Buckingham

Hunting the Hart

During our recent stop in Buckingham, the town’s White Hart Hotel was looking particularly attractive with its hanging baskets, so I paused to take the photograph above. I wanted to show not just the flowers but also some detail of the Doric porch, which acts as a platform for the statue of the eponymous white hart with the traditional gold coronet around its neck. Although the White Hart is a very common name for an in or pub in England, relatively few have a three-dimensional image of a stag as their sign. I’ve seen a number of these in my time – a splendid standing stag in Okehampton, for example, with a magnificent pair of outstretching antlers, and another high up on the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury, which can, in the right light, be dramatically silhouetted against the sky.*

The White Hart symbol became well known during the reign of King Richard II (reigned 1377–99), who adopted it as his badge. He is said to have based it on the heraldry of his mother, Joan, Countess of Kent, whom the chronicler Froissart called ‘the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England, and the most loving’. The king’s retainers and followers would have worn the badge, and it appears several times on the Wilton Diptych, the superb portrait of the ruler now in the National Gallery.

Like many White Hart Hotels (and indeed numerous other urban hotels), the one in Buckingham is early-19th century in appearance – the flat front, symmetrical facade, and classical porch are all standard features of the coaching inns of the late Georgian and Regency periods. In those days Buckingham was a good stopping point on the journey between the Midlands and London, or between Oxford and Cambridge, and the White Hart was one of several inns in the town. And it was in earlier times too – the inn’s history is said to go back further than the Georgian era. It’s still a good place to pause when making the cross country journey from Oxford to Cambridge – or, as it was for us the other day, from the hills of the Cotswolds to the flatlands of the Fens.

- - - - -

*See my Instagram account, @philipbuildings and scroll past recent posts, to see images of these.

Buckingham

For filling up

A recent visit to Buckingham, en route for a destination further east, saw us taking a stroll along Well Street, a way I’d never gone before. It wasn’t long before we passed this building, which I immediately wanted to photograph, although this was not easy because the street is not very wide. It’s a facade that’s wearing at least part of its history with pride. The building has most recently housed a restaurant, although this business seems now to have closed. The preservation of a pair of petrol pumps shows how the restaurant took its name and branding from the previous use – it was a garage and the restaurant was called The Garage. They even changed the globes atop the pumps to a pair bearing the letter G, specially made for the change of use, no doubt.

But the garage business cannot have been here much before the beginning of the 20th century; more likely it dated to some time after 1900. What was it before? The design of the front, with its symmetrically arranged windows and plain but decent brickwork, suggested to me a nonconformist chapel and that’s what it originally was. It looks early-19th century and a little research reveals that the structure was first a Presbyterian Meeting House. Although the frontage is Regency, the building behind it actually dates to 1726, with numerous further alterations in the 19th and 20th centuries. At some point after it ceased to be a chapel, it housed a school, before the wide doorway was fitted, no doubt part of the conversion to a garage. I’ve seen a chapel converted to a garage before (there’s one, for example, at Upton-on-Severn), but not one quite as elegant as this – the central doorway, though large, far from ruins the visual effect. Even the changes to the ground-floor windows do not completely destroy the symmetry.

In recent years many garages have closed, especially small town ones where a street-side site can make filling up with petrol an activity that holds up traffic. Country filling stations have been closing too as the profit margins are so narrow and the trade is now so dominated by the supermarket chains. So a few years ago this one closed and the restaurant arrived. Now it appears that the building is on the market again and conversion to residential use is one the cards. I hope its new owners will not erase the layers of its history that are still on show.

Buckingham

Life and soul

The 1981 Shell Guide to Buckinghamshire describes Buckingham as ‘A small, quiet, ancient country town of stone and brick buildings with red-tiled roofs, in a tight loop of the Great Ouse’. I was pleased to see that the centre of Buckingham still answers to this description, and that the interest spreads out from the impressive market place (with gaol and Town Hall) to the neighbouring streets. Up a narrow road off the Market Place is this medieval survivor, the Chantry Chapel.

Chantries were medieval institutions, set up to provide priests to celebrate Mass involving prayers for the souls of those who set up the chantry and for others nominated by them. Chantries were widespread in the Middle Ages, often based in chapels within parish churches, but they were suppressed in the 16th century, ultimately because they were linked with the Catholic doctrine of Puragtory.

Many chantries disappeared without leaving any architectural trace, but this chantry chapel survived by beginning a new life as Buckingham’s Latin School. The building now belongs to the National Trust and in its most recent incarnation houses a secondhand bookshop that is open two days a week. Opinions will differ as to whether this is a good use for the building, but clearly the chapel doesn’t fit into the familiar Trust template (tasteful paint finishes, tea rooms, gift shops selling pot pouri) so often used in its country houses. At least the chapel’s Gothic windows (including the lovely round one) and still older crisply carved Norman doorway, are well maintained and continue to enliven the townscape in this quiet side street.

Old Gaol, Buckingham

Nowadays we tend to prefer our prisons out of sight and out of mind. But in the Middle Ages and for centuries afterwards, it was common to put the town gaol on the market place – conveniently near the Town Hall, the court, and the likely centres of criminal activity. At Buckingham, the Town Hall is at one end of the market place, the old gaol at the other, two images of authority framing the commercial and social activity going on in between.

The gaol was built in 1748, and in the fashion of the time it took the form of a four-square castle keep – stone-walled, minimally-windowed, and crenellated, an embodiment of security and power. It was paid for by Lord Cobham of nearby Stowe, a man who, having laid out one of the great landscape gardens and filled it with eye-catching buildings, knew a lot about the symbolic power of architecture.

In 1839 the building was extended with the addition of the rounded front portion, which served as the gaoler’s house. This extension was designed by George Gilbert Scott, a young local man who was to become one of the most prominent Victorian architects. Its friendlier Gothic details evoke a less sombre mood, but Cobham’s castellated pile still lurks solidly behind.