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.

Varieties of architectural experience

Susannah Charlton, Elain Harwood, and Clare Price (eds), 100 Churches 100 Years
Published by Batsford

Lots of people like visiting churches, but the image of the traditional ‘church crawler’ is of someone who likes old buildings – and often old buildings in the countryside. That range of interests excludes most 20th-century churches, which are widely seen as assertively modernist and are most frequently in towns. So 20th-century churches tend to be neglected by visitors, except for experts and the growing number of enthusiasts for the art and design of the last 100 years. This new book, published under the auspices of the Twentieth Century Society, presents a fresh look at British church architecture between 1914 and 2015, revealing the field to be rich and full of surprises.

The range is enormous. The period is not all about rebarbative modernism. It embraces such fine buildings as St Alphege, Bath (designed in the style of an early Roman basilica by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott) and St Mary the Virgin, Wellingborough (Ninian Comper’s masterpiece, in a style that blends Gothic and Renaissance); or St Saviour, Eltham, London (by Cachemaille-Day, Welch & Lander, under the influence of German expressionism) and neo-Byzantine St John the Baptist, Rochdale (by Hill, Sandy & Norris, with glittering mosaics by Eric Newton). There’s modernism aplenty too, like St John the Baptist, Lincoln, where architect Sam Scorer and engineer Kálmán Hajnal-Kónyi contrived a hyperbolic paraboloid roof of breathtaking sweep, or, yes Brutalist-fanciers, the sad, decaying corpse of St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, a concrete masterpiece (‘already British modernism’s most spectacular and erudite ruin’) that’s quietly rotting away.

One hundred of these diverse examples, each glowingly photographed and briefly described, make up the body of the book. There’s also a series of short chapters on notable architects and practices – including Edward Maufe, H. S. Goodhart-Rendell, George Pace, and Gillespie, Kidd & Coia (the latter the progenitors of the ruin of Cardross). And in addition the editors have called into being specialist chapters including revealing surveys by Jane Brocket on stained glass and by Alan Powers on the art and artefacts, from fonts to altars, murals to lettering, that enhance many of these buildings.

It’s often the art that lingers longest in my mind when I visit these 20th-century churches, but the book is more than a series of portraits of single buildings and fine artworks. It also gives a sense of how changing ideas about religious practice, different artistic influences from Europe, and varying social and economic conditions have influenced the architecture.  So we get a sense of the variety of architectural choices – but also the monetary constraints – at play in the 1930s, of the moves towards liturgical reform in the late-1950s and 1960s, of the influence today of the changing landscape of faiths (the subject of another specialist chapter, by Kate Jordan). And so the change and variety continue, and along with them the plenitude of artistic and architectural interest. 100 Churches 100 Years will inspire many to seek these qualities out.

Not just white boxes

As I've done in previous years, I'm turning English Buildings into a book blog for ten days or so, as I review a few books in the run-up to Christmas. As usual, I've selected a handful of volumes that I feel enthusiastic about, in the hope that some of my readers might find something to give, or receive. 

Twentieth Century Society, 100 Buildings 100 Years
Published by Batsford

You get the idea: a span of a century (1914–2013) and one building per year, each described briefly and illustrated with photographs. The book was put together by the Twentieth Century Society and the buildings were selected by its supporters. Quite a few of the structures it includes would not exist without the campaigning work of the Society; one or two have, alas, been demolished. Together they make up an arresting selection of what’s most interesting, and sometimes provocative, about 20th-century architecture in Britain.

The book is not, though, intended to showcase ‘the best’ or to be ‘a representative selection’ of 20th-century buildings. It reflects the individual tastes of the selectors, who are well informed about 20th-century architecture but have varied preferences. And this is a good thing, since the architecture of the last one hundred years is the most diverse Britain has produced. It embraces the white boxes of 1920s modernism, Art Deco in its various forms, mid-century modernism, brutalism, postmodernism, hi-tech: all the usual suspects. But more than this, it acknowledges the impact of picturesque, garden-city inspired housing, of the serious Gothic of Bristol’s Wills memorial Building with its great tower, of the century’s neoclassical buildings, and of one-offs (or two-offs) like the vast airship hangars at Cardington or Ernest George Trobridge’s eccentric sort-of-Tudoresque houses in Kingsbury.

Representing all this variety is worthwhile because we get a bigger (if maybe more confusing) picture of modern architecture than the one revelled in many textbooks. And this is important for another reason. Many people and groups campaign for specific types or styles of building – modern movement buildings, say, or Art Deco cinemas. And that’s fine. But the Twentieth-Century Society takes on all of them, from the most modest Prefab to Battersea Power Station. We need this breadth of vision and approach.

Many readers will find favourites here. I was thrilled to find one of my own, Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion, on the cover, and a rhapsody (by Piers Gough) in praise of London’s Barbican housing inside. But like me I suspect most readers will also make interesting new architectural acquaintances. I was pleased to be introduced to UMIST’s Renold Building in Manchester and Benton Park School in Leeds, and to be reminded of Farnley Hey, Peter Womersley’s celebrated 1955 house in West Yorkshire. Clearly I should spend more time in the North of England.

An introduction and a series of essays (on Inter-war architecture by Gavin Stamp, on the Post-war period by Elain Harwood, and on Postmodernism by Timothy Brittain-Catlin) punctuate the text and add useful context. The book makes up a stimulating, breezy introduction to the variety of British architecture, with good photographs. A good start for anyone new to the subject, and a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf for anyone who thinks they know all about it: buy a copy for yourself and one for a friend: Christmas is coming.

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There’s an accompanying exhibition, too, at the Royal Academy.