Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025

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.