Green Street, London

An entrancing entrance

The late-19th century saw a lot of building activity in the Grosvenor Estate, that chunk of Mayfair owned by the Duke of Westminster. Green Street was one place where a number of new houses were built. The low numbers on the northern side of the street consists mainly of a run of brick houses that were speculatively built, but this particular house was a bespoke design. It was originally for the Hon St John Brodrick, but according to the Survey of London, Brodrick decided he couldn’t afford the house, so it passed to other owners who kept Brodrick’s choice of architects, Balfour and Turner.

Eustace Balfour and Thackeray Turner were from very different backgrounds. Balfour was Scottish and was the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated nephew of the former Prime Minister the Marquis of Salisbury and brother to a future PM, A J Balfour. As such he could talk to the aristocratic owners of the Grosvenor Estate, for whom his firm worked as surveyors, or almost equal social terms. Turner was a grammar-school boy from Wiltshire with a passion for old churches; he was a friend of Arts and Crafts luminary W J Lethaby. In spite of their different backgrounds, Balfour and Turner seem to have got on, going into partnership in the early 1880s and continuing until Balfour’s death in 1911. They shared an interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, a commitment to the work of the SPAB, and an ability to create work with considerable visual flair. They were kept busy in such Mayfair streets as Brook Street, Grosvenor Street, Green Street, and Balfour Street.

This house stands out both for its overall design, with its stone oriels, and the fine details. Loveliest of these details is the carving by the door, which Pevsner describes as a tree of life. It is probably by Laurence Turner, the sculptor brother of Thackeray Turner. It’s a wonderful urban alternative to the rural fashion for roses around the door.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Glorious Bastards

In 1731 a fire swept through Blandford Forum in Dorset and destroyed most of the town. The task of rebuilding was given to two memorably-named brothers, William and John Bastard, who combined the roles of architect, surveyor, carver, and designer of plasterwork. The Bastards created one of the most beautiful town centres in England, with a Market Place lined with finely detailed houses, a grand Town Hall, and a large church at one end. The streets leading off the Market Place were also rebuilt.

This building at the end of the Market Place opposite the church shows the quality of the Bastards’ work, which is carefully detailed in a rather playful classical style with hints of the baroque. The walls are brick, laid mostly in courses made up of headers, and there are lots of details picked out in white. The architects took a great deal of care over these details – look at the upper row of windows, with their curving aprons below and their protruding ‘ears’ above; the meticulous details around the windows on the middle-floor (originally the main floor of the building); the central pediment, its baseline ‘broken’ to accommodate the round-headed window. And the pilasters that seem to support the pediment are special too. At first glance they have Ionic capitals with spiral volute decoration, but when you look more closely you see that the volutes are actually the 'wrong' way round. These are capitals taken from a design by the Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini, which the Bastards would have seen engraved in the book Studio d’architettura civile di Roma by Domenico de’Rossi, a publication that did much to publicize the designs and details of Rome’s baroque architects in the early-18th century. The close-up below is from a nearby building, where the spirals are still very crisp and clear.

So what was this lovingly detailed building? Not, as one might think from the central carriage entrance, a coaching inn, although there is such an inn, with an almost identical frontage, just along the street. In fact it was originally three houses. John Bastard liked the left-hand one so much that he lived in it himself. He was indeed both a clever and a lucky – fellow.

'Borromini' capital, Red Lion, Blandford Forum

Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

Smoke-filled rooms

Today many people would say that the most important room in their house was the kitchen – the place where food is cooked and, often, eaten; where the family gathers; where it is always warm. For many, the kitchen is the social centre and heart of the house. In some houses it’s an economic centre, too – I’ve known business people who hold meetings in their kitchens, and a farmhouse kitchen can be the chosen meeting place for the farmer’s family, the farm workers – and often anyone who happens to be passing.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to discover that many medieval houses didn’t have a kitchen as such. Outside the grandest of houses (and specialized buildings such as monasteries and colleges), most people lived in one, all-purpose room. This open space, known as the hall, was kitchen, dining room, office, workroom, and bedroom rolled into one. There was a central hearth for heating and cooking, and trestle tables at which to eat. Come night-time, the tables were taken down or pushed aside, and people lay down to sleep on mattresses on the floor. More prosperous households managed a private room (the solar) for the head of the household and his wife, but much of the life of the household still revolved around the communal hall.

With its central hearth, the medieval hall was the archetypal smoke-filled room – there was no chimney so the smoke from the fire had to find its way through a hole in the roof high above everyone’s heads. People seem to have got used to the smoke, no doubt learning to control it by opening and closing the room’s doors to create the right kind of draught.

In a few houses, where food was produced on a large scale, there was another smoke-filled room, a separate kitchen reserved just for cooking. These dedicated kitchens were not very common, and few survive today. This is the one at the manor house at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, and it probably survives because the family decamped for another village in the 18th century, demolishing much of their old house but leaving some of it in place but unmodernized.

The kitchen was probably first built in the 14th century, and reroofed and given new windows in the 15th. Inside, fires were made against one wall, where spits turned to roast meat; there are also three ovens. As with the more common medieval halls, there was no chimney – the smoke rose to the ceiling where it exited through holes beneath the roof. Above all this is a cat’s cradle of timbers supporting the octagonal pointed roof, the whole thing topped off with a griffin made of lead.

The servants at Stanton Harcourt no doubt got used to the smoke, but it surprised one famous guest, the poet Alexander Pope, who stayed at Stanton Harcourt in 1717–18 while translating the Iliad. With Classical mythology very much on his mind, Pope compared the kitchen to Vulcan’s forge or the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. A dark cave of creation, then, closer to Homer’s world than Pope’s, and miraculously preserved into our own.

Frome, Somerset

Blue boys and asylum maids

This striking structure is in the charming Somerset town of Frome, a place where the gaze is often diverted from important things like the architecture to such distractions as shops selling a diverting range of local produce, and the stream that runs down the middle of the main street. But here’s one building that caught my eye.

There was an almshouse here from the 1460s onwards, but in 1728 a free school was added to the charitable institution, and this very upright, look-at-me, town-hall-like Georgian building was put up to house it. It’s known as the Blue House, because the boys wore blue coats, as charitable schoolboys often did in those days, and the façade has statues of both an almswoman and a schoolboy.

To one side there are two other statues depicting women, which come from the Keyford Asylum, which was pulled down in 1956. So now this corner of Frome is a repository of local history, a symbol of charitable pride – as well as still providing flats for the elderly. None of which can be a bad thing, especially when housed in such an uplifting building.


The maids from the asylum