Coleshill, Berkshire*

Looking at Coleshill again (2)

Starting to think again about the lost country house of Coleshill reminded me about one thing especially that struck me about the place. As Karen Fielder says in her essay, although the house itself has gone, the estate still exists.† As well as the gate piers in my previous post, the many interesting architectural remains include a model farm, a dovecote, a walled kitchen garden, and a number of cottages.

Of course thousands of English cottages once formed part of country estates. They were built to house workers on the farms and those who maintained the house and serviced the estate in all kinds of ways. While household servants would live in, in the attic rooms of the big house itself, workers in other areas – from the fields to the carpenter’s shop – would have had cottages. Such estate houses often follow the prevailing architectural style of the area, but sometimes they have distinctive features that mark them out as special, something that shows that they belong to the estate – a special design of porch, say, ornate bargeboards, or a particular paint shade.

Glazing bars with fancy patterns are sometimes such a defining feature, and this seems to be the case at Coleshill. Perhaps it’s because cottage builders liked such glazing patterns in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and this was when many estates were ‘improved’ by their landlords, who built better housing for their workers and adopted modern farming techniques too. Coleshill has several houses with these lovely windows glazed in hexagonal and diamond-shaped panes (along with others that have plainer square panes). The way the masonry is set off with details in ashlar (smoothy worked blocks of stone) at the corners and around the windows is another sign that some care and expense was taken with the houses in the picture. Without such details, buildings like these would look like fairly standard Cotswold houses (Coleshill is near the edge of the Cotswolds, where the hills yield to the flat country around the Thames) but the details set them apart.

The 3rd Earl of Radnor (1779–1869) was a notable improver of the Colshill estate. I think that these cottages were built by him in around 1850; they look larger than many cottages, especially the one on the left, but seem to display the estate style and would have been among numerous beneficial changes made during the earl’s long life. Karen Fielder says that the appearance of the village today owes much to his efforts. Not all 19th-century landlords provided such good housing, but it looks as if some at least of the people of Coleshill were fortunate. As are we, able to pick up clues about their past in the appearance of some fancy glazing bars from perhaps 160 years ago.¶

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*I use the ‘historic’ English counties because of a sentimental attachment to them and because they are used by the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

†Karen Fielder, ‘X marks the spot: narratives of a lost country house’ in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Historic England, 2016)

¶A friend reminds me that Coleshill was also the home of the great record producer George Martin, who died recently. RIP.

Coleshill, Berkshire*

Looking at Coleshill again (1)

I’ve visited the village of Coleshill several times and on one occasion I posted briefly about the Coleshill estate, the site of a great 17th-century house that was burned down in 1952, the remains being demolished soon afterwards. In my earlier post I highlighted the elaborate pair of gate piers pictured above, and I pointed out that I found their position slightly odd and that their ‘best’ side could only be seen from inside the gate – evidence, I thought, that they were designed to be seen by the occupants of the house rather than by passers-by.

Something I read yesterday sent me back to my old post. I have been reading parts of a fascinating new book, a series of essays edited by Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann called The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption. I’m sure I will read the rest of this book and write about it in my next group of reviews in the spring, but meanwhile I cannot resist mentioning what I read in the book’s final essay, on the estate at Coleshill.† The author of the essay, Karen Fielder, has lots of good things to say about the significance of this estate with its vanished house, but what she says about the gate piers especially caught my eye. The piers, she reveals, have been moved. They were originally in the formal gardens of the house, when no doubt the niches (and the busts they once contained¶) were set off to best advantage. But in the late-18th century the 2nd Earl of Radnor re-landscaped the garden and re-sited the piers by the road through the village so that they framed a view of the house from that road. The passer-by would have been interested in the view that the piers were framing, not in the sculptures or the gates, so placing the gateway that way round worked.

I’m grateful to this essay for putting me right about the piers’ apparently rather odd placement. It would have made perfect sense when the house was still standing. I’m grateful too for the chance to think again about this evocative place and for discovering how these traces of history tell part of its story.§ It makes me want to pay another visit.

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*Modern boundaries place Coleshill in Oxfordshire. I allocate it to Berkshire because of a sentimental attachment to the historic English counties and because these old boundaries are used by the invaluable Pevsner Buildings of England series.

†Karen Fielder, ‘X marks the spot: narratives of a lost country house’ in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Historic England, 2016)

¶The book includes a 1922 photograph by Nathaniel Lloyd that shows a pair of busts (of Roman-looking figures) in the niches of the piers.

§The estate’s later history, including the remains of underground tunnels used by auxiliary units, formed to supply the resistance in the event of an invasion during World War II, are also clearly well worth exploring.

Pimlico, London

Topping

I always look out for examples of model dwellings (see an earlier post here) built in the Victorian period by enlightened landlords who want to provide decent accommodation for the working classes. In London, many of these were built by the Peabody Trust, which did a huge amount of work to provide improved housing after its foundation in the 1860s. Peabody flats are often built in pale brick and sometimes with access balconies like these, the Coleshill Flats in London SW1, dating from 1871. On the ground floor are shops, and between the pairs of shops are entrances that lead to stairs to the balconies above. Pale brick with a bit of restrained polychromy in the form of narrow red brick bands, plus sash windows, completes the picture as far as the street facade is concerned.

Except, not quite. Looking up, one sees that the building has very decorative French-style pavilion roofs, each topped with ornate iron creating. It’s a surprising touch on what otherwise looks like a rather basic building, a roofing style that’s more at home on grand hotels or big office blocks. And the accommodation up there must, I’d have thought, be quite small (indeed the one Peabody flat I’ve been in had very small rooms, but was no less convenient and admirable for that). How interesting that the builders of these flats gave them this touch of grandeur, as if signalling that these dwellings were better – lighter, more hygienic, more spacious – than the accommodation its tenants were probably used to. As if, also, anticipating the upward mobility of the area a century later.

Coleshill, Berkshire

Gone, but not forgotten

Coleshill was the archetypal large house of the mid-17th century. Designed by the gentleman architect Sir Roger Pratt for his cousin, Sir George Pratt, apparently with the advice of Inigo Jones and perhaps also the involvement of John Webb, it had all the features of a grand house of its period – the Italianate proportions with rows of sash windows, the semi-basement storey to raise up the main floors, the strong cornice, the hipped roof with dormer windows, the big chimney stacks, and the best in classical mouldings and details. The interiors were impressive too, especially the grand double symmetrical staircase, lit by a cupola from above.

Alas, one day in September 1952 the whole lot went up in flames. In a chain of events similar to the fire at Uppark in Sussex in 1989, the blaze began during repair work, and house staff and estate workers ferried antiques and paintings out of the house, dodging molten lead from the roof as teams of firemen tried to bring the blaze under control. In spite of their efforts, the building was gutted and – here the resemblance to Uppark ends – the remaining masonry shell was later demolished. So Coleshill is a memory, one that lives on in black and white photographs in old architecture books.

But the great house has left its traces – estate buildings such as a farm and cottages, and these gate piers, which, with their accompanying stone wall, signal to the passer-by that there was once a grand building hereabouts. It’s initially a surprise that these piers are more ornate on the inside, away from the road. And then one realises that they signal no entrance drive and are a few paces away from a ha-ha surrounding the park. Clearly, they were designed to be looked at from the park, perhaps from the house itself, to enhance the view, a charming bit of visual punctuation amongst the water meadows and parkland that were once home to a very special English house.

Coleshill House in the years before the fire