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.