On the arterial road...

…pumpery revisited

One of my readers reminded me, after the previous post about corrugated-iron garages and roadside petrol pumps, that such structures were widely disliked and criticised when they appeared back in the 1930s and 1940s, much as we might appreciate them now. He is of course quite right. These makeshift structures are a good example of the way attitudes and fashions and the ways in which we see things change, sometimes radically, over time.

In the 1930s there were frequent protests about the unchecked rise of shacks, garages, and other unplanned buildings. These structures were often seen as unpleasant to look at, badly built, and part of the inexorable ribbon development that threatened to swamp the countryside around Britain’s towns and cities, joining settlements together so that no countryside would remain at all. Quite a few people wrote about this, attacking plotlands, garages, and ribbon development as part of the same problem. Take Sheila Kaye-Smith, for example, writing in the 1937 collection Britain and the Beast, edited by Clough Williams-Ellis. Here she compares modern buildings with the much-loved traditional buildings of Kent:

Compare [Kent’s traditional buildings] with the modern villa set up stiffly like a match-box on end, with the bungalow coloured a pink that can be seen nowhere else save in boiled crustaceans, with the garage of corrugated iron, the catsellated shop-front, and then address yourself to time, in your hopes no longer the preserver but the destroyer.

J B Priestley also had a go at such things in his book English Journey and the CPRE even suggested that motorists should boycott garages made of corrugated iron or sporting “garish, multi-coloured petrol pumps”. A whole world of sorry roadside development was captured in an illustration in another book by Clough-Williams-Ellis, The Adventure of Building, which I reproduce above: as well as corrugated iron, ubiquitous overhead wires and intrusive advertising posters are also part of the view.

Even back then, the objections were inspired by all kinds of motivations. For many, it was a genuine anxiety about the countryside and about the way our settlements were being planned – or not planned, but just thrown up, willy nilly along the highways. For others, it was snobbery about low-status building materials, discontent with structures that could be erected by unskilled labour, or a dislike of untidiness.

As far as corrugated-iron garages went, they got their way in the end – most have long vanished. Ribbon development, too, has been controlled by the planning system, as have, by and large, big advertising hoardings. And now, encouraged by writers like Jonathan Meades and Iain Sinclair, we are more likely to find something to admire or interest us in old garages, plotlands, and sheds. it might be the ingenious bricolage practised by their amateur builders; it might be the layers of history the represent. It might be – and this is where I come in – their contribution to, and absorption in, the character and life of specific places: a plotland bungalow softened by cow parsley or surrounded by shingle, a corrugated-iron roof turned over to nature, a barn rusting in the summer sun. Such things encourage us to look, and think, unearth stories about the past, and reassess what is still there in the present.

Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Village vision

My foggy morning visit to Great Rollright (see previous post) was followed by a brief stop in Cornwell on the other side of the A44. This is a tiny estate village full of typical Cotswold stone houses, all limestone walls, mullioned windows, and stone ‘tiled’ roofs. As you look, though, you detect that Cornwell is slightly different from the scores of other limestone villages on the Cotswolds. It’s not that most of it is gated off the main thoroughfare with ‘Private Road’ signs. The place just seems to have more than its fair share of whimsical details – gate posts with big ball finials, and, as on the cottage in the picture, lovely door canopies with curvy stone brackets and big chunky buttresses.

The reason is that the village was restored in the 1930s by the self-styled ‘architect errant’ Clough Williams-Ellis. Williams-Ellis, whose work ranges from the famous and fantastical Welsh village Portmeirion to a filling station in the form of a pagoda (long gone, alas) in Cheltenham, was a largely self-taught architect, an enthusiast of the baroque and of architectural fun, a committed proponent of conservation, an advocate of higher standards in town planning, and a persuasive writer (England and the Octopus) often in collaboration with his wife, Amabel. For Cornwell, the he designed an extraordinary centrepiece, the village hall, with its apsidal end and towering bell turret, and made a delightful feature out of the stream that flows through the village centre, over and under the cobbles of the street. Williams-Ellis worked on the big house in the village too, continuing the aqueous theme with a water garden. The whole place looks very much as it must have been when he left it, only the television aerials betraying the continuing modern life within the cottages. I almost expected a cart to go by, rather than the passing Land Rover, and even it seemed quieter than usual, as if its engine was muffled by the mist.