Birmingham

Turning a corner, 2

Few buildings turn a corner with such grandeur as this one in Birmingham’s Constitution Hill. It dates from the 1890s and was designed architects William Doubleday* and James R. Shaw for H. B. Sale, a firm of die-sinkers. The plan was to have offices and shops on the ground floor with each upper floor taken up by one large workshop, plus an office in the corner tower. Five floors were planned, but the fifth was not added until the mid-20th century, hence the difference in style.

The exterior is built of red brick with a rich array of terracotta dressings – foliage, flowers, and medieval-style heads all feature and the top of the building as originally constructed was given some distinction with the row of small curved gables still present in front of the 20th-century top storey. The stylistic label given by English Heritage’s short ‘Informed Conservation’ book about the district is Spanish Romanesque-style. The stand-out feature is the tower, which is still a landmark on the junction of Constitution Hill and Hampton Street. Each storey of the tower has a different kind of opening, from the first floor† upwards: trefoil, slightly wasp-waisted arches; flat-topped openings; windows topped with ogees; semicircular openings; and quatrefoils in the tiny gables around the dome. The tower also displays the owner’s name,¶ standing proud from the band of foliate decoration – a popular late-19th century effect that I always admire. Finally, the ogee dome at the top, with its fish-scale surface, provides a pleasing climax, although it’s slightly hidden by the gables and finials that surround it. What a glorious building. I hope its owners are soon able to remove the plants that are taking root towards the top of the tower, so that it can continue to provide the area with a landmark and an admirable collection of exuberant architectural decoration.

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* William Doubleday was based in Wolverhampton when this building was designed; he later moved to Birmingham.

† American second floor.

¶ You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it, which might make this a little easier to see.

Birmingham

Turning a corner, 1

This is one of my favourite buildings that I saw on a stroll around Birmingham’s jewellery quarter a while back. It’s not a factory or anything to do with the jewellery business, however: it was built as a pub at the end of the 1860s, that decade when Victorian architecture became more jazzy, colourful and free than most of what went before. The style of Gothic is described by the Pevsner City Guide to Birmingham as ‘very Ruskinian’. In other words there are lots of pointed arches in rows, built in a polychrome mix of red, white and grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks; there are natty details like the small oriel window at the corner and the octagonal turret just visible in my photograph; and there are twin openings divided by slender shafts with carved capitals. All of these details were in the architectural air at this time thanks to the writings of John Ruskin, whose accounts of Venetian Gothic (in books such as The Stones of Venice, which came out in the early 1850s) were increasingly influential.

So far, so good. Whether Ruskin would have approved of this building is another matter. He seems to have had a downer on the kind of dissipation sometimes associated with pubs and taverns, and on genre artists, such as Jan Steen, who painted tavern scenes. But many of us will take a different view. Why should a pub not have a stunning facade, designed with flair, built with care, and enhancing the streetscape? If places of worship or education can have glorious polychrome brick frontages, why not places of hospitality too? I thoroughly approve, and I approve too of the fact that the building has been restored to make the most of its glorious exterior.

Another thing I admire about this building is the swagger with which it occupies a corner plot that is challenging architecturally. Corner plots are good for business, because a site on a junction allows the building to be seen and approached from several different directions. But a tapering cake-slice of a plot like this one is not always easy when it comes to designing the building – how does the structure ‘turn the corner’ visually, and what do you do with the tiny sliver that faces directly on to the junction? Placing the entrance there can be a good solution. Giving the entrance a bit of emphasis by adding the oriel window above (with its cusp-headed opening to make it extra ornate, a pattern echoed in the window on the upper floor) is highly effective visually. Here’s to Victorian brickwork, ingenuity, and that quality of vigour and distinctiveness they called ‘go’!

Birmingham

Turning point, 3

For the third in this sequence of three Birmingham buildings, I return to Hockley Hill to look at a close neighbour of Gem Buildings, posted the other day. This is a retail building, originally the premises of Harry Smith, ironmonger. It survived as an ironmonger’s until relatively recently and the lettering of its signs, including those of the adjoining shop, is still clear. An old-fashioned ironmonger could function in any kind of shop, provided there was plenty of space to house the bewildering variety of stock. This embraced virtually anything made of metal and much that was not. Locks, cutlery, and tools, of course; but also buckets, pots, and pans; stoves and kitchen ranges; knobs for doors and drawers; bell systems for calling one’s servants, or for responding to the ringing command if one was a servant – all of these things were the preserve of the ironmonger and might well have been on sale here in 1913, when this building, like my previous two, was erected.

So if you think this building stark, if you prefer the traditional shop next door with its sash windows and conventional shop window, I sympathise, but pause for thought. Harry Smith might well have wanted to look up to date – or to want to combine the traditional virtues of good service and reliability with the latest in household convenience, c. 1913. What’s more, the plain facade in its heyday would have been, I suspect, little more than a picture frame for the lively composition of goods, from brooms to incinerators, that would have spilled out on to that broad pavement. Personally I still find something to admire in the frame, even now the picture is no more.

Birmingham

 

Turning point, 2

In contrast to my previous post, here is another rather different industrial building from Birmingham. It dates from 1913, just like the almost functionalist structure about which I posted a couple of days ago, and part of it also has pale walls. However, here the resemblance ends, because the entrance facade of this part of Manton’s, silversmiths and cut-glass manufacturers (the works later made everything from powder compacts to bells for cats’ collars), is highly decorative, with a distinctly Art Nouveau flavour. The building, which was known at different times as the Union Works and the Gwenda Works, was designed by William Doubleday, who was based in Birmingham and he must have been encouraged to do a job that was elegantly decorative.

Art Nouveau is a style associated with rich decoration – highly curvaceous forms (in everything from drapery to typography), and the use of imagery from plants, flowers, and trees. The style generally eschews the historical revivalism evident in much 19th-century architecture – hence the ‘Nouveau’. Here we see a band of foliate carving, together with two roundels also adorned with foliage, and very curvy numerals in the dates set two-thirds of the way up. The other lettering is more sober, but elegant and legible. All this is done in faience, a form of glazed ceramic that was popular for a wide range of commercial buildings, from factories to shops, prized for its decorative qualities as well as for the fact that its smooth surface means that dirt stands less chance of sticking to it, and what does stick is generally removed by the rain. This whole entrance building is covered in faience and very effective it is too. The plainer part of the works, to the left, is of red brick, but the windows are surrounded with faience, to give some unity to the design.

This pleasant building is in an unregarded bend in the road in Legge Lane, in the heart of what’s now known as the Jewellery Quarter. Its stylishness was no doubt a good advertisement for the company that was based here, as well as a generous helping of visual delight in what is now a quiet corner.

Birmingham

Turning point, 1

This is a surprising building for its date, which is 1913: one of the first in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter that’s broadly functionalist – in other words, it combines minimal ornament with features that – in theory – express the function of the structure, which contained large, light workshops on the upper floors and small offices on the ground floor. In addition, the building is designed along the lines then becoming fashionable in some parts of mainland Europe but still very unusual in Britain – box-shape, white walls, concrete beams, metal-framed windows, roof that at least gives the appearance of being flat (there are shallow pitched roofs behind the parapets). The first picture shows the side that faces on to Key Hill. The picture below is the Hockley Hill elevation,. which the owners no doubt regarded as the front – there’s a little bit of ornament here, but it is limited to baroque details at cornice level, where the building’s date is inscribed.

So what was the function of this functionalist building? It was the premises of Ginder and Ginder, diamond cutters and polishers. People in such a decorative trade might have been expected to opt for a more ornamental factory, but for some reason they didn’t. Maybe they wanted to look up to date. Maybe the structure was inexpensive to build. This may well have been a priority, since one of the firm’s selling points was that the cost of diamond-cutting in Birmingham was less than it was in the main European centres of the trade, Antwerp and Amsterdam. Modernity also seems to have been part of their ethos – they tooled up with the latest machinery from the USA when they set up their new factory. A number of Belgian refugees who came to the city during World War I increased their capacity, and there must have been a ready market back then for their stones in the factories of the jewellery quarter. There’s more about the company here. Their building is no longer part of the jewellery trade – at least some of the premises, when I passed a short while ago, was given over to a clothes business. But its architecture, stunning or stark according to your tastes, is a memorial to past glories and, arguably, to a company’s image of itself over a century ago.

Birmingham

Desirable alien (2)

In contrast to the British ‘alien’ of a few posts back, my other urban invader really is from overseas. It began life, of course, in China, and was donated to the city by the Wing Yip Company (Britain’s foremost Chinese grocer) in 1998 as a ‘thank you’ to Birmingham, the place where its business became prosperous. It enlivens a roundabout in the city’s inner ring road.

The Chinese pagoda was carved in Fujian. The granite structure was then shipped to Britain in sections and the whole thing was assembled on site. At 40 feet high, it is impressive, and, unlike the Pevsner City Guide to Birmingham, which finds it ‘gloomy’, I think it cheers up its busy roundabout. It makes is effect in spite of being dwarfed by the tall office and hotel buildings that cluster hereabouts, especially the partly pale blue Beetham Tower which, with its 36 storeys faced in glass panels, is something of an alien presence itself.

I like the way our cities can throw up such surprising bits of decoration – surprising, but not entirely random, because the pagoda stands near the city’s Chinese quarter. It’s good that even places that have been so busily modernized and remodernized as Birmingham continue to make us raise our eyebrows in this way. And that a roundabout has been thought about, for once.

Birmingham Moor Street

Almost old, almost new

One wet Friday recently I found myself with a few minutes on my hands in the middle of Birmingham and I decided to peer inside Moor Street station. Its gabled brick structure is a standard design of the old GWR, created by their Superintendent Engineer W Y Armstrong in 1911–1914 as a kind of detached annexe to the nearby Snow Hill station, and acted as a terminus for trains from Warwickshire. It was good to see that the old building had been restored in 2002–3, and was still looking well cared for with its GWR brown paint, historically aware signage, and modern buffet facilities that don’t dominate the concourse too much.

Nowadays trains go from some more recent platforms to one side of the original station, from where they still make for Warwickshire destinations such as Stratford upon Avon, as well as London. Steam-hauled excursions depart on summer Sundays and a locomotive stands at one of the old platforms as a reminder.

This view of the station looks across the original platforms towards a building of our own era – Future Systems’ dramatic, blob-like, aluminium-disc-covered, Selfridge’s. This building is now well enough known to be no longer shocking. It’s such a familiar symbol of the rejuvenated centre of Birmingham, indeed, that the overused word ‘iconic’ has been applied to it a few times too often. It’s still a surprise to come across in this context, though, and as odd as the contrast between the steam locomotive standing insouciantly at the platform and the modern, advertisement-emblazoned omnibus beyond. The almost-shock of the nearly-new.

Colmore Row, Birmingham

William Richard Lethaby is one of my architectural heroes. Born in Devon in 1857 he served his apprenticeship locally before working for Richard Norman Shaw, one of the most versatile and influential late-Victorian architects. Through Shaw, he met William Morris and joined Morris’s circle, becoming an early member of the SPAB. He was committed to craftsmanship, the tactful treatment of old buildings, and to old-fashioned quality – what he called ‘Good honest building’. As a result he had a significant influence on the Arts and Crafts movement.

He had another side, yearning for a quality of efficiency in building that has led some to see him as a precursor of Le Corbusier and the modernists. ‘A house should be as efficient as a bicycle,’ he said. These two sides of Lethaby come together in interesting ways. His stunning church at Brockhampton-by-Ross, Herefordshire (subject of a post on this blog soon, I hope) has stone walls, thatched roofs – and a concrete vault. And the building illustrated here, one of Birmingham’s finest, is a happy marriage of craftsmanlike detail and rather modern lines. It was built as the offices of the Eagle Insurance Company, though nowadays, in keeping with these sybaritic times, it’s a coffee house. I love the big window, making a bold statement on Colmore Row, and the decorated parapet, which still has its emblematic eagle. The door on the left is simply stunning, a piece of beaten metalwork under a curving stone canopy that must have given Lethaby particular pleasure.
So why isn’t England full of landmark buildings by this fine architect? The rigours of life on site don’t seem to have suited Lethaby that well. Bad experiences managing the construction of the church at Brockhampton caused him major problems – he acted as master builder as well as architect and when things did not go smoothly Lethaby suffered both financial loss and severe mental strain. It was his last building.

But Lethaby had at least three other creative lives. At Westminster Abbey, where he was surveyor to the fabric, he had the chance to put into practice his ideas about restoration. He was also a pioneering educator, founder of the Central School of Art and Design in London and, from 1901, first Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art. Third, he worked in architectural history and theory, publishing on medieval art, on the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (to get inside of which he apparently had to disguise himself as a woman, the building being closed to western men at the time), and on Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth. That rather odd title perhaps sums up his mixture of interests: like the really great modern artists, he could be very old and very new at once. Hats off to William Richard Lethaby.

Kings Norton, Birmingham

Congratulations to Canon Rob Morris and the other people of Kings Norton who have worked hard to preserve the Old Grammar School and Saracen’s Head. About four years ago the buildings were the winners in the second series of the BBC2 programme Restoration, in which viewers voted for it to be restored. Now the project is complete and yesterday Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, officially opened the Saracen’s Head.

The two buildings date from the 15th century, although both have been adapted and altered over the centuries, this history of change and development adding to their interest. The Saracen’s Head (shown in the picture) was originally a merchant’s house. It was clearly built for someone with both money and status – the timber work is very showy for its period, with the vertical timbers placed close together (a technique called close studding) and an overhanging upper floor (known as a jetty) – both of these features were signs of a high-status building. Later the house became an inn, hence its name, and later still part of the building was used as a shop and tea room.

Now it is to be the parish office and provide community rooms and a venue for local events. The Old Grammar School is used educationally to show visitors how pupils were taught in earlier centuries. Both buildings are very special survivals in this built-up district on the edge of Birmingham and they richly deserve the support they gained from both the viewers of Restoration and the local team who brought the project to fruition.

New Street, Birmingham

ORDER, ORDER (2)
In spite of blitzkrieg, modernism, decay, and demolition, there are still plenty of Classical buildings in England. And so architecture buffs, who know their metopes from their triglyphs, get used to recognising the Classical orders. But how often do we really look at their details, the curving spiral volutes of Ionic capitals, the curly acanthus leaves of the Corinthian?

Of course, capitals are usually high up on a building. You need binoculars and toned neck muscles to look at them closely. One of the joys of visiting the great cities of the ancient world – Istanbul is supreme in this respect – is the amount of Classical rubble lying around on the ground. In places like that you can look at all kinds of architectural sculpture close-up, without craning your neck.

Now and then in England, though, the accidents of building design bring you face to face with this kind of detail.This Corinthian capital is in the New Street branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in the centre of Birmingham, which occupies the former Midland Bank, a building of the late-1860s designed by Edward Holmes. The style is a grand, confident Classicism. It’s just the kind of thing for a High Victorian bank but the generous spaces also make it a good setting for a large bookshop.

The stairs afford interesting glimpses of some of the Classical details, and the invention and craftsmanship that went into their creation. The picture shows the capital atop one of the giant Corinthian pilasters inside the shop. Face to face with this capital, we see the Corinthian order, or an eccentric Victorian adaptation of it, afresh. Crisp acanthus leaves curve inwards and outwards, spirals thrust up and forward like springs, and the whole thing supports, not an entablature or lintel, but another piece of decoration, an even bigger piece of foliage. The most striking touch of all, though, is the centrepiece – a bird opening its wings amongst the scrolls and leaves. All praise to the Victorians for their whimsy, and to Waterstone’s for their conveniently sited staircase that gives us this close-up view.

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

This building began life as Oozells Street School, one of the board schools designed by J H Chamberlain, architect of Birmingham’s School of Art (see previous blog entry). These outstanding buildings were built as the result of a drive on the part of Birmingham’s politicians (especially the Liberals under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, no relation to the architect) to make Birmingham better. The fruits of this work included a library, the Council House, the Art School, and 30 board schools. This one is a quality Gothic building in brick with stone ornament, evidence of what its architect had learned from Ruskin and of his employers’ commitment to providing decent school buildings for their children.

In 1997 the school was converted for use as an art gallery. The architects of the conversion, Levitt Bernstein, added new floors and incorporated glass extensions to accommodate the stairs and lifts. They weren’t afraid to be modern, juxtaposing their glass-and-steel stair towers with Chamberlain’s brick walls and Gothic openings. The contrast works. The see-through stair tower gives you close-up glimpses of the fine Victorian detailing while the stair itself adds all kinds of new lines and curves in counterpoint to those of the original structure. It’s a happy marriage of the two styles, and a testimony to the ability of English buildings to combine old and new in dramatic and interesting ways.

School of Art, Birmingham

Schools, colleges, universities – they’re all buildings that ask for the best in design, but so often money, timing, expediency, or politics dictate that they don’t get what they deserve. J H Chamberlain, a Leicester-born architect who worked in Birmingham in the second half of the 19th century, wasn’t having any of that. As architect of Birmingham’s board schools he produced buildings that were a cut above the usual. And for the city’s School of Art he pulled out all the stops.

The School of Art is a very Victorian blend of brick, terracotta, stone, and tile. It’s very Gothic, too, with lots of pointed arches, little niches, and bits of moulding and carving. Elements like the repeated narrow windows and the band of tiles and moulded panels running around the building hold it all together. It must have inspired the first students when the doors opened in 1885. Even if modern students don’t quite respond in the same way to its Ruskinian Gothic, they still benefit from its light interiors, can still admire its glowing orange brickwork, and can still reflect that it was worth all the care that Chamberlain and his builders took.

Corporation Street, Birmingham

IN THE DETAILS (1)
This is an engaging example of the way a detail can reveal the history of a building. The carvings form part of the front of an imposing 1890s shop front, now occupied by the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, not far from Birmingham’s Law Courts. The frieze shows carpenters at work, because the shop was originally built for the furniture firm of A R Dean. Nearby are carvings of people eating, because part of the building was a vegetarian restaurant. The friezes are by Benjamin Creswick, who started out as a knife-grinder in Sheffield before his talent as a sculptor was discovered by Ruskin. There are other examples of his work in Birmingham, including carvings on the Junior School at Bournville.