Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

Aide memoire

Going through my photographs to pull out some to share, I came across the first digital photograph I took, or at any rate the first I thought at all fit to preserve. As you will see straight away, it’s far from an ideal picture, an ‘over the wall’ job, showing what can be seen of a building on private land from a public road. The building in question is the orangery at Frampton Court, Gloucestershire, and when I took the picture it was to jog my memory to go back on one of the occasions when the grounds of Frampton Court are open and it’s possible to see the this building – and the impressive architecture of the main house – clearly. Years later, I’ve still not made this visit, so the image above remains my only photograph of the orangery. Carpe diem.

Over the wall we see the building from the side, almost end-on but at a slight angle. Viewed from the front, it’s symmetrical and consists of a pair of matching octagons with ogee windows all round, joined in the middle and complemented by a central octagonal turret. In my picture the two matching octagons and turret can be seen, the turret topped by a tiny cupola. Pinnacles and crenellations crown the skyline, ogee-topped windows with glazing in a pattern of hexagons and diamonds dominate the walls. Indeed the walls, made of very high quality ashlar, are minimal, so many and so large are the windows. The stonework is finely detailed, with lovely curvy hoodmoulds. If you click on the picture, it might just be possible to make out tripartite ‘skirts’ beneath the window sills, carved in very shallow relief.

Reference books tell us that this building’s exquisite Gothick* architecture dates from the late 1740s and may be the work of William Halfpenny, who drew heavily on drawings in Gothic Architecture Improved (1747) by Batty Langley.§ This filigree architecture is in marked contrast to the Baroque and Palladian cocktail of the main house. It must make a wonderful garden feature – and is likewise enchanting if tantalizing when viewed, as in my photograph, over the garden wall. A future visit will be something to look forward to…

- - - - -

* I use the 18th-century faux-archaic spelling for this fanciful 18th-century version of Gothic architecture.

§ Halfpenny was probably based mainly in Richmond, Surrey, or London, but spent some time in Bristol. He was both an architect and the author of numerous architectural pattern books that showed a strong interest in the Gothick style as well as in Chinoiserie. William Halfpenny, Batty Langley: mid-18th century building could be both architecturally and onomastically lively!

Hertford

Red, orange, Strawberry

I pass by lots of Georgian houses and often give them an admiring glance – their proportions, Classical details, and brickwork are usually very satisfying. Cecil House in Hertford, a building of the 1770s, would probably have provoked a similar standard reaction: I like very much the red brick walls (Flemish bond) and the orange brick window surrounds, standing out from the crowd, but not too much.

But one feature stands out slightly more. It’s the porch, in the delicate 18th-century Gothic style (often called Gothick) that had become popular since Horace Walpole had begun to rebuild his house, Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, in the middle of the century. Slender clustered columns with little octagonal bases and minimal capitals support an upper area featuring a row of quatrefoils above repeated cusped blind arches. There’s a Gothic fanlight above the door and Gothic panelling in the reveals on either side of the door too.

None of this is anything like medieval Gothic, but it uses medieval Gothic motifs – quatrefoils, arches, little annulet rings around the columns, and so on – in a charming way. These motifs are combined in such a manner that they also recall classicism – those quatrefoil-decorated areas above the columns are a bit like a classical entablature, so that we are close to a sort of made-up ‘Gothic order’, something advocated by the 18th-century writer Batty Langley and a phenomenon I’ve noticed on other buildings of this period. The elements are rather plonked together in places, but that's part of their charm – as is the porch’s pointed, tent-like roof, which adds the finishing touch.

If the brickwork of this house seems to suggest tradition, solidity, and propriety, the porch is almost the opposite: improper, whimsical, and slightly flimsy. In many ways these two aspects of the building seem oddly matched, yet they are also true, in their different fashions, to their time.

Brewood, Staffordshire

Gothic on speed

In the middle of the small town of Brewood, strategically placed by a T-junction, is Speedwell Castle. This house is totally surprising, completely unlike the low-rise, rather modest houses and shops that surround it, and guaranteed to make the jaw drop and the eyebrows shoot up in astonishment. It's a house of the mid-18th century by an unknown designer – probably someone who had access to the architectural books produced by the memorably named garden designer and writer Batty Langley, a man who tried to make Gothic architecture better by elaborating it and applying classical rules to it, and who signalled his love of the classical past by giving his children names like Euclid and Archimedes.

Langley's book Ancient Architecture Restored of 1742, republished in 1747 under the title Gothic Architecture, Improved by Rules and Proportions, did much to encourage the fashion for the fancy, filigree version of Gothic that's often known as Gothick. This Batty Langley Gothick is all double-curved ogee arches, delicate pinnacles, and intricately patterned glazing bars. It was much used for small garden buildings and was developed by Horace Walpole in his famous Twickenham House, Strawberry Hill.

Walpole had in some ways a lighter touch than the builder of Speedwell Castle. Strawberry Hill is an asymmetrical building and sits beautifully in its garden. Speedwell by contrast is symmetrical and seems to burst out of its low-key urban setting. It makes you stop and stare – and ask how on earth it came to be built. No one knows the answer for sure, but there is an old story that provides a clue. The story goes that one William Rock, a local pharmacist who died in 1753, built the house with money he won betting on a horse called Speedwell. The story thus neatly explains the presence of the building and its name. An attractive tale, in lieu of any better explanation of the origin of this extraordinary bit of Gothic on speed.