Churchdown, Gloucestershire

 

Who did that?

Many people see graffiti as a modern phenomenon. It’s the young, you’ll hear, who do it – they have too much time on their hands, they have no respect, they should do something useful, and so on. Against that, others will put forward the graffiti of artists such as Banksy, who make social and political points by painting on buildings – this is graffiti that means something, that makes important points. ‘It’s art,’ people will say. ‘It’s fine…I agree with it…provided it’s not “enhancing” my house’...although some, valuing the work of Banksy (aesthetically, or financially, or both) welcome the artist’s interventions on their property.

But graffiti has been with us for a long time. The Romans had it, it exists in medieval churches. People who study medieval buildings are finding more and more ancient graffiti, and treating it seriously for what it might tell us about the interests of medieval and later people, and their religious beliefs. The marks made by scraping shallow lines on ancient stone can be hard to see, but they have their fascination. There’s an excellent book on the subject, Medieval Graffiti by Matthew Champion (see my review of it, here), and there are some good websites about the subject too.

In this post I want to give just one example of a piece of graffiti in a church not many miles from where I live. This is St Bartholomew’s, Churchdown, a church that’s often locked, but volunteers currently open it on Saturday afternoons in summer. There are quite a few graffiti marks around the doorway in the north porch, and one of the most remarkable depicts a mermaid. The image is indistinct, but not hard to make out once you get your eye in. I have increased the contrast in my photograph so that some of the details are a little clearer. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you may be able to make out the mermaid’s head and one eye, her strands of sticking-out hair, a narrow neck, an upper body in which one breast is still clearly visible, and a scaly tail that narrows and curves away to the left, getting less distinct at the end. As our eyes follow the mermaid’s stick-arms, we see that she holds a square mirror in one hand and a comb with two rows of teeth in the other.

Churchdown is nowhere near the sea, although not far from the inland port of Gloucester. But you don’t need to live near the sea to have heard about mermaids. Tales of such creatures were known widely in the Middle Ages and later. Medieval mermaids were generally portrayed with long hair and a mirror and comb. In folklore they were symbols of vanity, pride and the perils of lust, and woe betide any man who fell in love with a mermaid and pursued her. He’d most likely be captured and come to a watery death. There are quite a few ‘official’ images of mermaids in churches – in wall paintings, for example, and on bench ends. Here someone long ago – who knows who? – has added their own.

Hereford

 

From the far shore

Enjoying an aimless stroll across Hereford a few weeks ago, I decided to cross the bridge over the Wye in St Martin’s Street and turn left along a path that ran along the south bank of the river. I thought that doing this might give me a good view of the cathedral tower and wondered if another bridge would bring me back on to the opposite bank and into the city centre. Having admired the view of the tower, I checked the map on my phone, which suggested there was no bridge for miles. I carried on anyway, realising eventually that there was a rather elegant pedestrian suspension bridge, of all things, that would take me where I wanted to go. Shortly before I got to the pedestrian bridge, I saw the view above of a building in various materials and architectural styles reflected in the river.

I admired the long stone section on the left, with sash windows that could be Georgian or Victorian. To the right of this is a slightly taller section with a stone base and brick walls further up, and an attractive two-storey bay window jutting out over the water and propped on a pair of struts. On the far right was another stone wall topped by a more modern, glass-walled and flat-topped wing, where people were sitting out and apparently enjoying drinks or ice-creams. I was intrigued and resolved to find out if I could what this building could be.

Having crossed the bridge, I made for the building and had a surprise. The stone walls of the left-hand section are clearly much older than Georgian or Victorian. I was greeted by pointed arches, in some cases so slightly pointed as to be nearly semicircular – I’m thinking of the nearer of the two doorways and the central pair of window arches in the image below. Some of this work looked as if it could be 13th century. A helpful plaque confirms that the structure has medieval origins at least. Its inscription reads: ‘CASTLE CLIFF mediaeval water-gate of HEREFORD CASTLE, GOVERNOR’S LODGE & late the BRIDEWELL’.

So this building allowed access to the former castle form the river, at some point also providing accommodation for the governor, a person who undertook the management of a castle on behalf of the lord or sovereign who held it. An important part of a castle now virtually vanished, then. Later, it was the site of the bridewell, a term used for a kind of prison or ‘house of correction’, where wrongdoers, vagrants, runaway apprentices, and other people who in the 16th century and later were seen as miscreants and undesirables.

The current users seem to be a far cry from the undesirables of the early modern period and the people on the roof terrace certainly seemed to be relaxed and enjoying themselves. The building is now listed as a holiday cottage. With the park on one side and the river on the other, they enjoy delightful prospects.

London, Weymouth Street

 

A kind of cocktail

Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do with Queen Anne. It brings together a mix of stylistic influences – a bit of Dutch, some Christopher Wren, a hint of Renaissance – that its historian, Mark Girouard, described as ‘a kind of architectural cocktail’. Architects added to the mixture features such as red brick, white-painted woodwork, fancy gables, oriel windows, and steep roofs to produce an impression that, to the Victorians of the 1870s onwards, represented a breath of fresh air after the stuffiness of the Gothic revival on the one hand and 19th-century classicism on the other.

This house in Weymouth Street exhibits many of the typical Queen Anne features, plus a few more that are equally decorative: circular windows, a dormer with a curvy pediment above it, and big ‘look-at-me’ swags in those eye-catching gables. It’s the work of F. M. Elgood, who built (or added new facades to) many houses in the Marylebone area. He was surveyor to two of the big landowners in this district, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Hop[e-Edwards Estate. This house was built for the former. By the time it was on Elgood’s drawing board, Queen Anne was widespread, influencing the design of even such downmarket buildings pubs. Perhaps for a large town house like this, both architect and client felt that there was a need for some extra bells and whistles, hence those elaborate swags. A heady cocktail indeed. Cheers!

Gloucester

On celebrating your heritage

I live in Gloucestershire, so Gloucester is my county town and one of the two big towns near me. Whenever I go there these days I try to take a minute to walk around the bak of Northgate Street to look at the concrete mural on the old Sainsbury’s building, which is currently empty pending redevelopment as apartments. I have always liked this mural and I hope plans to remove it before the redevelopment starts and display it somewhere else come to fruition. I think it’s an object lesson in making something memorable out of a blank wall and using the opportunity to commission talented artists.

The artists concerned were Henry and Joyce Collins and 40 or 50 years ago they were quite well known for this sort of decorative work. Henry Collins married Joyce Pallot in 1938 and from 1948 on produced a number of public artworks in Britain. They are best known for murals made of concrete, the first of which was for Sainsbury’s in their home town of Colchester in 1969. The Gloucester mural followed in 1970. The couple produced about 30 such murals during the ensuing decade.*

They were well aware that many people found concrete dull and grey, so countered this both by the vigour of their designs (the concrete is often deeply cut to produce strong patterns of light and shade) and by using colour, especially brightly coloured mosaic tiles, to enliven their designs. They were also keen to make their murals express something specific to their location, often the history of the town where they were located. This explains the subject matter of the Gloucester Sainsbury’s mural, which features that city’s rich Iron Age, Roman, Medieval and later history.

The section in my photograph, which represents slightly more than one quarter of the whole artwork, shows how they did this using patterns, symbols, heraldry, and figurative art. Starting at the far left, the vertical band of zig-zag pattern is taken from prehistoric Beaker Period pottery. The small roundel next to it and the octagon just above and to the right are motifs from a Gloucester Roman mosaic and recur at other places in the mural. The larger roundel with a sun-like design is a device they used on murals for Sainsbury’s. Beneath are two coats of arms, both for the city of Gloucester, the first granted under Henry VIII, the second from the time of Oliver Cromwell. Beneath the coats of arms is a plough, with the inscription, ‘Success to the cultivation of waste lands,’ in honour of the area’s rich agriculture, a point also made by the wheatsheaf to the right. The roundel next to this shows a coin from time of William the Conqueror. Above, and dominating this section of the mural, are two figures against a background of vibrant orange† mosaic tiles: a medieval abbot of Gloucester (the building that’s now the cathedral was an abbey before the time of Henry VIII) and a Norman soldier. To the right of the soldier are images that allude to Gloucester’s maritime and riverine history: a Severn coracle and paddle, and a sailing ship. The latter is based on a token produced in 1795 to mark the start of work on the Gloucester and Berkeley Canal. The bell-like object to the right of the token is based on a cup illustrated in a local Roman mosaic, but turned upside-down to symbolise the town’s bell-founding industry. Above the sailing ship and cup-bell are the words ‘GLEAWE CEASTRE’ the city’s Saxon name.¶

The mélange makes for an engaging mix of images, and forms in my opinion a fine tribute to the city’s history in the idiom of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s bold, well designed, and its use of colour works well. It has livened up a dull part of the city (it overlooks a car park) for over 50 years. Removing this fine piece of public art from the wall it’s attached to is going to be a delicate operation that needs to be done by experts. One hopes that this process, when it happens, is successful, and that the mural is properly resited. I have a certain anxiety over all this because another work of Henry and Joyce Collins, from Gloucester’s branch of British Home Stores, has been similarly removed and now languishes in storage ‘awaiting a suitable site’. It has been there for some years. 

- - - - -

* For more about this artistic couple, see the Henry and Joyce Collins website.

† Orange is a colour used in Sainsbury’s corporate identity, but it works well visually, giving the mural a welcome warmth.

¶ I am indebted to the website of the Gloucester Civic Trust for information about the iconography of the mural.

Kirkburn, East Yorkshire

 

Beasts, chevrons, and scrolls

I apologise to any readers who have been frustrated at my previous post, which illustrates a notable Norman church but discusses the flowers in the churchyard. If that’s a little perverse for an architecture blog, I’d argue that a building’s context is often as important as the building itself. However, as St Mary’s, Kirkburn, is a Norman churches with some memorable carvings, I’m not going to let it pass without a few words, and a couple of pictures, of its memorable entrance.

This is the south doorway of the church, and it’s a star example of the kind of entrance that the builders and sculptors of 12th century England liked to produce when they had the time and money to do so. The overall design will be familiar to many people who like to visit old churches: a semi-circular opening featuring several more or less concentric bands of decoration, known as orders because they sit on a series of miniature columns (known in the business as shafts). The inner orders are recessed, leading the eye towards the door and the interior of the church. The capitals at the heads of the shafts and carved with scrolls, which give a distant hint of the Roman Ionic or Corinthian, reminding us that the style of architecture in Britain known as Norman is also termed Romanesque.

Kirkburn’s south doorway has three orders, the inner one decorated with chevron ornament, the second also of chevrons, with some carved decoration on each triangular outer surface, and the third of beakheads. There’s a fourth, outermost, band that has no shafts supporting it. This is known as the label and this one is unusual in that it bears quite striking figurative carving – labels are often quite plain.

My second photograph shows the central part of each ornamental band, so that you can see them in detail. The first, innermost, band has multiple rows of  finely cut chevrons, both on the front face of the arch and the underside. This is high quality work by someone at home with mallet and chisel – and it’s a standard pattern of this period so you’d expect it to be done competently. Before the next order comes a band of stones carved with mostly abstract patterns (chevrons, squares, scrolls and one crudely cut head); this band tapers towards the sides, to accommodate the difference in curvature between the lower order (segmental, to fit the door) and the upper orders (semicircular). The carving here is much less assured, almost as if it had been left blank and a less skilled mason had later decided to decorate it.

The next order up is again made of chevrons, but exceptional ones because there are carved motifs on the upper surfaces. These motifs range from stylised stars, leaves and spirals to beasts – on the far left there’s what looks to be a serpent. Next comes the outer order of beakheads, crisply carved, with the usual features of these creatures: pointed beaks and furrowed brows. With both these orders, we are back to more confident work.

Finally, there are the carved stones of the outer band or label. It’s mostly difficult for the 21st-century eye to identify the subjects of these. The excellent website of The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) tries hard.* This site is compiled by people who are used to looking at and studying Romanesque sculpture, so if their conclusions are surprising, they’re at least based on knowledge of the subject that spreads broad and goes deep. From left to right they identify the subjects in the close-up picture as: a sheep; two serpents with foliage sprays in their mouths; two lions; a horse; a woman holding a torch (sideways on to fit the stone); a dragon among stars; three birds with their eggs; and two animals with foliate tails and tongues.

If one could be sure of the animal identification, one could no doubt draw conclusions about the moral or spiritual lessons to be drawn from the creatures illustrated. But I hold back from trying to do this when the ‘sheep’ is so elongated and stylised, when the ‘lions’ have tufted tails but not a lot else lionish about them, and when some animals are not identified at all. I prefer to marvel at the skill of the carvers (even work we might describe as ‘crude’† is graphic and effective), at the good state of preservation (apart from the odd chipped beak) and the strong sense of design. There’s plenty here to scratch one’s head about, but much to give pleasure too.

- - - - -

* I cannot stress enough what a useful resource this site is. It’s here.

† If, looking at the ‘sheep’, you’re tempted to say that a child could have done it, remember Picasso’s remark when accused of a similar lack of sophistication: ‘Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to draw like children.’ There are various variations on this remark of Picasso’s online, but the one I give is the one I believe to be most accurate. 

Kirkburn, East Yorkshire

Green thoughts

Churchyards. I’ve been in a lot of them in my time and mostly I can concur with the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s First Love, ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’ I’ve known churchyards where grass grew knee-high, and others mown to within a millimetre of their lives; churchyards in Leicestershire full of elegantly cut slate gravestones and ones in the Cotswolds populated by tombs made of glowing oolitic limestone; I’ve been in churchyards so deserted and unkempt that my only company was a furtive rat scuttling into a crack in the side of a table tomb; I’ve been in a churchyard when sheep were grazing there and in another where a young man in gaiters and tweeds looked like a ghost from the 1920s as he swept leaves in the midge-haunted twilight. In all of these, save perhaps the one with the rat, I’ve taken the air willingly. There are many beautiful and engaging churchyards, and they spark our admiration in all kinds of different ways.

My photograph shows one that I admired very much. It’s at Kirkburn, East Yorkshire, near Driffield, north of Beverley. What I love about this place is that part of the churchyard has been set aside as a haven for wildflowers together with the insects and other animals that find food or shelter in such a place. It’s a part of God’s acre that contains old and often illegible stones, so not an area that many people will want to access – most visitors, I hope, will like me be happy to keep to the pathways. I’m sure most people will find heartwarming the sight of ox-eye daisies, knapweed, buttercups, and – yes! – a pyramidal orchid, among other things. Bees and other pollinators will be more happy still.

I didn’t realise when I was in Kirkburn, looking mostly at Norman architecture and carving, that it’s set in an area with a lot of intensive farming. This fact makes even this small bit of nature conservation more worthwhile still. CPRE North and East Yorkshire reports that species lists for the churchyard are growing, and remarks that Kirkburn’s was the only church they visited with a Pipistrelle dropping on the church door!† This is progress, although one hopes that the bats do not pose too many problems of their own in the context of the ancient church building. The approach wouldn’t work in every churchyard, but if just a few thousand of England’s 16,000 or so parish churches could set aside an area like this, what a benefit it would be to the environment.

- - - - -

* Most of my churchyard blog posts have been about things (gravestones, buildings, walls) in churchyards, but for nature, see my picture of ox-eye daisies at Bradford-on-Avon; and for another way to enjoy churchyards, see my thoughts on a picnic (and other things) in Tixover.

† See their website here for a report on their church visits. It’s to the CPRE that I owe the information about local intensive farming.

Amersham, Buckinghamshire

Underneath the arches

I break off my succession of posts about buildings in London and Liverpool to report that I found myself in Amersham the other week, having coffee with friends from the Czech Republic (as you do), and making brief observations of the local buildings before delivering said friends to Heathrow in time for their flight back to Prague. One building that we couldn’t miss was the chunky brick Market Hall, a structure of 1682, built thanks to Sir William Drake, the local Member of Parliament. It’s in the form of an open ground floor with arches supporting the enclosed meeting room above.

I found this large building rather difficult photograph without getting a lot of unwanted incidental detail into the frame, so I offer a closer shot of the arches (below), and a detail in one corner of the arched market area (above). This detail is a small wooden door with a barred semi-circular section above, where the fanlight would be in a Georgian doorway. This was the town lock-up, a small and rather dark cell where petty criminals could be detained for a night or so, before being taken to the local court to be tried. It’s not unknown for a lock-up to be incorporated into another structure – I’ve previously posted an example here – but it’s still a surprise to find one tucked away in the corner of this market hall. I don’t know whether the lock up is contemporary with the rest of the building – looking at the difference in the brickwork, I’m tempted to think it might be a later addition.

This kind of lock-up would have been in use until well into the 19th century. In theory, the County Police Act of 1839 made such provision unnecessary because the act obliged counties to set up their own paid professional police forces, who were to build police stations that would include secure cells to detain wrongdoers. In practice, however, some of these older lock-ups were retained in use after 1839.

The inscription above, a nice clear example of a ‘Commit no nuisance’ sign, looks 19th-century. I associate these signs with sites near pubs or other places of entertainment, their purpose being to discourage people from indulging in antisocial behaviour, especially when the worse for drink. I have noticed these signs before (there’s a rather light-hearted post about them and other old signs here), but I’ve not seen one on a lock-up before. It’s not inappropriate, and many a detainee must have read it and regretted that they’d not taken heed of it sooner. It takes more than a sign, of course, to discourage such antics, as a visit to any town on a Saturday night will reveal, if proof were needed. Amersham however, which looks a thoroughly civilised place, is I hope altogether more law abiding.

Somerton, Oxfordshire

 

A moment of confusion

Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare as hens’ teeth, I said to myself. And the figures are characterful and ooze charm – Jesus sits with the head of the apostle he loved best (normally said to be St John the Evangelist) on his lap; one diner seems to be refusing a drink; another pours from a jug; yet another gesticulates, as if in conversation. The faces, some with curly hair and beards, are delightful. The story is that the reredos was removed from its place behind the altar at the time of the Reformation and hidden away. It was, say different accounts, reinstalled during a restoration of the church in 1822, or after another in the later-19th century.

And in the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it probably is. Setting aside such normally authoritative sources as Pevsner and the listing description of the church, I do another Google search. This time I find a short piece on a website called The Antiquary. Here, the historian Dr Allan Barton gives a different story. That the figures, damaged beyond repair during the Reformation, was at some point restored. The restorer remade the faces and other details (handles, vessels, etc) using plaster of Paris attached to the surviving 14th-century stone (the arches, table, the bodies of the figures) by means of wooden dowels.

Barton does not give a source for his account, although it would no doubt be possible to tell the difference between stone and plaster on very close examination. But this version of events seems plausible. It would account for the style of the facial sculpture, which is rather more like Romanesque sculpture than 14th-century Gothic. And it would account for the good condition of the faces, which are surprisingly crisp for medieval survivors that had been removed, hidden and reinstalled.

There are problems with this kind of restoration. It is, of course, going against longstanding principles of historic buildings conservation to replace old work with new, and if damaged medieval carving was destroyed in the process, this would be cause for great regret. However, if the iconoclasts of the Reformation had hacked off whole faces and limbs, one’s attitude to a later sculptor adding new work would be more accepting. Even so, disguising the difference between old and new is also a problem. It should be clear what has been done and where the original ends and the repair begins. 

The usual 21st-century attitude to such items is to condemn them as fakes or forgeries. But we are where we are. Simple pleasure at what we are left with now is also a legitimate response.† It would be fascinating to know more, however. How does Barton know what material the additions are made of, and how they’re attached? Who modelled these faces and when, and was their intention to pull the wool over our eyes or just to renew something in their own way? What did the reredos look like in its damaged state? Oh to know more.

- - - -

* The Somerton in Oxfordshire; there are others.

† Albeit with questions about what if any medieval work was sacrificed during the restoration. 

Liverpool, St John's Lane

 

Liverpudlian Goth-ish

St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s eye with a very ornate corner entrance. It’s a phantasmagoria of arches, shafts, and Gothic details such as trefoils, stubby pinnacles, carved capitals and openwork parapets in a mixture of grey granite and buff-to-reddish stone. Over the door, a semicircular tympanum bears the name of the company in green and gold mosaic. Look up, and this entrance is crowned by a tower and spire. Beyond, four sets of office windows with gables above lead the eye down St John’s Lane while a slightly shorter facade of three gables stretches along Queen Square.

This building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1896–8. It’s a relic of a time when many large insurance companies had offices in large provincial cities as well as headquarters in London. Waterhouse’s bread and butter was designing such structures for Prudential – most of those are in bright red brick and terracotta and many, like the huge Prudential HQ in London are still there, occupied by other companies. For Pearl, Waterhouse used stone. Struck first by the entrance, I mentally filed the building under ‘Liverpudlian Gothic’, like the office block in my previous post. But a quick look made me realise that it’s more complicated than that. The details on the corner are Gothic, sure enough. But the arches are all semicircular, not pointed as one would expect in a Gothic building. And the side windows and gables seem to speak more of a Jacobean revival style.

View of the building showing the facades on St John’s Lane and Queen Square

By the 1890s, many architects were leaving behind the kind of strict, would-be accurate revivalism adopted by their predecessors earlier in the Victorian period – especially in secular buildings but even in churches too. The more vernacular building of the Arts and Crafts movement had arrived; Art Nouveau was just around the corner; and for designers like Waterhouse, working for clients who wanted buildings that were part landmark (the spire), part status symbol (the decoration), and part economical use of space, an eclectic kind of architecture was a good solution. Although Pearl Assurance has disappeared (after a takeover in the late-1980s), this building carries on, a tribute to an architectural blend of ideas and requirements that led to something practical, but hardly a visual compromise.

Note Thank you to my regular readers for indulging me in my splurge of Liverpool buildings over the last few weeks. I had not visited the city for years and it was even more architecturally rich than I remembered. My next few posts will be from elsewhere, but I plan to do more Liverpudlian posts in the future.

Liverpool, Bixteth Street

Liverpudlian Gothic

There are still a large number of good 19th-century commercial buildings in central Liverpool, and some of them are highly decorative, as if to emphasise the prosperity of the city in this period. Some of these structures are enormous, but even relatively small ones can be visually exciting, and Gothic, a style primarily but by no means exclusively associated with churches, lends itself well to showy facades. Here’s a good example, an office building, dating probably to the 1860s.

This building is called Lombard Chambers, but its architecture is the Victorian version of Venetian Gothic – polychrome masonry (red brick with stone dressings and a grey stone plinth), with lots of pointed arches and a distinctive gable with a row of tiny arches beneath the cornice. The central shafts of the pairs of windows on the second floor are made of iron although they could easily be mistaken for grey stone.* Some of the pale stone is carved with intricate foliage designs and creatures curled around one another (see my photograph below). 

I say it’s probably an 1860s design not only because that’s the verdict of the Pevsner guide to Liverpool,† but also because it was in the 1860s that this kind of highly ornate, rather jazzy, facade became fashionable. Venice, once the base of a maritime trading empire, appealed to businessmen in Britain’s big commercial ports like Liverpool. John Ruskin had compared the empires of Britain and Venice in his monumental book The Stones of Venice in the 1850s, and he loved the Gothic architecture of the city.

Ruskin’s admiration of Gothic architecture, and of Venetian Gothic in particular, was influential, and Venetian Gothic offices and even factories popped up in many English cities. Industrialists generally liked them not for Ruskin’s refined moral and aesthetic reasons, but because you could make a colourful splash with polychrome brickwork, pointed arches, and crisp carving. A building like this could act as a landmark and an advertisement for the owner. I don’t know who built this particular example, but the result still catches the eye and lodges itself in the memory.

- - - - -

* I count the floors upwards from the lowest visible level thus, in English fashion: basement, ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor; above the latter a modern attic floor, set back from the front, is just visible.

† Joseph Sharples, Liverpool (Yale University Press, 2004)

Lombard Chambers: carved details

Liverpool, Lime Street

Second among equals

The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas responded with an eye-catching round tower featuring a dome that seems to grow organically from the masonry below; both tower and dome are festooned with curvaceous frames around windows and pediment-like features that proclaim the design’s baroque heritage. The gables are fancy too, with more curves and finials – it’s a shame that neighbouring buildings mean that it’s hard to see much of this skyline against a background of sky.

Fireplace with beaten metalwork surround and panel depicting Viking ships.

Inside, the pub is very much a sibling of the Philharmonic, with much carved mahogany, polished metalwork, and a mix of stained and etched glass. Some of the metalwork is outstanding – the relief featuring Viking ships above the fireplace in my photograph is a good example.

Privacy screen with oval of stained glass. An original bell push is visible on the wall beyond. 

One feature of the layout is a number of wooden privacy screens with Art Nouveau stained glass panels and lamps mounted on metal uprights set into wooden columns. There are also telling memories of a kind of table service not seen in pubs much now (if at all): small bell pushes that enabled customers to call for service without getting up and going to the bar.

Copper-clad bar front, carved mahogany column and elaborate plaster ceiling

Dating from 1907, this pub is a few years later than the Philharmonic, but they clearly have much in common. One difference is the style of plasterwork in the ceilings. While the Philharmonic recalls the Jacobean era (early-17th century), that at the Vines looks to be inspired by designs from later in the same century. It’s no less impressive, and worth a stop to anyone seeking visual or alcoholic refreshment.†

- - - - -

* The name comes from one Albert Vines, who ran an earlier pub on this site.

Liverpool, Hope Street

Listed

When visiting a city I don’t know very well, I make lists of major buildings that I want to see, but once I arrive I’m constantly on the lookout for unexpected delights – the assorted unregarded shopfronts, pubs, sheds and shelters, many of which make up the subject matter for blog posts. In Liverpool, I made a bee-line for two pubs that can hardly be described as ‘unregarded’ – they’re among the most memorable drinking-places in Britain, a must for anyone who revels in the excesses of Victorian or Edwardian architecture and decoration.

The first is the magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a pub so ornate that my usual blog formula of one (or sometimes two) pictures and a commentary simply isn’t enough. You can see it’s a remarkable place before you enter. The exterior is a riot of freestyle details of 1900, the work of architect Walter Thomas for Liverpool brewers Robert Cain & Sons. Stepped gables, finials, turrets, balconies, and a big protruding corner feature all vie for attention – but somehow manage to cohere into a whole. You see the stand-out feature as you go in: a set of Art Nouveau gates in black iron and gleaming gilded copper.

Gates: by Henry Bloomfield Bare; Liver bird, gazelles, women’s heads, and the motto of Cain’s brewery, Pacem amo (I love peace).

Step inside, and you’re in another world. An intricate plaster ceiling, carved mahogany fittings, a mosaic-fronted bar counter and stained glass panels immediately catch the eye. The sheer quality is obvious at once – the crisp lines of those ceiling pendants, the beauty of the woodwork (many of the joiners also worked on the interiors of great ocean liners, swapping between architectural and marine jobs according to the availability of work). 

Mosaic-fronted bar, mahogany fittings, heraldic stained glass, and Jacobean revival ceiling. The interior work was supervised by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratton of Liverpool’s School of Architecture and Applied Arts.

Repoussé copper panel by Henry Bloomfield Bare, reflecting the pub’s musical links. 

Then as you grasp your pint and settle at one of the tables, you take in a variety of other decorative touches that go in quality and quantity way beyond what anyone has any right to expect in even an elaborate Victorian gin palace. Repoussé copper panels, etched glass, decorative mirror glass, tiles, a vast room (referred to as the Billiards Room, though some say it may have been a restaurant) with a plaster frieze, even the marbles and tiles of the gents toilets* – there seems to be no end to it.

Plaster frieze in the Billiards Room. Major figure work is by the sculptor Charles John Allen (his friend, a Mrs Ryan, modelled for the caryatid figures); other plasterwork was by a talented Irishman, Pat Honan.

This magnificent pub surpassed the expectations I had when I put it on my list. It’s a testimony to the huge prosperity of Liverpool, which was at its height in 1900 when the Philharmonic was built. I noted when I read about the building in Geoff Brandwood’s excellent book Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, that it was listed by English Heritage at Grade II* – an exceptional rating for a pub. However, I noticed on checking the current listing that it’s now actually listed at Grade I, the top listing reserved for the country’s most exceptional buildings. Rightly so. I’d encourage anyone who likes this kind of thing to put it on their personal list, head to Liverpool, stand themselves a pint, and toast Robert Cain & Sons and the team of architects and craft workers who made this place possible.

- - - - -

* There’s an old post about the lavatories here.

Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

 

The red and the grey

An 1840s complex of vast warehouses and numerous smaller structures around the water, the Royal Albert Dock is the masterpiece of engineer Jesse Hartley. Hartley designed it to be fireproof – the warehouses are constructed entirely of brick, stone and metal – there’s no structural timber, apart from over 5,000 beech piles sunk in the damp soil beneath on which the vast buildings rest.

The dock is so large that it’s hard to appreciate in a photograph, but a view across the water can take in the rows of mostly cast-iron orange-red Doric columns with four storeys of brick and stone warehouse space rising above them. Every so often the row of columns is broken by a broad arch, which provided extra height for cranes to operate, swinging items out of the ships’ holds and into the covered quay area. The design allows ships to birth and unload directly into the warehouses, most of the work taking place undercover in the space immediately behind the columns. Here goods unloaded from the ships could be sorted and hoisted up to the chosen storage area in the warehouse or loaded on to carts for transport elsewhere.

The brick outside walls are load-bearing, each level’s wall slightly thinner than the one below. Inside, however, the floors and ceilings (and indeed the weight of the stored goods) are supported by a grid of columns spanned by iron beams. At the top of each level, shallow brick arches span the spaces between the metal beams to form ceilings; these arches are built up to form a flat surface above, creating the floors. In adopting this layout, Hartley was drawing on the design of fireproof textile mills. He noticed that such mills sometimes collapsed because of the outward thrust of the ceiling arches, so he fitted plenty of iron tie-bars to counter this thrust.

This is a highly practical design, but it is also visually very attractive. When the docks fell out of use in the 1960s as container ships required a different kind of handling facility, various schemes were proposed to redevelop the site. Ideas to demolish the warehouses and build office towers were rejected, as was a plan to convert the warehouses into a new campus for what was then Liverpool Polytechnic. In the end, the current conversion was devised, accommodating several museums and galleries,† a variety of retail and restaurant outlets, the Beatles Story, two hotels, and other uses. Although as I write several of the attractions are temporarily closed for redevelopment, the dock still buzzes with visitors, drawn like me to this visually stunning structure steeped in British and international history. Long mays its bricks and its chunky red columns glow.

- - - - -

† Tate Liverpool, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum, all currently closed for maintenance and a major redevelopment project. Anyone interested in visiting. Tate Liverpool is scheduled to reopen in 2027, but dates can shift when alterations to complex historic structures are concerned.

Liverpool, Wapping Dock

Stand-out structure

Not far from the Albert Dock, whose gatemen’s shelters were featured in my previous post, stands Wapping Dock, and alongside this dock is an even more extraordinary small building. It’s slightly later (c. 1856) than the Albert Dock shelters, and stands by the site of the Wapping Dock’s entrance gates. It’s variously described in Joseph Sharples’ Pevsner City Guide to Liverpool (2004) as a policeman’s lodge and in the listing description online (c. 1975) as a gatemen’s shelter. Given the more recent date of the Pevsner guide, I’m inclined to accept its verdict, reinforced, to my mind, by the extraordinary architecture. The tall, spire-like roof seems to answer the old question, ‘Why can you never find a policeman when you need one?’ with a very visible point of contact. A reader has been in touch (see Comments section) to point out that the 1849 large-scale OS map marks two ‘Policeman’s huts’, one at either end of the dock. I think we have our answer.

If the tall roof and the unusual oval plan make this building stand out, so does the irregular stonework, laid like very high quality crazy paving, like the cyclopean masonry in my previous post. Other notable features are the horizontal protruding bands and the peculiar cross motif visible in my photograph. This cross is not unlike an arrow loop of the kind found in medieval castles, enabling an archer within to shoot at enemies outside. But this castle detail is very much an ornamental allusion to the old style of building – it’s not an actual opening and the lower part of the cross is not straight, but ends in a slight curve, diminishing in width as it tapers down.

Apparently this striking lodge or shelter once formed a central pier of a two-section gateway, making the visual reference to castle gatehouses and defensive architecture relevant in a way. The stone – tough granite – is also good for a gate or entrance. No wooden cartwheel, passing through, would do much damage to this hard stone. It must have done its job well, this tiny tower, eccentric as it looks.

Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

Small structure, giant stones

On a visit to Liverpool recently, I was very taken with the docks, the Royal Albert Dock in particular. Its imposing and innovative structure deserves at least one post of its own, but before I get there, a post or two about some of the smaller dock buildings, no less meticulously designed and built than the vast warehouses nearby. My first example is one of three dock gatemen’s shelters built in 1844 to designs by the Albert Dock’s engineer and designer, Jesse Hartley.

The shelters are not large – there’s just enough room for a small group of men to gather and shelter before rushing out to open or close the dock gates, do maintenance work on the docks and their gates and bridges, light the dock’s lamps at night, and so on. Inside was a fireplace and some wooden benches and not much else. The octagonal plan with windows facing different ways enabled those inside to keep a good watch on what was going on nearby.

Hartley was an innovative designer who took his ideas from many different sources. Here he specified Scottish granite, one of the toughest stones anywhere and a costly choice; it needed bringing all the way from Scotland and it was hard to work. Nevertheless, Hartley’s masons did a good job of working the stone to a smooth surface and laying it in the ancient Greek manner known as ‘Cyclopean’*, with very large rectangular blocks at the corners and smaller, irregularly cut pieces filling in the space in between. The roof is made of the same stone, cut into enormous slabs, laid stepwise, and supported by the stout walls and fancy stone brackets (referencing oriental pagodas) at each corner.

What a lot of skill and effort devoted to such a small building in a place where some dock companies might have made do with a cheap wooden hut. The result is something beautifully made that is still, some 180 years after is was constructed, almost as good as new. Hats off to Jesse Hartley, his masons, and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board for their parts in the shelters’ creation, and to National Museums Liverpool for their informative display in one of the huts.

- - - - -

* After the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, most familiar to readers of Homer’s Odyssey. Cyclopean masonry is normally made of very large stone blocks (as if only giants could handle them), with some if not all of irregular shape (suggesting the primitive skills of the giants). There is nothing primitive, however, about the masonry in Hartley’s shelters. 

London, Marylebone Lane

 

The pub on the corner

Corner sites are favourites for any business that relies on walk-in trade – shops of course, but also pubs. I passed this glowing example on a recent walk from New Bond Street to a meandering, roughly northwestward drift along Marylebone Lane. Every so often the narrow lane opens out at a crossroads or junction and here, at the corner with Bentinck Street was an ideal inn site, with an attractive looking pub catching the afternoon sunlight in pole position.

It’s the Coach Makers Arms, named in honour of a trade once prevalent hereabouts in Marylebone and, as opposed to the only vaguely Jacobean revival architecture of the shop in my previous post, it represents something from the same period (in this case 1901), in a free but more obviously Jacobean style. The early 17th century influence makes itself felt in the proportions of the windows (but not the sashes on some of them); the curving pediment at the top of the Bentinck Street frontage, with the little architectural flourish that pops up at the very top; the entrance canopy with the chubby baluster columns that help to support it; and the flourish of ornament in low relief on the corner of the building above the ground-floor window.

The use of red brick with stone dressings is typical of many buildings in this part of London, so the pub very much looks at home. There was evidence as we passed that there were still plenty of people drinking there at around 4 p.m., sometimes a quiet time after the lunchers have departed and before the after-work early doors trade begins. In this time of challenges for pubs, in terms both of architecture and hospitality, it seems as if this one is getting something right.

London, New Bond Street

 

Free style

A stroll through the gallery and couture retail area around New Bond Street throws up various architectural delights. Here’s just one example spotted on a London visit the other day, sticking out elegantly and self-consciously between a couple of more sober buildings. A neat group of stone-mullioned windows is caught between a large flattened arch that embraces both ground and first floors and a curvy gable that stands out between the flat-topped structures on either side. There’s also quite a bit of carved ornament – looping vines and tendrils, bunches of grapes and so on, all done in creamy Bath stone.

One of the curious things about this sort of building of the early years of the 20th century is that architectural historians find it difficult to put a precise stylistic label to it. Pevsner* goes for ‘free Jacobean’, taking his cue from the mullioned windows and the gable; the listing text describes it as ‘free late Gothic’, perhaps reflecting the double-curving ogee shape of the big arch. The common element in these two descriptions is ‘free’. This was a moment in architecture around 1900–1910 when architects (here Treadwell & Martin) broke away from the Victorian fashion for reviving past styles (aiming in many cases for a kind of ideal version of the past), going instead for something more original. So I see elements of Art Nouveau here alongside the Jacobean windows, in the ornament, in the tall, narrow gable, and in the double curve of the ogee arch, especially the way in which at its top it merges with the flowing ornamental vines. The number in the apex of the arch is also done in an elongated and curvy style that’s typical of Art Nouveau.

There’s something unbuttoned and celebratory about this building, which does things differently from its more straight-laced neighbours – Pevsner catches this feeling in his account of the building on the corner, which represents a ’sobering up after the Edwardian party’. That’s right, and the plain frontage to the left allows its elegant neighbour to shine.

- - - - -

* By Pevsner here, I mean the revised volume in the Buildings of England series, London 6: Westminster, by Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Framlingham, Suffolk

Show of strength 

Framlingham Castle looks very impressive as you approach it from the town. Today the entrance is along a path bounded by hedges, across a small 16th century bridge over a defensive ditch, and through the gatehouse. The main defensive element is the stout curtain wall, punctuated by 13 rectangular towers. Inside, built against the walls were the main accommodation buildings including a chamber block and chapel of which only fragments remain.

The defensive walls look strong, as well they might, because they were home to the Bigod family, earls of Norfolk and in the 12th and 13th centuries probably the most powerful family in Suffolk. Hugh Bigod was famously astute at changing sides during the civil war that erupted in the 12th century between the two rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda. However, when Henry II became king, he sought to curtail Hugh’s power, took over the castle, and dismantled it…although he finally gave the estate back to Hugh. Hugh’s son Roger rebuilt the outer walls of the castle, probably completing them by 1213, when King John stayed at Framlingham.

Although the walls and towers certainly look the part, the towers are not as substantial as they seem from outside – they are open at the back and most have no inner floors for accommodation, just an upper wooden bridge to allow defenders (and now visitors) to walk along the upper part of the walls. They would, though, have provided defending arches with a useful vantage point from which to observe, and shoot, approaching enemies. Another showy feature was added later. A number of the towers have particularly ornate tall chimneys. These were added in the 15th century, by which time the Bigod line had died out and the castle was held by the Dukes of Norfolk. My photograph shows three chimneys, though there are several more. Hardly any of them were ever connected to fireplaces – the towers, after all had no rear walls. They seem to have been there primarily as rather superficial status symbols. ‘We live in the lap of luxury here,’ they seem to say.

We are used to thinking of castles as military buildings, built to be as strong as possible for defensive reasons, and devoid of anything approaching comfort, let alone luxury. According to this view, if a castle bore status symbols, they’d come in the form of defensive bells and whistles – an extra-strong drawbridge, perhaps, or a supersized moat. The towers at Framlingham could be said to fall into this category. But the chimneys are different, speaking of an image of comfort and sophistication. The more work is done on castles, the more this sort of thing emerges – some castles had not just vast banqueting halls, but elaborate gardens, for example. A castle was a home as well as a fortress.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

 

Occasional haunts, 2

I often stroll around Cheltenham, admiring its Regency architecture (terraces, crescents and squares of stone or stucco-clad houses especially). This heritage reflects a heyday in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when people flocked to the town to visit its several spas and take the waters in the hope of curing a variety of ills. However, the town remained prosperous in the Victorian period, when health tourism was supplemented by education (Cheltenham became home to several public schools) and by its popularity as a place to which to retire (it was a favourite of army officers, colonial administrators and their families). The public schools were not for everyone, and many local-authority schools were built in the late-19th century.

One of these, now converted to apartments, was All Saints’ School, built in hard, mass-produced brick with Dutch gables and big windows, in the style of many a London board school. The architecture is enlivened by architectural terracotta – i.e. clay cast to produce decorative or other designs, a material that was becoming very popular when the school was built in 1890–91. By this time, terracotta faces, sunflowers and foliage were appearing all over fashionable houses. On the school, this material was used to produce signs denoting the separate entrances for boys and girls (photograph below), and for highlights such as capitals atop the brick pilasters that ran up the building, enlivening the expanses of brickwork (above).

My favourite piece of terracotta decoration on this building combines acanthus leaves and scrolls with human faces and vases of flowers. Ornaments like this could be bought from stock from manufacturers in certain towns where bricks were produced – Ruabon, Tamworth and Loughborough, for example. Elaborate bespoke ornaments could be ordered individually, but examples like this, where the architect and builders would have been working to a tight budget, would probably have been selected from a manufacturer’s catalogue, just like those used on many streets of middle-class housing. Perfect for a lesson in the interest of looking up, even at a familiar building.

Newent, Gloucestershire

 

Crafty

Straight away, it was familiar, this utilitarian building tucked away in the centre of the Gloucestershire town of Newent, where I might more predictably be looking at the medieval church* or the timber-framed market house.§ Striking me, with its odd, seven-sided walls-come-roof design, it called to mind a kind of Art Deco Nissen hut, but I couldn’t remember what this kind of building was actually called, or exactly what it would have been built for. I knew, though, that its origins were military, and that I might find the answer in Paul Francis’ excellent reference book, British Military Airfield Architecture.† And yes, this book provided the answer. It’s a Handcraft Hut, although it was not designed to house people crafting with their hands…

Handcraft Hits were first made in 1942 by the Universal Asbestos Company, whose factory in Watford was called Handcraft Works. They were built as accommodation for airmen and women at airfields, and were made by bolting together asbestos cement sheets, the corrugations of which gave them strength enough to stand up without a supporting framework. On a good solid base, all you needed was some brickwork (and a door at one end) and interior dividing walls (made of asbestos in the original design) that varied according to whether the hut was meant for officers or other ranks.

This example differs from the standard design in that large double doors have been fitted and a brick plinth is needed to allow the asbestos cements sheets to rest on a level footing. The doors and location suggest a commercial use in this case, and a sign tells anyone who needs to know that the workshop once active in the hut has now closed.

Not a particularly attractive building, many would think – fine for an airfield in time of war or a yard in peacetime. The use of asbestos must mean that a lot of these huts must have been dismantled (one hopes by people qualified and equipped to do so). So why spend time contemplating an ugly building in a material now condemned as dangerous and even potentially life-threatening? Perhaps because it’s an instance of the kind of ingenious engineering that sometimes happens in wartime. A material then thought of as something magical, combined with an ingenious design using corrugation, formed into a many-sided sheet, made for an ingenious and no-doubt cheap structure that could provide much-needed accommodation that could be erected quickly by people of limited skills. A bit of history that’s worth remembering and, found like this one in the middle of a country town, rather a surprise.

- - - - -

* It was locked, alas.

§ Blogged, after an earlier visit, here.

† Paul Francis, British Military Airfield Architecture: From Airships to the Jet Age (Patrick Stephens Limited, 1996). Copies come up on the second hand market, but it’s not a common book and usually commands a premium price.

Swinbrook, Oxfordshire

 

Shelved

About 13 years ago I did a post on this blog about some tombs in the churchyard at Swinbrook. a delightful village on the edge of the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire. I implied that I’d write another post about something inside the church, but I wasn’t very happy about my photographs of what I wanted to write about, so I put the post on hold…and then forgot my original intention. A few weeks back, I returned to Swinbrook, looked at the monuments to members of the Fettiplace (sometimes Fettisplace) family, and took some rather better, though far from perfect, photographs. The surprising tombs of this important landowning family deserve their long-awaited blog post. Here it is. 

They lie, says John Piper in his Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, ‘on slabs like proud sturgeon’. Most of us, though, look at the enormous monuments, which cover most of the north wall of the chancel, as sets of shelves, supported by columns and topped by canopies of an architectural magnificence that’s somewhat at odds with the humble surroundings. As I’ve remarked before, if there are relatively few English churches of the 16th and 17th centuries compared with the vasts numbers of medieval churches, architectural features on church monuments abound from the Tudor and Stuart periods, and these two grand memorials make use of the panoply of classical orders (Corinthian here), pediments (semicircular with heraldry) and other devices.

On the left as we look at the wall of the chancel, are the effigies of the earlier three generations of Fettiplaces: Sir Edmund (d.1613) at the top, then William (d.1562) and Alexander (d.1504). They look very similar and wear similar, but not identical, suits of armour. They are rather stiff and somewhat stylised figures and although they’re provided with stone cushions for the elbows on which they lean, this doesn’t seem to make them very comfortable. The architectural framework is impressive, but I remember that my instinct when I first saw them very m any years ago was to laugh. It was the combination of the shelves, the grand architecture, and the stiff but imposing figures that provoked this reaction I think. The sculptor is unknown, and authorities agonise over whether it was some local ‘primitive’ or the same craftsman who produced the Seymour monument at Berry Pomeroy in Devon, on which three figures recline in a very similar manner.

The second monument (above) is to another three male members of the same family, Sir Edmund (d.1686) and two Johns. The work here is more sophisticated. The faces are more individual, the bodies seem more naturally posed and more relaxed, and the stonework’s mix of pale and grey marble, together with gilding for the capitals and other details, is more confidently handled. This time, the work is signed, by William Byrd of Oxford. Byrd did many jobs for Oxford’s university and colleges, including the carving of the original emperors’ heads that surround the Sheldonian theatre, on which he would have worked with Sir Christopher Wren. No mere provincial he. The conjunction of these impressive sculptures with their less sophisticated neighbours made me smile this time rather than laugh, and itv was a smile of pleasure: I’m glad I returned.

Upleadon, Gloucestershire

 

Light-bulb moment

’This is Forge Lane,’ says the Resident Wise Woman, doing some navigation with her phone. ‘Maybe that’s the forge.’ We have both spotted a picturesque brick building, lit up by the sun, with a nearby gate in which we can pull up and take in the architectural view. We’d both seen the old waterwheel and thought ‘mill’, but it could equally be an old forge. When we look properly we see old brickwork (Flemish bond, probably early-19th century); windows, partly blocked, beneath gently curving segmental arches; and an upper opening for loading or unloading. The windows have their original glazing bars, but two have a single larger pane, which is probably a replacement for an opening section with a pivot half-way up, widely used on 19th-century industrial buildings. I find the brickwork appealing to the eye, even though I know this is a building desperately needing maintenance. This sort of pleasing decay can make a building glow, like the last brief brilliance of an old-style incandescent light-bulb before the filament finally breaks and its illumination is gone for good.

A little research reveals that there was mill here, at the meeting-point of the River Leadon and the Glynch Brook, since the 11th century, but that it became a forge at the end of the 17th century, pig-iron coming from Newent, a few miles away, to be worked. By the early-19th century, it was rebuilt as a mill once more, and this is the building we see today – only the single-storey section at the end is a later addition. The corn mill ran until the installation of electricity at some point in the last century, when the building was used to make animal feed, finally closing in 1995. Has it been used since? For storage perhaps? Whether or not that’s the case, I hope it finds a viable use soon. It seems too good a building to lie idle and decaying, and the light-bulb could soon go ‘phut’. 

Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Occasional haunts…

…that just keep on giving: there are certain small towns, mostly in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, that I visit quite often, and where I find myself staring at some architectural feature that I’ve not looked at closely before. Here’s an example in Witney: a probably 19th-century shop with a collection of ghost signs that I was aware of, but had not perhaps given the attention they deserved. Above the modern shop front one can see brick walls made up of a pattern of light and dark bricks – red or brown bricks with their long sides (the stretchers) visible and between them pale white or cream bricks laid so that their ends (the headers) can be seen. The resulting effect is pleasingly mottled, making the upper floors more appealing than the unfortunate shop front below. 

But what makes the building stand out for me are the painted signs. They’re faded, and when I first saw the building I noticed only the large letters across the front: GLO’STER HOUSE, the first word a once common contraction of Gloucester, in which the apostrophe, not always included, is just about visible here (clicking on the image should make it larger and clearer). The words on the corner are more informative, however. The fourth word down, just above the lamp, foxed me at first, because I thought it was HOTEL. But what the words on the corner actually say is, I believe: VINER’S FURNISHING STORES NOTED HOUSE FOR Bedsteads, MATTRESSES, BEDDING, TIN TRUNKS, CARPETS. I think there may once have been more – is that an AND below CARPETS? Even without the missing bit, we get a picture of a home furnishing and bedding store.

I’ve not found out much about Viner’s except that a photograph with the ghost sign in place and the business still open can be seen online, with a suggested date of c. 1964. It’s very blurred and looks as if it may have come from an old newspaper. Perhaps Viner’s, then, were in business through the first half of the 20th century and well into the 1960s. That decade marked my first personal knowledge of Witney, when I remember as a boy being driven by my father along the A40 road, which then passed straight through the middle of the town. I vaguely recall being struck by various shop signs, including, on a butcher’s a board painted with the slogan, PLEASED TO MEET YOU – MEAT TO PLEASE YOU. The locally made blankets were also featured on signboards – I expect Viner’s stocked them too. How good to be reminded of such things by the fading ghost sign of Messrs Viner. Though their wares are no longer sold here, the sign is still doing worthwhile evocative work.

Aston Somerville, Worcestershire

Looking more closely

I like to think I’m good at taking in a building when I visit it, at getting straight not just the overall architectural history§ but also the details – all those tombs and carvings and incidental oddities that fill my numerous blog posts on country churches. But when I found myself near Aston Somerville in Worcestershire and stopped to have a second look at the church, I found something I’d not noticed before. Aiming a long lens at the grotesques at the top of the church tower, I found the creature in my photograph. I say ‘creature’ because I’m not sure what it is – if those protrusions at the top are ears, then it’s not human, something that the muzzle-like face also suggests. Is it a bear? An ape?

But the species doesn’t particularly matter. What matters, of course, is the pose. This is what’s described in serious writing about this sort of thing as a ‘male exhibitionist carving’, the masculine equivalent of the Sheela na gig.* To modern eyes it’s odd, to say the least, to display this sort of sexually explicit imagery on a church. But anyone who has visited a lot of medieval churches will know that the grotesque is far from unusual in medieval church decoration. Dragons, monsters, foxes dressed as bishops, people showing off their private parts – it’s all there, whether we like it or not. Mostly, this kind of exhibitionist carving is outside the church, but there’s the occasional example inside, including one in a church roof in Hereford.†

Various reasons have been suggested for this sort of thing. To some, it’s a protection against evil spirits. To some, it’s a warning against lust. To yet others, exhibitionist carvings and other grotesques form a more general reminder of the wicked ways that threaten us when we allow ourselves to veer away from the protection of the church. There’s also undeniably a sense of humour here too – people could laugh at this sort of carving while also appreciating the moral message, just as monks could giggle at the lewd or humorous images in the margins of otherwise highly serious medieval manuscripts. People knew the difference between what was on the ‘margins’ of a building and what went on in the sacred spaces inside.¶

If there were lessons here for the original medieval users of the church, there are lessons today’s church-crawlers too. Look more closely, look up, take a pair of binoculars or a camera with a long lens on your travels. And if you’ve done all these things, revisit anyway, because everybody misses things first time around. You may be surprised at what you find.

- - - - -

§ Well, fairly straight – unpicking the history of ancient buildings is rarely simple.

* See my post from back in 2009 on the famous Sheela na gig at Kilpeck. There are some interesting further remarks and interpretations in the comments to this old post too.

† This is a human figure and is now easy to see because a mezzanine floor, part of a church café, has been installed, brining the viewer closer to the roof.

¶ My go-to reference for medieval ‘marginal’ imagery is Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Reaktion Books, 2019), which I have recommended before on this blog.