Snape, Suffolk

 

Vernacular nostalgia

Sanding by the river at Snape Maltings and looking across at this house I was suddenly transported back decades to the time when, as a small boy, I began to realise that houses varied in their appearance according to whereabouts in England they were. It must have been on one of our family trips from Gloucestershire to visit my grandparents in rural Lincolnshire. It had been pointed out to me that many of the older houses in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds were built of local limestone; although we did not live in such a house, I soon got used to seeing them everywhere in the area around where we lived. In Lincolnshire, by contrast, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny farm worker’s cottage built of brick with a clay-tiled roof. My cousin’s farmhouse was bigger but similar in materials and overall architectural style. In perceiving the differences between these kinds of vernacular architecture I was starting to develop a sense of place.

There are many similar houses to those Lincolnshire ones in East Anglia too. This one in Snape reminded me instantly of what I’d grown used to in Lincolnshire. Walls of brick laid in Flemish bond, curvy pantiles on the roof. Shallow brick arches over the windows and doorways. Such houses are testimony to the fact that in many areas hereabouts, the local building stone (flint or chalk) is not as well suited to construction as Cotswold limestone. Bricks began to be used in East Anglia earlier in the Middle Ages than in most parts of England – thanks largely to sea contact with the Low Countries, where bricks were common.

Hence these lovely houses, built in a material that people soon grew to like, adding aesthetic preference to practicality. There was a time, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, when houses like this were regarded as old fashioned. They had low ceilings (look how close the windows are to the roof in this Suffolk example). They were ‘pokey’. Bigger windows made houses that were lighter. And so on. Thanks to depopulation following the mechanisation of agriculture, many were simply demolished, like my grandparents’ house in its field. Now they’re fashionable again, as more and more people appreciate traditional buildings and their practical advantages (small windows and rooms are easier to keep warm, for example). I think there are enough of them left so that they can still be part of that blend of the natural and the man-made that comes to together to create a sense of place.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

 

Bardsploitation?

On my many visits to Stratford-upon-Avon, I’d not paid much attention to the sign of the Hathaway Tea Rooms. It’s in a street I don’t often walk along, and if we want tea or coffee in the town, the Resident Wise Woman and I have places where we regularly go. If I noticed it at all, I probably silently condemned it as another arbitrary connection with the Shakespearian reputation (for those who don’t know, Anne Hathaway was the woman who became Mrs Shakespeare). ‘Bardsploitation,’ I might have muttered. ‘What’s Hathaway to them or them to Hathaway?’

Well, the town is full of Bardic references on buildings, so why should Anne Hathaway not get a look-in too? The name gives a good excuse for a pleasant pictorial sign of her cottage, a famous tourist destination in the nearby village of Shottery, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and open to the public. The word ‘LUNCHEONS’ on the beam from which the sign hangs is very much a period detail – it’s a word redolent of the first half of the 20th century.

As is the business itself, and its long life (‘Established 1931’) is something to crow about. It may also be relevant architecturally. Apparently this impressive late-medieval timber-framed building was restored at around that time or a little before, along with its next-door neighbour. Someone (maybe the Georgians) had plastered over the wooden framing and the 20th-century restoration removed this covering, exposing the many timber beams and uprights, adding another bit of ‘black-and-white’ architecture to the town’s centre.

Of course these days we know that blackened beams like these are not a medieval look: structural oak was usually left untreated, so that it achieved a silvery-grey colour. So this ‘black-and-white’ architecture is itself redolent of another time – the Victorian period and later. Any building of this age is likely to bear the marks of several different periods, and such a story of evolution is as interesting as the fact that its origins are ancient. Food for thought over your tea and buns.