Bridgnorth, Shropshire

Classical conventicle

Most British people, even if not chapel goers or architecture buffs, are aware of the thousands of nonconformist chapels that dot the towns and villages of England and Wales. And even if we’ve not thought much about it, most of us could draw a typical chapel from memory: central door, a pair of quite tall windows,* shorter window above the door, and a plaque with a name or date somewhere in the centre too.

Once everywhere, these familiar buildings are not quite so common now, but there are still many, and the variations on this simple design seem endless – Gothic or Classical or Romanesque style; brick or stone or stuccoed walls; variations in window height and proportion. Most of them were put up by local builders without the help of an architect and it’s very difficult (for a non-expert at least) to classify them or to find any sort of pattern that might ascribe one style to the Methodists, another to the Baptists, and so on.

The builders of the Bridgnorth Baptist Church set to work in c 1742, the town’s tiny Baptist congregation of the early-19th century having clearly expanded quite a bit.¶ Their chapel is therefore earlier than the big Baptist expansion that occurred later in the century, with the popular preaching of men like Spurgeon and the resulting large Baptist churches (‘large classic convenictles’, as John Betjeman described them§). At Bridgnorth they used the simplest of classical means to produce a quiet, well proportioned facade: very plain pilasters in the centre and at the corners; moulded surrounds to the windows and doors with just a little elaboration; quite a large parapet in which draws the eye to the central name plaque, which is done in the clearest sans serif capitals. A lick of paint, together with the sunlight, throwing all those details in relief, does the rest.

- - - - -

*Or two pairs of windows, arranged one above the other on either side of the door.

¶The Baptist Magazine (in a piece by one J. B., dated 7 January 1821) says that in 1816 the church numbered just three members, one of whom died the following year; by the time of the article, the number was up to eight. The writer prayed, ‘May the set time to favour this part of Zion soon come!’ It looks as if this prayer was answered.

§ See John Betjeman, ‘Nonconformist Architecture’ in First and Last Loves, 1952. Betjeman does attempt to ascribe styles to specific denominations, and to generalize about the differences in architectural approach between different groups of, say, Methodists (Weslyan Methodists favouring a solid, faintly Gothic style, Primitive Methodists going for much plainer buildings in general, with the occasional ‘flimsy Italianate’ city chapel). But generalizatons about this are difficult. I am eagerly awaiting Historic England’s forthcoming book on nonconformist chapels, scheduled for publication towards the end of this year.

Brailes, Warwickshire

Decorated

Now and then as I travel around the country I enter a church and I’m blown away not by the architecture, or the antiquity of the building, but by a single stand-out object – a bit of carving, say, or a stained-glass window – that makes my journey worthwhile. Things like this, as John Betjeman put it, hinting that you have to suffer for your art, are worth ‘cycling twelve miles against the wind to see’. Indeed – although I must admit I arrived in more comfort, on four wheels.

The church of St George in Brailes is a large building, mostly 14th-century but with a tall 15th-century tower. Inside, in spite of an interesting monument or two and at least one item that could qualify for one of my ‘odd things in churches’ posts, what got my attention was the font. Whoever carved this, some time in the 14th century, decided to use each of its eight sides as a showcase for a window design. These windows in stone are stunners, and present a round-up of 14th-century tracery in the style the Victorian antiquarians labelled ‘Decorated’, an appropriate term that’s still widely used.

So, in my first photograph, the carver illustrated on the left ‘reticulated’ (net-like) tracery, in the centre an interesting design with a pair of flame-like openings, and on the right a window incorporating the double-curved ogee arch that was so popular in this period. In my second photograph are three more designs: on the left trefoils, in the centre a wonderful whirling wheel, and on the right quatrefoils within a framework of intersecting tracery. Beneath the window designs are two bands studded with stylized flowers – four-petalled flowers and the round, incurved ballflowers, another very popular 14th-century motif that I’ve noticed before.

This kind of font (the one at Brailes is not unique, although such fonts are not common) is sometimes known as a pattern-book font, a term that suggests a mason providing a catalogue similar to those offered in printed books in the 18th century enabling builders and carpenters to run up the required kinds of fireplaces, doors, cornices, and so on. Not that a static piece of church furnishing from the Middle Ages could have quite the same purpose as a commercially available book – it’s a font, at the end of the day. But what a wonderful place to begin one’s journey through life. Or to end a 12-mile cycle ride.

- - -
Font-fanciers might like to know that I posted about a similar font, adorned with carved tracery but in the style prevalent a century or so later, in the church at Preston Capes, Northamptonshire.

St Pancras, London

Why Sir John hangs on to his hat

This blog is now three years old this month, so bear with me while I reflect about how I blog, and why. A regular reader, noticing that most of my photographs are of exteriors, recently asked me how often I manage to look inside the buildings I post about. The answer is sometimes, but not that often, and the reason lies in how I blog.

I had to decide at the beginning how I’d approach this blog. It would be possible to do lots of research, contact building owners in advance, and hope some would oblige with guided tours, information, and, in an ideal world, tea on the lawn. But, interesting and nutritious as all this would be, it would also take a lot of time, and, like most people, I have many calls on my time. So I decided on a different approach. I travel around – on business, for pleasure, or on the lookout for interesting buildings. When a building, often one I didn’t know about before, catches my eye, I take photographs of it, do some research, and see where this leads. If it turns out to be interesting, I write a post. So, in general, I look from the outside, though I take advantage of buildings that are open anyway, like many of England’s parish churches, and step inside.

This way of working reflects my interests, which are as much to do with the history, quality, and atmosphere of place, with townscape, with local distinctiveness, and so on, as with architecture. And the buildings turned up by my serendipitous methods reflect my interests too, which extend to barns and breweries as well as castles and cathedrals. When I wrote The English Buildings Book I described these preoccupations by referring to the great Nikolaus Pevsner. At the beginning of his book An Outline of European Architecture, Pevsner defines his subject by example: ‘A bicycle shed is a building,’ he says. ‘Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.’ So in calling our book The English Buildings Book, Peter Ashley and I were saying that we wanted to include all types and conditions of buildings – and both Lincoln Cathedral and a bicycle shed make their appearance in its pages. The English Buildings blog works along similar lines.

There’s another consequence of working in this way that has, I’d argue, wider significance – that one can find out a lot about buildings without privileged access, and that this way of looking at buildings is open to anyone who can use their eyes. Sir John Betjeman knew this. When extolling the pleasures of ‘church crawling’ he insisted that you need only two things: a map (in England it has to be an Ordnance Survey map) and ‘an eye’. Keep looking, look around you, above all look up, and you will be rewarded – and that is surely why Sir John is looking up, a practised hand keeping a firm grip on his headgear as he does so, in the statue by Martin Jennings at St Pancras Station.

A lifetime of looking at buildings and writing about them made Betjeman very well informed, of course. But he insisted that a knowledge of architectural styles was less important than observation. The eye comes first, and all of us who have eyes to see can use them in the way Betjeman intended. Doing so makes every journey one of fascination and I hope some of the fascination comes through in this blog.

Slowing down the buildings

In a comment on the previous post, a reader expressed appreciation for the way I describe things, saying that where she would have seen a stained-glass window showing the Holy Family and the Magi, I picked out a host of details, enhancing her enjoyment of the image. This is not the first comment I've had along these lines, and it pleased me greatly because it gets to the heart of what this blog is about - I point out some of the things I see in buildings, including details that others might miss, in the hope that my readers will be interested too.

One of the reasons I do this is because I'm all too aware that buildings - the biggest objects, on the whole, that humankind creates - are oddly easy to ignore. We might be awestruck by a great cathedral or annoyed by an ugly office block, but most people, most of the time, pay scant attention to the buildings around them.

Rushing around from place to place, few of us take the time to look at the buildings we pass. And when we do, how much do we actually take in? Most of us are like the gallery-goers who spend on average just a few seconds in front of each painting, identifying artist and subject but missing all but the most obvious details.

I'm remdinded of my experience of working for the publishers Dorliong Kindersley in the 1980s. Peter Kindersley was very aware of how little time people spend looking at images, and this was an issue of huge importance for a publisher of illustrated books. 'We need to slow down the pictures,' he would say. And so we adopted a variety of methods to make people look more closely at the pictures in our books - placing text right next to the part of the picture it was describing, using leader lines to point to specific parts of an image, commissioning cutaway illustrations, photographing an object from several different angles, and adding all this together to create complex pages in which words and pictures were integrated.

In this blog I try to slow down the buildings around us and showcase unregarded structures or unfamiliar aspects of well known ones. In so doing I hope to sharpen my eyes, to make myself more aware of telling details and neglected bits of the built environment. I hope to help others see more clearly too - though they may well see different things in the buildings I write about. The main thing that you need when looking at buildings, said John Betjeman, is not a guide book, or a theory, or a degree in art history, but 'an eye'. Everyone's eye is different. The important thing is to use it.