Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire

Swan, up

I’m always telling people to look up, an activity that, on the streets of Leighton Buzzard on Sunday, was somewhat perilous. Because there was lots going on, the place was very crowded, and anyone glancing upwards for a moment risked colliding with fellow passers-by. I just about avoided major impacts, and the wrath of the queue for the ice-cream van, to take this picture of the swan, high up at parapet level, on the eponymous hotel in the High Street.

I was impressed by this swan, red-beaked and footed, wings lifted, and feathers delineated, although it’s not a white as it might be. It reminded me of the lovely swan in Boston, Lincolnshire, marking the building that was once Anderson’s (later Fogarty’s) feather factory. Leighton’s Swan Hotel is an imposing building of the early-to-mid-19th century but there was a Swan Inn or Hotel there long before this, stopping place for coaches, source of much hospitality, and place where numerous auction sales and market deals took place.

It seems the facade has looked spick and span since the Wetherspoon’s chain took it over a few years ago, and it’s good to see its neat pale plasterwork and red lettering proclaiming its name and still, above the courtyard access to one side, advertising it as a ‘posting house’. It would be even better if the owners could get someone up there to remove the green growths and make looking up at the swan more rewarding still.

Dunstable, Bedfordshire

Sweet and simple

Trim 18th-century brickwork, perhaps of 1717, the date on the rainwater heads, marks out the Old Sugar Loaf as a building of some consequence, and a plaque says that there has been an inn on this site in the centre of Dunstable since 1660. It was a first-class posting and coaching inn by the time of its 18th and 19th-century heyday, a place where travellers liked to stop, especially if their coach arrived in time for dinner – the early menus were said to be lavish. But what caught my eye of course was the sign, a gigantic conical sugar loaf placed atop the rather stripped-down, Regency-looking Doric portico. Eyecatching, bold, and literal, it does the job, I suppose, though it's hardly the most artful of the unusual English inn signs I've spotted in my travels.

The thin bands running around the cone seem to be the wires of fairy lights, which presumably enliven the scene at night. The idea of sparkling lights reminds me that the sugar loaf also looks like one of those 'volcano' fireworks that spark and splutter on bonfire night. Here's to architectural (and semiological) fireworks.

Potsgrove, Bedfordshire

Out of place?

It has recently been announced that the Royal Mail, the service that delivers letters in the UK, is about to become a private company. This state-owned letter-delivery service can trace its history back 497 years to the reign of Henry VIII, although in its present form it could be said to have had a new beginning in 1840. This was the year when, with the introduction of the penny post and the first pre-paid postage stamps, the service guaranteed to deliver any letter posted to an address in Great Britain for a uniform rate, paid by the sender.

An essential element in the postal system is the mail box, and I've blogged before about some of the various kinds of box found in England, including pillar boxes and wall boxes of various types. Here's another kind, the compact metal container known as a lamp box because it is designed not to be inserted into brickwork, as in my photograph, but attached to a lamp post or telegraph pole by means of  pair of metal loops fixed to the side of the box. Lamp boxes originally had steeply curving metal tops, but this design, with a shallower curve, came in the time of George V and lasted into George VI's reign (1936–52) – the later king's monogram is cast into the front of this example. The gently curving top reminds me slightly of the roof of a telephone box and harks back to the time when telephone and postal services were both run by the same body.

If this lamp box is rather out of place with its side loops removed and set into a brick pillar, it's clearly still doing its job. And how often have I seen the happy blend of a red rural post box and a growth of green ivy working its way around the metal, to be cleared away occasionally but never obliterated? Will the postal service be out of place in the public sector or manage to accommodate itself to the demands of shareholders, pressing around its edges like the invasive ivy around this box? Time will tell.

Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire

Times of change

Another white van goes past, and then a car, and as the traffic clears and I raise the camera to my eye a steady procession of pedestrians crosses between me and the building. I lower the camera again and wait. It’s not that I necessarily object to including people in my pictures – there are always people in a busy market place on a Saturday, after all. But not everyone wants to be photographed, and not everyone wants to appear on the web, so I lower the camera.

Perhaps I should just take a photograph of the clock turret and leave it at that. I’m an admirer of the wooden clock towers that often appear on traditional market halls and town halls. Architecture books seem to say little about them – they’re seen, I think, as minor carpentry-stuff, rarely attributable to a specific craftsman or designer, and fit more for the fancier of clocks than for the serious business of architectural history. However, I like their variety and their usefulness and I’m pleased to spot this one. I’ve already assumed, without looking very hard, that the red-brick building that it’s topping is the town’s market hall. Another gap in the traffic, and I look more closely. The building bears a sign saying ‘Fire Station’. ‘Wrong again!’ I think.

But not entirely. This was indeed the site of Leighton’s market hall, and for centuries there was a market building here with an arched lower section for stalls and an upper room used for courts and meetings. The structure was rebuilt in 1851 in brick along similar lines and that, substantially, is the building that still exists. Except that in the early-20th century it was converted for use as a fire station, with a big arched opening for whatever appliances there were to come and go.

The upper part of the building – the big window, the pinnacles, the decent brickwork in a sort of honest simplified Gothic, the clock turret that caught my eye – is very much as it was in the Victorian period. The lower part was remodelled for the fire service with the addition of the big arch and the neat stone plaque. It continued as a fire station until 1963 and has since had other uses. It’s a restaurant now, and is not the first garage-style building with generous floor space to make this transition.

Buildings (like pop stars, political parties, magazines, and the rest) seem to need to reinvent themselves from time to time in order to survive. Buildings are often made redundant because their original user needs more modern premises, or goes bust, or relocates. At this point, many buildings remain empty and decaying until the land they stand on is worth more than the bricks and mortar, and they get pulled down. Unless, that is, someone comes along with some lateral thoughts about how the structure can be used. That’s where the reinvention comes in, and here in Leighton Buzzard instead of firemen sliding down slippery poles there is pasta sliding off forks. And we can all enjoy this Leighton landmark standing proud among the clutter and the crowds. Tortellini, anyone?

Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire

Masters of iron and stone

Curving and recurving across the door of St Mary’s church at Eaton Bray is some of the most remarkable ironwork from the Middle Ages, a series of intricate scrolls that date from the middle of the 13th century. Structurally, they help to bind together the timbers of the door; they are also like a signpost telling visitors that they are in for something special here.


When you open the door you find the nave and aisles separated by two beautiful arcades. The one in the picture is the more ornate of the two. It is of a similar date to the ironwork on the door and shows the kind of workmanship you’d expect to find in a cathedral rather than a medium-sized parish church in a Bedforshire village. There’s great refinement here. The arches are made up of deeply cut roll mouldings – eleven rolls in all around each arch. Each pier is given extra richness with the addition of eight slender shafts– and there’s an extra trick, in that some of the shafts, such as those around the pier in the foreground, are just slightly detached from their pier, to give additional shadow and depth. Each pier is topped with a capital carved with stylized foliage in a design known as ‘stiff leaf’, a motif that represented high sophistication in around 1240 when this row of arches was built.

English parish churches have an endless capacity to surprise and give pleasure, but often the pleasure comes from homespun, vernacular design. Here it’s more sophisticated work in the style that has been known since the 19th century as Early English Gothic. The breathtaking quality is perhaps to do with the fact that the church had been given to the Augustine abbey of Merton in Surrey the previous century. The unknown mason they employed produced a design of power and grace that still stands out, more than 700 years on.