Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

Light the lights

The facade of the Ritz cinema in Burnham-on-Sea looked somewhat the worse for wear when I passed it the other day – but, no matter, the place is still open and still showing films, on three screens now I believe, unlike the single screen that it had when it opened in 1936. It presents to the street a very plain front, rendered in cream, with a central section breaking forward slightly and accommodating three simple rectangular windows and the sign bearing the name above. It’s Art Deco, in other words, of the most pared-down kind.

The lettering in the sign is pretty simple too. Four capitals, with all the strokes more or less equal in width and all the characters very square-looking, including even the initial R, which has been made to do some rather alien things in order to eliminate its usual curves. It’s not the most pleasing of letters, this R, but in the context of the plain, simple, rectilinear building it makes sense. Imagine the neon tubes of the sign lit up at night, as one must with such a cinema building, and the whole thing works – even though we lose what caught my eye on the sunny Sunday afternoon I was there: the lucky similarity between the colour of the lettering and the blue of the sky.

Edithmead, Somerset

Tin tabernacle

As regular readers will know, I’m a great fan and regular user of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England books, to which I refer all the time and which also inspire many of the explorations of English buildings that lie behind this blog. I am in no doubt that the series, with its comprehensive coverage of architecture – first in England and then in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland – is one of the greatest works of art history ever, in any country.* If I have a reservation about the books it’s that, even in the fat revised volumes that are still appearing, they often stop short at even passing coverage the more modest buildings that in many places play a huge part in defining local character – the lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh, maybe, or the hovels of the Vale of Evesham, or plotland bungalows, or minor industrial buildings in some towns.† Or corrugated iron buildings, a personal obsession of mine, even though buildings made of this material are widely seen as minor and often temporary. There are, though, plenty of corrugated iron structures that are vital to their community and that have histories going back over a century.

I was pleased, therefore, when browsing in the Somerset: South and West volume of Pevsner to find a corrugated iron church mentioned at Edithmead, close to Burnham-on-Sea. Recently I was nearby, and stopped to have a look. What I found was a charming, white-painted ‘tin tabernacle’ not especially churchlike in appearance, except for the miniature spire and the bell at one end, but attractive nonetheless. If the rectangular windows and tiny structure without a separate chancel look unecclesiastical, there’s a reason. This building began life on another site, at East Brent, where it was an ‘Adult School’. It was brought to Edithmead in 1919 to serve the small local community as a daughter church to the one in Burnham-on-Sea. The congregation look after it well – although maintenance of a building like this is easier that the upkeep of a stone building; the main jobs recently have, I think, been painting the building and replacing the wooden window frames.

Thanks to the congregation, the tiny church with its modest spirelet and delightful cresting along the ridge of the roof, still looks good and locals were able to celebrate its centenary on the site in 2019. Hats off to the people of Edithmead – and to the authors of the Pevsner guide for pointing me towards a place of which, until the other day, I’d not even heard.

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* The revised volume for Wiltshire is the latest one I’ve acquired, and I plan to review it shortly here.

† All of which may be built in part of corrugated iron.

Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

More light!

Here’s the Round Tower lighthouse at Burnham, or what’s left of it, for all that remains is the tower’s truncated stump, attached to the white building on the left, which faces on to the sea front.

Apparently the light had humble origins. A fisherman lived in a cottage somewhere near this spot in the mid-18th century, and his wife got into the habit of lighting a candle and leaving it at one of the windows to guide her husband home. Later the light was placed in the nearby church tower, so that it could be seen from further out at sea. Finally the curate of the church built the round tower – next to the churchyard, as can be seen in the photograph – so that the light was clearer still.

Even in its original tall form it wasn’t that high, and in 1832 it was replaced by the subsequent lights, so that shipping might be guided more reliably home, either to Burnham itself, or on up the River Parrett to the port of Bridgwater.

Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

Attention all shipping

I normally leave this kind of thing to Peter Ashley, over at the excellent Unmitigated England, a fine photographer of lighthouses as of much else. He would not have parked at the far end of the sea front, leaving himself with a twenty-minute walk across a deserted beach in a stiff wind blowing tons of dry sand in a landward direction. A few hundredweight of this sand lodged itself in my nostrils and ears, more of it sandblasting my face and probably my camera lens too.

But in the end, buffeted and battered, I made it to the Low Light, Burnham’s sea-shore lighthouse on poles. This unusual structure was built in 1832. It was the third lighthouse in the town, replacing the Round Tower slightly inland, which now survives at half its original height, and complementing the High Light, a more conventional pillar lighthouse not far away.

On its nine timber posts it has held up very well, surviving both the Round Tower and the High Light, which blinked its last in 1993. The staircase is a recent replacement in galvanized steel. It takes the same form as the original wooden stair, but has openwork treads so that the load of water pressure on the structure is not so great at high tide. A light is still displayed through the window at the side of the Low Light, so it remains useful to shipping as well as a notable landmark for those walkers who are rash enough to brave the Burnham breeze.