Stamford, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire Tuscan

‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is plain and empty and about as simple as you can get, with a ‘dentil course’, widely spaced, either made up of the ends of supporting timbers or suggesting their presence.

Why such plain Tuscan architecture for a library? Not, I thought, in some kind of tribute to great Tuscan poets (Dante and Petrarch, for example). But when I researched the building, I found that it didn’t start life as a library at all. What you can see in the photograph was originally the entrance to a market and shambles,* built to designs by local architect William Daniel Legg† in 1804–8 and converted to make the front of a library in 1906. Those windows and the walls that surround them are additions of the latter phase.

So the Tuscan portico was no doubt a simple and relatively inexpensive choice to create a strong statement at the market entrance – an entrance that’s easy to see from a distance among the shops that surround it. It stands out, while providing a generous central span to allow not only people but also goods to pass in and out with ease.There’s no fancy ornament to get damaged by barrows or carts, just good plain building. It’s a landmark on the street. And now it’s a library, its stand-out design is still valuable in what I’m sure is a much valued community asset.

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* A shambles, in this sense, is a row of stalls selling meat, or a row of butchers’ shops often built on the site of former market stalls.

† Casewick Hall, the stables of Panton Hall, and Vale House in Stamford itself are among Legg’s Lincolnshire works. He also designed some gate lodges for Burghley House near Stamford.

Neal Street, London

Advertising your wares

However many times (it must be hundreds, maybe thousands) that I’ve walked along Neal Street in London’s Covent Garden, I never fail to spare a glance for the Crown and Anchor. It’s not a pub I ever patronized when I worked in the district, even when, in the early days, a key requirement for holding down a job in publishing seemed to be the ability to ingest large volumes of alcohol.* Nevertheless, its architecture has that inviting quality associated with the urban variety of the traditional British public house.

‘Traditional’ in this case means a building put up in 1904. There’s much to like in the architecture of this corner-dwelling building – a neat domed corner turret, a datestone high up on the Neal Street side, helpfully telling us when it was built, and what you can see in my photograph: a bright red tiled frontage, liberally supplied with arched windows in that brown wood finish that many associate with similar finishes that once made English pubs so warm and inviting inside. The fashion now is for lighter wood effects (‘Out with the brown furniture!’ cry the mavens of the modernist revival), but the darker look can work well in an Edwardian pub.

The red tiles and dark wood also set off the fine tiled panels advertising what, back in 1904, one could expect to be served from the pumps: Watney’s ales and, as in this panel, Reid’s bottled stout. These panels are done with typical Art Nouveau lettering. What’s Art Nouveau about it? Mainly, the way the letters are proportioned – the way the S and the B have tighter curves at the top, broader ones at the bottom; the high position of the cross-bar of the E; the larger, tapering loop of the R. It’s stylish stuff, but also clearly legible, not over the top.† The other letters visible here are the big gold capitals of the pub name. These are probably standard off-the-shelf letters and may well be made of wood. The way they stand slightly proud of the red wall (producing a bit of shadow), their clarity, and colour are all effective. It’s a shame the R is hanging loose. And was it intentional to make the ampersand slightly bigger? Who knows?

Set all this off with some colourful hanging baskets and no wonder the pub was already attracting lots of custom when I passed one late morning recently. I must return and sample the interior.

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* The culture changed, and both my own alcohol intake and that of most of my colleagues, dropped appreciably as the 1980s progressed.

† The position of the apostrophe, high and oddly tilted, is perhaps a bit eccentric, but it’s my impression that you often see it on lettering of this period.

Covent Garden, London

Uncommon market

An occasional recurring theme of this blog is my memories of places and how buildings and places themselves trigger memories. I alluded to this when I wrote a post about London’s Covent Garden Market a couple of years ago. The Covent Garden area has played a major part in my life. I worked for a publisher in Covent Garden for two stints in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the beginning of the first period, the Resident Wise Woman also worked nearby. It was also sometimes a place to stay on in the evening – I remember it for various meals, summer vertical drinking sessions outside the Lamb and Flag, opera performances, and plays in the Donmar Warehouse Theatre.

Before I worked round there I remember seeing a television film about the area and the market. In my memory, this film of the 1970s was in black and white and was structured around a day in the life of the market. I didn’t remember much else about it, except that it featured evocative shots of market and streets, and of market people and traffic in abundance…and that the background music was Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata, the three movements (fast–slow–fast) of which reflected the changing pace of life throughout 24 mostly hectic hours.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I might be able to find this film on the internet. So I googled it, and found Lindsay Anderson’s marvellous 1950s documentary Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which covers a day in the life of the market in beautifully lit black and white cinematography. But it wasn’t the film I’d remembered. There was no Beethoven music, and Anderson’s film was made in the 1950s (I’d associated my memory with the imminent closure of the fruit and vegetable market in the 1970s), and it was different in other ways I couldn’t pin down. Could there have been another film? I couldn’t find it.

The other day I looked again. And there, among various links to Anderson’s documentary was another. This was a film made for the television arts programme Aquarius, just before the market closed in 1972. First there was a shock: a very staightlaced introduction by presenter Humphrey Burton, square black spectacles and all, revealed that  it was in colour – but then in 1972 I was probably watching it on my mother’s television set, which was black and white, so my memory of it was naturally in monochrome. And when the introduction was over, the clang of a metal shutter resounded and the opening chord of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 8 Opus 13, the Pathéthique, rang out. In no time at all, we were off with people drinking in the Essex Serpent at 5 am, vans being shoehorned into minimal parking spaces (to the accompaniment of much bleeped-out swearing), and business beginning and after the music’s slow, declamatory opening, film and music were off at a canter, and the market’s frenetic daily activity was underway. As it appears on YouTube the film still has its relentless timecode and a persistent background hiss, but was still good enough to make me gasp, ‘This is it!’

It was a revelation, as a succession of images unfolded and came back to me. Lippy greengrocers, old codgers in pubs, all-night cafés, men in a workshop making ballet shoes, other people making market barrows, ceramics, copper pans, bookbindings, suits of armour, and an aristocratic woman arriving for her job in a publishing company, something I’d be doing a decade after the film was made, although not in a chauffeur-driven car. Most uncanny for me was a point where they were talking about traffic and parked cars blocking the way and into my head came the thought, 'In a moment some blokes are going to pick that car up in their bare hands and move it.' And this is what happened. It was striking that there were still some vestiges of the old area very much there when I first worked there (but then I arrived in 1980 so this was not totally surprising): the ballet shoe shop, Collins's ironmongers ('Four candles'), some of the greasy spoons, Rule's Restaurant (roast beef and suet puds for the well upholstered), the opera house, one of the pubs.

The film was made when there was a very real prospect that huge swathes of the area would be demolished to make way for better roads and modern office buildings. The Covent Garden Community Association made the case for more measured change, and this is what we got – the fruit and vegetable market went, and the boutiques and tourist shops arrived, but most of the streets were preserved and much of the area’s architectural character survives. But the community is different. Few people like those drinking in the Essex Serpent or dropping in to chew the fat at the barrow-makers could afford to live in the area now. That’s a cost of the crowded shops and gentrification and tourism on speed. The film's last shot shows a graffito saying ‘This was home’.

Brent Knoll, Somerset

Lambing

The church at Brent Knoll has a terrific collection of bench ends dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. Vigorously carved, they feature a number of different devotional and moral subjects and I’m sharing one of the devotional ones today.

I particularly like the chevron-carved wool of this lamb, and the way its head is turned towards the cross and flag. In some respects this is a familiar image from Christian iconography, a symbol of Jesus and the way he is sacrificed to redeem the sins of humankind that’s found in a variety of locations from van Eyck’s large Ghent Altarpiece to humble pub signs. ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,’ says John the Baptist in John’s Gospel. But there is no ‘standard’ version of the image – sometimes the lamb bleeds, to represent sacrifice, sometimes he is shown with a book, often, as here, he stands holding the flag. The lamb usually has a halo, but here he has not. Another issue for carvers of the lamb and flag was portraying how the creature holds the flagpole. Some versions of the image have the lamb’s leg crooked around the pole, which rests on the his shoulder; in others the pole stands on the ground while the lamb holds it against his body. Here it seems to balance on the lamb’s foot, a lovely touch.

Buildings, and the objects inside them, are also interesting for the personal memories they conjure up, and I cannot resist sharing one such memory. This image, then, reminds me of the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden. This pub was an Ian Nairn special, and I was pleased to discover that it was an office local when I worked in the area, a watering hole we favoured especially in the summer. ‘It’s one o’clock. Anyone want to go and stand outside the Lamb and Flag?’ J, a cherished colleague, gone now, would call out. An hour of vertical drinking – sometimes I have to say rather more than an hour* – would ensue.

* Most of us reformed, in the end: autre temps, autre moeurs…

St Giles High Street, London

In a name

Tucked between Charing Cross Road and Centre Point are a couple of rather dusty-looking blocks of presumably Victorian flats with shops below. They are called Clifton Mansions and York Mansions, and, although I must have passed them scores of times I'd not noticed much about them except to register a general impression of rows of windows and classical details. When we were passing by again the other day, the Resident Wise Woman looked up and pointed at this interesting bit of signage. 'Look at the two kinds of lettering,' she said, and I got out my camera and snapped, holding the thing as steadily as I could in the gloaming. We commented on changing fashions, how someone had felt the need to replace high Victorian curvaceous carved lettering with plainer, blockier, more grotesque capitals to satisfy some late-Victorian taste. And then we continued our journey in the direction of Covent Garden.

I thought nothing more of this until I picked out my picture to post on the blog, took a closer look, and realised that there are in fact three generations of lettering not two. One is, indeed, curvaceous and carved, and part of it, saying 'SIONS' (presumably part of the word 'Mansions') is clearly visible where the later plaster has peeled away. Another is, indeed, in bold capitals, painted on the plaster that has partly peeled, and enough of it survives that we can read 'CLIFTON MAN'. But look closely to the right of 'CLIFTON' and a ghostly 'Y' can be seen. Look closer still (you'll have to click on the image to make it display larger) and there is clearly another word in bold capitals beneath 'CLIFTON'. I think it's 'SALISBURY' but the first 'S' has vanished. And what is that under the bottom line? 'HO'? Could this building have begun as Clifton Mansions, changed its name to Salisbury House, then changed back to Clifton Mansions?

So what was going to be a post about two styles of lettering has developed into a puzzle about naming that has left me mystified. Does anyone know anything about these buildings and their names?

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Update
In the comments section there is now an incredibly detailed and interesting note from Shui-Long (for which many thanks), the conclusion of which is that the building had three successive names:
'Some time between 1895 and 1899 flats were created on the upper floors as no.54 High St, with the name "Dover Mansions"; between 1899 and 1910 this was changed, with no.54 becoming "Salisbury House" and no.57 becoming "Winchester House"; and some time after 1915, the names were changed again to "Clifton Mansions" (54) and "York Mansions" (57).'
The part of the building in my photograph is No.54, so it was successively Dover Mansions, Salisbury House, and Clifton Mansions. Please see the Comments section for more detail.

Covent Garden, London

Every day except Christmas

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I crossed the piazza of Covent Garden every day on my way to and from my desk in the office of a publishing company. Now and then I paused to admire the main market building, the market house designed by Charles Fowler and built in 1828–30, still largely intact but with roofs (glass and slate supported on iron columns) added in the later 19th century. The rows of Tuscan columns and the corner pavilions with their lower storey picked out with banded rustication, defined the outside and are visible in my photograph of the east end of the market house.

By the time I began work in this part of London, the market was already beginning its second life as a tourist attraction, the original raison d'être of the place, the wholesale selling of fruit and vegetables, having been moved to a site at Vauxhall. But I'm old enough to remember the vegetable market at Covent Garden with its nocturnal life, its lippy porters, its pubs open in the mornings when this was unknown elsewhere in England, its surrounding labyrinth of lanes and alleys in which opera-goers heading for the "other" Covent Garden would occasionally get lost.

I was reminded of all this the other night by a chance online viewing of Lindsay Anderson's documentary Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which chronicles in black and white a day in the life of the market. It is all beautifully shot and composed, from the midnight loading of lorries in Kent, to the organised chaos of the arrival of trucks (apples from the Vale of Evesham, flowers from Lincolnshire, mushrooms from the southeast, and so on) in the crowded streets around the market; from the stallholders' careful arrangement of their stock to their moment of relaxation in a nearby café (this place also inhabited by nocturnal "characters" who seem to have sidled in from another, edgier, world); from the first sale to the removal of vegetables and fruit on precariously loaded barrows and packed vans.

Much of what I saw was familiar, from chance late-night crossings of the market years ago and, perhaps, from an earlier viewing of the film itself. But this is where memory starts to play tricks. I hold in my mind a memory of a documentary about the market set to the music of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata, structured around the piece's three movements (fast-slow-fast, mirroring the market's phases of frenetic activity punctuated by an interlude of calm). But there is no such music in Lindsay Anderson's film. Could there have been another documentary covering a day in the life of Covent Garden? Or have I confused Anderson's film with another, on a different subject, but using Beethoven's music? Or have I imagined the whole thing? Googling has not given me an answer. I continue to rack my brains.

Detail, corner pavilion, Covent Garden market, west end

Earlham Street, London

More candles

As a pendant to my previous post about the ironmongers on the Market Place in Uppingham, here is a photograph of the sign above F W Collins, the ironmonger in Earlham Street, on the edge of London’s Covent Garden. In business since 1835 and owned by the same family until just a few years ago, Collins is the archetypal ironmongers, first stop for tools, screws, buckets, oil, etc, etc, for many who work in Central London and for those who live in the Covent Garden area too. The sign is a reminder that traditional ironmongers made – and occasionally invented – things as well as selling them.

Back in the 1980s I worked in an office in Covent Garden as an editor of illustrated reference books, and I or one of my colleagues often had to pop over to Collins to buy items for photo shoots. The shop usually came up with the goods, but not without a lot of banter, which usually involved the shopkeeper looking down on customers coming in to buy screws, say, or saws, with no intention of actually using the things.

I once had to buy a hammer and a sickle for a photo shoot. The response came pretty smartly: “You don’t want a ’ammer and sickle.” What business did I have with such tools of manual toil? But of course it didn’t take long before a hammer of exactly the right shape was found. Then came the question of the sickle: “A sickle? What you want a sickle for?”
“Well, I...”
“I haven’t got a sickle.”
“Oh.” Pause.
“But I’ve got a short-’andled baggin’ ’ook.”
Mr Collins vanished into a pile of garden tools, bins, and buckets, emerging, with remarkably little clanking, holding two bagging hooks, large and small models. To my untrained eye they looked very like sickles.
“Which one d’you want?”
“I’ll take the small one, please.” It looked best with the hammer.
“This? It’s a boy’s one. You want that one. That’s a man’s ’ook, that is.”
Exit “boy”, looking sheepish.