Harrogate, Yorkshire

Hotel town

Harrogate is well supplied with large hotels, many dating to the town’s boom in the late-19th century – or even before, the spa being well established by the early-18th. One witness to the town’s earlier life as a watering places was the traveller redoubtable Celia Fiennes, who visited in 1697 and recorded that she could not force her horse to come near the ’Sulpher or Stincking Spaw, not improperly term’d’.* She tried a couple of quarts of the noxious water and found these doses to be ‘a good sort of Purge if you can hold your breath so as to drink them down’. The hotels are variously classical, Italianate, or a sort of free style with many bays, prominent gables, and mansard roofs. My photograph shows the Crown, which is in a mixture of styles, and has a long history.

Before the current building was put up, there had been a hotel here for a long time, even before the Crown was owned by the Thackwray family form 1740. Lord Byron, who stayed in 1806, was one of the best known guests, and he recorded that his beloved dog Nelson§ had to be put down after attacking a horse in the hotel’s stable yard. The Crown was very convenient for the town’s sulphur well, which only a few yards away and available to all. Joseph Thackwray, however, sunk his own private well in a building adjoining the Crown, greatly reducing the flow from the public well. There was an outcry from other innkeepers, and when a group took legal measures against him, he relented. It is said that this case actually alerted the town to the value both of its wells and of its pleasant environment generally, and so preserved the generous public green spaces that distinguish the place to this day.

In 1847 the Crown was rebuilt in the classical style, and this building remains the core of what’s there now – the 3-bay central section (pilastered, with rectangular windows), flanked by slender 1-bay side wings. This was extended in the Italianate style (bay windows, with round-topped central openings) in 1870, when the two parts were unified by building the balustered parapet across the top of the whole front. almost concealing the low hipped roof behind. There were yet further elaborations, including extensions to the sides in around 1899, including the tower visible on the right. The result is an impressive ensemble, near the centre of the town and not far from the greenery of The Stray. In short, an excellent venue for the festival† I attended two weeks ago and no doubt a fine centre for visitors who’ve been coming for hundreds of years.

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* Christopheer Morris (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (The Cresset Press, 1947)

§ A mastiff, apparently, not the poet’s most famous dog, the Newfoundland Boatswain.

† The Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival

Croome, Worcestershire

A connoisseur of views

On a couple of occasions in the past I’ve explored the grounds of Croome Court in Worcestershire, and have looked not only at a building in the park near the great house but also further out, to take in structures built as eye-catchers in the wider landscape. One of these outlying buildings that I’d not seen was the panorama tower, which was put up on the western side of the estate, in part as an eye-catcher and in part as a place from which which to admire the views. Recently I set off to find the panorama tower, an exercise that first off all meant getting over to the western side of the M5, the motorway having sliced through the old Croome estate, cutting the tower off from the house, park, and other eye-catchers. Coming out of the village of Kinnersley, I missed the place where I thought it was, and so pulled in where there was a parking space near a road junction. As soon as I got out of the car and peered over a gate I realised that I could see the tower not far away across a field – I’d reached the right place, by accident rather than design.

The tower, I saw, was round, domed, and classical in design. James Wyatt was the architect but apparently he based the tower on a drawing by Adam, so its design is earlier than the years on either side of 1810 when it was built. It’s very plain – the columns are Tuscan, the niches blank, the cornices simple, the dome shallow. Yet the overall effect is satisfying, thanks to the rhythm of the openings, the relationship between the lower section and the small domed upper storey, and the modest way in which the building occupies its elevated position, not dominating it but offering itself up and affording views eastwards towards Croome itself and westwards towards the Malverns and the Welsh hills.

The tower’s builder, the 6th Earl of Coventry, had a thing about towers and views, as many landed aristocrats did in the 18th and 19th centuries. The panorama tower beautifully complements the medieval-looking eyecatchers elsewhere in the park and also reminds us that the earl built the great Broadway Tower, miles away to the southeast on his Spring Hill estate. This is a sizeable and impressive presence on the Cotswold scarp, built to give views over thousands of square miles towards Croome and, again, far into Wales. Although much preoccupied with gardening and building, the earl must have been aware too of the beauty of Britain as a whole, and his towers – pigeonholed by some as ‘mere’ follies, both enhance that beauty and aid its appreciation.

Hereford

Sun and shadows

Some architecture only looks really good in the sun. That’s true, in my opinion, of this building, the Catholic church of St Francis Xavier, in the middle of Hereford’s Broad Street. When I first saw it, drizzle was closing in and I didn’t feel inclined to linger and look at it. My mind pigeon-holed it away as a rather grandiose bit of early-19th century neoclassicism, trying hard to assert itself over the surrounding buildings, which fence it in. And there was another thing which seemed odd to me about it. The fact that there were only two Doric columns on such a big building seemed somehow strange, as did the paucity of fine detail: just flutes, triglyphs, and a bit of moulding. There was something about this that gave the impression of a small building that had been put under a magnifying glass. All this passed through my mind in a second or two as I passed by the building, without giving it much more thought. The other day when I found myself in this street again, the sun was out and the facade made a completely different impression. The sun lit up the mouldings and flutes, creating tonal contrast and casting shadows that gave a much better impression of their modelling. It also brought out the facade’s rich cream colour. There was something to engage me, after all.

When I got home, I looked the church up in Pevsner, and found that the architectural guide was illuminating about the building. It was designed by Charles Day and built in 1837–39, making it just Victorian. The design of the facade was based on the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, but the church is taller and the proportions are narrower than those of the ancient Greek building. The architect also intended there to be a pair of short towers, which presumably never got built. Pevsner also told me that Pugin, who was exercised particularly by churches, Catholic churches above all, hated it. He called it ‘a pagan temple’ and ‘a Catholic concert hall’. Only Gothic would do for Pugin. Much as I love Gothic, I don’t share the great Pugin’s doctrinaire views, but on that rainy day I’d have nodded in at least half-agreement with him. Now I’ve seen the church in the sun, I’m inclined to moderate my view. It’s amazing what a bit of tonal contrast will do.

Bath

Lost in the post?

This post is by way of an apology to a number of my readers. One of the pleasures of having this blog is the number of comments I’ve received about my posts. Nearly all these comments are positive and constructive, they are often informative, and not infrequently appreciative: I enjoy getting them, and often respond to them.

For years now I’ve had a system set up that alerts me to each comment by sending me an email. For some reason, this system no longer seems to work, probably because Google, who host the blog on their servers, have changed the way things work. They often make such changes, usually notifying bloggers of what they are doing, and I generally take notice of these notifications. But this time, I didn’t realise what was going on. As a result, many of you have made comments and I’ve not read them. But they are not lost in the post: most of them are there, in the system, and I have now bulk published many of them to their relevant posts, and over the coming weeks will go through them, read, digest, and comment myself.

I’m sorry about this. I do value your comments, will continue to respond, and will now look out for them. I hope that all of you – old friends, longstanding online acquaintances, new readers, and the rest – will forgive me, and carry on reading.

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The letter box that illustrates this post is one I saw in Bath. Its rather lovely ‘Greek key’ decoration, architectural as it is, particularly appealed to me.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Architecturally incorrect

It’s a happy coincidence that I visited Sunningwell, in the previous post, within a few days of going to Chipping Campden, where in the large 15th-century parish church I found this memorable monument in the chancel. Although quite large, it’s easy to overlook in a church that contains still bigger, more eye-catching tombs not far away. What links the monument to Sunningwell is that it’s from the Tudor period and is another example of the arrival of a particularly eccentric architectural classicism in England.

It’s the monument of Sir Thomas Smyth, who died in 1593, and what concerns me here is not his effigy, recumbent on its tomb chest, the head resting on the knight’s metal helmet, nor the figures of his two wives and 13 children arranged around the base, charming as they are. What I’m interested in is the canopy.


You can tell straight away that this is a classical structure – there are Corinthian columns with their capitals of curly acanthus leaves, holding up a canopy topped with a triangular pediment. But look a bit more closely and the design breaks all the rules. The pediment does not run the whole width of the frontage and is far too high – and there’s half of another pediment on the short side. The carving in the triangle depicts not classical scenes but a coat of arms. Around the frieze beneath run designs that are neither Greek nor Roman but Elizabethan patterns including, near the corners, motifs that look a bit like interlaced strips of leather and are known as strapwork – there are also large versions of these on the underside of the canopy. And another thing – at the front there are three columns, one at each corner and one in the centre. True classical design does not use odd numbers of columns – an even number is used, so that there’s a gap, not a column in the middle.

All of which is enough to tell you that this monument has not been built according to the rules laid down by the architects of ancient Greece or Rome, or of their Italian Renaissance imitators. And this is not surprising, because English builders of this period got their knowledge of classical architecture not from Greece or Rome, where virtually none of them had been, but from France and the Netherlands, where the classical style had already been adopted and developed with the addition of different kinds of ornament. When the English took it over, they put their special spin on it too. The result: architectural hybrids like this tomb canopy.

But what a glorious hybrid! The monument is carved with vigour. It makes you look, but it doesn't dominate the entire church. The blend of Roman details and English ornament is happy. The whole thing has a liveliness that later English Classicism sometimes lacks. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare, its contemporary, who had ‘small Latin and less Greek’, but who put what he had to good use, in order to make something out of it that was special and rich and, occasionally, strange.

Brackley, Northamptonshire

Marking time

I have a fondness for the old town halls of the 17th and 18th centuries. They form visual climaxes to so many high streets and market places and they combine civic pride and usefulness in a way that seems just right. The typical layout is an open, arched ground floor where you can have a market, a big upper room for meetings, and a cupola on top, often with a clock.

The clock is important. Back when the Town Hall at Brackley was built (by the Duke of Bridgewater, in 1706) not many people had watches or clocks of their own. So they relied on the church clock or a town hall timepiece like this one to tell the hours. The church wasn’t always visible from the main street, so to give a town a clock, right in the centre where everyone gathered to meet, buy, sell, and gossip, was a real gift to a town.

Such a gift needed to be visible and town hall builders started adding these cupolas, perfect little bits of carpenter’s Classicism, to show them off. The cupola at Brackley is one of my favourites. Everything about this ornate little structure – the fancy weathervane, the neat dome on its eight Classical arches, the cube containing the clock with its white corner brackets – shows that the builders took special care and gave the job the time it deserved.

St Michael's Street, Oxford

In the early 1700s, one of the most important and monumental English buildings was begun just outside Woodstock, near Oxford. Blenheim Palace, the nation’s gift to its military hero the Duke of Marlborough, is a country house on a vast scale, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh. Soon, builders began to learn about Vanbrugh’s heavyweight, rather ponderous brand of Classicism, and the influence of Blenheim was being felt in other new buildings in Oxfordshire.

This house in St Michael’s Street is an example. The twin giant pilasters that shoot up on either side of the door, the curious canopy above them, and the curve-topped windows above that – all these are Vanbrugh-type features. So are the heavy keystones – the central wedge-shaped stones the top the first- and second-floor windows. It all adds up to a surprising piece of grandeur in a side street, but it’s the kind of thing that English cities are good at – pulling us up short with something dramatic in a quiet or everyday setting. Not for nothing is this compact piece of architectural splendour called Vanbrugh House.