Melksham, Wiltshire

Five early pieces: 5

My final reprise (for now) is one of my smallest buildings (and one of my shortest posts). The roundhouse in Melksham...

This small surprise is tucked away in a side-street in the Wiltshire town of Melksham. It’s an 18th-century structure, built, Melksham being a wool town, as a wool-drying room. When the wool trade declined in the 19th century many such buildings were no doubt demolished. But this one survived, playing down the years a multitude of roles – armoury for the local volunteer militia, feed store, business premises, tourist information centre, and museum. England has many specialized structures like this, the often odd-shaped remnants of local industries – oast houses and lime kilns come to mind. Often they seem designed so precisely for their original function that adaptation appears impossible. But with a little imagination, many of them have been recycled to the delight both of their users and of passers-by.

Postscript 2012 This small paragraph contains a large truth: that the survival of historic buildings often depends on finding new uses for old structures. Even a highly specialized building like the roundhouse has lasted more than 200 years because people have found different things to do in it and with it. Sometimes a change of use requires some adaptation of the building, but a little sensitive alteration is better in the vast majority of cases than demolition or dereliction. Let’s hear it for thoughtful adaptation and sensitive reuse.

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Putting up a good front

This is an example of something that happened a lot in the 18th century. There was a substantial building in St Mary’s Square, Aylesbury, overlooking the churchyard. It was probably a house although later the building became a public house, the Derby Arms. In the Georgian period its owners were followers of fashion, but they didn’t have the money, or the inclination, to rebuild their house in the latest style, with a symmetrical front in two-tone brickwork, sash windows, and a panelled door set in a classical door case topped by a triangular pediment. So they did what lots of middle-class townspeople did: added a facade with all these features and more to the front of their existing house.

Seen directly from the street the building looks like a Georgian house and the details – the door case with its Ionic capitals, the windows with ‘aprons’ beneath the sills, the shaped head of the central window, the deep cornice at the top – are impressive. Only the top floor, where there are only three windows instead of five, with brick panels instead of windows at either end, looks slightly odd. And viewing the building from the side, we see why: the upper level of the facade hides a pitched roof, leaving no space for windows at either end of the top floor.

If there had been a neighbouring house, as there is on the far side of the Derby Arms, the contrast between the facade and the rest of the house would be virtually invisible from the street. Maybe there was such a house once. But now there’s just a garden wall, and this episode in the building’s history is clear to see.