Bath, Somerset

Water is best

I go to Bath quite often and almost always, when I’m there, I admire the Georgian architecture that has made the place famous, but also look out for buildings and details that are either not Georgian or otherwise not typical of the city. Recently, walking along Walcot Street, the Resident Wise Woman and I spotted this small marvel. It’s a drinking fountain that once supplied water for humans and, via the trough to the right, for animals too, appropriately enough since it once served the city’s cattle market. Water, of course, was the thing that made Bath famous before the Georgian period, when the healing spa brought the Romans here. “Water is best” as it says on the walls of the Pump Room,* extolling the life-giving liquid.

Water once came to Walcot Street not in a classical pump room or a Roman bath, but via this Victorian fountain. It’s a Victorian creation, erected in 1860 by one Major Charles Davis, who was appointed city architect and surveyor a couple of years later.† By the look of it he’d been studying the work of John Ruskin, whose books, especially The Stones of Venice, are illustrated with the author’s beautiful drawings showing just this kind of architectural detail. What Ruskin admired in the architecture of Venice (especially its Gothic architecture) was the combination of craftsmanship and visual beauty. He drew arches sometimes with patterns carved into the surface of the stone, as in the outer arch here; sometimes with a zigzag pattern in two colours, as in the drinking fountain’s lower arch; often with shafts (miniature columns) in different materials, also as here. In 1860, bright, shining, and new, the arch would have gleamed, catching the eye with this combination of varied geology and delicate carving. The sound of running water would have added to the appeal.

It’s a shame that the fountain has seen better days – the weeds in the trough seem well established (was it once used as a planter?) and, because the structure is on the side of the road where there are no shops, few people walk along this bit of pavement to notice. Looking it up online, I found an article about restoring the fountain, but I’m not sure the date of this. I hope some cleaning and conservation work is possible, even if the fountain can no longer be connected to a water supply. Though the trickle of water would be an added attraction too.

- - - - -

* This motto is actually in ancient Greek, as it’s a quotation from the poet Pindar, put there, I believe, by temperance campaigners to encourage people to choose water over intoxicating liquors.

† Davis did a lot of work in the city, from the redevelopment of the Roman Baths to the building of the Empire Hotel. He would have needed to cultivate versatility to produce these diverse works, and the tiny project of designing the drinking fountain shows another string to his bow – Ruskinian Venetian design to add to his classical works in the Baths and the more generic Gothic and Norman that he needed for his church restorations.

Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire

For vigour

What’s this, in the park of the 18th-century house of Lydiard Tregoze, near Swindon? Not a sheep wash. Certainly not something for cleaning mud off the wheels of carts. It is, I’m reliably informed by the adjacent interpretation board, a plunge pool for humans, and it dates to about 1820, when Sir George Richard St John was Lord of the Manor. Although by this time the technology for piped water certainly existed, most country houses did not have such a convenience. What did the upper classes need piped water for, when they had a large staff of servants to bring the stuff to where it was needed? So water for washing and bathing was brought to your room by hand, and most country-house owners were happy with this arrangement.

Some houses, however, had plunge pools, either out in the open like this, or undercover in an outbuilding. Plunge pools, as the name suggests, were not for wallowing. The idea was to plunge in and out quickly and the reason for doing this was not primarily for washing, but because a dunking in cold water was deemed to be good for your health. Some went to Bath or other health resorts, some, increasingly, went to the coast to bathe in salt water, but many held that immersion in fresh water – here supplied from the nearby lake – was just as good. Madness, rickets, leprosy and asthma were among the disorders said in the Regency period to be helped by a course of plunge-pool treatments. Maybe some bathers thought that a daily dash down to the plunge pool and back would bring them increased vigour, in the same way as a cold morning bath at boarding school was supposed to do.

So it was perhaps a case of going down the steps as quickly as you could manage, ducking in a few times, and then dashing back up the steps – even faster, and shivering no doubt – and rushing indoors to be dried. Invigorating? I hope so.

Bath, Somerset

Matters of taste

Kingsmead Square seemed to be the perfect spot for a socially distanced cup of coffee on a recent visit to Bath. Our seat was also a good place from which to admire the entrance front of Rosewell House, named for the person who had it built, one Thomas Rosewell. Rosewell’s architect was Nathaniel Ireson of Wincanton who developed part of this square in the 1730s – there’s a carved datestone inscribed ‘1735’ at the very top of the house’s facade. By this time, John Wood Senior had already set the style for Georgian Bath with developments such as the grand, palace-fronted Queen’s Square. But Wood’s style was less reliant on ornament and more on proportions than this house. Ireson’s mode was more akin to the lively baroque of the beginning of the 18th century – so there’s plenty of carving, more curves, more elaboration.

You can see this wherever you look. The windows all have fancy surrounds – the first-floor ones with carved busts in the keystones, the big central windows even more elaborate, one with a surround of curves and scrolls, one flanked by upright figures. There are lots of pilasters dividing up the frontage and book-ending it, those on the ground floor with banded rustication. The whole is topped by a deep cornice and segmental pediment that contains the carved datestone, which is concealed behind a tree branch in my photograph. Presumably the ground floor would originally also have had sash windows, but the spaces now accommodate shop windows.

I find all this detail fascinating. It’s even more elaborate than the beautiful stone facades in a smaller Georgian town like Stamford in Lincolnshire, another place where the provincial taste for baroque elements lingered longer than they did in more ‘progressive’ and ‘sophisticated’ cities like Bath. John Wood, in the vanguard of sophistication, did not care for this sort of thing, which he referred to as ‘ornaments without taste’. Well, Wood built some fine houses, and I have some respect for him as an architect, but I’ll happily look at this example of what he saw as bad taste all day. There is more than one way to design a classical town house, and Bath has room for several different approaches.

Bath, Somerset

The red box ten years on

I can hardly believe that it was ten years ago that I blogged about the Gallery on the Green in Settle, Yorkshire, an admirable example of finding a new use for one of the redundant red telephone boxes that used to abound in Britain and are no longer as common as they were. The gallery, which launched itself as ‘probably the smallest art gallery in the world’ is just one example of this creative repurposing, and there are now many more.*

And just as well for people like me, who admire these fine bits of British design, because the numbers of red boxes have continued to go down. There were once 70,000 red boxes on Britain’s streets. There are now only 10,000 of the famous classic boxes, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott,† left, plus a further 20,000 public phone boxes of other designs. Only about 30,000 calls are made per year from all of these 30,000 boxes, so more will vanish. But a scheme allows local councils to ‘adopt’ a redundant box if they can find a new use for it. A number of the boxes in my local area (the Cotswolds) now house defibrillators. Others are miniature galleries, book-swapping facilities, or even small businesses (there’s one in London where smartphone screens are repaired which I pass from time to time). In Cheltenham the local museum took over a couple of adjacent boxes for a while, although these now seem to be empty again. My photograph shows one of several boxes used as planters that I recently saw in Bath, another clever reuse in which, back in July, red geraniums were blending pleasingly with the paintwork of the box itself.

Most of these conversions are of the familiar K6 design of telephone kiosk. The earlier and slightly larger K2 boxes, which are scarcer, represent the original successful version of Scott’s design so are doubly precious; these are all listed and so will survive. Many of the K6s are likely to be removed in this age of mobile telephones, unless more new uses are found. I think their total removal would be a shame as Scott's is a beautiful design and such a recognisable part of the British scene, in both town and country. So I hope that as many red boxes as possible will be repurposed, and that those who adopt them continue to look after them, keeping their shiny red paintwork both shiny and red.

- - - - -

* There is a good article about reusing red boxes in The Guardian, here. I suppose purists might object to the reuse as planters, given that it involves alterations such as removing the glass. But better this than the scrapyard.

† Sir Giles Gilbert Scott is also famous for his work on the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool (still happily with us), Bankside Power Station (in large part preserved thanks to its conversion to Tate Modern), and Battersea Power Station (which has fared less well, but is currently being redeveloped).

Bath

Lost in the post?

This post is by way of an apology to a number of my readers. One of the pleasures of having this blog is the number of comments I’ve received about my posts. Nearly all these comments are positive and constructive, they are often informative, and not infrequently appreciative: I enjoy getting them, and often respond to them.

For years now I’ve had a system set up that alerts me to each comment by sending me an email. For some reason, this system no longer seems to work, probably because Google, who host the blog on their servers, have changed the way things work. They often make such changes, usually notifying bloggers of what they are doing, and I generally take notice of these notifications. But this time, I didn’t realise what was going on. As a result, many of you have made comments and I’ve not read them. But they are not lost in the post: most of them are there, in the system, and I have now bulk published many of them to their relevant posts, and over the coming weeks will go through them, read, digest, and comment myself.

I’m sorry about this. I do value your comments, will continue to respond, and will now look out for them. I hope that all of you – old friends, longstanding online acquaintances, new readers, and the rest – will forgive me, and carry on reading.

- - - - -

The letter box that illustrates this post is one I saw in Bath. Its rather lovely ‘Greek key’ decoration, architectural as it is, particularly appealed to me.

Bath, Somerset

A view of some rooms

I have just enjoyed immensely the current exhibition at the Victoria Galley, Bath. It is called A Room of Their Own: Lost Bloomsbury Interiors 1914–30, and looks at the stunning interior designs of members of the Bloomsbury group,* especially the work of the Omega Workshops and in particular designs by Bloomsbury Group members Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry.† Only at Charleston in Sussex, the country house of Bell and Grant, and a favourite meeting point of the other members of the group, do such interiors survive. So the exhibition draws together paintings, screens, lamps, painted furniture, ceramics, and other decorative items from various public and private collections, arranging some of them in groups to recreate several long-vanished interiors.

One of the most effective of these room sets (they’re actually partial rooms, arranged where two walls meet to create the effect of a domestic corner) is what one might call an ‘early Omega Workshop’ room (above), inspired by an illustration in Roger Fry’s The Artist as Decorator. Strongly coloured abstract panels on the walls, a fireplace dressed with white vases, a beautiful decorated dining table (its worn surface an angular labyrinth of stripes), and some Omega Egyptian chairs are the main elements. Nearby is a glorious ‘Lily Pond’ screen by Duncan Grant, which, the caption tells us, was made by dripping ‘puddles’ of paint on to its surface to create a vibrant composition of black, green, and pink – a technique prefiguring Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings decades later.

Another room, a music room, shows the more muted colours and figurative art of the later period, with a screen by Vanessa Bell depicting musicians. A further room (below), again subtly pastel in palette, evokes a dining room designed for Dorothy Wellesley in 1929, with paintings of classical nudes and bathers, a fireplace with arched and round decorations like a modernist take on Adam, and an octagonal dining table decorated with a huge flower-like pattern.

Between this small group of room sets are displayed striking designs, fans, and pieces of furniture such as Roger Fry’s luxurious marquetry cabinet featuring a pair of giraffes in different inlaid woods. The whole show (in one large room of the gallery) gives not just an admirable impression of the lost interiors but also a sense of how the designs of the Omega Workshop developed and of the input of its notable contributors – both the three I’ve mentioned and other artists, notably Carrington, whose work on show includes a stand-out portrait and some stunning painted furniture. Above all, this exhibition provides a glimpse of how the Bloomsbury Group’s ideas about modern art and literature were not just for the study: they lived their ideas in a setting that vibrates with colour, freshness, and joy.

* * * * *

*For the Bloomsbury Group and its contributions to the arts, start here.

†The Omega Workshops, of which the three artists were directors, designed murals, painted furniture, textiles, and other products, as well as decorating whole rooms. The company was founded in 1913 and closed in 1919, but for Fry, Bell, and Grant, the ethos lived on and Bloomsbury artists continued to produce objects in the Omega tradition for years afterwards. Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the Bloomsbury Group’s most prominent painters and the sister of the writer Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant (1885–1978) was a painter of portraits and landscapes and a designer of textiles and pottery, and also a theatre designer. Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a prominent critic as well as an artist, wrote influential essays on art, and was responsible for introducing Post-Impressionism to Britain.

Bath, Somerset

Other worlds

People sometimes ask me why I do not do more posts about interiors. There are various reasons. First of all: what most interests me about buildings is the face they present to the world – not just how they look from the outside, but also how they relate to their surroundings and how they enhance (or not) our experience of townscape, villagescape, landscape, or whatever other kind of scape we find ourselves in. I also find it easier to take photographs of exteriors, and what I most like to do is show you one photograph that combines with a small piece of text that tries to sum up what I feel about the building. Although I sometimes can’t resist a church interior, interiors on the whole are another country (if not another world) and I’d have to do things differently there.

But now and then there’s nothing like an exception to prove, as they say, the rule. A few weeks ago the Resident Wise Woman and I went to a concert in the Forum, Bath. I knew, from reading, that this was a former cinema and that it had some kind of art deco interior. But this information, plus the rather classical stone-clad exterior (this is Bath, after all) could not prepare me for the delights inside: a virtually complete art deco interior of 1933–4, with chromium-plated handrails, doors of fine woods (walnut, ebonized timber), all kinds of plasterwork embellishments, a classical frieze of naked warriors, and lighting (both concealed and visible fittings) to die for.

If ever there was a place, I’d thought, that sums up the glamour of the interwar cinema, it must be somewhere like the Muswell Hill Odeon (all streamlining and swirls). But for my money, the Forum knocks such places into a cocked hat. Only the mad Gothic interior of the Granada, Tooting (by the once-celebrated theatrical designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, whose very name takes one to other worlds) can compete. The architects of the Forum were a Bristol practice, W H Watkins and E Morgan Willmott, who were enthusiasts for American design – not just decoration influenced by the New World but also planning, including the generous splay of the fan-shaped, 2,000-seater auditorium. You can’t sum this sort of thing up in one picture, taken quickly before the house started to fill before the performance, so here is one image that catches, albeit inadequately, the plasterwork, the frieze, the rather Egyptian surround of the proscenium arch, and the use of colour; plus two details of a light fitting and a bit of incised plasterwork. I enjoyed the concert, but if it had not been so good I’d have had a good time anyway looking at my surroundings. Another world indeed.

Bath, Somerset

In splendour

In England in the dark month of February, we long for the sun and regularly comment on its appearance or non-appearance, and constantly consult the weather forecast to track the possible parting of the clouds. (What did we do before the internet? Consult the weather vane, for one thing.) And when the actual sun is not out, we find images of him everywhere, on buildings especially.

Not all these images are literal. Back in the 1970s, the photographer Tony Evans produced a whole book, The English Sunrise, of stylized sunrise images – the sun’s rays suffusing Art deco stained glass windows, Albion truck badges, Young Farmers’ Club emblems, cinema facades, tins for gramophone needles or tobacco, and suburban garden gates.

Marvellous stuff as this is, one could make another compilation of portrayals of the sun fully risen and radiating heat and light through 360 degrees. The sun in splendour. You see him a lot, once you get your eye in. On pub signs and door knockers, for example. I’ve even seen him peeping from a capital atop a pilaster in Central Europe. But back home in England he’s as likely as not to be found on old fire insurance plaques – the ones people put on their houses to show that they’d paid their premium, without which, in the good old days, the firemen would not call in times of need. Here’s a lovely example from Bath: nicely modelled face; lively, wriggly rays; pleasant lettering. Splendid!

Revisits

A top ten of 2014

Before we advance into a new year of architectural encounters, it occurred to me to take a look at what my readers have found most interesting during the last year – or which of my 2014 posts, at any rate, have been viewed the most. I have compiled a top ten, and they are a mixed bunch indeed, featuring mostly modest buildings such as prefabs, a shop front, some almshouses, and a public lavatory. They also include some memorable architectural details and a couple of reviews (of the recent exhibition of Edwin Smith’s photographs and the reprint of Nairn’s London). Miscellaneous as they are, they seem to represent a reasonable if partial cross-section of my interests and, I hope, those of my readers to.

They are:

Far from ordinary: the story of prefabs in Catford, south London, notable examples of the glory of the ordinary.

A sort of Jacobethan: a whimsical but interesting bit of pseudo-Jacobean detail in Northampton. God, or the Devil as they say these days (and well they might in these unMiesian contexts), is in the details.

Hygienic high-style: a terrific Art Deco shopfront in Ashby de la Zouch, showing that Deco can be about restraint as well as showing off.

The essence of place: the stand-out exhibition of the photographs of Edwin Smith (closed now, but it’s still worth reading about this photographic master).

What we see, and when we see it: a meditation in Malmesbury about how photography often reveals what we don’t see.

Fifty years on: a personal memory of some almshouses in Louth and the architecture of James Fowler.

Old orders changing: an unusual classical order in Clifton (pictured above).

The ladies, vanishing: a memorable cinema in Cheltenham, which is no more.

Being moved in London: a review of my favourite book about London, which has recently been reprinted.

From the sun to the stars: a cast-iron public lavatory in Bath.

Happy New Year to you all.

Bath, Somerset

In a Bath tea-shop

I have a certain fondness for old enamel advertising signs – their strong colours and period letterforms are hard to resist. I find it rather exciting to find them in situ, out of doors, still advertising long-forgotten brands of sausages or cigarettes. But almost as good is coming across an example that someone has saved and put up, just for the fun of it. Here's one the Resident Wise Woman and I came across when having afternoon tea on the day I discovered such things as the abandoned public lavatory and the hill-top villa that I've previously posted on this blog.

Lyons' made quite a few signs for their brand of tea. This is one of the simpler ones. Larger versions had added slogans, such as 'Always the best' and 'A packet for every pocket'. On this occasion, they just let the brand do the talking, aided by the distinctive orange and blue colouring. Many people knew Lyons' because of their chain of tea shops (and their larger and grander Corner Houses), which served tea, cakes, and inexpensive meals and were beloved of shoppers on many a High Street.

The company sold foods over the counter too. Lyons' restaurants usually had a bakery counter at the front and there were also larger Maison Lyons stores that sold a range of goods. This being Britain, tea was a big seller, along with ice cream and biscuits, and these remained important lines for Lyons' until the company went into decline and was broken up in the 1980s. Now the vibrant signs remain, on restored heritage railway platforms and in the occasional tea shop, to remind us of a once-great brand.

Bath, Somerset

Another Bath

Walking out of the centre of Bath and up Bathwick Hill, one gradually leaves behind the urban Georgian world of symmetrical crescents and terraces and comes upon another, different Bath, a Bath of asymmetry and greenery. Here, in the 1830s and 1840s, a number of large, Italianate villas were constructed, to bring a breath of the South to these otherwise very English slopes.

These houses wear their Italianate origins on their sleeve. It even begins with the names on the gate piers – Casa Bianca, La Casetta, Fiesole. These villas are essays in the Picturesque, the asymmetrical style of the early-19th century, in which towers, balconies, loggias, chimneys, and overhanging roofs are assembled to produce enticing, rather Romantic houses. Openwork balusters, and ornate chimneys add further ornate notes, although there are also typical classical details such as quoins and large keystones.

All this material was marshalled by architect Henry Edmund Goodridge to produce houses like Fiesole, the one in my photograph. Goodridge, son of a successful Bath builder, built up a large practice in Somerset and Wiltshire. He attracted prominent patrons like William Beckford, whose Lansdown Tower he designed, and this brought him numerous domestic jobs in the area, many of which show this willingness to mix Italianate and Classical styles.

This bit of Italy in Somerset is a little known aspect of Bath and embodies a different architectural approach from those we normally expect to find in the city. The Pevsner city guide to Bath finds their design ‘formulaic, heavy-handed and lacking charm’. True, the concatenation of gables and projections, the jagged roof edges and the unbalanced facades hardly add up to great architecture. But I have a bit more time for them than the Pevsner guide. I’m rather fond of this lumpy collection of varied masses. In addition, my photograph, taken on a sunny afternoon, shows the practicality of the loggias, which are providing shade (on the upper floor) and sheltered sunshine (at ground level), a combination that works as well in England as in Italy. Once the preserve of well-heeled owners, today, these facilities are available to a wider public because Fiesole is a Youth Hostel.

Flaking paint, gate pier, Fiesole, Bath

Bath, Somerset

From the sun to the stars

My journey to Bath, which I interrupted to visit the Bristol public lavatory in the previous post, encompassed another pissoir, this one looking sadly dilapidated, although the scars are probably mainly superficial. The building hangs on, locked up and unkempt, in a shady corner of Sydney Gardens, the park behind the Holburne Museum.

This example, like the Bristol one, is made of iron. Apparently it’s a product of the Star Works in Birmingham (the Bristol example came from the Sun Foundry in Glasgow – clearly these Victorian businesses looked to the heavens for their onomastic inspiration). The Star Works produced many such conveniences, although very few now stand. Rectilinear where the Bristol gents is rounded, it has openwork ventilation panels around the tops of the walls and rectangular panels below, each decorated with an abstract design that recalls, without reproducing exactly, a compass rose. This kind of decoration, which leaves behind the curvaceous lines of Art Nouveau, suggests a date somewhere in the second decade of the 20th century. At some stage after this, the pissoir was painted a tasteful grey, although the peeling paintwork on the side in my photograph reveals early green coats beneath – green being the most common colour for such buildings, especially when sited, as here, in public parks.

Sydney Gardens now has new public lavatories in a nearby stone-clad structure that looks very substantial. I don’t know what the future is for the Victorian building, but I hope, in preservation-conscious Bath, that it has some hope of survival.

Bath, Somerset

Polish

I'm not sure if I'm right, but I associate these large brass shop signs particularly with chemists' premises. They were an elegant fashion of the 19th century, and the curving line of the sign catches the light well. No doubt the resulting glitter reflected that of the various medicine jars that were once displayed in the shop window. The use of brass perhaps also embodies the pharmacist's association with the medical profession. Doctors, after all, traditionally identified their surgeries with a brass name plate (the French talk about a doctor "putting up his plate" when a new practice is established). Whether or not this is the case, brass signs like this are certainly eye-catching, and I was pleased to find this one surviving on a shop long since given over to the purveying of cheese, coffee, charcuterie, and "fine wines".

The letters are cousins of the sans-serif or  "grotesque" capitals I noticed here, although they take an outline form and are maybe rather thin and spindly. Their details owe more to the metalworker than the sign-painter or stone-carver. But looked at from a distance, the outline form of the letters makes a clear and stylish impact. Examined more closely, they show the irregular impressions made by the metalworker's tools, as if the letters did not get the way they are without a lot of hard work. This is mark-making with a difference, and the result sets up a lovely counterpoint between the straight lines of the letters and the irregular strokes within those straight lines, between roughness and, what we first notice when the sign catches our eye, sheer polish.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The iceman's cousin

This is a brief pendant to the previous post about a terrace in Bath and its keystones carved in the form of icemen. A correspondent pointed out that the exuberant carved decoration on the Bath terrace might well be an expression of impatience with the austere classicism of much Georgian architecture, an exercise in lightening up and putting on the frills. I think that rings true. Here is another bit of ornament in a non-classical, but equally unexpected, context.

On a recent Cotswold walk a friend and I crossed a field on a downhill stretch towards a familiar road and missed the proper footpath by a couple of hundred yards, arriving roughly where we wanted to be but by a different, unofficial route. As we did so, we passed a tiny stone building of unknown purpose. The only remarkable thing about it was this rather fine date stone, complete with a mask that is surely, if I'm right in seeing icicles in the beard, a distant modern cousin of the Bath icemen. Whoever he is, he was a pleasant surprise.

Bath, Somerset

The icemen
You know how it is. The road you drive along often is the one you don't look at properly. Whenever I visit Bath I drive into town along London Road, registering various architectural highlights (a Georgian terrace here, a shop front with stained glass there), but not stopping to look properly. So the other day, encouraged by a picture in Michael Forsyth's Bath in the Pevsner City Guides series, I decided to stop outside Grosvenor Place, one of the terraces that runs alongside London Road, and have a look. I'm glad I did.

Architect-builder John Eveleigh started Grosvenor Place in 1791. The idea was to have a swanky central section containing a hotel, with houses on either side. Eveleigh was making a lot of money on speculative building schemes of this kind in Bath, and this site, fronting one of the city's pleasure gardens, seemed like a winner. But in 1793 there was a financial crisis. England and France started a war, the cost of credit rocketed, and Eveleigh, like many of Bath's other builders, found himself in money trouble. He was soon bankrupt, his share in the project was sold, and work on the terrace was halted when it was half done. The project was only completed years later.

Grosvenor Place, carved plaques

Some of the decoration on the building was never finished – three of the oval panels on the facade, for example, were left uncarved. But even so, the central portion of the terrace is extraordinary. It's an extravaganza with giant columns adorned with garlands (towards the bottom of each column is a plain stone band: presumably  this too was meant to be carved into a garland, another job left undone). There are seven columns, a very unclassical odd number which means that the central column is right above the doorway. All very unorthodox and eye-catching.

Grosvenor Place, the iceman cometh...

Among the details I especially like are the little masks on the keystones above some of the windows. Their faces are made of icicles, a motif that Eveleigh also used on another Bath building, Somerset Place. These chilly faces are in marked contrast to the richer carving of the rest of this centrepiece, as if casting a cold eye on all the frivolity around them. Financial crisis? Yes, we know what you mean…

Bath, Somerset

Heraldic Coade

I was admiring a neoclassical shop front near Bath's Pulteney Bridge when my eye was caught by the royal arms above the shop window. The shop has been a chemist's since 1828, but the arms are those of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, who visited Bath in 1817, the year before she died. So they must refer to royal patronage of some earlier business based here or hereabouts. The highly complex heraldry combines the arms of the British royal family with those of her father, who was Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The amount of detail on these three-dimensional arms is staggering – all those harps, bulls' heads, fleurs de lys and so on in low relief, and the extraordinary garland of flowers around the central panel. The lion and unicorn are real characters, the former astonished, long-maned and well fanged, the latter realistically equine.

Beneath the lion, the inscription, "COADE LONDON" tell us that this coat of arms is made in Coade Stone, an artificial, stone-like ceramic material produced at Coade's Artificial Stone Manufactory in Lambeth, London. This business, founded by Eleanor Coade (always known as Mrs Coade, although she was unmarried) in around 1770. Mrs Coade developed the material, which she called Lithodipyra (from the Greek for "stone fired twice"), a ceramic composition in which flint, quartz, grog (a mix of silica, alumina, and other elements), and crushed glass were mixed with the clay. It was generally found to be hard and weather-resistant, and was easy to mould into complex shapes. These qualities made Coade stone popular for statuary and architectural ornaments between 1770 and the 1830s. Just the material, in other words, for moulding harps, lions, and tiny flowers.

Bath, Somerset

Bird spotting

A while back I posted some decorative tile panels advertising post cards and road maps, from the front of a branch of W H Smith in Malvern. Here is one still more colourful panel, this time from a former W H Smith shop, spotted by me in Bath today. As with the Malvern panels, the tiles were made by Carter and Company and the letters were designed by Eric Gill. No doubt there were originally more panels on the Bath store, perhaps illustrating different kinds of books. Now only 'Nature books' survives on the shop facade, which now fronts a branch of Patisserie Valerie. As a reminder of the shop's previous role, this toucan, leaning down from its branch, fits the bill.

Bath, Somerset

A tomb with a view

I make no apologies for returning once more to Bath, especially as on this visit I was drawn to an unusual building that I’d not seen before, high on the outskirts of the city on the way to Bath Racecourse. I knew it was there, I’d read about it and knew some of its history, but my reading hadn’t prepared me for the uncompromising sight that met my eyes.

When I say ‘uncompromising’ I mean that this tower is perhaps of all the buildings I’ve seen in England, most unambiguously, sternly classical. In a way it’s the exact opposite of what one would expect, for this tower was commissioned by the writer, collector, MP, and artistic patron William Beckford, the man who, obsessed with the Middle Ages, had built the most outrageously Gothic country house in the country, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

Beckford, born fabulously wealthy from family sugar plantations in Jamaica, collected ravenously, picking up cheap Italian Renaissance paintings, Asian sculptures, drawings by Blake, and French furniture. He wrote travel books about Italy, Spain, and Portugal, published Vathek, a pioneering Gothic novel, and egged on his architect Wyatt and his builders to finish Fonthill with its enormous tower and vast halls, increasing the workers’ beer allowance and poaching builders from Windsor Castle in the process.

Fonthill was glorious, from its 10-metre-high front doors to the top of its 90-metre tower, but both Beckford’s fortunes and his architecture proved fragile. The tower at Fonthill collapsed. Twice. Beckford lost his sugar plantations in a legal action, and he was forced to leave, and then sell, Fonthill. He retired to Bath, where he had a town house connected by gardens to this tower. The tower, designed in 1825 for Beckford by the young architect H E Goodridge, was designed to house the owner’s books and such treasures as he was able to salvage from his earlier life.

The bottom section of the tower is perfectly plain, then there’s a very strong cornice supporting the belvedere, with its three tall rectangular openings on each side – from here there are glorious views over Bath and the surrounding countryside. Above this, the tower becomes octagonal, with a squat plain octagon supporting the final touch, a gilded lantern. That lantern relieves the severity of the main tower, and gleams in the sunshine, making one think as much of an ancient lighthouse as the Athenian monuments on which the building is partly modelled.

After Beckford died in 1844, his daughter sold the tower, but when she discovered that the new owner was going to turn it into a pub, she bought it back and gave the adjoining ground to the church for a cemetery. Beckford’s own tomb, in pink Aberdeen granite, is in the foreground of the picture. The great connoisseur’s final resting place is next to his final home and visitors come from miles around to enjoy the views from his tower and his tomb.

* * *

The Landmark Trust operates the lower part of the tower as a holiday cottage. The tower also contains a museum that is open regularly. Both of these links contain further information about the tower.

Bath, Somerset

Windows on the world

Every time I go to Bath I marvel at its Georgian architecture. The way both individual buildings and the larger plan of the town, the sense of both architectural and urban space, have survived into the 21st century is simply glorious. And the place is very well looked after, so its survival looks secure.

There’s so much to see in a place like Bath that the eye doesn’t know where to look next. At one moment the visitor is trying to take in an entire sweeping terrace or crescent, the next focusing on some detail – a door surround, say, a carved street name, a bit of ironwork. All of which can make it easy to miss things, such as how some of these buildings, beautifully preserved though they are, have been altered over the years.

Look at these two houses, part of a sequence that steps its way majestically up Gay Street. Most of my readers will notice quickly one difference between them. The windows of the house on the left still have their small panes, four up and three across, while the windows on the right have been converted to plate glass. All expect for the small unregarded windows in the attic and basement – the ‘low status’ servant-haunted parts of the house, which the Victorians did not think worthy of clear, shiny, plate-glass windows.

Examine the right-hand house more closely and you’ll see another difference. The windows on the central floor are taller than those in the house on the left. And the left-hand house has a band of stone running beneath the widows at this level. This suggests that the Victorians made another change – they lowered the sills of their middle windows to make them taller, eliminating the stone band in the process, to give more emphasis to, and bring more light into, the principal rooms on this floor. This would have been a labour-intensive job, but it was quite often done in Bath.

One cold go on, of course. About the preserved shutters in the right-hand house, which are at odds with the opportunistic and unfortunate window blinds. And the window box on the left. And the paint colours: who’s for National Trust green? Or neutral white? Do any experts in historic paint finishes read this blog, and can they tell us what colour they’d prefer?

The houses in Bath, then, well preserved though they are, exhibit lots of changes, many of which are themselves historical indications of how taste has changed. Such changes are interesting in their own right. These are real houses where real people have lived and it’s fascinating to find signs of their presence and traces of their taste.

Bath, Somerset

Plumb good

Now I’ve started, here is a little more plumbing from Bath. Literal plumbing, since plumbers were originally those who worked with lead (Latin plumbum). Those with sharp eyes will spot that this is a branch of W H Smith’s. Smith’s went in for rather beautifully designed stores in the 1920s – the shop fronts often featured stone, rich oak finishes, windows with small panes, and, sometimes, beautiful tiles. Here, though, it was the down-pipe and associated plumbing that caught my eye.

You quite often get the date embossed in rainwater fittings like this, perhaps mainly because it’s not difficult to do, lead being a soft metal that takes this sort of decoration and information with ease. But the openwork ‘WHS’ monogram is a special treat here, as are the scallop shells, the kind of thing that on a medieval building would symbolize a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Why are they here, on a 1920s shop front? Maybe it’s enough that they look right.

Look at the way, too, in which the pipe in recessed into the stonework, so that its outer edge is flush with the wall. This was shop design that was conceived as a whole, and built to last. How refreshing compared to the ephemeral, here today, revamped tomorrow retail design that’s common now. Here’s to the stationers, and their plumbers, and their long view.