest some time fairly on in the history of the arcade. It’ll suit me.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Suit you, 1

My visit to Hull back in July turned out to be rather provisional. Faced with just a day in a very large city, I concentrated on strolling around, looking at as much as I could, but resisting the temptation to linger too long or to visit museums. I soon decided that this was a place I’d have to come back to. Nevertheless, a number of buildings, large and small, held my attention. Here’s one that did so by sheer size.

As readers will immediately see, this building began life as a branch of Burton’s, the tailor, in the 1930s. I have gone for a photograph showing the whole thing, in all its vastness, but even so the sign at the top of the building displaying the company’s name can be seen clearly (you can click on the image to enlarge it). By 1935, the year this branch opened, Burton’s already had a history going back several decades. Its founder, Meshe David Osinsky, was born in what is now Lithuania and emigrated to the UK in 1900. He eventually changed his name to Montague Burton, and was one of the entrepreneurs who revolutionised the business of men’s outfitting – like his forerunners Hepworth’s, he offered made-to-measure men’s suits at affordable prices. A customer would come to one of his shop, get measured up, and select a fabric and style, then the suit would be made at one of Burton’s factories. The business expanded quickly, because Burton made a deal to manufacture military uniforms during World War I – and his success continued when his branches became a go-to source of the suits soldiers bought when demobilised from the army. By 1939 he had 595 shops.

Burton knew that impressive shop fronts were good advertising. It wasn’t just the long shop windows, but the tall buildings, mostly specially designed by an in-house architect – Harry Wilson in the case of this Hull branch. By the 1930s, Burton had fully embraced Art Deco, and his stores often came with polished black granite facades, tall, metal-framed windows, and jazzy details like the V-patters above the upper windows, the pair of central gold pilasters, and the moderne balconies of the middle section of windows. The company name takes pride of place. Though hard to see in my photograph, there’s a diagonal line of script to the left of the ‘B’, which is the owner’s first name, so that the whole panel reads, ‘Montague Burton The tailor of taste’. What was behind all those upper windows? Not men’s clothes. Burton had all the retail space he needed on the ground floor. Upstairs in a large Burton’s there was usually a room with billiard tables, to attract potential customs to the building. The rest of the upper floors were let out as offices, bringing in more revenue.

When I saw the building, it was obvious that it had recently been restored, but I wasn’t clear how much of this impressive facade had been replaced. It turns out that a lot of the granite had been damaged and has been replaced with material from the same quarry as the original stone. Defective window frames have been renewed and shop fronts reconstructed. And it does look impressive, and an improvement on the tired frontage that it had become. At the time of writing, the building is on the market, to let for retail or restaurant use (the ground floor) and for ‘mixed use’ (the upper floors). One hopes that the old Burton’s will be successful in its new life.

York Way, London

The ‘Theophrastus effect’

It happens every now and then: you’re walking round a town or district that’s unfamiliar to you, and you notice something – an architectural detail, a combination of colours in the paintwork, a type of sign – that seems more common here than elsewhere. It can be a bit of local distinctiveness like a preference for certain patterns in pargetting, or evidence of a craftworker with notable skills, or just a fashion that has taken hold in a few neighbouring streets. Or maybe it’s just that, as you look, something strikes you and your eye and brain are alerted to other examples nearby. My personal name for this is the Theophrastus effect, because years ago I had to write something about the ancient and some would say obscure Greek writer Theophrastus and suddenly, because I was thinking about him a lot, I began to see references to him everywhere.

Walking around some of the streets near Euston Station the other week, the Theophrastus effect came into play when I started to spot metal lettering positioned over entrances to courtyards, a housing complex, and even a pub. Some of these signs incorporated fancy wrought-iron decoration and a particularly good one, the sign above the entrance to the Lincoln Arms pub, has some superb metalwork.

This is a lovely way to mark the entrance to a hostelry, drawing you into the oddly angled doorway or making a memorable impression if you’re just passing by. The letters aren’t at all bad – maybe the curved ones are less assured than the other letters, but they’re good enough to hold their own. The surrounding wrought-iron spirals, scrolls, and foliage are outstanding, in my opinion. Their inventive curves, some of which scroll, then bend in a different direction, are redolent of Art Nouveau and the way in which the foliate forms overlap the ends of the lettering slightly I find particularly appealing.

This memorable sign certainly made me want to go in, although I had a commitment elsewhere that made this impossible. I intend to go back though, not least because the building next door was covered in scaffolding, making a decent photograph of the whole pub impossible. And because, according to CAMRA,* the Lincoln Arms, which had a phase as a ‘trendy bar’ is now a traditional pub again. How pleasing that this sign has survived the various changes.

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* The Campaign for Real Ale, the organisation that has done much to improve the quality of the beer available in British pubs, as well as encouraging improvements in the quality of pubs as a whole.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Pebbles and nodules

Regions said to be poor in building stone (or far enough away from good stone to make transport prohibitively expensive for all but the most high status structures) often display ingenuity in the way builders use what is available. One example is the use of pebbles and nodules of such materials as flint, chert and quartzite, all of which are found in and near Suffolk, among other areas. These rounded or irregular forms seem at first unpromising building materials, but they have all been used to make pleasing walls. I was reminded of them when I came across this picture of a section of wall in Lavenham when looking through my photographs for something else.

The wall has obligingly fallen into disrepair, giving us an insight into how it was constructed, There seems to be a core of brick combined with rubble, together with areas of brickwork on the surface that must key into the core masonry and give the structure strength. Much of the outer surface, however, is covered with pebbles and small nodules of stone. The majority of these stones come in various shades of grey and are probably flint. There are also a small number of orangey stones, which are likely to be chert. They’re all arranged roughly in courses and stick out a lot from the mortar in which they are embedded, which may have eroded away with time to produce the very knobbly effect.

Erosion, moisture and frost certainly seem to have affected the wall badly, as a large area of the pebble surface had come away when I took this photograph a couple of years ago. Water has probably got in at the top and then frozen, in spite of what looks like a top course of hard grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks, designed to protect the wall and probably added later than the rest of the structure. Full marks for effort. Perhaps with a little care and attention, what is still in part a very attractive wall could be put right – maybe it already has been.

Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Local speciality

Stoke pots, Nottingham lace, Luton hats. In years gone by, many English towns became specialist centres of manufacturing. Whatever else they might produce, even big cities like Birmingham (famous for its small metal goods, from jewellery to boxes) or Sheffield (steel and cutlery), became widely known for particular industries. Witney in Oxfordshire looks at first glance like a typical small rural town with its Corn Exchange. But what made Witney well known all over the country was its woollen blankets. In the winter, Witney kept you warm at night. A short walk from the town centre the buildings of Early’s blanket mill still exist, and nearer still to the heart of the town is the Blanket Hall, built in 1720 as the headquarters of the Company of Witney Blanket Weavers. Inside was a room where the weavers came to have their products weighed and measured, to ensure that their work was up to standard; there was also a room for meetings and facilities for catering for blanket makers’ feasts.

The architecture of the Blanket Hall is early Georgian with a baroque flavour. This is not the full-blown baroque that we see at Vanbrugh buildings such as Blenheim Palace (not far away), but a small-town version with curved (segmental) window heads, pronounced but plain window surrounds, a pediment that is broken at the bottom to accommodate the clock, and a skyline punctuated with ball finials. The frontage is built of good ashlar but the side just visible in my photograph is of rougher stone, because most people won’t notice.

The architect is said to have been William Townsend (or Townesend) of Oxford. Townsend was a member of a family of master masons and builders who worked in Oxford in the late-17th and 18th centuries, working on numerous colleges and other buildings. They formed a locally important building dynasty comparable to the Smiths of Warwick, the Patys of Bristol and the Bastards of Blandford Forum. William Townsend was primarily a mason, and probably worked in tandem with an architect on his larger buildings, but here he may have taken sole responsibility. The baroque front that he created in Witney is in a style I’ve seen a number of times in small Oxfordshire towns – Chipping Norton, for example, has some examples. It makes a grand enough impression to stand out next to the rural-looking buildings on either side, but is not so ornate as to be showy. The blanket-makers, one feels, were happy to display substantial wealth, but not in a way that’s too grandiloquent or boastful. Fit for purpose, reassuring, does the job well: like the blankets, in fact.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

An enduring tradition

To Malvern, to browse in the secondhand bookshops, to look around, and to pay a visit to the Priory. It’s a terrific building with a tower resembling the one at Gloucester cathedral, some outstanding stained glass (both medieval and recent), and a superb collection of medieval tiles. The examples in my photograph began life as floor tiles in the 15th century, but during restoration work in the 19th century they were taken off the floor and mounted on the wall that separates the sanctuary from the ambulatory. This has protected them from further wear and makes them very easy to see and admire.

The selection in the photograph shows the delicacy of the designs that the makers (who apparently were based on site and also supplied tiles to other churches, including Gloucester cathedral) could achieve by combining red and buff clay. Many of the patterns contain flower or leaf motifs arranged in quatrefoil frames or in circles subdivided with designs that are similar to medieval window tracery. Yet more like tracery is an abstract design (the second tile in the top row, and another in the third row) that is reminiscent of a rose window. Other tiles bear inscriptions or heraldry. These were in a sense humble objects, designed to be walked on every day, but their sophisticated decoration marks them out as high-status items, of the sort you’d seen mainly in large churches and the houses of the royal family or aristocracy. Monasteries, according to tile expert Hans van Lemmen,* were some of the best customers of the medieval tile-makers.

The influence of these craftsmen lived on for centuries. When Malvern Priory was being restored in the 19th century, the tile manufacturer Maw & Co were commissioned to make copies of some of the church’s ancient tiles, so that part of the building could be paved as it had been 400 years before. Contemporary tile companies, such as Craven Dunhill use the same technique of combining colours to make tiles today.

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*See Hans van Lemmen, Medieval Tiles (Shire, 2004)

Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Forty years on

Exactly forty years ago today, the Resident Wise Woman and I were married in St Mary's, Sudeley. I have written about my memories of the wedding and this building before, so here is what I wrote when we frevisited Sudeley about two years ago:

The small church of St Mary, Sudeley is unusual in that it is both a parish church and the chapel of nearby Sudeley Castle. It’s an easy walk from where we live and from where the Resident Wise Woman grew up, and partly as a result of that, we hardly ever visit the historic castle, let alone its little church. In fact until the other day, the last time I set foot inside the church was in September 1985 when the Resident Wise Woman and I were married. It was wonderful to tie the knot in such beautiful and historic surroundings, pleasant for guests to be able to take a look at the gardens on the way in and out, and delightful to have the wedding reception in the castle afterwards.*

The beauty of the place is obvious enough, I hope, from my photograph, and the architecture – standard late-medieval-style window tracery with the added touch of a delightful bell turret corbelled out so that it overhangs the west front slightly – clear too. The history is that the shaping force behind the church was Ralph Boteler†, (c. 1394–1473), 1st Baron Sudeley and Lord High Treasurer of England under Henry VI. He rebuilt the castle and the nearby church, both of which owe much of their architectural character to him, although both were severely damaged during the English Civil Wars. After a period of neglect and dereliction, both castle and church were restored for the Dent family, who bought the castle in the 19th century and employed Sir George Gilbert Scott and his master perspectivist (later an independent architect) John Drayton Wyatt to undertake the restoration.¶

It’s thought that Scott and Wyatt took the church back to very close to its 15th-century appearance externally, renewing the tracery of the windows, preserving or recarving the gargoyles and other carvings, and restoring the bell turret. The church was refitted inside, with new woodwork and stained glass, and Wyatt designed a new tomb to house the remains of Katherine Parr, the last queen of Henry VIII – she lived at the castle after she married its then owner, Thomas Seymour, after Henry’s death. The result is a delightful little church which could not have been better for our small wedding.

Another of Scott and Wyatt’s additions was what I assume to be an underfloor heating system, with warm air emerging through grilles in the floor. As we left the building the other day, one of us stepped on the grille by the door and it made a loud clanking noise. Straight away, I was back in 1985, waiting for the bride to arrive. Suddenly, the silence was broken by a clank, and she and her father made their way up the nave towards where I and my best man waited. Vows, music (Thomas Arne, Henry Purcell), speeches, cake, and the chance to talk to our closest friends and relatives ensued: much of this is all a blur now. But I do remember smiling a lot. I’ve smiled a lot since.

Four decades. Say it like that and it seems a long time. But time’s winged chariot has moved swiftly through more than a decade together in London and nearly three decades in the Cotswolds (with, for an extended period, a parallel life in the Czech Republic). For much of this blog, my wife has been referred to as the ‘Resident Wise Woman’ – a joke, a truth and a ploy for anonymity. In this post I'll give her her real name: Zoë. I’ve edited and, latterly, written, lots of books. Zoë has moved through careers in arts management and urban regeneration, bringing transformative changes to people’s lives in London’s Vauxhall area and East Oxford; more recently she has published two volumes of her poetry, with a third on the way.§ Together we explore many of the buildings that end up on this blog and Zoë’s eye wonderfully stimulates, provokes and supplements my own wherever we are. While I have always been interested in architecture, I am lucky that she has encouraged me in my belief that the small adjuncts to architecture (such as signs, odd bits of carving, unexpected fittings and fixtures), the seemingly random associations that buildings can evoke, and the interest of the most modest of structures (privies, henhouses, so-called ‘shacks’) can be as rewarding as the facade of a great cathedral or the drawing room of a country house. On we go, ceaselessly into the past, but with at least part of us determined to remain hopeful for the future.

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* Back in the 1980s, weddings in country houses and castles were not the big business they are now. The church was not licensed for weddings when we got married and I had to go to a Church of England office next to Westminster Abbey and swear oaths to the effect that I was who I said I was, which allowed me to obtain an elaborate ‘special licence’ for the occasion. Today, people get married in the castle often, although I’m not sure that, even now, church weddings take place here. ‘I think it’s mostly blessings,’ a guide said, when we looked around the castle.

† Usually pronounced ‘Rafe Butler’. He was ‘one of a line of rather distinguished butlers,’ as my school history teacher said, even longer ago than the events I’m recalling here.

¶ Wyatt and Scott also designed a school and almshouses in nearby Winchcombe, which were funded by Emma Dent, then owner of the castle.

§ Zoë’s poetry books are Owl Unbound and Fool's Paradise.

Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire

Out of the window, on to the track

As my Oxford to London Marylebone train approached Princes Risborough, I admired the impressive signal box, labelled ‘Princes Risbobo North’, and reflected that I never seem to take photographs of signal boxes, in spite of the fact that they can be interesting and useful buildings. I resolved to take another look on my return journey and as I did so I raised my mobile phone to the window and pressed the shutter as the train pulled out. There are a few reflections off the glass of the window, but on the whole it’s not a bad image, showing the box’s wood and brick construction and its large size. I couldn’t recall seeing a larger box on the train lines I travel on most frequently between the Cotswolds and London.

When I looked it up, I discovered that Princes Risborough North is indeed the largest surviving box on the lines of the old Great Western Railway. Why such a big box, which must have contained many signal levers, for a station serving a small town with, as far as I knew, a single line running through it? A look at an old railway map put me right. It showed lines from five different directions converging at Princes Risborough – to London (via High Wycombe), to Oxford, to Watlington, to Aylesbury, and towards Ashendon, another junction with lines leading hither and yon. The size of the building began to make sense.

Apart from its relative length, the Risborough box follows a standard traditional signal box design. On the upper floor is the row of levers that control the railway signals and move the points to ensure that each train joins the correct bit of line for its onward journey. This upper storey is timber-framed with windows all round, giving the signal operators a good view of the nearby signals and lines. The floor below (here built of brick though many smaller boxes are wholly timber-framed) houses the locking room, which contains mechanisms which ensure that signals and points interlock so that points cannot be moved without the appropriate signal being given to the train driver.

The signal box at Princes Risborough was built in 1904 and continued in use until 1991, when signalling on the line was handled from Marylebone station in London. After this the signal box began to fall into disrepair. However, the line in the direction of Chinnor is now used by a heritage railway called the Chinnor and Princes Risborough Railway, who are at work restoring and preserving the box, ensuring that this important bit of railway history has a future. 

Dunster, Somerset

 

A web of wood

Having posted about Dunster’s charming and well preserved dovecote the other week, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the most prominent building in the centre of the village, the striking octagonal Yarn Market. This is, probably, everyone’s favourite building in Dunster. Thousands who have paused here for a moment have taken a photograph of this structure and, with a passing thought that it’s not like any other building* and very much unlike most of the old market buildings that survive (rectangular structures open below and with rooms above) have moved on.

Some will know that it’s a 17th-century building, showing that the wool trade hereabouts continued well beyond the Middle Ages. In fact, it’s an indication of a change in trading conditions. Dunster had been a port with a hinterland stretching across Exmoor, but the sea retreated and a new trading base was established here in the middle of the village. The Yarn Market’s presence is an indication of a significant amount of business and merchants’ need for shelter and security. Its striking shape shows that those 17th-century traders liked the idea of creating a building that could be easily identified and could form something of a landmark.

Anyone who goes inside can see that the octagonal roof required a network of rafters, braces and struts (photograph below); together with the posts that hold up the whole building and the lantern on trhe top, most of the structure is made of wood. The central stone column is a key support, and the whole structure is made more complicated by the generous roof overhang and the dormer windows, necessary to let more light into the space below. This wonderful building gives us an uncommon chance to look inside a roof structure of its period – most roof frameworks are hidden from the public by ceilings, after all. The pleasure I get from it is akin to the pleasure I’ve got from occasional views up into the interiors of church spires. These webs of woodwork required skill, ingenuity and a surprising amount of timber. Hats off to the carpenters who built them, and built them to last.

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*Although there is at least one later homage to the Yarn Market, at the Cadbury’s model suburb of Bournville.

Dunster, Yarn Market, central column and roof timbers

Fretherne, Gloucestershire

A class act

Visiting Arlingham the other say (see my recent post here) reminded me of an occasion maybe eight or ten years ago when the Resident Wise Woman, our son and I celebrated my birthday with an excellent lunch at The Old Passage, an outstanding fish restaurant (it closed after covid, alas!) by the River Severn not far from the village. On the way home we stopped at the church of St Mary, Fretherne, which was on our route. My memory of the visit comes back to me through a haze of good food and wine, but we were all mightily impressed by this glorious building, packed with stunning craftsmanship – stone sculpture, woodcarving, painting, tiling, metalwork. To me, there’s something hard and cold about many Victorian churches – the architecture may be very correct Gothic, but the result lacks the irregularities, winning oddities and rough surfaces that make many older churches so delightful. Now and again, however, I find a church that turns these ideas inside out. Such a building is St Mary’s, Fretherne.

From the outside it’s dominated by a wonderful crocketed spire, upward-pointing pinnacles, and steeply pitched roofs. The two-tone stonework is a mixture of toffee-coloured Stinchcombe sandstone and Bath stone dressings, the latter lending itself well to window tracery, carved detail, crockets and other ornaments. Most of these details are exuberant imitations of the architecture of the 14th-century as reimagined by the local architect Francis Niblett in 1846–47. Niblett is not well known outside Gloucestershire. He was the younger son of the owner of Haresfield Court, a few miles to the east of Fretherne, and did quite a lot of church and other work in the county. Fretherne, where he had a sympathetic patron in the upper-class clergyman the Rev. Sir William Lionel Darell, is his masterpiece. Niblett was a dedicated follower of the work of A. W. N. Pugin, who advocated ornate 14th-century Gothic as the style in which to embody ‘the beauty of holiness’. These were also the ideas that the influential clergy of Oxford and Cambridge were behind: out with Classicism (the style of paganism) and in with Gothic (the style of catholic Christianity*); out with the old spartan preaching churches of the 18th century, in with beautiful buildings that were fit for the sacraments and could move you to prayer.

Inside St Mary’s there is beauty everywhere you look. The intricately carved pulpit and font cover; the painted organ case and pipes; corbels and brackets carved with foliage or with angels playing musical instruments; colourful Minton floor tiles; a reredos dripping with miniature arches and shafts and framing a pyrographic picture of the Supper at Emmaus done by a local clergyman; a painstakingly painted and stencilled roof; elaborate hinged metal grilles that allow doors to be left open for ventilation; innumerable details meaning that there’s always something to see that you’ve missed before. This is a very special building.

For all this high-Victorian glory, the place certainly does not feel stuffy. The parish has embraced the eco-church movement. There is community planting in the churchyard – cherry tomatoes were on offer when I was there and parts of God’s acre are kept wild. And amongst the wildness the crocketed lines of Niblett’s beautiful spire rise above the yew trees, thrown into relief by the sunshine and leading the eye upwards to the clouds and the patches of deep blue in the summer sky.

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*By ‘catholic’, the Anglican campaigners of the 1830s onwards meant true to the doctrines of the ancient, undivided Christian church. They believed the Church of England to be a truly ‘catholic’ church.

Angel mural, Fretherne church, Gloucestershire

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

Round-up

I belong to a local Facebook group here in our corner of the Cotswolds. People post news, coming events, and other items of interest. If someone spots escaped livestock (sheep usually, occasionally cattle) on a nearby road, they put up a post with details of the location and before long another member who knows which farmer is responsible lets them know. Back in the Middle Ages, before the enclosure of land into small fenced fields, stray livestock was much more of a problem. Animals grazing on open common land wandered off regularly. The answer to this problem was the village pound.

If someone’s animals strayed on to your bit of one of the big open fields and you didn’t know whose they were, you could drive them to the pound, a walled enclosure in the middle of the village. When the owner found out what had happened, the creatures could be retrieved. Most village pounds fell out of use after enclosure of the land into the self-contained fenced or walled fields we know today, when stray livestock became much less of a problem. But a few pounds survive. The one at Arlingham is a rectangular enclosure bounded by walls of a mixture of stones – red sandstone and green pennant stone brought across the River Severn from the Forest of Dean, together with local lias. In c. 1870 when the pound was repaired, a fourth type of stone was used – recycled Cotswold stone from a demolished house, Arlingham Court, which once stood nearby. Amongst the reused stone was part of a window surround, which can still be seen among the masonry on the inside of the front wall (see photograph below).

To pay for the upkeep of the pound and presumably to provide feed for the animals if they spent long there, a charge was levied for each animal impounded. A modern notice lists the charges in force in the 1780s: 1 penny for a horse, 2 pence for a cow, 3 pence for ‘a score [20] of sheep’ and 4 pence for a sow. Quite enough, one would imagine, for an owner to look after their animals (and, after enclosure, their fences), to ensure that they would rarely have to pay up before driving a stubborn cow or pig back home.

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* Arlingham was enclosed in 1802, but the pound was clearly useful enough post-enclosure for these repairs to take place.

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

All about line

I’d planned to go over to Frampton-on-Severn, stroll along the enormous village green, and look at some favourite buildings. But as I approached the place I saw signs saying in large letters, ‘FRAMPTON VILLAGE FEAST – FUN FAIR’ and when I arrived the village green was full of roundabouts and dodgems ready for the big day. So I decided to push on to Arlingham, a village set deep in the River Severn’s most dramatic loop, and look at the church, which until now I’d not managed to get inside.

When I got there I found the church locked, but a telephone number on a noticeboard put me in touch with the key’s helpful custodian and I was soon inside. To me the most engaging of the many delightful things in the church were four panels of mid-14th century stained glass. Each panel shows a standing saint and the two in the photograph above* are St Mary and St John, both set against a rich red background within ornate white architectural frames. Both saints, especially John, display the slightly sinuous form of the body typical of the period: his head is tilted to the left, his upper body slopes slightly to the right, his abdomen is straighter, and one foot points to the right. This is not quite the stylised S-shape of some 14th-century figures, but definitely tends that way.

However, the feature of the figure drawing that particularly struck me was the depiction of John’s right-pointing foot and Mary’s hands. The foot has exaggeratedly long toes, unrealistic in their proportions but so carefully enough drawn that each toe has its nail delineated. Mary’s hands likewise have very long fingers and they are drawn with one continuous line to produce the effect of interlocked digits. I like this carefully executed but rather eccentric effect, as I do the other linear details, the face, the headdress, and the architectural adornments – crockets and finials.

And in this window there’s a lovely bonus. High up in the quatrefoil that fills the top of the window is a tiny but beautifully formed image of St Catherine, with her wheel (see my second photograph). This little portrait has more interesting line work, including the face (with its somewhat scornful glance at the instrument or torture), the patterns, and another long-fingered hand, holding the wheel. How pleased I was that my avoidance of preparations for the fun fair and feast and had led me to a small feast for the eye in these windows at Arlijngham.

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* Please click the photograph to see the details more clearly.

Chastleton, Oxfordshire

 

A spirit of place and time

I have visited Chastleton House before, but the other week the Resident Wise Woman and I decided that it was time for a revisit, so once again we found ourselves parking in the designated car park and walking along the path across the field and past the dovecote, to arrive in front of one of the most perfect of English Jacobean country house facades. As I’ve shown this front before in a previous post, I want this time to dwell on the interior, its unique contents, and the unusual way in which the National Trust has preserved it all. When the house came to the National Trust in 1991, it was remarkable not just for its architecture of 1607–12, but also for the fact that many of the 17th-century contents were still in place, and nothing substantial had been altered. None of the inhabitants had been rich, so there were no makeovers, and no money for anything but the most basic necessary repairs. The effect was not much different from that described in a Country Life article of 1919: ‘one of those rare things that once seen can never be forgotten…for the retention of its ancient furniture, fittings, pictures, pewter, glass and tapestries…it stands out as a wonderful survival’.*

What the curators at the National Trust saw when they took over in 1991 was something very similar – but with an added element. The house was also testimony to the owners who had hung on, living in the house but doing very little with it. The evidence of their lives was all around them – recent inhabitants had included an art critic and a scientist – the cups and plates they used every day, boxes of chocolates, the books and magazines they read, the glasses they wore while reading them. The place was a time capsule, but evocative of two eras: the early-17th century and the mid-20th. How to preserve this legacy?

The Trust decided not to restore the building to what it might have been like in the Jacobean heyday, but to preserve it very much as it was in 1991 when they took over. They adopted the minimal of alteration, only the most necessary repair, to lay, as Mark Drury put it, ‘as light a hand as possible on Chastleton, to arrest 150 years of progressive decay with an almost imperceptible tightening of the reins’. So no wholesale repainting or regilding of surfaces, just touching up here and there, while retaining the overall feeling of flakiness; no new curtains but gentle repair of what was there; and so on. And in addition, retaining the marks of a life lived in the house – magazines left open on the bed or table; a teapot waiting to be poured; a half-empty decanter, old guidebooks to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds in a rack near the entrance.

The approach has always been controversial. There are some who believe that a place as beautiful as this deserves a more interventionist approach, to take it some way back towards its 17th-century glory; one good friend of mind calls the Trust’s approach at Chastleton ‘brilliantly wrong’. There are indeed ways of doing this without wholesale restoration and the SPAB and those who follow its tents have established best practice for conservation. But I’m more sympathetic. I love the way the house pays homage to both its original builders and its 20th-century owners. I also admire the way the house’s custodians can keep something so fragile in this precarious state indefinitely. But I’m also aware of the problems of doing this. All conservation is difficult, expensive, and painstaking; keeping this fragile place just so must be even more so. And as I stroll around the house with other visitors, our feet pounding the floor and staircases, our breath changing the humidity, our hands leaving marks on banisters, I realise that I and all the other visitors are ourselves part of the problem, a strain on the building, while also providing funds for its upkeep. And yet at moments, when one is alone in a room, there is an atmosphere, a spirit of place and time, like nowhere else in the world.

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* Quoted in The Art Newspaper, 1 December 1991

Chastleton house, teatime tableau

Dunster, Somerset

Inside view

Anyone who looks at the different types of building that I write about on the English Buildings blog would be forgiven for thinking that I have a bit of a thing about dovecotes. I’ve done about a dozen posts about dovecotes over the years and yes, I do like them, both for the light they shed on past lives and diets and for their variety of structural forms – examples include structures built of stone, brick and wood; plans range from squares to octagons and, mostly common of all, circles.

Why circular dovecotes? The one at Dunster, which may date back to the 13th or 14th century but which many think is more likely to be 16th century, is well enough preserved to show how such a building worked. From the outside, the emphasis is on solid walls and small openings (through the little lantern or louvre at the top), to let in the doves or pigeons, while keeping out larger predators. The largest predator of all, man, can enter through the door, which would most of the time have been kept securely closed. Through it, the workers of the local lord (or, if the dovecote is from one of the earlier possible dates, monks of the Benedictine priory)* could enter and gain access to the nest boxes, where the eggs or young birds could be gathered to provide a welcome supplement to the medieval diet.

The key feature inside, apart from the 500 or so nest boxes set in the walls, is the central wooden device called the potence (photograph below). This consists of a substantial central post that can rotate and to which are attached horizontal beams and platforms. These in turn support a ladder. When the potence is turned, the ladder gives access to different next boxes, making the whole array of boxes accessible. Many ancient dovecotes have lost this mechanism, but at Dunster it’s preserved, giving us more of an idea than usual about how the dovecote was used, and an insight into the ingenuity of medieval and later carpenters.

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* Only nobles or members of the clergy (monastic or secular) were allowed to build and maintain dovecotes in the Middle Ages.

Dunster dovecote, interior showing nest boxes and potence

Lullington, East Sussex

Where was I?

Year: 1968. Scene: A red Humber Sceptre driving along a lane in remote Somerset, my father at the wheel, me in the passenger seat, trying to find where we are on an Ordnance Survey map. We are trying not to admit to each another that we are lost.

DAD: Well, I don’t think this can be the right road.

ME: I know. It doesn’t look right on the map.

DAD: Let’s carry on for now.

ME (excitedly): Look! There’s a post box. Let’s stop and see what it says.

DAD (braking): Good idea – son.

That last word was always said with a slight pause before it, ‘son’ being stressed in an unusual way, part in irony, part in praise, or, occasionally, if the emphasis was very strong, admiration.

Of course, what we both knew was that back then, post boxes carried information about their location on the panel that bore the collection times. So we stopped and discovered more or less where we were.

I thought of this when I saw this lovely signpost at a Sussex junction back in the spring. I found several things about it easy to like – its wooden construction, the tapering column, the black-painted finial, the shaped corners of the pointing arms, and the clear sans serif lettering. Also the way it told me the direction of Lullington church, which is what I was looking for. And the fact that the column spells out where you are: LULLINGTON. If you’re unsure of your bearings, it puts you right. Perfect.

This was useful when the signpost was erected and, it could be argued, it’s still useful today. Most of us find our way around these days with the help of apparently miraculous satnav devices.* They are usually pretty good at guiding us to our destination, but not very good at telling us where we are. We glance at the dashboard map and see we’re nearing a grey area signifying a settlement, but no name is attached to it. If some oaf has driven into the village sign and knocked it over, or if we miss it because we are dodging other dashing objects or are distracted for a split second by an interesting Georgian rectory, we have no idea. If we’re in a place like Lullington, too small to have many signs at all, we’re likewise likely to be foxed. Signs like this still have their uses.

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* One of these days I’ll get round to doing a post about the virtues of OS maps when it comes to finding interesting buildings. Come to think of it, I’ve covered this ground already, in more than one earlier post. See this one from 2019.

Vindolanda, Northumberland

Markers of significance

Oh I do like a good sign. Shop signs, inn signs, ghost signs, road signs. Signs that tell us to ‘Commit no nuisance’; signs that implore us to adjust our dress before leaving. Signs that transport us to other times and other ways.* When our hosts took us to the wonderful Roman site at Vindolanda, they had a bonus to show us: not one old sign, but two close together, from vastly different eras. First, the stone column in the upper photograph. That’s a Roman milestone, and the only one in Britain that survives both intact and in its original position. It was one of a series marking the miles on the Stanegate, the Roman road that once linked Corbridge and Carlisle. The Stanegate, and the forts along it such as Vindolanda, date from the time in the 1st century CE when the Romans were advancing into what is now Scotland. When their progress was impeded in 79 CE they withdrew, so that the road became in effect the empire’s northern frontier. Hadrian became emperor in 117 and visited Britain in 122, probably staying at Vindolanda, when he ordered the wall to be built. Milestones marked the distance to the next important place along the road and had an additional propaganda value because their inscriptions mentioned the emperor. Sadly the inscription on this one has worn away, but its survival reminds us of a once essential route for the Romans, at first as a point from which to advance and later as a route for the defenders of the frontier.

As an antiquity of great importance, the milestone was put under the care of the Ministry of Works in the 20th century. The object in my second photograph is one of the ministry’s admirable cast-iron signs naming the monument and its location, and warning the reader that damaging it will render the culprit liable to prosecution. There used to be hundreds if not thousands of signs like this and their iron construction made them very durable. This one would have been put up during the lifetime of the Ministry of Works (1940–62); in 1962, the body was renamed the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which it remained until 1970, when it became part of the Department of the Environment. The sign refers to this monument as the Chesterholm Milestone, Chesterholm being the name of a nearby 19th-century house built by the antiquarian Anthony Hedley. Before the name Vindolanda became known (in 1914, when an altar to the god Vulcan inscribed with the name was discovered), ‘Chesterholm’ was often used to describe the fort and objects found there. Although the sign was put up after 1940, people had obviously been referring to the stone as the Chesterholm Milestone for many years and the name was still in circulation.

When I started visiting castles and other ancient monuments as a boy with my parents in the 1960s, both this style of sign and the ‘Public Buildings and Works’ signs that replaced them were commonplace. Most of them have been replaced by later signs, but a few, like this one, survive. Where did all the others go? Who knows? Most of them probably went for scrap. A few must have been snapped up by collectors. Signs hold a lasting fascination for many, whether for their design, their historical associations, the nostalgia they can evoke in the beholder, or personal connections. I know of a café not far from where I live that has an old National Trust sign of similar vintage, I have friends who own old advertising signs and other antiquated notices. I am pleased that such things have found good homes, but I also like it when such a sign can still be found in its original setting, just like the more ancient and highly significant the Roman milestone.

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* For a lighthearted post on old signs, see The signs of yesteryear, from 2018.

Hexham, Northumberland

 

Welcome intervention

I’ve written before about the many positive contributions to British culture made over the centuries by those who arrived on these shores as refugees.* Perhaps the contribution to architecture and design that has been most celebrated over the last 90 or so years was that of the numerous Jewish architects, designers, and craftspeople whose flight from Nazism brought them to Britain. But there have been so many others. One group that is not widely known nowadays is made up of the Belgians who came here after the fall of their country in the first year of World War I. The numbers were vast, their impact was varied, and when I visited Hexham I saw one building where it shows.

One craftsman who settled in the area was Joseph or Josephus Ceulemans, a woodcarver.† While in Hexham he restored Hexham Abbey’s medieval font cover, which had fallen to pieces, providing intricate carving to complement what was left of the original. More of his work is visible on a shop in Fore Street. In Ceulemans’ time this was Gibson’s the chemist, where a collection of Flemish and French books had been assembled so that the refugees, many of whom initially spoke no English, had something to read. Ceulemans lavished his carving skills on the shop front, adding a profusion of vine leaves and bunches ofd grapes above one doorway (top photograph) and creating a carved tribute to Philip Gibson, Freeman of the City of London, above the shop sign (lower photograph). There is also carved foliage of various kinds and several coats of arms.

The variety of decoration found on surviving Victorian and early-20th century shop fronts is extraordinary, from Gothic arches to Classical columns, cast ironwork to colourful tiles. Wood, however, is the main material for shop fronts of this date, and few are as decorative, or ornamented with such lavishness, as this one. Another Belgian refugee commented on his and his friends’ plight: ‘We find nothing to occupy ourselves …and this idleness weighs upon us.’ Some, though, like Joseph Ceulemans, did find things to do and this carving marks a turning point in a craftsman’s life. Forced to leave his homeland, he was trying to be as active as he could in his craft (keeping his hand in, as we say), while also, no doubt, paying a tribute to the local people who made him welcome.

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* For one piece I have written about the positive impact of settlers from overseas, see this blog post from 2014.

† I am indebted to the website of the Allen Valleys Local History Group for information about Joseph Ceulemans.

Hexham, Northumberland

 

Grapes and glazing

I read online that in Britain the rate of pub closures continues to be high: on average one pub is closing every day. Apart from the loss of places to eat and drink and the disapearance of jobs, this also has an impact on architectural heritage. The more important or spectacular pub buildings are protected by listing, but there are many that, while not significant enough for listing still retain interesting or pleasing features that can disappear with a change of use. So when old pub fittings or decorations survive, I’m usually pleased, and sometimes my pleasure finds expression on this blog.

In Hexham, my eye was caught by some good embossed glass in the windows of the Grapes. Sure enough, the decoration features among other things…grapes. It also bears an unusual wording, ‘Family Department’, which may be clearer if you click on the picture to enlarge it. I’d not seen this wording on a pub before. I wonder if any of my readers know of pubs that describe their separate bars or rooms as departments? I’d be interested to hear from them via the comments page if so.

I assume that these glass windows date to the late-Victorian period. They’d be ruinously expensive to install today, especially the curved glass pieces – there are actually two of these, one on either side of the door. Their imagery (mythical beasts, vases containing plants, scrolls and the eponymous grapes) were produced by a skilled craft worker. In his excellent book Victorian Pubs,* Mark Girouard quotes a remark from an 1898 textbook of glass decoration that shows how common this kind of work once was: ‘there is scarcely a warehouse, a bank, a shipping office, or public building throughout our great towns in which embossed or ornamental glass in some shape or another is not used.’

So much of this has vanished over the years; much of what remains is in pubs. There were at least two different ways of producing these designs on glass. Both involved masking part of the design and applying acids to the unmasked portion. In some more elaborate designs, additional techniques such as brilliant cutting the glass, or applying gilding or coloured paints, were also used, but these were expensive techniques and many pubs, like the Grapes in Hexham, made do with the basic embossed decoration. The result, while calling attention to the pub and also restricting the view in from outside, can be elegant, engaging, and well worth preserving. It says ‘pub’ almost as clearly as a swinging hanging sign.†

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* Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press, 1984)

† If you’re interested in another example of this kind of glass, see my post of some ten years ago on the Albert pub in Victoria, London.