Devizes, Wiltshire

Landmark base

I’ve passed this building a number of times when driving into or through Devizes in Wiltshire – one can’t fail to notice it, but it’s one of those buildings that is easy to pass by because you’re on the way to somewhere else. Coming out of the town the other week, I resolved to find a place to stop, have a closer look, and take a photograph. I knew little about it except that it was a former army barracks and that it was built in the late-19th century.

Its original role dates back to a series of reforms of the British army undertaken in the 1860s and 70s by the Liberal Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone and his Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell. The reforms involved abolishing the practice of buying commissions in the army, changing the way the War Office worked, and setting up reserve forces based in Britain. The barracks in Devizes were home to one of these forces, and was named after the illustrious cavalry commander John Le Marchant. For a long period the building was home to the Wiltshire Regiment, although during World War II it was used as a prisoner of war camp.

The castle-like architecture clearly signals the barracks’ military function – the part in my photograph is clearly built to resemble a castle keep, although longer blocks running to the left and behind this ‘keep’ are less military looking. The long blocks are the barracks themselves – the accommodation for the soldiers. The keep building contained a guard room, detention cells, and storage areas and armouries. The keep is a highly symbolic part of the complex. It is gratifying that it has survived the closure of the barracks and the eventual conversion of the site to housing – a structure that both embodies the past and reminds people today of the old phrase about an Englishman’s home being his castle.

Devizes, Wiltshire

When is a castle not a castle?

...When it’s a toll house.

This small building was erected some time in the mid-19th century, probably the 1840s, to collect tolls on a turnpike road form Devizes to Chippenham. The building is all of a piece, with stone walls, windows with dripstones, and a parapet with battlements that remind one of a castle. But there are three distinct sections. The largest part, to the left in the photograph, would have provided residential rooms for the toll-collector, whose accommodation also took up much of the middle, octagonal, section. However the octagonal shape of this part was also useful for work, because the windows in the canted walls have good views of approaching traffic on either side – the building is actually at a fork in the road the forms the meeting place of the modern A361 (to Trowbridge) and A342 (to Chippenham). Toll houses of this period were often octagonal and the resulting angles of view were often cited as the reason for this unusual shape. Another reason could be the very distinctiveness – an octagonal building stands out on the road.

The third, right-hand, section of the house is a porch, the door of which is now blocked because an entrance on the end is more convenient these days. Another doorway in the side has been blocked too, and the space decorated with a trompe l’oeil image of a half-open door – you’d not want to step out of it these days, into the path of a passing bus. The porch afforded some shelter for the toll-collector on rainy or cold days. In the road, there would have been a gate and, when the toll-collector saw traffic approaching, he could lurk here in the dry until whatever it was – coach, carriage, cart, horse rider, pedestrian – was at the gate. He could then come out, collect the traveller’s money, and open the gate. Nowadays this is a busy stretch of road – getting a picture of the building without any cars, lorries or buses in front of it entailed some patience. Although it has been altered and now seems rather marooned between the two main roads, this castellated building still offers a glimpse of a past way of life.

Devizes, Wiltshire

 

Now showing…

Entranced on previous visits to Devizes by such buildings as the delightful stone-fronted Parnella House and the massive Victorian red-brick brewery, I’d overlooked the cinema, which stands between these two landmarks. When I did look at it, I found it pleasant but rather enigmatic. There are Art Deco things about it – notably the very plain pilasters or piers, which run right up to the parapet, where the central ones pierce the skyline. But the facade also has the look of an earlier era – the swags and the various curved dripstones feel to me Edwardian. Likewise the rather demure torch-bearing statues that stand on brackets above the cinema’s name: they’re a far cry from the celluloid lasciviousness of some Art Deco cinema decoration, while also avoiding the stylization or symbolism common in other 1930s cinemas, although the faux-flaming torches do feel to me a bit more akin to Art Deco.

The Devizes cinema, in its first incarnation, was an early one, opening, according to the excellent Cinema Treasures site, in 1912 as the Electric Palace. The same website also tell us that the cinema was enlarged in the late-1920s – could this be the date of this white, rather chaste facade? The latest edition of the Pevsner Wiltshire volume actually gives the date of the building as 1932 and the architects as Satchwell and Roberts of Birmingham. So what I think we have here is something very much of the Art Deco period but in a style that fits the more restrained setting of a country town better than the sometimes brash, sometimes stylish full-blown Art Deco efforts of the architects who worked for the Odeon or Gaumont chains. The current owners, according to press reports earlier this year, are said to be intending to upgrade the building. One hopes that they produce plans that are both viable and respectful of the frontage and setting, so that this modest but elegant cinema can serve the town once more.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Boot’s Corner

One result of spending some time thinking and writing about the history of shops is that one becomes aware of the way different multiple stores liked to design their shop fronts – the light oak window frames of W. H. Smith, the muted, modernised neo-classicism of Marks and Spencer, and so on. Among the best of the bunch were a number of Boot’s branches in town centres, which were often placed on corner sites and sometimes adorned with statues of famous historical figures with a local connection. When I looked up at the corner of St John’s Street and Wine Street in Devizes, it wasn’t long before I guessed I was looking at a former branch of Boot’s.

In the 19th century, Boot’s began to diversify their range beyond the company’s core pharmaceutical products, taking in everything from cosmetics to photographic processing. As a result, they needed larger stores, often with room for an upper sales floor. They also chose corner positions to take advantage of higher footfall and shop windows facing in two different directions. The Devizes branch was one such corner shop, with the added feature of a round tower to emphasize the building and turn it into something of a landmark.

Then there were the portrait busts in roundels on the upper walls. Some of the more spectacular Boot’s stores (for example, in Newcastle, Derby, and Bury St Edmunds), boasted full-length statues. The Devizes branch, in a smaller town, made do with busts, but they’re still impressive. The busts form part of a decorative scheme involving very fancy window surrounds, running even to putti beneath the top-floor windows, and pilasters that extend up the full height of the building. The busts, set in garlands, are at the tops of the pilasters. The two busts in my photograph portray Hubert de Burgh and Edward I. Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent in the early 13th century, fought alongside Richard I during the third crusade, encouraged King John to add his seal to Magna Carta and became chief Justiciar of England. However, his enemies brought about his removal from office and he found himself imprisoned – in Devizes Castle, which is how his portrait came to be displayed on the walls of the Boot’s store in the town. The reason for Edward I’s presence here may be that the town sent two representatives to this king’s 1295 parliament, the so-called Model Parliament, because it set the precedent of boroughs sending two representatives to Westminster; for some historians, this makes the Model Parliament the first such representative assembly in England’s history.

One gets the impression, looking at the decoration on this building’s facade, that it was built to last and that Boot’s intended to occupy the store for an extended period of time. Although they no longer do, the facade remains as a reminder of the times when retailers put real effort into the design and construction of their shops, making the country’s numerous ‘Boot’s Corners’ a pleasure to look at.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Chapel style

Somewhere in the back of my mind there’s the image of a stereotypical nonconformist chapel – the classic design with a symmetrical, vaguely classical brick-built frontage with a central doorway, two tall, round-headed windows and a hipped roof. Chapel design, though, is much more diverse than that stereotype suggests. Town chapels, especially, were often grander than my mental image. Here’s Sheep Street Baptist chapel in Devizes, with its own kind of Gothic grandeur, a building of 1851–2 designed by an architect called Hardick. The building’s plain pinnacles and extra-tall lancet windows mark it out as a typical Victorian version of the first phase of Gothic, 13th-century Early English.

For all its Gothic revival style, this building doesn’t really look like a Church of England church of the Victorian period, perhaps because it lacks a bell tower and has a west door rather than the side entrance favoured by the C of E. It certainly stands out though, this elegant chapel, and no doubt it was meant to advertise itself. The first minister to the united Presbyterian and Baptist congregation that worshipped here was Charles Stanford, a noted preacher who built up the congregation in Devizes  before moving to London where he became minister of a chapel in Camberwell.

Stanford became a well known Baptist leader, served as president of the London Baptist Association, and wrote several books – biographies, memoirs, and The Wit and Humour of Life: Being Familiar Talks With Young Christians. If his books are no longer read, his building is still standing out and reminding us of the variety of design approaches adopted by the nonconformists in the 19th century. It’s still in use by the Baptist congregation too.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Letter set (3)

Back before Christmas, I was finding examples of the various kinds of letters found on English buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries. My last example, inspired by a recent visit to Stroud in Gloucestershire, was of the Egyptian letter, with its slab serifs. Here's another type, the clarendon, in which which those serifs are linked to the main strokes with a little curve, to make the whole letter less blocky. These huge letters on the sign of the Bear Hotel in Devizes are some of the biggest I've sen recently – there is absolutely no mistaking the identity of this building, and the huge size of the sign means that I can blow it up with ease so that you can see the little curves clearly on the T, E, and L.

Clarendons also work well on a much smaller scale and are often used on the cast metal signs bearing the names of streets. Although thousands of these old cast signs have been replaced by less attractive plastic ones (on the grounds of saving repainting costs, presumably), there are quite a few still around. SIgns on the gigantic scale of the Bear Hotel, forming a stripe right across the front of the building, are also quite unusual these days, although the Victorians had a liking for them, often covering commercial buildings with big signs of all sorts. The proliferation of advertising and similar signs is nothing new – but at least painted signs like this one show more care and flair than modern plastic ones.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Piper and after

One of my favourite blogs is Adventures in the Print Trade, in which Neil Philip, proprietor of the online gallery Idbury Prints, shares some of his discoveries and enthusiasms. Neil recently posted about some images of 1940s Devizes by John Piper and I was particularly pleased to see these prints because I’d already read Piper’s short essay about the town reprinted in his book Buildings and Prospects (the dust jacket of which is illustrated with versions of some of the Devizes images). In the essay, Piper praises the town’s ‘good minor architecture, magnificent museum (contents not building), brewery and tobacco factory (sensible, small-scale manufactures for such a town), branch-line railway, good inns and bars, hotels… fair churches and chapels, canal of handsome appearance, sensible plan, bracing air, good-looking inhabitants, cinemas (old-fashioned and super, the super not ostentatious).’ If the place has lost some of these amenities since Piper wrote in 1944, it retains enough of them, from inns to churches, to make it recognisably the same town.

Piper’s approach in his illustrations is similar to the way he worked on prints of towns such as Penzance for the Architectural Review. He shows us groups of buildings, throwing light on how they relate to one another along a street, and conjuring up in the process a powerful sense of place. I’ve chosen a couple of examples from Neil’s collection to show what I mean. The simple outlines, blocks of colour, and rapidly sketched details give us the essential information – the shapes of the buildings, their materials, key details such as windows and doors. We quickly grasp the character of the place – a mix of Georgian and Victorian buildings in stone, brick, and colourwash, with a minimum of modern modification.

The prints also appeal to me because they bring out an essential difference between the way an artist like Piper worked and the way I work when I point my camera at the same place. Piper could include or exclude anything or anyone he liked from his sketchbook. My camera is not so selective. So when I last went to this town on a busy Saturday morning (and I was pleased to see that the place was busy and the shops well used), I tended not to take general views like Piper’s which would have been full of cars and shoppers, but to concentrate on individual buildings when there happened to be fewer passers-by in front of them.


So I went, for example, for the Old Town Hall (also known as the Cheese Hall), visible in Piper’s print down a street of the Market Place itself. This George II building (see my photograph above) shouldn’t work really – the old open arches of the ground floor have been glazed to make offices for a bank. And even in its original state the building was a cobble: an even number of arches (and, therefore, a column in the middle of the façade) is a no-no in Classical architecture. But from chunky ground floor to sculpted pediment it holds together. And look how Piper, in the upper print at the top of this post, has caught the context – the distant tower of the church to the right, the elaborate shop (a former Boots) with domed white tower to the left, and the framing buildings on either side.


Likewise with Piper’s view of the side of the Market Place containing the Black Swan, a coaching inn dating from the 1730s. His sketchy style doesn’t show as many details as a photograph might, but he’s got the gist of it. And the setting – including the streamlined 1930s Co-op to the right, now replaced, as you can see in my photograph, with a blander building, no doubt designed to “fit in” to the townscape, but sadly losing the struggle.

There’s so much more in Piper’s Devizes prints, and looking at them again makes me want to revisit the town and see what other details noted by the artist are still there. These small works show that Piper, whether he was producing a very worked-up, consciously grand, print or painting of a big country house, or these more modest images of a market town, could pack in telling details – and make us look, and look again with fresh eyes.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Beer and behemoths

Whenever someone decides to put up a new building in the middle of one of our historic towns and villages, the temperature of the inhabitants is apt to rise. New buildings are seen by many as a threat, and the greatest threat of all is posed by buildings that don’t ‘fit in’. People recognize certain key elements that buildings contribute to the character of a place – elements such as style, scale, and materials. A city like Bath, for example, is dominated by Georgian architecture no more than a few storeys tall, most of it faced with local limestone; a tall modernist skyscraper made of concrete would look out place there. And if someone came along with plans for a house made of concrete blocks in a Cotswold town, or a gigantic brick tower in a Warkwickshire ‘black and white’ village, or a creation in glass and steel amongst the weatherboard and brick of the rural southeast, hackles would rise.

Devizes, this conventional wisdom goes, is a stone-built market town. The houses and shops of its central streets are mostly three storeys or less, and the character of the place owes much to creamy limestone – and a bit of matching pale render here and there. What, then, are we to make of the brick-built behemoth at the end of the market place – not a new building but certainly not one that blends into the townscape? At around twice the height of the neighbouring houses and several times the width, this monster ought to have destroyed the town centre. But I don’t think it has. I think it makes a positive contribution to the town centre (and not just because of the beer it produces, to which I have a certain attachment, because the first pint I ever drank was a pint of Wadworth’s).

The Northgate Brewery in Devizes was designed by the firm’s proprietor, Henry Wadsworth, and completed in 1885. It’s functional – the large-scale brewing process called for generous height and a big footprint. And its red bricks were no doubt economical. It was a practical building, then, that must have pleased its original owners. But what do other people think about it? Alec Clifton-Taylor (in Another Six English Towns) found it ‘perhaps a little overpowering, but…undeniably a building of character’. John Piper praised it in Buildings and Prospects. Pevsner (in the first edition of his Wiltshire) reserved judgement, alliteratively noting the ‘big brick brewery’.

Not for the first time, I find myself with Alec Clifton-Taylor. It is a bit overpowering, especially close-to. But architecture is not only about blending in to the surroundings. It's also about standing out. And seen from the other side of the market place the brewery certainly does stand out, even though its red colour also echoes the mellower Georgian bricks of the non-stone houses that are scattered here and there. For Devizes is not simply a stone town. It’s on the edge of the stone country and bricks find their place here too, just as there is a place for beer as well as wine in the town’s many watering-holes. Devizes is diverse and big enough to accommodate its brewery, and be the better for it.

Devizes, Wiltshire

House of healing
This is one of the many beautiful buildings on the Market Place in Devizes, a town whose architecture – houses, churches, inns, halls, brewery – is some of the best in the region. It’s called Parnella House, was built in around 1740, and in the early-19th century was home to a surgeon, a man called W. Clare. The façade is an interesting ragbag of elements in which a pair of bays with Venetian windows are sandwiched between the formality of that ground-floor colonnade and the tiny triangular pediment at the top. An eventful frontage, then, and one which holds its own amongst the many minor architectural gems in this large market place.


And as if all that wasn’t enough, the façade also accommodates a statue of the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius (or Aesculapius, to give the Latin form of his name) above the doorway. The usual symbols of Asclepius are a pair of snakes twisted around a staff, although he sometimes also has attributes such as pine cones, or a she-goat and a dog (commemorating one myth of his upbringing that tells how he was abandoned as a baby and how a nanny goat suckled him while a dog protected him). This Asclepius carries a scroll and has one snake, curled around what looks like a young tree trunk.

There’s something rustic and not too sophisticated about this statue, exemplified in the way the god’s head seems to be propping up the keystone in the crisply cut Gibbs surround that frames his image. It’s a classical subject, but the classics were just there, part of people’s background, and Asclepius could look like you or me or a farmer from the local fields. It’s good to see him still here.