Lacock, Wiltshire

Looking up in Lacock

You probably know Lacock. It's the Wiltshire village that's wholly owned by the National Trust and preserved as a perfect prospect of limestone and timber framing. The village centre, with its range of houses from medieval to 19th century, its stone barn, its medieval church, is almost too perfect. Take away the cars and it could almost be an English village of the early-19th century – and it has played just that role in various film and television adaptations of Jane Austen novels, including the famous 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. It has been in Harry Potter films and other movies too.

Faced with such picture-perfect villagescape, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. So here, up near the eaves of one house, are, if not trees, some leaves – or at least carvings of leaves. These odd carvings with leaves and spirals are actually capitals – they want to be on top of columns or pilasters, doing the architectural job that capitals usually do. But all they have beneath them is plain wall, as if the builder had a spare lot of capitals left over from some other job and someone said, "Oh well, let's stick them up here, then."

They are an unusual kind of capital too. Most of us are familiar with Ionic capitals, with their spiral volutes, but Ionic capitals have no leaves and their spirals are the other other way around. This "wrong way round spiral with added leaves" was made popular by the great Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini and was copied by various builders in England. I've noticed these Borromini capitals before at Blandford Forum in Dorset, where the local builder, the splendidly named John Bastard, used them more conventionally, at the tops of pilasters. But if Borromini capitals raised an eyebrow in Blandford Forum, here on the top of house at Lacock they are a real source of surprise.

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