Combrook, Warwickshire

Ornamental

Thoughts of St Augustine, Kilburn, were still in my mind recently when I visited Combrook, a village in Warwickshire, not far from the Fosse Way. Combrook was an estate village of Compton Verney and seems to have had a lot of attention paid to it in the mid-19th century, when a number of cottages were built or rebuilt, a school was erected, and the church given a new nave. The architect of the church was John Gibson, who was also at work making alterations to the great house of Compton Verney in the early 1860s. Gibson gave the church a striking west front, a visual highlight in the centre of the village.

The style of this front is Gibson’s very ornate version of what the Victorians often called ‘Middle Pointed’, that’s to say the phase of Gothic fashionable in the first half of the 14th century. Elaborate window tracery, naturalistic carving, and ogee arches are typical features. However, this frontage is hardly typical. It’s a Victorian throwing everything at a small church – very fancy tracery (‘overcusped’, says Pevsner), unusual shapes in the form of a rose window and a pair of ‘circular triangles’, a very ornately carved ogee doorway, the small overhanging turret with its spirelet, and outward-leaning angels flanking both the turret and the doorway.

This is all very impressive in a slightly gawky way, and the oddity continues with the treatment of the aisle roofs, which consist of multiple gables rather than a single lean-to, a design that produces an odd junction between the downward-sweeping angle of the west front and the gables that stick out behind it. Gibson’s work here is a little like that of the Victorian ‘rogue architects’ such as S S Teulon – inventive, ornamental, unafraid to be different from the accepted Gothic models – but without Teulon’s polychrome dazzle or his skill in handling three-dimensional forms.† For all this, the overall effect is pleasant, rather like a large garden ornament, and an admirable focal point for this attractive village. 

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* This is the phrase used by the architect and writer Harry Goodhart-Rendel to describe an adventurous and sometimes outré group of Victorian church architects. For my post on a church by Teulon, look here.

† Gibson’s best known church, the ‘marble church’ at Bodelwyddan, in the lower Vale of Clwyd, also has very elaborate tracery and carving, but is more conventionally roofed and massed. Gibson is most famous for designing banks, but was clearly much more versatile than this suggests.

Nunhead Green, London

Whizz and bang

Now we’ve got over Hallowe’en, it’s time to look forward to a festival I’ve more time for: Guy Fawkes’, the night of bangs and whizzes. I’ve always liked a firework, and I’ve been to some memorable Guy Fawkes’ dos in my time, which have ranged from occasions of Handelian gentility to some raucous, politically incorrect, and highly enjoyable displays in Sussex and Kent. And they remind me of something else. Long ago I lived in southeast London, not far away from Nunhead, an area on the edges of SE4 and SE15 known, if it’s known at all, for being the home of one the capital’s great Victorian cemeteries. Nunhead is also notable for Soper’s, one of London’s best fishmongers, and for the pub that has one of my all-time favourite names: the Pyrotechnist’s Arms.

The Pyrotechnist’s Arms is named in homage to Brock’s, probably Britain’s oldest fireworks manufacturers, who used to have their factory nearby. Brock’s began in Islington in the early 18th century and moved south of the river, where they had factories at various locations including Sutton and Nunhead, in the 19th century. They supplied fireworks to the relocated Crystal Palace as well as producing more serious explosives (they sold cartridges to the French army during the Franco-Prussian War). The company seems to have left London in 1910, but lasted until 1988, when it was bought up by Standard Fireworks.

This pub name seems to be the only visible link between this little known part of London and its former industry. I like the group of plotters on the sign – especially the way the artist went to town on their outrageous headgear and the fact that they’ve placed their risky candle on top of the barrel of gunpowder. It’s a reminder that many pub names and signs have links to bits of local history. But few as incendiary, or as unusual, as this one.

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My overseas readers may find it helpful to be told that Guy Fawkes’ Night, otherwise known as Bonfire Night or simply November 5th, commemorates the foiling of a plot hatched by a group of Catholics who planned to blow up Parliament on November 5th 1605, when the Protestant monarch James I was in attendance, before installing the king’s nine-year-old daughter as a Catholic head of state. Celebrations involve fireworks and bonfires.

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Compton Verney, the Warwickshire country house and art gallery about which I've blogged before, is holding an exhibition of fireworks until 11 December.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

The ice man returneth

In 1626 the great writer and polymath Francis Bacon discovered that he could preserve a fowl by packing it with ice and snow. Tragically, the philosopher caught flu and died after his experiment with the fowl, but soon after this sad episode the use of ice caught on in the kitchens of the rich. Ice was used not just for food preservation, but also to make chilled desserts and to cool wine. If you had a country house with a lake (or special ice ponds), you had a ready source of ice in the winter. To keep the ice for use in the warmer months, you needed dedicated storage: enter the ice house.

Ice houses were small structures built to keep in the cold. A typical design consisted of a brick-lined chamber sunk partly into a hillside (or into an earth mound) and roofed with thick thatch. Some architects specified a double wall, for extra insulation; there was generally a drain to carry away surplus water; and there might also be a brick-vaulted entrance corridor with a door at either end, to cut off the ice chamber from the warm outdoors. Ice was packed carefully into the ice chamber, a job supervised by the head gardener, who would ensure that there were only the tiniest of gaps between the blocks of ice, to minimize air pockets and discourage thawing.

The ice house at Compton Verney, built in 1771–2, recently restored, and resplendent under its round thatched roof, is a beautiful example. It has a well constructed brick-lined interior and even though visitor access is to the entrance corridor not the ice chamber itself, it’s pleasantly cool in there. And one can see that, if Osbert Sitwell, comparing his family’s ice house at Renishaw to one of the vast stone-vaulted tombs at Mycenae, was laying it on a bit thick, he had a point – they really are very imposing interiors.

It was a bonus, when visiting Compton Verney to see their current exhibition of pictures by Ben Nicolson and Alfred Wallis, to find this ice house restored, a reminder of the time when Compton Verney was not an art gallery but a flourishing country house and an indication of the ingenuity of those who supplied its inhabitants with food and wine.


Above Entrance corridor, Compton Verney ice house

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There is more about the restoration of the Compton Verney ice house here, and more about Compton Verney itself here.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Palace of art

When I first came across Compton Verney the place had an air of melancholy mystery. The great 18th-century house can be glimpsed through trees from a road the joins the Fosse Way, the old Roman route that runs northeast from Cirencester to Leicester and on to Lincoln. Rows of sash windows and gigantic corner stones made the place look imposing in the manner of a house by Sir John Vanbrugh, but in the 1970s it all looked rather down at heel. What was this place, and who lived there?

The building that I could make out through the trees had been begun on the site of an older house in the early years of the 18th century for the 12th Lord Willoughby de Broke. The designer isn’t known, but the strongest candidates (apart from Vanbrugh) are William and Francis Smith of Warwick, successful Midlands master builders who often also acted as architects. What is known is that in the 1760 the 14th Lord Willoughby de Broke had the place remodelled by Robert Adam. It was Adam who was responsible for turning what had been a courtyard house into the striking U-shaped building that still exists.

In the 1970s, when I first saw the place, no one lived there. Requisitioned by the army during World War II, Compton Verney had stood empty ever since, and could easily have been one of the hundreds of country houses that were demolished in the years after the war. But the building’s absentee owner held onto it, and it was finally bought and turned into an art gallery with funds from the Peter Moores Foundation. The architectural firm Stanton Williams were commissioned to convert the interior and build an extension – modern in idiom but discreet and complementary to the original building – on the site of former service buildings.

After almost 50 years of neglect, Compton Verney has found a fitting role. The building houses a permanent collection that specializes in a number of interesting areas of art history (highlights: Chinese bronzes, British folk art) and puts on temporary exhibitions that keep one going back. No doubt one day the place will have me blogging again, too. The conservation work, which embraces the Capability Brown landscape in which the house sits, is now turning to the ice house in the grounds. I wonder if they will find a way of showing visitors the impressive sunken brick-domed interior. Anyone for CCTV?

Go here for more about Compton Verney and its history.