Church Langton, Leicestershire

The old order

This house, which I’ve admired several times when I’ve been driving northwards through the Langtons, a cluster of villages in Leicestershire north of Market Harborough, seems to be the epitome of Georgian country life, something that looks as if it has been at home in its setting since the 18th century, an admirable and unchanging bit of domestic architecture in the style of the great Robert Adam. The balanced composition, the central arch, the urns and swags – all these evoke the age of Adam (1728–92) beautifully. And yet, although I can do no more than scratch the surface of a building I’ve never been inside, it has actually changed a bit over the years.

The house was built, probably in the 1780s, for a member of the Hanbury family, one of a line of Hanburys who were rectors of this once prosperous living. Its architect is not known for certain, but the design is very similar to that of a house in Mountsorrel and both buildings have been attributed to the architect William Henderson of Loughborough. However, it’s now the Old Rectory, so is no longer the home of the rector. A friend who lives locally showed me a photograph taken in the 1970s from the rear, which shows that the side wings were then little more than brick walls – dummy wings, in short, made to make the house look larger and to balance the grand centrepiece; now they seem to be proper wings with rooms in them.

A further change is that at some stage the urns on the parapet were removed, along with the decorative relief of swags and urn in the central pediment. An illustration in the old Highways and Byways book on Leicestershire, which came out in 1923, shows the front of the building without these adornments. By the time the revised Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Leicestershire and Rutland was produced and published in 1984, there were urns on the parapet once more (modern cement ones, as now) but no pediment decoration. But the other day when I passed and took the photograph above the decorative ensemble had been restored (my local friend assures me it was there in 2007 when he took another photograph), so perhaps the house now looks as good as it ever did. Which in my book is very good indeed.

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J. B. Firth, Highways and Byways in Leicestershire (Macmillan, 1923)

Mountsorrel, Leicestershire

Bricklayer’s classical

After my recent encounters with garagiste’s corrugated iron and chunky fragments of railwayana, perhaps this blog could do with a some more polite architecture. So here’s a lovely house from the 1780s on the main street in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, a small town I have known for years and mused about before.

The winning combination of brick arches and the building’s classical proportions typify the late Georgian period. Those urns, swags, stucco stringcourses, and white balusters give the facade that bit of extra interest and, indeed, swagger. We can be a bit Adamish, the house seems to say, even if we are in a provincial town in the Midlands. The white stucco details stand out effectively against the background of red brick, a material that’s been common here for some 200 years. There was a local brickworks from the early-19th century, but when this house was built the prevailing materials in the town were probably Mountsorrel granite and Swithland slate. So from brickwork to stucco, from doorstep to rooftop urns, this is a building that stands out.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Pepper pot

Boston Stump, the Gherkin, the Shard: we like to give nicknames to buildings, especially towers, of unusual shape, and this selection suggests a tendency to try and bring them down a peg or two – but in an affectionate sort of way. There's something of the same effect about this example, sometimes known as the Pepper Pot. It's one of the major landmarks in Upton on Severn, and is an eyecatching sight as you enter the town from the Malvern side.

It started out as the tower of Upton's church and was a plain medieval sandstone structure topped with a spire and with buttresses at the western corners. In the 17th century the church was the scene of fighting when Royalists tried to stop Parliamentary troops crossing the nearby bridge over the Severn. In the 1750s the medieval church to the east of it was rebuilt in classical style and in 1769–70, when the spire became unsafe, the octagonal pepper-pot, copper-clad dome, and tiny openwork lantern on top were added, to make the tower look more in keeping with the rebuilt church. The architect was Anthony Keck, who had quite a large practice designing country houses in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and South Wales. He was a classicist and a follower of Adam, and his addition to the Upton tower has something of Adam's delicacy.

About a hundred years after Keck's pepper pot was added to the tower, it was decided to go in for a larger church at the other end of the town. This, a Gothic structure with a spire, became Upton's main church and in 1937 the old church was pulled down.* All except for its tower and ornamental pepper-pot top, which remains to house a heritage centre and to surprise passers-by.

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* Putting their cards on the table as usual, the BBC reported recently on their website that "the knave of the church was demolished in 1937".

Croome, Worcestershire

Winter blooms

Croome is historically important because it is the first major work of the great landscape gardener and architect Lancelot Brown, known as ‘Capability’ Brown because of his habit of assuring prospective clients that their grounds had great ‘capabilities’ for improvement. At Croome, Brown designed both the house and the park, although his work was supplemented in the house by Robert Adam, who worked on the interior, and James Wyatt, who designed some of the ‘eyecatchers’ around the edges of the park.

The park itself, created for the 6th earl of Coventry from 1747, was designed to feature a river, imitating the nearby Severn, and a large curvaceous lake with an island. Stately trees punctuate the views, as do a fascinating selection of garden buildings, including a grotto, guarded by a Coade stone statue of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. Some of the buildings were designed by Brown, some by Adam, and James Wyatt added several of the more distant eyecatchers, including a ruined ‘castle’ that I included in an earlier post.

I was planning to do a post about Brown’s grotto at Croome, but on the frosty afternoon I walked around the park the other day the statue of Sabrina was swathed in wrapping, put to sleep as it were for the winter under a protective puffy green duvet, as were the other statues and urns dotted about the park. So instead, here’s a building called the Temple Greenhouse, which was designed by Adam.

Today it looks more like a temple than a greenhouse, because the windows that were once fitted between the columns have been removed. So it can no longer contain exotic plants, but still makes a noble feature in Croome’s landscape. Adam included symbolic sculptures to complement the vegetation that once filled the greenhouse: overflowing cornucopias and this brimming basket of flowers. These vigorous reliefs are full of life, with a variety of blooms turned this way and that, and leaves twisting, as it were, in the breeze. They bring a welcome bit of summer to the frosty winter landscape.


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Croome Park is owned by the National Trust, and there are some stunning photographs of it here. The house, Croome Court, is owned by the Croome Heritage Trust, and is leased to the National Trust, which is managing its restoration.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Palace of art

When I first came across Compton Verney the place had an air of melancholy mystery. The great 18th-century house can be glimpsed through trees from a road the joins the Fosse Way, the old Roman route that runs northeast from Cirencester to Leicester and on to Lincoln. Rows of sash windows and gigantic corner stones made the place look imposing in the manner of a house by Sir John Vanbrugh, but in the 1970s it all looked rather down at heel. What was this place, and who lived there?

The building that I could make out through the trees had been begun on the site of an older house in the early years of the 18th century for the 12th Lord Willoughby de Broke. The designer isn’t known, but the strongest candidates (apart from Vanbrugh) are William and Francis Smith of Warwick, successful Midlands master builders who often also acted as architects. What is known is that in the 1760 the 14th Lord Willoughby de Broke had the place remodelled by Robert Adam. It was Adam who was responsible for turning what had been a courtyard house into the striking U-shaped building that still exists.

In the 1970s, when I first saw the place, no one lived there. Requisitioned by the army during World War II, Compton Verney had stood empty ever since, and could easily have been one of the hundreds of country houses that were demolished in the years after the war. But the building’s absentee owner held onto it, and it was finally bought and turned into an art gallery with funds from the Peter Moores Foundation. The architectural firm Stanton Williams were commissioned to convert the interior and build an extension – modern in idiom but discreet and complementary to the original building – on the site of former service buildings.

After almost 50 years of neglect, Compton Verney has found a fitting role. The building houses a permanent collection that specializes in a number of interesting areas of art history (highlights: Chinese bronzes, British folk art) and puts on temporary exhibitions that keep one going back. No doubt one day the place will have me blogging again, too. The conservation work, which embraces the Capability Brown landscape in which the house sits, is now turning to the ice house in the grounds. I wonder if they will find a way of showing visitors the impressive sunken brick-domed interior. Anyone for CCTV?

Go here for more about Compton Verney and its history.

Holy Trinity, Teigh, Rutland

A tiny gem in a Rutland village. In 1782, Robert Sherard, fourth Earl of Harborough, commissioned an architect to rebuild the church at Teigh. The result was rather unusual. The medieval tower was kept and extended. It acts as an entrance hall into the main body of the church, which was completely remodelled. Unusually, the pews, instead of facing the altar at the east end in the normal way, are placed facing each other along the length of the church, like cathedral choir stalls or the seats in a college chapel. Parishioners sitting in these pews look one way to the high altar, the other to the west end, where a pulpit and a pair of reading desks are arranged around the entrance door. The vicar climbs a narrow stair from the tower to appear as if by magic in the pulpit above the entrance door. The charming arrangement is completed with a painting of a window, which frames the pulpit.

Who was the architect of this unusual and surprising little building? It was probably George Richardson, who had designed two other churches for the earl. Richardson didn’t design many buildings, but was well known in the late-18th century because he published a number of popular architectural books, generally illustrated with his own engravings. Most of these were pattern books, volumes with titles like A Book Of Ornamental Ceilings or Original Designs For Country Seats Or Villas, containing designs which readers or their builders could use or adapt for their own homes. Richardson also worked for years as a draftsman and designer in the office of the famous Adam brothers. The delicacy of the design – with the domestic-looking plaster ceiling, the little pulpit and tiny reading desks, and the trompe l’oeuil foliage in the painted window – would have certainly been within the scope of someone who worked for Robert Adam and his brothers.