Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Still busy

The beehive has been a powerful symbol for centuries. For some it has represented ‘the winged republic’, where society runs in an equitable way, with each individual playing their role to general benefit of the whole. For others, it has stood for industry and productivity. Perhaps the latter train of thought was behind the adoption of the beehive as the symbol of Lloyd’s Bank in 1822. It was the bank’s sole symbol until they took over Barnett ’s Bank in 1884, when the company also began to use Barnett’s emblem: the black horse. Both symbols were used by the bank until the 1930s, when the hive was phased out and the black horse remained.

But the occasional Lloyd’s beehive survives, like this one on a hanging sign in Bury St Edmunds. Since sign and bracket alike have clearly been carefully designed and made with some skill, it’s understandable that no one wanted to throw it away. The sign has a dome shape at the top to accommodate the hive, which is itself cut out from the background and coloured the same gold as the lettering. The bracket is shaped to follow the contours of the hive, adorned with curlicues and finials, and braced with a diagonal strut; it’s fancy, but not distracting because the clear lettering and symbol make the sign very easy to read: I’d say the combination works very well. No doubt that fact that the building it’s attached to is still branch of Lloyd’s means it’s still effective too, alerting anyone who doesn’t know to the bank’s location as they approach along the pavement. It was, I’d say, a good investment.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

High Street heroes

At first glance, this striking shop front is confusing, first because it’s not the 17th-century building it might appear to be and secondly because the premises are occupied by W. H. Smith, a company once known for ornate facades. But it wasn’t built by Smith’s. Originally, this was a branch of Boot’s the chemist, who could also put on a bold front. In the early years of the 20th century, Boot’s did a number of revamped shop fronts using timber framing with ornate plaster infill, and some of these were festooned with eyecatching details such as carved bargeboards, fancy brackets, and even statuary.

I’ve long been a fan of the large former Boot’s in the middle of Derby, which is on a prominent corner site and has a succession of statues of local Derbyshire worthies that must be almost life-size. The former Boot’s in my photograph, in Bury St Edmunds, is smaller, but equally ornate, with a full compliment of woodcarving, pargetting, and four large statues. The design dates to 1910 and was the work of the company’s in-house architect, Michael Vyne Treleaven, who set this style for their shopfronts in this period.*

The statues set in decorated niches across the facade were the work of a London sculptor, Gilbert Seale & Co of Camberwell, who did more than one job for the company. They feature, from left to right, Agricola, St Edmund, Edward I, and Edward VI. These figures all have local relevance as well as their wider significance: Edmund was the local saint, Edward I held parliaments here, Edward VI founded a local grammar school, and the Roman general Agricola led his people’s conquest of Britain and crushed the uprising of Boudica, local queen of the Iceni; one source suggests that this figure is actually another Roman general, Trebonius, who accompanied Caesar on his Gaulish and British campaigns. Boot’s the chemist, under its gifted owner Jesse Boot and his successors, was well aware of the benefits of local publicity, and was keen too that his premises should be assets to the towns where they were located. It would be wonderful if today’s retailers took such care over their architecture.

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* Thanks to the reader who confirmed that the design of the Bury shopfront was Treleaven’s.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Blink and you miss it

A few years ago I made my first visit to Bury St Edmunds and, keen to see the cathedral and various other architectural monuments, I missed this pub, although I was aware that it was there. That is not totally surprising because it is one of the candidates for the title of Britain’s smallest public house. I blinked, as they say, and I missed it.

When I was writing my book Irreplaceable for Historic England in 2018, I was reminded, doing the entry for the Nottingham pub called Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, that there are several pubs that claim to be the oldest in the country. Ye Olde Trip is one. I live not far from another of them – it’s in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire. There are others, all with advocates who point to traditions, stories, apparent allusions, architectural details, and even genuine historical documents in support of their pub’s great age.

Dates can be slippery and hard to prove. With dimensions, surely, you’d think you were on safer ground. But it’s not as simple as it seems. The Nutshell’s claim seemed secure – it measures just 15 feet by 7, it’s palpably there, in the middle of town where it has been for 150 years, and it was ratified by the Guinness Book of Records. But in 2017 the John Lewis store in London’s Oxford Street opened a pub in a shed in its rooftop garden, and the shed measures just 6 x 8 feet. Then there’s Platform 3, next to the station in Claygate, that boasts standing room for three customers. Cleethorpes’s Signal Box Inn, likewise railway themed, looks scarcely larger. And there’s the Old Kent Market, which, at 11 feet x 6 feet 6 inches, is given the accolade in a more recent edition of the Guinness Book.

Few things in architecture are cut and dried. But The Nutshell is charming, small, stuffed with an eccentric collection of historical objects and memorabilia, and ready to serve local ales. A bit of English eccentricity that deserves a raised glass any time between and now and closing.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Bells and railway whistles

Before we leave the world of Victorian brickwork, which has been occupying me for the last few posts, may I offer for your delectation the railway station at Bury St Edmunds.

I was in Bury a couple of months ago and though I didn’t get there by train I’m certainly an admirer of the railway station. It was designed by Sancton Wood, an architect with a large and diverse practice who is especially known for his railway work in eastern England. Wood had an unpromising start. He was educated at a progressive school in Birmingham, where children were encouraged to work as much or as little as they liked. Sancton Wood admitted that he worked very little, and what to do when he left was a puzzle. But the boy had shown an aptitude for drawing, and his mother was related to the architect Sir Robert Smirke, so the young Wood was sent off to Smirke’s office as an apprentice and studied drawing at the Royal Academy too. Luckily, he found that architecture was his métier.

By the time Wood went into practice in his own right, the railway system was expanding and offered opportunities for a young architect. He was soon preparing designs for buildings on the Eastern Counties Railway, and a few years later was also at work in Ireland, doing stations between Dublin and Cork amongst others. More stations (on the Midland and North Western Railway) followed, as did houses, schools, churches, and warehouses.

Stations such as Stamford (in stone for that stone town) and Ipswich show his talent for designing stations in a variety of suitable and engaging ways. Bury is particularly striking – brick with stone dressings, eye-catching gables, a strong-looking triple-arched entrance, and, on either side of this, attractive brick side bays with oeils de boeuf and stone pediments that break into a curve at the top, taking on a life of their own. There are lots of attractive details. The end wing in the foreground for example reveals neat brick detailing around the doorway and arch, some rather assertive mouldings, and a characterful corner treatment in stone, as well as the pediment and oeils de boeuf already mentioned. Another stand-out feature is the slender cupola-topped tower (there’s actually another matching one, on the other side of the tracks, but not visible in the photograph). All this makes not only a very satisfying and enduring building, but one on which the eye can linger, picking out details and admiring the inventive way in which they have been used and combined. It’s a station of which the railway company – and now, one hopes, the town – could take some pride.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

People’s bank

British banking expanded in the Victorian period, and it wasn’t just a matter of high finance. In the 18th and early-19th centuries there was a dearth of places where people on low incomes could save on a modest scale, putting away a small amount of money for hard times and unforeseen needs. Local savings banks were one answer, and such banks spread widely after the success of one founded by the Rev Henry Duncan in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, in 1810. It’s said that such a bank was started in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1816. Thirty years later it was large and well enough established to move into these premises in Crown Street.

Lewis Cottingham, a Suffolk-born architect who established his office in London and became well known as a Gothic-revival specialist, was the designer of the bank. This commission came at the end of Cottingham’s life – he had developed a successful career as a repairer of churches and cathedrals (and was the restorer of the Norman gate tower next door to this site), and a builder of houses large and small. For the savings bank he chose neither straight Gothic, nor the classical style so often used for banks, but a red-brick ‘Tudor-Gothic’ style with stone mullioned windows, prominent gables, and tall, ornate chimneys. The brickwork has diaper patterns, which the Victorians sometimes used on their more decorative buildings, from humble cottages to William Butterfield’s vast Keble College, Oxford.

The result is impressive, making good use of the corner site, but not grandiose. There’s a domestic feel to the building, and the look of the date, picked out in dark bricks, is more like something you’d see in homespun by a builder than on an architect-designed bank.  So much so indeed that I took it at first glance to be a group of almshouses, in which the large door led to a courtyard. But a bank it was, and it served the people of Bury in this way until 1892. I’m told the building is now divided into apartments, and must also serve its residents well with light, attractive, and central accommodation.