Manchester, Kennedy Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 3

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.

Manchester, Bloom Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 2

Next in my series of three bits of Art Nouveau lettering is Albert House, a building in Manchester’s Bloom Street that once housed offices, although for what company or organization I’m not sure. It’s a building of brick and red sandstone, relieved by ornament in terracotta. Panels of terracotta decorated with stylised foliage and other curvaceous motifs sit beneath the windows. There are more very Art Nouveau curves in the metal grille on the double doors (and in some coloured glass panels in the windows).

However, my particular interest here is the terracotta lettering just above the door. In these panels, the tendency of Art Nouveau designers to stylise letterforms and to distort their shape for ornamental effect has been taken to extremes. The changes to the shape of the letters (to fit the space above the arch), the oddities in the positioning of some of the letters (look at the placing of the O in the left-hand panel), and the use of decorative foliage wrapping in and out of the word and date, make this at once highly ornamental and hard to read.

When I first looked at this, I could make out the word FOUNDED easily, and the AD and the first two figures in the date. But AD 18-what? It seems to be 1829, but the intertwined 2 and 9 take a fair amount of work to see, or at least they did for me. It’s a bit of fun, then, this date inscription, but also rather over the top. Full marks for effort, but also high marks for effortfulness.

Manchester, Deansgate

Letters from the turn of a century, 1

From around 1890 and for the first ten or so years of the 20th century, a new decorative style, Art Nouveau, arrived in England. English designers* drew on the work of graphic artists, architects, and product designers in France and Belgium. The hallmarks of their work included curved lines (and curvaceousness generally), ornament based on the natural world, especially plants and flowers, and a preference for pastel shades.† The curvilinear features of Art Nouveau spread to the way lettering was handled, and in this and two following posts, I’d like to illustrate this by signage on three Manchester buildings.

First, the Sawyers Arms Hotel on a corner in Deansgate. Corner sites were a favourite location for pubs, especially sites, like this one, on a crossroads – they gave you maximum passing footfall, and two frontages on which to display your sign. This site has held a pub almost continuously since the 1730s and the current building dates to the end of the 19th century.

The name stretches all the way around the curving corner of the building and the script in which it’s written is typical of the style and period – that’s to say expressive, curvy, and a little bit eccentric. Some of the letters break out of their ‘normal’ positions and proportions with great swagger – look at the way the S plunges beneath the base line and displays a noticeable difference in the size of its two loops – small at the top, huge at the bottom. The R likewise has an exaggeratedly large upper bowl, leaving the ‘leg’ of the letter to kick out to the right, invading the lower area of the next letter along. The upper strokes of the W and Y have ornate tops, while the middle parts of the W and M have small strokes, but are still very decorative.

These fancy details, all done with an ornamental curve where this is possible, make the lettering showy and eye-catching. Some elaborate lettering can defeat its own purpose, ending up muddled and hard to read. But that’s not the case here – the sign is both wonderfully clear and brightly eye-catching. It’s just the thing for a grand city pub, a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. Exemplary, I’d say.§

- - - - -

* English rather than British: the history of this development was rather different in Scotland, for example, where there were closer ties to the Austrian and German version of the style, known there as Jugendstil and characterised by a more straight-lined, geometrical approach.

† See, for example, the advertising work of the great Czech artist Alfons Mucha, active in Paris, and architects such as Hector Guimard, famous for his Parisian Metro stations.

§ Grammarians will note the cop-out when it comes to the lack of an apostrophe.

The Lee, Buckinghamshire

Geological pudding

Enjoying coffee one morning at the Cock and Rabbit, by the village green at The Lee, my eye caught what looked like some sort of prehistoric standing stone. A little later I stepped outside to have a look. It’s clearly not a menhir, but in fact three chunky stones piled one on top of the other, and a further stone on the ground in front of the three. The Resident Wise Woman, a quick hand with online maps, has already identified them as ‘the Pudding Stones’ and was busily reading about them online as I took a photograph.

I’m no expert in geology, but I’d come across puddingstone when reading about building materials. It’s a form of conglomerate stone, in which numerous small pebbles are fused together by a kind of natural cement made of sand and silica. The result resembles a geological plum pudding, hence the name. The stone is not uncommon in Hertfordshire and in the Chilterns (where we were at the time), and often occurs in the form of large lumps, moved around aeons ago by glaciers. Big pieces of the material have sometimes been left in place as landmarks, or heaped up to make a still more striking effect.

Puddingstone looks unusual and must have been puzzling to people in earlier times. This has led to nicknames such as ‘witch stones’, suggesting magical or healing powers, or an ability to ward off evil spirits. People have carried bits of puddingstone around with them, or placed them at the thresholds of their houses to protect themselves or their family. Now puddingstones are treated mostly as attractive local curiosities. When I’d taken my photograph, the Wise Woman reported that she’d even found an online review of The Lee Puddingstones – apparently they’re perfect for a family day out|! I doubt if most families would spend a day looking at four stones, but it you combined them with a meal at the Cock and Rabbit and a walk around the local paths and lanes taking in the delightful countryside, you could perhaps do worse.

The Lee, Buckinghamshire

 

Distinctiveness at the fingerpost

In 1964, the Warboys Committee, led by Sir Walter Warboys, reported on traffic signs on the roads of Britain. The committee concluded that the existing signs were no longer good enough – increased traffic levels and the speed of traffic on the roads meant that signs could be difficult to read. New signs were developed that are still used today. They included everything from the triangular warning signs with their clear symbols and minimal use of words, to the rectangular direction signs on primary and local routes, which were adapted from the direction signs on motorways introduced in the late-1950s. One result was the disappearance of many of the old fingerpost signs, with their pointing arms bearing place names and distances in miles (sometimes down to the nearest quarter or even one-eighth of a mile).

Fortunately for people like me who care about historical artefacts, a number of the old fingerposts were kept in some areas, and when one looks at them it becomes clear that something was lost with their large-scale disappearance. It’s not just the demise of those very precise distances, it’s also their quality of local distinctiveness.* Roads and their signs were largely a matter for local government – county councils particularly – and counties produced their fingerposts in similar ways, but with subtle differences. In places where a number of the old sings remain, you can find, for example, in Somerset, numerous iron posts with a pyramid-shaped finial, each of its four faces bearing the initials S.C.C. (Somerset County Council). Parts of rural Oxfordshire retain wooden fingerposts with rather broader arms than usual. In East Sussex there are also some of the old wooden fingerposts, with their scalloped-cornered arms and tapering posts with an octagonal finial.

In Buckinghamshire recently, I noticed this one near the village green at The Lee, with its white ring bearing the words ‘Bucks County’.§ It seems to be in someone’s garden, though it still points usefully in the right directions. I wonder if it is an example of a private individual preserving a bit of history. While I understand the need for modern signs, I’m glad these early ones are preserved in some places, to remind us of the various local ways in which fingerposts were designed and made.† The quality of local distinctiveness is frequently eroded away in the often worthy cause of standardisation. But it’s something that makes places what they are, just as much as the brick and tile of the house behind the sign, or the weatherboarded former outbuilding in which we were staying when we were in Bucks. Let’s celebrate local distinctiveness when we can.

- - - - - 

§ Click on the picture to enlarge it for a clearer view.    

* This concept is discussed and encyclopaedised in the excellent England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)

† And to be reminded of such resonant place names as Swan Bottom

York, New Walk

Well built

York’s New Walk is a tree-lined path running south along the bank of the River Ouse that was new in the 1730s. It was laid out as a recreational path, a pleasant route for visitors who fancied leaving behind for an hour or so the hustle and bustle of the city centre. In the recent heatwave, the Resident Wise Woman looked at her map and found the path and thought it would be just the route for us after a hectic morning in the city centre. The shade alone (provided by a mixture of original trees and ones planted to replace elms killed in the Dutch elm disease outbreak of the 1970s) meant that we were glad to follow in the footsteps of our 18th-century forebears.

Soon I was surprised to find a chunky stone archway set to one side of the walk. The plain semi-circular opening was set in quite rough masonry, with battered side walls and buttresses adding strength. The structure is small but somehow imposing and the roughness of surface seemed to be calculated to create this effect by someone who knew what he was doing. We’d stumbled upon a well house, originally designed by the eminent architect John Carr of York, although it’s said by some to have been wholly or partly rebuilt a few years later by the City Surveyor, Thomas Pickersgill. Whoever was responsible for the structure we can see today seems to have based the design on the grottoes commonly found in country house parks and gardens, and the masonry is said to be made up of medieval stones reused from the demolished part of a medieval church. A damaged 12th-century capital was salvaged from this material and placed as the finial in the centre of the parapet.

The well-head, locally known as the Pikeing Well (I have not seen a plausible explanation of this name), is slightly later than the New Walk itself, and was built in 1752. This was a time when spas were becoming increasingly popular – many people flocked to spas that dispensed mineral-rich waters and cities such as Bath grew rich on the income from visitors who prized the water’s healing powers. Although York has no such mineral spa, the water from the spring at New Walk did have a reputation for curing eye diseases. So the authorities commissioned Carr to build this structure over an existing well, to form a kind of spa. Inside, Carr paced steps down to a stone-lined pool, giving access to the reputedly healing liquid. Whatever the facts about the water, the well was officially closed in 1929. Only the striking well house remains.

This is the last of my current series of posts about buildings in York. I have more to say about the city, and will no doubt write more posts in the future, but variety is the spice of this blog, and regular readers may appreciate some variation in the diet. So stand by for something different, architecturally and geographically, soon.

York, St Sampson's Square

 

Scene with cranes

As regular readers of this blog will have noticed, I’m rather fond of pubs decorated with tiles. There was a great fashion for tiled pubs in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when pub owners liked the tiles’ wipe-down surfaces and their colourful appearance – if you’re offering hospitality, it pays to stand out on the street, to catch the attention of passers-by as well as locals. The Three Cranes in York’s St Sampson’s Square has a tiled ground floor that certainly fulfils the easy-care and easily spotted requirements, but it’s also clearly a popular place to gather. Rather than photograph the whole building, and a whole lot of people, I looked up at the beautiful tiled sign.

So here are the three cranes in their watery and reed-surrounded habitat, an elegant trio indeed. They must have been a satisfying job for whichever artist produced them at Doulton’s, say, or Minton’s or one of the other factories that produced architectural ceramics.

When I researched the pub’s history I got a surprise. It turns out, if a York Press article of the year 2000 is to be believed, that the pub goes back a long time. There was certainly a public house on the site in the 18th century – the sign is clearly a later addition and a photograph from earlier in the 19th century shows it with the same name but a sign without a picture. The same article says that the pub’s name does not derive from wading birds at all. Apparently the square in which the pub stands was once the city’s Thursday Market, where cloth was sold. A trio of wooden lifting cranes were installed to load and unload goods, and these are said to have given the pub its name.

The three birds, then, are a later reinterpretation of the name. But given my weakness for architectural ceramics and the sheer quality of this tiled sign, I for one don’t grudge this change from mechanical to ornithological.

York, Feasegate

Iron on display

Look up in central York and, above the shopfronts, you’ll see all kinds of evidence of the city’s architectural and social history. Georgian brickwork and sash windows are quite frequent (I think there are some Georgian sash windows reflected in the upper-level glazing of the building in my photograph). Tudor or earlier timber framing can also be found with ease – with great ease as its black and white patterns readily catch the eye. Here’s something different, a legacy of York’s later history. Above the frontages of the Yorkshire Building Society and Motto Sushi is a facade that’s nearly all glass, held together with iron beams and slender columns and punctuated with still more slender glazing bars.

The generous iron eaves cornice at the top allies the building to classical culture, but the proportions of the rest are not at all classical – this is a structure of the industrial age, and it shows. Its builders have put the technology of the railways and factories to use in a shopping street – this was a substantial multi-storey shop, with upper windows in which large goods such as furniture could be displayed. It’s the shop as showroom, and 100 years ago made a bold architectural statement amongst the brick and timber facades, although most people now barely notice it.

The building was completed in 1885. The architect was called W. Brown* and the framework he specified was manufactured by York’s Thomlinson Walker foundry – the foundry incorporated their name into the structure’s right-hand upright, where it can still be seen (albeit made less distinct by successive coast of paint), low down on the base.† The presence of the founder’s ‘signature’ draws attention to the fact that in spite of the modern shopfronts, the whole structure, from pavement level to cornice, is still very much intact.

Iron foundry name on base of column

The other key element in this facade is of course the glass. This is plate glass, the production of which had come on in leaps and bounds since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a huge quantity of the material was produced for London’s Crystal Palace. So the technology was well up to speed by the 1880s. Even so, using such large sheets of glass with such slender supports was unusual – Pevsner refers to the facade as ‘a remarkably radical piece of work’. True. It’s well worth craning one’s neck to take a look, though many will draw the line at getting down on one knee as I did to take a picture of the founder’s name.

- - - - -

* I wonder if he was the William Brown listed as ‘architect and sanitary engineer’ in York in the late-Victorian period.

† This foundry’s reach extended far beyond York – they made the railings at London’s National Gallery.

York, Rowntree Park

 

Gate of peace

I thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.

Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about the park does, however, confusingly refer to it as a lychgate, the structure traditionally marking the entrance to a churchyard, where at funerals, the bearers may rest with the coffin, before proceeding on to the church (‘lych’ being an old word for corpse).

In fact it is a gateway from the outer part of the park, where the café stands, to a quieter inner area, a garden with a water feature, a statue of Mercury and an ample supply of benches, where one might rest and indeed remember those who laid down their lives in war, as the Rowntree family clearly intended. I have begun to think of it as a lychgate to a memorial garden, that garden being the horticultural equivalent of a cenotaph.

The gateway’s simple vernacular structure does this job well, aided by two further powerfully suggestive elements. Inside are two brass plaques, describing the donation of the park after World War I and the further donation of some fine wrought-iron gates after World War II. The first plaque is in retrospect very sad, expressing at it does the hope that the first conflict might be the ‘end of war’ and that the creation of the League of Nations might be the crowning post-war achievement. In the light of subsequent events, a further suggestive symbol is perhaps more powerful: in the roof of the lychgate is a dovecote – the entrances for the birds are just visible in the gable end – and white doves still flutter in and out. At least these delicate creatures endure, living symbols of peace, both peace in general and the peace of the garden that the Quaker Rowntrees shared with those of us who survive.

York, Rowntree Park

Ice cream, confectionery and books

‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,’ wrote the American poet Wallace Stevens. This arresting line brought enquiries, including one from the US Amalgamated Ice Cream Association, no less, who no doubt wanted to know the poet’s precise meaning. But on a blisteringly hot afternoon in York, anyone who could sell us a good tub of the cold stuff would be high in our estimation indeed. A walk away from the crowded city centre towards Rowntree Park, in search of shade, nature and ice cream, seemed a good idea. I was sure there would be something of architectural interest along the way.

The Quaker Rowntree family, confectioners of renown, had their factory in York and were great benefactors to the city. After World War I, Jospeh Rowntree gave the 25-acre park as a memorial to the members of his staff who lost their lives in the war. He liked the idea of a place of quiet contemplation, and also of a recreational area accessible to all, and his architects set out the park with gardens, trees, a lake, large areas of lawn and places to play sports and games. It’s still popular today, even when a succession of heatwaves has dried the grass and much of the planting to a sorry crisp. In charge of the layout were two architects, Fred Rowntree and W. J. Swain. Fred Rowntree was from a branch of the family that lived in Scarborough and were cousins of the confectioners. He trained in his home town and designed numerous buildings in York as well as in London, which he later made his base.

Rowntree is said to have been the designer of the building in my photograph. It’s a multi-purpose structure. At the top is accommodation for the park keeper that looks out over the lake and gardens in the middle of the park. At the bottom are the open arches of what was originally a boat house. The middle part of the building, including the single-storey wing to the right, was designed as a café and still plays that role. It’s now the Explore Rowntree Park Reading Café. A café with books, no less, a relatively recent idea, but one that would no doubt have pleased the early Rowntrees. The whole was built just after World War I and completed in c. 1921. It’s a pleasant building, with casement windows, round-headed doorway and arches, and tall pantile roofs, that looks well amongst the surrounding trees and shrubs. It seems to evoke that moment in English architecture when traditional materials (brick, tile, render) combine with a plain, unornamented style to create something that has a hint of the old and a bit of the new too. The café also sells excellent ice cream.

York, Oglethorpe

 

All done in brick

Glancing up a York backstreet called Oglethorpe, I caught sight of this, a brick building of 1648, to which a pair of curvy, Dutch-style gables with dormer windows were added a bit later in the 17th century. It is said to be the earliest house in York built completely of brick, although bricks had been used extensively in eastern England by the time it was built. The Dutch gables give the house its name (it’s called the Dutch House) and cap a pleasant facade in which almost everything, from the door surround to the window mullions, the central oriel to the pediments above each window, is fashioned out of brick. A pantile roof completes the composition of orangey-red clay.

All those bold brick details give the building the air of the style known as Artisan Mannerism, although this style is typically applied to grander buildings incorporating brick scrolls, mouldings, and chunky eaves-cornices. Another house once called Dutch, the palace in Kew Gardens, is such a building at the grand end of the scale, Wilberforce House in Hull is a middling example. But something like York’s Dutch House, enlivening a quiet street, is certainly an eyecatcher. It has had a varied history. Starting as an impressive individual house, it was later divided into three separate dwellings, before becoming part of John Smith’s brewery. Needless to say, numerous internal alterations were made during the building’s first 300 years.

In the 1950s, Smith’s wanted to demolish the house, but the York Civic Trust restored it and it’s now a holiday home available to rent. It looks to be an excellent refuge in the city centre as well as a visual asset to the street. Convenience, history and style – it sounds like a good combination.

York, Foss Gate

The view from the pavement

When I go to a city that’s new to me, or one I’ve not visited for years, one of the things I do is stroll around randomly and look out for any interesting buildings that I come across. I’m taking a leaf out of the flâneur’s* book, if you like, although I have also read guidebooks and the pages of Pevsner in advance, so there are specific buildings I’m looking out for too. I York the other week, I was on one of my wonders when this building hit me between the eyes. I’d seen it in a book already and it was somewhere in the back of my mind, but for the moment I’d forgotten exactly where I was and so find it at that moment was a surprise. It hit me between the eyes and I needed to spend a few minutes taking it in.

It was built in 1911 as the Electric Cinema, York’s first purpose-built picture house, films having been shown in the city before, but in places built for some other purpose. 1911 is early for a cinema and there was no consensus about what such a building should look like but the large arch, symbolically welcoming the potential cinema-goer and adorned with luxurious-looking decoration, is the focus of more than one early cinema facade. This frontage plays that role. It’s supported on Ionic columns and describes a gentle curve that is very much of its Edwardian period. It’s decked out with swags of fruit and topped with a face modelled on an actor’s mask from the ancient Greek theatre. This ornament is ceramic, and was supplied by Doulton’s, a large amount of whose output was architectural faience.

What’s within the arch has changed. Where there are now doors and windows were once ticket booths, a signboard indicating what film was showing inside, the entrance doorways, and a great deal more faience decoration. It’s a shame that all this has gone, but the pattern of cinema history intervened. After functioning as the Electric, the place carried on under other owners, eventually being renamed the Scala Super Cinema (see the name of the adjoining alley, Scala Yard), but the decline in filmgoing that came with the television age led to the its closure.† For some time it was furniture shop and now, like so many city buildings, it’s made over to the hospitality industry. Now there are chairs and tables out front, where the flâneur may pause, enjoy a drink, and watch the people go by. 

- - - - -

* An originally French term for an urban stroller or loiterer, ‘a gentleman stroller of the city streets’, as Baudelaire put it, who walks around a city with no apparent aim apart from people-watching and taking in the atmosphere of the place. The feminine equivalent is flâneuse.

† I’m indebted to the cinema treasures website for some of this information.

Guiting Power, Gloucestershire

New light on an old box

I interrupt my flow of blog posts featuring buildings seen on my travels to turn my attention to something only a few miles from where I live. Nowadays the village of Guiting Power is typical Cotswolds: well kept stone cottages, a couple of pubs, a church with Norman roots, a former Post Office now selling excellent coffee and food. Farmers, the horse racing fraternity, cyclists and locals mingle, mostly amicably. Battered old Land-Rovers vie for parking spaces with polished BMWs. The place looks prosperous.

It was not always so. In the early-20th century, agricultural decline brought poverty, together with dilapidated cottages. Two landowners turned the place around: in the 1930s, Moya Davidson bought up cottages and let them to local people; in 1958 Raymond Cochrane ran the estate and continued to improve the cottages. It was Cochrane who was faced with finding a new use for the old blacksmith’s shop on the green. Part of this building was converted to a bus shelter and next to this a telephone box was installed – not the usual red freestanding kiosk, but a small booth incorporated into the building and fronted by a standard door as used on a K6 telephone box. The familiar door is testimony to the effectiveness and ubiquity of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s phone kiosk design – we know exactly what it was designed for, even though there is no ’Telephone’ sign.

Some years ago, however, the public telephone, little used in the age of the mobile phone, came to the end of its life. A new use was found: the box became the home of the village defibrillator. More recently still the building's custodians have smartened up the door with new paint. The original colour scheme consisted of a grey frame and red door, a combination that was once the recommended livery for telephone boxes in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Guiting Power was in the Cotswolds AONB, which is now the Cotswolds National Landscape, so this box merited the design with the red door and grey frame. Maybe whoever looks after the box will come back with some grey paint and finish the job.

I hope people near and far will appreciate this small triumph of public service and its unusual design solution – only a handful of telephone boxes are incorporated into existing buildings in this way and this one, with its important new use, deserved to be preserved. As a result, the Twentieth Century Society has submitted applications for this building, and four more unusual telephone boxes, to be listed. It’s a good idea to afford them this protection and I hope the listing comes into place.

Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Crossing point

The Palladian Bridge in the park at Stowe was built in 1739 by the first Viscount Cobham, around the time that many of the numerous other garden structures – temples, pavilions, statues and monuments – were erected there. Its design was probably by the great classical architect James Gibbs and he based it closely on the similar bridge at Wilton House, Wiltshire, which went up just two years earlier.The arrangement of an Ionic arcade of four columns between a pair of pedimented end pavilions is beautifully satisfying – no wonder the architect adopted it with few changes. Gibbs did modify the earlier design slightly, however, chiefly by making the structure wider than the Wilton bridge and also lower, so that carriages could cross it as their passengers went on tours of the gardens. It’s the second of the great trio of English Palladian bridges, the other being at Prior Park, Bath.*

The design doesn’t come from any extant structure by the great Italian architect Palladio, although it is based on a scheme he created for a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice that was never built. The Stowe bridge has changed slightly since it first saw the light of day. It originally had open arches on the westward side, but a blank wall on the east (behind the bridge in my photograph). The rationale behind this was that the bridge was near the edge of the park, and the idea was to encourage those on the bridge to admire the view across the water and into Cobham’s grounds. On the inside of the blank wall was a relief carving by Scheemakers of the Four Quarters of the World bringing their products to Britannia. The bridge was never an ideal place for the carving as it was actually quite difficult to see it clearly because you couldn’t stand back far enough from it. So it was removed in 1762 and placed in the pediment of the Temple of Concord and Victory. When this was done the builders fitted a matching colonnade, so that the two sides were identical.

The Palladian Bridge as it stands does not bear obvious symbols of the philosophical and political ideas expressed in many of Stowe’s temples and monuments – buildings such as the Temples of British Worthies and Ancient Virtue, statues such as those of the Muses, and monuments like those to heroes like Captain Cook and Captain Grenville all represent very specific values. However, the elegant classical architecture of the bridge, together with its key position on the Path of Liberty, a long itinerary through the grounds, places it firmly in the same category as these monuments and structures. No doubt ,many of those taking a walk in the grounds were grateful for it too, pausing there to admire the view or taking advantage of the shelter it offered from the rain. The bridge is clearly as useful as its design is beautiful.

- - - - -

* There’s a fourth, known as the Marble Bridge, in the grounds of the Russian imperial palace at Tsarskoye Sole, St Petersburg. Another structure, at Stourhead, known as the Palladian Bridge, lacks the striking superstructure of the other four, and is hardly Palladian at all.

Lee Common, Buckinghamshire

 

Wellsprings of Liberty

When I catch myself taking our water supply for granted in the face of countless communities in other parts of the world who do not have the benefit of a reliable supply of clean water, I think back to my childhood. In the village in Lincolnshire where I was born, my mother had to go to the village pump every day to collect the water we needed to drink, wash and clean. And we were lucky. Our house was called Pump Cottage because it was next to the pump – fetching the water was simply a matter of walking down the garden path and opening the gate. For my grandparents, in a still more rural location (their house was in the middle of a field), water was even nearer: a spring discharged right next to the kitchen door. But in the 1950s, neither of these households could draw water by simply turning on a tap. Universal fresh water in England is a surprisingly recent development.*

In some villages, people had to wait for a local philanthropist or benevolent landlord to come along and sink them a well. Such a man was Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty, founder and owner of the famous Liberty & Co store in London and lord of the manor at Lee Common in Buckinghamshire. Actually, Liberty did not pay the full cost of the well, which was built by public subscription, but he was the prime mover and where he led, many others no doubt followed. Local historians will tell you how workers had to dig a shaft some 365 feet deep, using candles to light their way and a large pair of bellows borrowed from the local blacksmith to keep the shaft ventilated with fresh air.† The well is conveniently close to most of the houses in Lee Common. We stayed there a short while ago, but at the other end of the settlement, so missed the well for a few days before we stumbled on it. But it must have been a boon to villagers until it closed in the 1950s due to pollution – and the coming, one hopes, of piped water.

The well was beneficial to the locals and a good way of celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It being a project spearheaded by Sir Arthur, the well house is as beautifully designed as the home furnishings he stocked in his London shop. Indeed he organised Liberty craftsmen to make its wooden structure – hexagonal, with an oak frame, a tiled pointed roof, and panels like wooden gates between the posts. In the period between 1890 and 1910, Liberty embraced the fashionable Art Nouveau style of design, and there are traces of that in the woodwork of the well house. This is clear in the beautifully cut lettering of the inscription, which extends around the structure’s six sides, telling the reader that ‘This well was built by public subscription in commemoration of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, Anno Domini MDCCCXCVII’. The lettering, with its ornamental letter forms, is as decorative as it is informative, reflecting the combination of elegance and utility displayed by the well house itself.§

- - - - -

* And yes, I’m sure there are households in some isolated places where there’s still no mains water.

† I’m indebted to the website of The Lee, the neighbouring village in the local cluster of settlements, for this information. The depth of 365 feet seems conveniently memorable, recalling those country houses that have a room for each day of the year, but is no doubt accurate to within a foot or two.

§ The well shaft is kept covered today, but the winding machinery is still there, the well still functions, and the water is tested periodically, to ensure that if needed, it is still fit for use.

Lee Common Jubilee Well, detail of lettering

Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire

 

In the wind

I’ve featured a number of windmills on this blog, because they fascinate me as ingenious structures in which a distinctive architectural form is well adapted to do the job it needs to do – housing heavy machinery such as large rotating millstones and supporting a set of sails that harness the power of the wind. There needs to be a means of pointing the sails in the right direction, so that they catch the breeze, and the whole structure has to be at once robust, to withstand the considerable forces exerted by the mechanism, and lightweight, as at least part of it has to rotate. From conical brick tower mills, with their rotating caps, to wooden post mills, the whole of which can be turned by hand, windmills do this job elegantly. There’s another type, a kind of wooden tower mill, that’s polygonal with a turning cap that often looks rather like an upturned boat. This sort is known as a smock mill* and one of the best preserved examples is the octagonal one at Lacy Green in Buckinghamshire.

Lacy Green Windmill is generally accepted to be the oldest surviving smock mill in England.† The machinery inside dates to somewhere around the middle of the 17th century. There is an old story that the mill was moved from Chesham to Lacey Green in 1821. It’s certainly possible to move a windmill in this way§ but researchers who have trawled the archives and archaeologists who have examined the alleged original site doubt that this was mill was moved. It seems more likely that the mill had a major overhaul in 1821, when perhaps much of the structure was rebuilt and the machinery upgraded. There are certainly records of a mill at Lacey Green before 1821.

The windmill ran for almost a century after this rebuild, finally ceasing work in 1915, after which it was used as holiday accommodation for a while. However, by 1930 it was in a poor state due to water penetration. There was a restoration, but by 1969 the mill was once again close to collapse. A team led by the engineer Christopher Wallis set about removing the cap and the single surviving sail, straightening the twisted structure, and restoring the frame, sides, and floors. This process was complex and took years – an account of it is on the mill’s website. The restoration seems to have been effective, and the mill currently appears to be well looked after – our oldest smock mill looks to be good for many more years.

- - - - -

* Because the overall shape is said to resemble a peasant wearing a smock.

† It’s not entirely simple to come to a judgement about the age of a wooden building, since many parts of it can be replaced, like the notorious ancient broom that had had many new handles and several new brush heads. Here the machinery seems to be the oldest part.

§ See my blog post about the wonderful post mill at Thorpeness, Suffolk.

Marsworth, Buckinghamshire

 

Changing roles

To the traveller along the Lower Icknield Way, north of Tring, the village of Marsworth seems unimpressive, somewhere to pass by quickly perhaps, on the way to Dunstable. But it’s more interesting than that, because the village is set at a junction of the Grand Union (formerly Grand Junction) Canal, and was once an important transport hub. Nearby are the large Tring Reservoirs, built to supply water to the canal – Tring was the summit of the navigation and this stretch was vulnerable to running dry as locks shifted huge volumes of water. In addition, numerous cottages were built in the village of Marsworth to house those working on the canal and in related businesses.

One such related business was providing refreshment for barge workers – pubs were a familiar canalside feature and many also incoporated shops where the barge people could buy provisions. As I looked down at the waterway from the bridge at the end Vicarage Lane in Marsworth, I admired the charming thatched cottage in my photograph. I wondered whether it had once been such a pub, although I had my doubts because there’s another pub nearby on the lane, the Red Lion, which was covered in scaffolding on the day I was there, but still very much open for business.

The house by the canal is thatched and built mainly of white-painted brick. One end is weatherboarded. It’s said to be 17th-century in origin, although modified in the 19th century. At that time, and for much of the 20th century, it was indeed a pub, the Ship Inn. Later in the 20th century it was a shop, and now it’s a house (available as an Airbnb, according to some sources. So I was right about its role and its relation to the canal. In the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th, it must have thrived by quenching the thirsts of large numbers of barge workers. When the canal’s use declined between the two World Wars, it found other roles. Now apparently, having been part of a transport infrastructure that was so important to manufacturing industry, it serves a very different business, tourism. Such is the fate of so many historic buildings – the fortunate ones find a new use, and are preserved.

Hereford

Wooden leg, or, Odd things in churches (19)

How odd to find the effigy of a medieval leg leaning against one of the piers in the aisle of Hereford cathedral. It’s the leg of Sir Richard Pembridge, a knight from the county, who died in 1375 having fought at the battles of Crecy and Poitiers. He was made a Knight of the Garter by Edward III and his tomb, which was made of alabaster, included his garter insignia on the left leg, in the correct position; there was, in accordance with the custom of the order, no garter on the right leg.

During the 17th century the effigy’s right leg was damaged* and a replacement leg, made out of wood, was made and fitted to the monument. However, this replacement was carved with a garter. During the 19th century, the Archdeacon of Hereford, Lord Saye and Sele, had a new leg made in the correct material, alabaster, and without the garter. This replaced the wooden leg, putting everything right with the monument.

At this point, the wooden leg was removed and passed into private hands until, much later, its owner gave it back to the cathedral, where it was displayed, standing very gamely by the pier and indeed securely attached to it, lest it wander from its home once more. Here it remains, to interest visitors and to tell this curious story of a mistake rectified. You really never know what you are going to find in churches and cathedrals.

- - - - -

* This may have been something to do with the Civil War.

Coleford, Gloucestershire

 

Wood, coal and iron

The Forest of Dean, the area of ancient Gloucestershire woodland between the Rivers Severn and Wye, is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. Ancient trees, including oak, beech, sweet chestnut, birch, holly and various conifers, abound, while parts of the forest are rich in wild flowers and fungi. What surprises many visitors is that the region also has a rich industrial history. It was once studded with coal mines (a few were still worked when I was a boy) and places where iron ore was extracted. Because there was both iron ore and trees to make charcoal, there was a major iron-smelting industry in Roman times and in the Middle Ages, when the metal was sent to centres such as Gloucester as well as being worked locally.

In the late-18th century, iron smelters in many regions realised that coke could be a more efficient fuel for their furnaces and by the 1790s, some industrialists were making coke from the local coal and using it to smelt iron. Just outside Coleford there are the remains of a large coke-fired blast furnace that was built for smelting iron ore in 1798. Investors in the furnace included a stockbroker from London called Thomas Halford. He became unhappy with the money that iron from the furnace was making him – it took about 80 tons of iron ore and 120 tons of coke to make a mere 20 tons of pig iron. Halford began to correspond with an expert in the field, David Mushet of Derbyshire. Mushet went into partnership with Halford and by 1810 had moved to the Forest to run the furnace.

It quickly became clear to Mushet that he couldn’t make a profit from the furnace – rich as the local ore was, the Forest coal simply didn’t lend itself to coke production. Mushet sold his shares and Halford eventually went bankrupt. The ruined furnace remains, its great arch leading into a vast space where the ore was heated. The size of the structure, the very thick walls, the chunky masonry all speak of a purposeful industrial structure here among the trees. There was originally also a steam engine to pump away and send a blast of air into the furnace to keep the internal temperature high enough to melt the iron. The clanking engine, the horse-drawn tramroad bringing in coal and ore, the activity of the workmen – all of this must have made this a noisy, bustling place. It’s quiet now, with the occasional sound of traffic on the road to Coleford the loudest sound, and between the cars, the song of birds.

Ludlow, Shropshire

 

Mermaids revisited

One morning recently the Resident Wise Woman and I, finding ourselves in the middle of nowhere in northern Herefordshire, realised we were not far from Ludlow. Lunchtime was looming so we decided to make our way there for refreshment. It was a no-brainer to pay a visit to St Laurence’s church, one of the largest and best in the country bordering Wales, while we were there. We’d visited this church before, but we knew there was more than enough there to make another visit rewarding.

I headed for the chancel, where the choir stalls have a lovely set of misericords, those seats that tip up to provide a ledge to lean on during the long periods of standing required during the medieval liturgy. Beneath the seats, invisible when they’re in the ‘down’ position, are delightful carvings, many of which are designed to make a moral point in an amusing or entertaining way. One of my favourites is a carving of a mermaid, the subject of my previous post about church graffiti.*

The Ludlow mermaid is in generally excellent condition. (Click on the picture to see her more clearly.) Nearly all the standard features of a medieval mermaid are intact – her long hair, exposed breasts, scaly, fishy tail, and the mirror she holds in her right hand. Only her left arm has gone, together with what it held, which would have been a comb. The mirror, though, is enough to remind the viewer that in the Middle Agers the mermaid was a symbol of vanity, and of the way she was said to use her physical attraction to lure men into the sea. A moral lesson in a visual form, carved with care and vigour – those tresses, those scales.

This misericord is also a reminder of the fascination of the sea. The mermaid was not the only monster to lurk there – think gigantic krakens ‘battening on huge sea-worms’,† sea-serpents, sirens, all threatening, rumoured presences, coming to get the unwary sailor or preying on one another, as Shakespeare said that monsters of the deep were wont to do.§ The pair of supporting carvings on either side of the Ludlow mermaid are chunky toothed fish who look as if they’d willingly chew on a mariner’s foot. ‘Stay away from the fishes’ realm,’ they seem to say. Yet their fascination, and that of the mermaid, endures.

- - - - -

* On such graffiti, see also Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015)

† See Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Kraken’ (‘There he hath lain for ages, and will lie | Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep…’)

§ King Lear, Act IV, Scene ii (‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, | Like monsters of the deep.’)

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.