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.

- - - - -

* 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.

- - - - -

* 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.