Ramsbury, Wiltshire

Pattern language

People who follow me on Instagram (where I am @philipbuildings ) may have noticed a while back that I posted one of those old black and yellow AA signs on a brick wall in Ramsbury. It occurred to me then that I should post a brick building from this Wiltshire town, and the blog seems the place for it because most of my readers look at the blog on a bigger screen than those of the mobile devices most often used with Instagram. Blowing up the picture by clicking on it will reveal the bricks more clearly.

Brickwork makes up a rich architectural language of patterns and this house is no exception. Many will recognise straight away the pattern of alternate stretchers and headers (the long sides and short ends of the brick) that makes up Flemish bond. That’s not unusual – Flemish bond is often seen on old brick buildings in England, though it’s not that common in Flanders, as Alec Clifton-Taylor and others have pointed out.* What’s different here is the use of darker bricks for those facing header-outwards. These are probably red bricks with ‘vitrified headers’, in other words headers that have been given a dark glaze at one end, either because those ends were facing a very hot part of the kiln, or the brick-maker added salt during the firing process, or a particular type of wood was used for firing.

This is an effect quite often seen in South Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, where according to Clifton-Taylor the presence of lime in the clay fosters the darkening process. These grey vitrified bricks were fashionable from the 18th century, and sometimes you see a house with a front wall in grey bricks with the more common red bricks reserved for the sides and back. More frequent still are walls where the two colours alternate, as here, to give a variegated effect that I find delightful. It’s sometimes said that creating these patterns was a way of using up bricks that had partly darkened, and that may sometimes have been the case. But I’m more convinced that people made these choices because of their visual effect, which adds colour and interest to many a building in this part of Central Southern England. Long live vitrification!

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* See Alec Clifton-Taylor, The Pattern of English Building (Faber & Faber) for a feast of information on English traditional building and building materials.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Clifton-Taylor’s English towns: In the marches

My short armchair travel series concludes for now with another of my favourite English towns – Ludlow – in a further programme from Alec Clifton-Taylor’s 1978 series. He begins with the Norman castle that gave the place its reason for being, and with a wonderful aerial shot of the castle and the town. A helicopter shot really helps one to understand Ludlow – not just the layout of the castle but also the town's grid plan, which is a notable example of medieval town planning.

Further joys unroll thereafter, including Ludlow’s fine parish church (especially its carved misericords) and the carving on the town’s timber-framed houses (the Feathers, above, best of all). If these were built on the prosperity that came from wool, the profits from the new industry of glove-making helped the Georgians improve the town in the 18th century, when it also became a notable social centre. Bigwigs’ mansions and the smaller houses of Georgian merchants offer further delights. The house with eight Venetian windows brought a smile to Clifton-Taylor ’s face, as it did to mine.

Entertaining diversions involve bad graveyard materials (e. g. ’nauseating crème de menthe chips’, luckily absent here) and the ‘de-blacking’ of timber framing. The whole programme is entertaining and an admiring portrait of this lovely town, still one of the gems of the west of England.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Clifton-Taylor’s English towns: Down by the riverside

Next in my short series of posts on Alec Clifton-Taylor’s 1970s television programmes on English towns see the presenter not far from my backyard, exploring the town of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, as Vauxhall Vivas and Rover 2000s zoom about in the background. Tewkesbury is a waterside town by two rivers (the Severn and Avon) built around a huge medieval abbey. I’ve posted about Tewkesbury several times before, noting its vulnerability to flooding, its noble abbey, its historic houses, and its very special Baptist chapel. My photograph shows the west front of the abbey, its enormous Norman arch now filled by a late-medieval window. Clifton-Taylor ranges outwards from this huge stone pile to the town’s mainly timber-framed buildings, up its characteristic alleys, and along its bounding rivers. There are interesting diversions on brick production and glass-making on the way, too.

Tewkesbury is a busy local centre, and much appreciated locally, but many tourists miss it, because they are distracted by the Cotswolds ten or twenty miles away. It’s well worth the diversion, as Clifton-Taylor fascinatingly shows.

Chichester, Sussex

Clifton-Taylor’s English Towns: Brick and flint

January’s cold and dark days encourage armchair travel rather than the real kind. I’m using my armchair to sit and rewatch some of Alec Clifton-Talyor’s television programmes about the history and architecture English towns. They’re almost forty years old now, and have a different pace from more recent documentary television. But for well informed commentary, accompanied by relevant shots of the towns, their streets, buildings, and surroundings, they’re still terrific.

The link below is to the first in the series, on Chichester, and at the beginning, Clifton-Taylor explains what he does. It’s an exercise in looking, he says, and he looks especially at houses, and at their building materials. At Chichester he starts with the Romans and the medieval builders who came after them, and their use of flint to build walls. The Romans also created the town’s street plan, with its two main streets at right-angles,* and the medieval period brought the ornate market cross at their intersection (above) and the nearby cathedral. Clifton-Taylor is very good on the different stones (various limestones) used for the cathedral, and on the calamitous collapse of the spire in 1861.

The second half of the programme turns to the town’s houses, many of them Georgian and beautiful. Here we’re back to flint again, and the camera shows with great clarity how builders coped with the challenge of making regular courses using lumps of flint of highly irregular shape. The diverse colours of Sussex bricks are another feature that makes Chichester’s houses stand out and both brick and flint walls are complemented with painstaking details like elegant fanlights and meticulous cornices. As usual, I find Clifton-Taylor’s restrained, old-fashioned enthusiasm infectious.

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*Already partly pedestrianized in 1978, so there are relatively few glimpses of old cars (Triumph Heralds and Hillman Imps among them) in the background of this programme.

Stamford, Lincolnshire

A view of a town

I have recently been watching an old television series called Six English Towns, written and presented by the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor. This was a formative series for me when it first came out in the 1970s – it must have been one of the first things that made me look closely at the buildings around me.* It’s wonderful that these old programmes are available again, and I intended to say more about them.

Clifton-Taylor covers some of my favourite towns, and a lot of the buildings he describes are still there. Stamford in Lincolnshire is a particular favourite: a limestone town of extraordinary grace, once on the busy A1 road but now bypassed – and still bustling and thriving in spite of now standing to one side of this arterial north-south route.

Clifton-Taylor says a lot about stone, and a lot about the Georgian houses and other buildings in Stamford built of this material. One thing he noticed was the number of variations on the carved keystones above windows: the town really is an exhibition of the art of the keystone carver. Looking through my own photographs, one example struck me in particular: Stamford’s Town Hall, a building of the 1770s.

At first glance, this building, with its rows of sash windows, its rusticated ground floor, its low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, could be a grand Georgian town house. But the coat of arms at the top gives it away. The architect isn’t known fort certain but it may have been Henry Tatam, a local cabinet-maker who also designed buildings. The window surrounds (detail at the top of this post) don’t protrude very much, although the lasts-afternoon sun that shone when I took my photograph does its best to catch the surface variations on the facade. The sun also catches the decoration around the upper windows – the pattern of rosettes and linear forms that give these windows their elegant character. This pattern is taken up in both the keystones and the cornice, giving the decorative scheme its character – a sense of unity or repetitiveness, as you wish. The walls themselves, with their very tightly jointed stonework of the kind common in Stamford, set all this off well.

Clifton-Taylor mentions this building in his film, and shows many others, often just as interesting. His programmes are good old-fashioned TV† – no gimmicks, just a man talking about what he likes for half an hour in an informative way – and well worth watching. 

Alec Clifton-Taylor, Six English Towns: Stamford

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*There were a further two series, so he covered 18 towns in all, and he brought out books to accompany each series too.

†Very much of their time, these programmes show a middle-class, rather schoolmasterly Englishman unglamorously talking to camera – and showing off the buildings he discusses with relevant, informative footage. The sort of thing that’s sneered at too often as paternalistic, like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (another formative series for me). One shouldn’t let prejudice get in the way of their genuine insights.

Lewes, Sussex

Doing the math

Lewes is full of houses with beautiful brickwork, but sometimes the ‘brickwork’ is not what it seems. Many of the fronts of houses in this town are not built of brick at all but covered with a kind of tile designed to look like brick. These tiles, called mathematical tiles. became popular during the 18th century and were usually used to clad timber-framed houses so that they looked as if they were built in brick. There are lots of them in Lewes, and in other places in southeast England, such as Brighton.

Although mathematical tiles are usually the same colour as regular red bricks, they are quite easy to spot when you get your eye in. They’re a different size from bricks and, because of their slender profile, they look different at joins and at the corners of the building. Sometimes the tiles are not red at all, but black. There are quite a lot of these black tiles in Brighton and they also feature on this Lewes building, Bartholomew House, near the entrance to the castle.

At a quick glance you might think this house was built of black glazed brick. But when you look more closely, there are several odd things about it that give the game away. Here’s a house with the sash windows and fanlights of the 18th century, but the proportions are all wrong. An 18th-century house would not normally have the ground-floor window in the middle: this window would line up with those on the upper floors. The pair of doors is unusual too. And the fact that none of the windows has the classical number of panes. And the way in which the three lower windows almost touch at the corners. And the lack of arches and keystones above the windows.

Put all this together, and it looks as if this is a framework building. In other words, what’s holding it all up is not a brick wall, but a timber frame, and this frame dictates where the windows and doors can be. Some time in the 18th century, the owners decided to upgrade it, following the fashion, using glazed black tiles. If you look at the corners (photograph below), there’s a narrow wooden band covering up what would be an uncomfortable join if the edges of the tiles had been exposed: a neat solution to a major headache with mathematical tiles. The moulding around the windows is probably wooden too (I was so taken with the look of this house that I forgot to kick or tap these parts to find out.)

Why tile a house like this? It is sometimes said that mathematical tiles came into favour as a way of avoiding a tax on bricks that came in in 1784. But mathematical tiles were in use well before this date – and were taxed too†. It was more to do with fashion. Timber was out; brick was in; tiles gave the appearance of brick without the expense of a complete rebuild. Fashion – and finance – ruled the day, and the builders of 18th-century Lewes did the math.

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† As pointed out by Alec Clifton-Tailor in his chapter on Lewes in his Six More English Towns (1981). I’m indebted to his account in this post.