Chester

Alas: Smith and Jones…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lullingon, East Sussex

At home on the Downs

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

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

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

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* Or just part of the chancel

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

Lewes, Sussex

 

Glowing in the sun

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

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

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

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

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

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

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

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

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

Hastings, East Sussex

Local heroes

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

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

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

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Public utility

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

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

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

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

 

Ghosts’ stories

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

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

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

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

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

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

A small glory

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

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

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

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Hot hut

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

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

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

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

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Still flushing

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

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

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

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

Gents: interior showing clerestory grilles to admit light and air

Halesworth, Suffolk

Not quite lost

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

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

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

Bungay, Suffolk

 

Oddly enough…

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

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

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

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Portal wonders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Beaten tracks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.