Banbury, Oxfordshire

 

Brush up your Shakes

Some time ago I remember wondering why a shop in Parsons Street in Banbury had a bust of Shakespeare above the window. On my most recent visit, I wondered again, while also smiling at the lucky combination of an old sculpture of Shakespeare next to a sign saying ‘Sheila’s Shakes’: shakes, clearly, without peer.

The answer to my question is the obvious one: there used to be a pub here and it was called the Shakespeare. And so this bust of the bard is added to my collection of three-dimensional pub signs, along with all the White Harts, Swans, Lions, Elephants and Sugar Loaves I’ve noticed over the years. There’s not much to say about the sign. It’s rather crudely made – although generations of paint have probably obscured some of the details, but it has a certain charm about it. And after all, the available early images of the English national poet are hardly great works of art – this one looks as if it has been based on his monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity church at Stratford, a bust which the literary critic John Dover Wilson said made him look like a ‘self-satisfied pork butcher’. The Banbury bust could perhaps do with some of the care and attention lavished on the one in Stratford.

One can trace the pub through various 19th-century directories and census records, which list the innkeeper’s name and mention additional jobs as well as that of publican. For example in 1871 the main occupant was William Reed, stonemason and beer seller; in 1881 it was John Sole, coach builder and innkeeper; in 1901, Maurice Horan, beer house keeper and groom. This range of activities may be an indication of 19th-century Banbury entrepreneurship, but is more likely the result of this being a small pub or beer house, not a big enough business to support a family. One hopes that the business of ’shakes’ is a more prosperous one.

Banbury, Oxfordshire

 

Things like dips and feed

I remember when visiting Banbury many years ago as a teenager that I was struck by a shop with an abundance of painted signage on the upper floors. Back then, I’d never seen a building with so much writing on it. Even now, I’ve seen few to rival it, all repainted and spick and span as it is. Was it still functioning as a seed and forage merchant when I first saw it in the late-1960s? And what was its history?

Looking online, I drew a blank at first, but then I caught a glimpse of a name…which rapidly disappeared behind another screenful of information. The name was Lamprey. Surely this was the word I saw on the shop long ago, a name that reminded me then not of agricultural suppliers but of eels slithering along in the River Severn, near where I lived. And yes, Lamprey’s were in business in the late-1960s, and were using a mill on another site as a warehouse in 1969.*

So Lamprey was the name, John Lamprey and his son William, who were supplying a large hinterland of farmers who needed seed, animal fodder, and the like. Perhaps they had a rep who travelled around the farms, like the speaker in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Livings’ (‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed’). Banbury was an agricultural centre, and Banbury market became one of the largest livestock markets† in the country. This building is at one end of the market place, an ideal position. But the Lampreys did not stop at dealing in seed and feed. As their building’s inscriptions proclaim, they were also coal merchants. They had lime kilns near the canal, hence ‘LIME’ among the repainted ghost signs on the wall. They had a brickworks nearby too. They must have been Victorian go-getters, keen to be involved in any business that would make them money, whether related to the burgeoning building trades or to the prevailing agricultural markets. Their wall of advertising suggests they weren’t about to let anyone forget what could be bought from their premises.

From memory, the painted signs were rather worn when I first saw them. Clearly they have been repainted recently, and have come up looking fresh without losing all of their character, with the widths of the letters adjusted freely so that the words fit between the windows. Not quite genuine ghost signs, left faded but old, but still a lively bit of townscape that helps remind us of what this place was like once. The kind of agribusiness I could buy into. It’s gone now, and the building is occupied by very different concerns – a recruitment firm and an estate agency. I’m not sure how long the seed and feed business lasted, but, to paeraphrase Philip Larkin, perhaps it was time for change, in nineteen sixty-nine.¶

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* I’m indebted for this information to an article posted by the Banbury Museum, here. 

† Perhaps the largest.

¶ See ‘Livings’ in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber and The Marvell Press, 1988)

Banbury, Oxfordshire

Still hanging on

My recent visit to Banbury threw up one further highlight in the brief interval between rain and more rain. A short-lived shaft of sunlight made me look around me – and look up since the modern shop fronts in the street in which I found myself were generally uninspiring. So up I looked, and saw this bit of history: a house built in 1650 for a mercer called Edward Vivers. In its heyday this must have been a grand building, home and place of work to a successful town trader. In the intervening 360-plus years it has been through quite a bit, and the recent shop fronts, successors to earlier but still intrusive ones no doubt, are not the least of the changes. From street level, it’s impossible to appreciate the rest of the facade unless you step well back.

Above the windows offering coffee and the conveniences of 21st-century life, the frontage is more original, but still has the air of trying to escape through the accretions of the more recent past. But one can still take in the original form: three bow windows jettied out over the street, and, above them, three gables likewise protruding. Framing them is a collection of quite elaborately carved timbers – bargeboards with finials and a wooden frieze with pendants – plus moulded wooden window mullions. Adorning the white infill sections is pargetted plasterwork in bold geometrical patterns.

All this is very much of its time, when what has been described as a sort of baroque began to spread across English vernacular architecture. The pargetting is especially interesting because the received wisdom is that this is a regional craft, found in eastern England, especially Suffolk and Essex. This is true, but not the whole truth – there are pargetted fronts dotted around all over the place. Here a prosperous owner wanted a showy front, and pargetting fitted the bill. It’s a shame that the ground floor is now singing to a different tune. Maybe one day…

Banbury, Oxfordshire

The same, but different

Striding through Banbury in the rain after my visit to Hanwell, I made a mental notes of the buildings I’d look at more closely and photograph properly on my next visit, which will be, I hope, in drier weather. As the rain abated for a moment, though, I did stand briefly in front of the Olde Reine Deer Inn to contemplate the sign.

I remember this sign from forty years ago. Its wooden bracket was then by far the biggest I’d seen, and on my recent visit I was pleased to see it still in place. Back then I wasn’t so interested in letterforms, so I was agreeably surprised by the inscription on the arm – ‘Hook Norton Ales’ – with its chunky letters and, especially, those Arts and Craftsy interlocking and dotted Os, each one with a slight protrusion at the midpoint.

Looking at the photograph I quickly took before the rain began again, I wished I’d given more of an impression of how the sign stretches right across to the middle of the road. This sent me looking online, where I found an old postcard image, presumably from the late-19th or very early 20th century. This shows the sign in context. It also confirms the early presence of the heavy structure with its curving strut (this plain and unlettered in the old image) and the fact that the hanging sign, back then as now, was all lettering – no image of a reindeer to be seen. The lovely crowning ironwork is present, too.

Parsons Street, Banbury

There was an intermediate period, however, a few years ago, when the sign was pictorial and neither the curving strut nor the fancy ironwork above the sign were there. So the sign’s current form is a restoration. Even if the structure would work without the strut, I for one find it more aesthetically pleasing with it. And any opportunity to advertise the excellent products of the Hook Norton Brewery is, as far as I’m concerned, a bonus worth raising a glass to.

Banbury, Oxfordshire

On course

When I first saw this building, its vast windows shining in the sun across a car park, I thought it must be a school. Did the stone torch at the tip of the main gable confirm this? It certainly seemed to. But a closer look revealed a damaged inscription on another gable: ‘The Banbury In titute’. A mechanics’ institute, then, shining its torch of instruction on the working people of north Oxfordshire.

Mechanics’ Institutes began in the early-19th century to provide adult education for the working classes. A typical institute offered courses of lectures (usually on a range of subjects, both vocational and academic), discussion groups, and a library, and these offerings were free in an age when the alternatives (for example, subscription libraries) were only available to those who could afford to pay. Pioneered by George Birkbeck, they spread across the country, clearly filling a gaping hole in the education system in the years before compulsory schooling for all children. Birkbeck worked in Glasgow before moving to London and founding the London Mechanics’ Institute in 1823. The next couple of decades saw the foundation of hundreds of institutes across the country.

Not all institutes lasted. As the public library movement gathered pace, for example, some became local libraries. And there’s a historical debate about how useful they were to the working classes, with some historians claiming that the free lectures were soon taken over by the middle classes. As institutes were locally founded and run, clearly, an institute’s success depended on specific organizers and conditions – and the fates of mechanics’ institutes vary from early closure to evolution into universities offering the best in higher education (that first institute evolved into London’s Birkbeck, for example).

Banbury’s institute, founded in 1835, seems to have been well used and by the early 1880s had outgrown its original building. Hence this one, built in 1884 and designed by local architect W E Mills in a kind of Tudor semi-Gothic. Mills was clearly the man for the job – he also taught at the Institute as ‘visiting master for architecture and building construction’. At night his rows of windows must have shone like true beacons of learning.

Art and Architecture, Mainly has some interesting posts about mechanics' institutes in Australia, the first of which is here.