The third and last, for now, of my series on Art Nouveau lettering from Manchester. If you look up the architectural history of the Vine Inn on Kennedy Street, you’ll find out how it occupies two buildings, one originally an 18th-century town house and one part of an adjoining 19th-century textile warehouse. The town house is recorded as a pub by the 1880s, but the joining together of the two buildings occurred, according to CAMRA, as recently as the 1970s. And yet this panel of coloured glass, which seems so typical of the Art Nouveau period (c. 1890–1910) is set over one of the doors in the textile warehouse section, which was not part of the pub at that time.
Maybe the panel was moved, or CAMRA is wrong about the date this part of the building began part of the pub, or the panel is simply much more recent than it looks. In a way, this doesn’t matter to the aesthetic appreciation of the panel. It uses ornamental lettering in a very Art Nouveauish kind of way, with big curving strokes in the Ns, and smaller fancy flourishes to the V and E, to give the panel a sense of decorative swagger that’s wholly appropriate for a pub. The swirling stems and flowers that surround the pub name add an additional flourish without distracting from the lettering, which is helped by being glazed in white, in contrast to the surrounding red and green. The round flowers bear some resemblance to the stylized roses devised and used by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald. But they’re very much simplified, and certainly not direct copies – under the influence of Mackintosh perhaps. Whatever its date, this is a striking and attractive bit of glazing.
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