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.