London, Weymouth Street

 

A kind of cocktail

Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do with Queen Anne. It brings together a mix of stylistic influences – a bit of Dutch, some Christopher Wren, a hint of Renaissance – that its historian, Mark Girouard, described as ‘a kind of architectural cocktail’. Architects added to the mixture features such as red brick, white-painted woodwork, fancy gables, oriel windows, and steep roofs to produce an impression that, to the Victorians of the 1870s onwards, represented a breath of fresh air after the stuffiness of the Gothic revival on the one hand and 19th-century classicism on the other.

This house in Weymouth Street exhibits many of the typical Queen Anne features, plus a few more that are equally decorative: circular windows, a dormer with a curvy pediment above it, and big ‘look-at-me’ swags in those eye-catching gables. It’s the work of F. M. Elgood, who built (or added new facades to) many houses in the Marylebone area. He was surveyor to two of the big landowners in this district, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Hop[e-Edwards Estate. This house was built for the former. By the time it was on Elgood’s drawing board, Queen Anne was widespread, influencing the design of even such downmarket buildings pubs. Perhaps for a large town house like this, both architect and client felt that there was a need for some extra bells and whistles, hence those elaborate swags. A heady cocktail indeed. Cheers!

Liverpool, Lime Street

Second among equals

The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas responded with an eye-catching round tower featuring a dome that seems to grow organically from the masonry below; both tower and dome are festooned with curvaceous frames around windows and pediment-like features that proclaim the design’s baroque heritage. The gables are fancy too, with more curves and finials – it’s a shame that neighbouring buildings mean that it’s hard to see much of this skyline against a background of sky.

Fireplace with beaten metalwork surround and panel depicting Viking ships.

Inside, the pub is very much a sibling of the Philharmonic, with much carved mahogany, polished metalwork, and a mix of stained and etched glass. Some of the metalwork is outstanding – the relief featuring Viking ships above the fireplace in my photograph is a good example.

Privacy screen with oval of stained glass. An original bell push is visible on the wall beyond. 

One feature of the layout is a number of wooden privacy screens with Art Nouveau stained glass panels and lamps mounted on metal uprights set into wooden columns. There are also telling memories of a kind of table service not seen in pubs much now (if at all): small bell pushes that enabled customers to call for service without getting up and going to the bar.

Copper-clad bar front, carved mahogany column and elaborate plaster ceiling

Dating from 1907, this pub is a few years later than the Philharmonic, but they clearly have much in common. One difference is the style of plasterwork in the ceilings. While the Philharmonic recalls the Jacobean era (early-17th century), that at the Vines looks to be inspired by designs from later in the same century. It’s no less impressive, and worth a stop to anyone seeking visual or alcoholic refreshment.†

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* The name comes from one Albert Vines, who ran an earlier pub on this site.

London, New Bond Street

 

Free style

A stroll through the gallery and couture retail area around New Bond Street throws up various architectural delights. Here’s just one example spotted on a London visit the other day, sticking out elegantly and self-consciously between a couple of more sober buildings. A neat group of stone-mullioned windows is caught between a large flattened arch that embraces both ground and first floors and a curvy gable that stands out between the flat-topped structures on either side. There’s also quite a bit of carved ornament – looping vines and tendrils, bunches of grapes and so on, all done in creamy Bath stone.

One of the curious things about this sort of building of the early years of the 20th century is that architectural historians find it difficult to put a precise stylistic label to it. Pevsner* goes for ‘free Jacobean’, taking his cue from the mullioned windows and the gable; the listing text describes it as ‘free late Gothic’, perhaps reflecting the double-curving ogee shape of the big arch. The common element in these two descriptions is ‘free’. This was a moment in architecture around 1900–1910 when architects (here Treadwell & Martin) broke away from the Victorian fashion for reviving past styles (aiming in many cases for a kind of ideal version of the past), going instead for something more original. So I see elements of Art Nouveau here alongside the Jacobean windows, in the ornament, in the tall, narrow gable, and in the double curve of the ogee arch, especially the way in which at its top it merges with the flowing ornamental vines. The number in the apex of the arch is also done in an elongated and curvy style that’s typical of Art Nouveau.

There’s something unbuttoned and celebratory about this building, which does things differently from its more straight-laced neighbours – Pevsner catches this feeling in his account of the building on the corner, which represents a ’sobering up after the Edwardian party’. That’s right, and the plain frontage to the left allows its elegant neighbour to shine.

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* By Pevsner here, I mean the revised volume in the Buildings of England series, London 6: Westminster, by Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Manchester, London Road

 

When size matters

I have marked my recent visit to Manchester with a series of posts on three of the city’s small architectural gems – a cinema, a chop house and a library – structures that many people might miss in a city full of buildings that are on such a large scale that they command the view. For my next couple of posts, then, I turn to some seriously big Mancunian buildings.

Hardly has the visitor emerged from Manchester Piccadilly station than the parade of architectural juggernauts begins. In London Road, straight opposite the railway hub, is this Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century. It’s an enormous structure, and the part visible in my first photograph is just one facade of a building with four unequal sides surrounding a large courtyard. In 1906, when it was completed, Manchester was a prosperous city that wanted to give the emergency services a home that was architecturally magnificent and the design, by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham,* fits the bill. There’s the full Edwardian panoply of towers, turrets, domes, classical columns and grand entrances, all in a combination of red brick and glazed terracotta. Rows of windows are testimony not only to the various offices occupied by the emergency services and the coroner’s staff, but also to the many apartments provided. Workers such as firemen, on call night and day, often lived on site, in this case in homes that were better than most of those in the surrounding, rather poor, area. Whatever one feels about the design as a whole, the architects made a noble effort to compose the diverse elements – the large entrance arch, the rows of windows, the recessed section with its pairs of columns, the various towers – to create a convincing composition.

The decorative details, for those with the time to give them the attention they deserve, are likewise impressive. Among the best are above the largest entrance on London Road. Above the great central arch are two groups of allegorical figures. On the left are three figures representing fire: they bear torches and thunderbolts, and their hair is aflame. Opposite are three water-carriers, who offer the solution: at their feet are fishes and foliage grows prolifically above their heads, representing the life that can thrive when the danger of fire has been averted. Figures with similar iconography are set above the central window and within the arch, near the ‘FIRE STATION’ plaque.

This extraordinary building served the emergency services through much of the 20th century, most of it closing when the fire-fighters moved out in 1986. With the closure of the coroner’s court in 1998, the place was finally empty. In spite of a plan to convert it to a hotel, it was left abandoned and deteriorating until recent years and now a new scheme is underway for a mixed-use conversion. I believe work on this is still ongoing.

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* A short-lived local partnership of three architects who practised with various partners and in different groupings. Manchester, a large and growing metropolis, was able to sustain numerous architects – most of the Manchester buildings that I’m posting were designed by firms based in the city.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.

Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

Bungay, Suffolk

 

Oddly enough…

On our recent visit to Bungay in Suffolk we found much to satisfy our architectural curiosity – medieval churches, a market cross, a castle (closed and with the builders in at the time of our visit). But as usual, a casual stroll around the town threw up many less spectacular pleasures. Even so, it was a last-minute impulse that sent me down Chaucer Street, and I’m glad it did, because I found this building in the full-blown polychrome brick style that was popular in the 1860s and 1870s. In that period of architectural showing-off, even a minor building could be as jazzy and eye-boggling as a shopfront from the 1960s.

The frontage bears a large sign saying ‘Masonic Rooms’, giving no doubt about its current purpose. Freemasons have met in Bungay since 1862, when the warrant for the local lodge was issued. Most of us are used to thinking of the Freemasons as a secretive group (though that is much less the case today than it used to be), but the secrecy does not extend to their architecture. In this case, the building stands out proudly from its rather plain red brick and painted brick neighbours. It would be difficult to miss, with its striped archers and patterned stretches of wall in three shades of brick – red, buff, and the shade of grey known in bricky circles as ‘blue’. There’s some stone too, in the gable especially, to add to the rich mix, and the roof is covered in pantiles of two colours. The stone roundel in the gable encloses an octofoil that framed a symbol (perhaps a hand or a coat of arms) that has now worn away.

This building was a small surprise to me, but a bigger surprise ensued when I looked it up in the Suffolk: East volume of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. According to Pevsner, the structure was ‘apparently built for the Oddfellows in 1910, but its exuberant polychromy looking a good forty years earlier’. So this building, not originally masonic at all, was put up when the architectural fashion was for the curves, swirls and plant motifs of Art Nouveau. Who cares now, though, that the building was behind the times? A big ‘thank you’ to the Oddfellows for being exuberant and colourful.

Chester

 

A good front

A couple of posts ago, I noticed an early building serving the automotive industry in Clifton, a structure of 1898 that showed how swiftly architecture began to adapt to house the new business of selling and maintaining cars. This facade in Chester is what remains from another early automotive building, the Westminster Coach and Motor Car Works of 1914. The front that remains shows a combination of practicality (big arches for the easy toing and froing of coaches and motor cars) and lavish display – terracotta cladding bearing rich decoration in the sort of Renaissance revival style popular at the time, with semicircular rusticated arches, dentil courses, balusters, and lots of ornament including scrolls, foliage, fanciful beasts and the occasional human face. The building’s name and purpose are displayed in fancy lettering in the pediment.

The building was actually a replacement of another, similar in design and purpose, which was destroyed in a fire; there had been a coachworks on the site since 1870. Its owners, named Lawton, built their own cars and carriages, as well as selling Mercedes and other vehicles, together with Michelin tyres. Lawton’s also ran a motor cab company. Their building remained a car showroom until the 19709s, after which a new city library was built behind this facade, a structure that was itself recently replaced by the current shopping arcade.

I’m usually pleased when an old building finds a new use – the alternative is so often decay then demolition then the construction of a new building of poor quality and short life. Hanging on to an old facade and erecting a new structure behind it is rarely an ideal solution either. But here I think it works. The current arcade has a landmark for a frontage, with a central arch that provides a grand entrance. The signage could have been handled better in my opinion, but that terracotta extravaganza has been kept, and Chester is the better for it.

Clifton, Bristol

In the vanguard

I like to wander around towns and cities, finding interesting buildings, rather than relying too slavishly on guidebooks, but before our most recent visit to Clifton I did consult the excellent Pevsner city guide to Bristol, to check whether there was anything I should be looking out for. The guide sent me to the memorable 1960s church of All Saints and hinted that there was a late-Victorian baroque garage nearby. Even the book’s enthusiastic description did not quite prepare me for this modest but highly ornate building.

Catching sight of it from some distance, I could make out the combination of brick, bands of stone, shallow arches and fancy finials that told me that I was approaching something special in that distinctive, rather frantic baroque style that was popular from the end of the 19th century into the Edwardian period. Getting closer, and taking in the elaborate decoration above the central entrance, I could appreciate the full effect: scrolls, face masks, cornices, circular window, pediment with extra large mouldings, and foliage draping down and springing up everywhere. Mr E. Edwards (his name lettered in clear, plain capitals but with a hint of the raffish in the curved crosspiece of the ‘A’) must have been proud of his premises. His architects, Drake & Pizey,* did him proud,

Remarkably, this building is dated 1898: that’s about a decade on from the German petrol engines of engineers Daimler and Benz that enabled the earliest vehicles we’d recognise as motor cars, but only three or four years after the first cars were seen on British roads.† The firm of Edwards, who both sold and maintained motor vehicles, were pioneers. Their building was in two parts: showroom on the left, workshop on the right. There are photographs from little more than 20 years ago that show the workshop still in use (as an MoT test centre). The showroom section is still used to display cars. Few late-19th century automotive buildings have outlasted the Daimlers and de Dion Boutons, the Lanchesters and Austins, that were sold or serviced there in the 1890s and early-1900s.

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* A Bristol partnership who also designed a baroque bank in Bristol, which I must also seek out.

† The National Transport Museum now awards the honour of the first car in Britain to a vehicle produced in 1895, but stresses that there are many conflicting contenders. It also depends what you mean by a car. But the point is that cars were very few in these early years and Edwards were true pioneers.

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.

Long Buckby, Northamptonshire

Self-help

The Northamptonshire village of Long Buckby still bears evidence of its part in the Northamptonshire shoe-making trade (at least one small factory building is still visible). During the shoe business’s 19th-century heyday, the place was also a centre of radicalism and religious nonconformity – the Chartist movement was strong here and there were three chapels as well as an Anglican parish church. Long Buckby was also home to Northamptonshire’s first cooperative society, which started in 1858. Part of its 1910 shop survives on a corner in the middle of the village, marked by this handsome sign. The clock, the specially made lettering and the frame with its scrolled brackets and curved top, are now by far the best part of a building sporting replacement windows and modern signs advertising the current occupants.

Although the British cooperative movement began in the late-18th century, cooperatives really took off after 1844. This was when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers established the key principles of their cooperative organization.* So Long Buckby’s Self-Assistance Industrial Society was one of many that were started in the 20 years after the one in Rochdale.

Cooperatives’ main business was usually buying and selling goods following fair trade principles and distributing the profits to the members of the organization. Cooperatives could also offer other services, from banking to housing schemes. The Long Bucky society was one of many such coops that also operated a cinema, showing films to people who, in the days before mass car ownership, found it difficult to travel to a larger town with a purpose-built cinema. Although the showing of movies stopped there long ago, and the building that was once a shop and cinema now houses a gym, there is still a coop in the village operating on similar principles. The sign at the corner is a lasting reminder that such enterprises have a long history. It shows too that though we may be better now at many things than we were in 1910, our sign provision is often far less good than it used to be.

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* For more about the Rochdale Pioneers, follow this link.

Chichester, Sussex

 

Don’t look up!

I’m always telling people to look up in towns – look at old facades above shopfronts, look at windows, look at old signs, look at roof lines, and so on. But what I should really say is ‘Look everywhere.’ In other words, one is liable to make a mistake if one becomes too preoccupied with looking in a single direction alone. I was reminded of this when walking along South Street in Chichester and admiring the White Horse, once a pub, now a Prezzo. Of course, I’d noticed that the brick frontage of the upper storeys looked Georgian (the building turns out to be much earlier, having been refronted in the 18th century). As I was taking this in, the Resident Wise Woman prompted me: ‘Have you noticed the glass?’. I had not, because I was looking up. From yet another era come the late-19th or early-20th century windows, with coloured glass used to delineate white horses.

This use of glass to decorate or advertise the name of licensed premises was quite common in the late-Victorian period and just after.* Coloured glass was also used to advertise the drinks available – sometimes you can find ‘Beers’ or ‘Wines and Spirits’ picked out in coloured glass lettering. Here it’s just white horses, in various depictions – here, on the move (trotting perhaps) in the fanlight; elsewhere at full gallop, or stationary. There are also white horses with flared legs, to indicate they’re shire or ‘heavy’ horses; there are even horses’ heads in some of the windows. They’re all in a white, almost opaque glass, but are mostly surrounded by patterns and scrolls in a mix of colours including amber, dark red and deep blue: the windows must lookl very appealing when the interior is lit up at night.

So when you’re walking along an urban street, by all means look up, but also look sideways, straight ahead, and down. And try not to do this while on the move – it can lead to pedestrian collisions, and worse! And if you start colliding, people might think you’ve had one or more too many at the White Horse…

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* Pub architects also specified elaborate engraved glass. For an example of this, see a post I did a few years ago, here.

Market Harborough, Leicestershire

 

Feel free to admire

Sometimes the purpose of this blog is just to point out things that I like – and I don’t necessarily have much more to say about them than that. This is an example, a former fire station that I passed one morning when walking through the centre of Market Harborough. It was built in 1903 (and then extended, hence the asymmetry of the sign’s position) by Johnson and Coales for Market Harborough District Council and they did a pleasing job on the street frontage. The segmental arches to admit the fire engines have a satisfying curve that’s mirrored in the form of the four upper windows, which must front some beautifully light rooms. The combination of good looks and practicality – the green tiles above a granite base combining toughness with a wipe-down surface, the mix of green and red colouring – is also admirable.

The structure has been converted to a café, and it’s good to see that the building has a useful future now no longer needed by the fire service. And that, from shiny red doors to gleaming green tiles, it’s still looking good after almost 120 years of use. And there’s a bonus across the road: an ambulance station by the same firm of architects with black tiles, white lettering, and a Diocletian window of enormous proportions. The emergency services of early-20th century Market Harborough seems to have been very well provided for.

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Staggering architecture

This is a building that startled me in two distinct ways when I was looking at the wonderful 18th-century clothiers’ houses in Trowbridge the other week. Jammed into a corner between two of these classical almost-palaces, this building is constructed of the same creamy limestone and is also in a classical style. But look at the detail! At the top, a triangular pediment with a cornice that sticks right out from the main wall, producing deep shadows and emphasising the very large dentil blocks that punctuate its lower edges. The bottom of the triangle is interrupted in the middle to make room for swathes of carved ornament that hangs deep down on either side of a window and extends upwards into the triangular space made by the pediment. In the middle there’s a blind oval with four exaggerated stones – one at the top in the position of an arch’s keystone, the others matching it on the bottom and sides, like the cardinal points on a compass. Lower down this end wall run pilasters with deeply cut blocks of stone, each pilaster topped with more carved ornament.

So what was this highly ornate building that caught my attention and made me rush across the street so that I could examine it more closely? At first I took it to be an especially showy example of a clothier’s house, the residence of someone who had more of a taste for the baroque that the apparently more classically minded neighbours on either side. It was, of course, something quite different and much later: the imposing offices of Ushers Brewery, built in 1913 to designs by local architect W. W. Snailum in a style sometimes called brewer’s baroque. Thomas Usher had established their brewery in the centre of Trowbridge in 1824 and by 1913 the firm must have been doing well. By the mid-20th century, they had expanded hugely but were no longer so profitable and were eventually taken over, like so many provincial brewing firms, by a larger company, Watney Mann. When the baroque office building was put up in 1913, Usher’s must have been growing and optimistic of further success: the architecture seems to reflect that.

I began this post by saying that this building startled me in two ways. What was the second surprise? It was more sudden, and less pleasant. When I crossed the road to look at this extraordinary architectural confection more closely, keeping my eyes on the stonework and not on the ground beneath my feet, I tripped on a metal bar meant to stand upright to define a parking space but actually hinged down, parallel to the ground, and fell flat on my face, my smartphone and my dignity slipping from me instantly. The Resident Wise Woman, crossing the road more slowly than I, was soon behind me, and a passer-by was also offering help. I was, thankfully, able to climb to my feet unaided, and although I was bruised on my knees and chin (the main points of impact), I sustained no lasting damage. It has, though, made me warier of looking up without watching where I put my feet, not wishing to repeat what happened when I went to look at this doubly staggering building.

Grantham, Lincolnshire

Bling and beer

Grantham when I last passed through (a few years ago on a summer evening), was as closed as it must have been recently: hardly any shops open, St Wulfram’s church closed, nowhere much opening hospitable doors. Drifting along the quiet High Street, I spotted this, above a shop door adjacent to the facade of what was once the George Inn, a building mentioned in Nicholas Nickleby and bearing a plaque to Grantham’s most famous son, Sir Isaac Newton. The front of this building looks much later than the George. It seems to speak of the fashion for small paned bow windows and restrained classical fancywork that was popular at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The shop window below fits with this but with more ornate detail including foliate carving and some eye-catching glass.

Back in the Victorian or Edwardian period, then, this place was a jeweller’s and one keen to display its upmarket credentials. ‘Goldsmith’, one panel says, while another declares ’Silversmith’. What more could an Edwardian with an appetite for bling require? Diamonds, naturally, and the glass panel in my photograph, directly above the door, reassures us that this is the place to get them. This kind of effect is made by either etching or cutting into the glass to create the lighter areas. The glassworker can then grind the surface to make it opaque, and then add gilding or colour to help the etched lettering stand out.* The result is redolent of the ideas of brilliance and the skilful working of hard, bright surfaces that’s common to diamonds, both glitzy and well made. It’s impressive, to be sure, although not perhaps as upmarket as it seems nowadays. But we get the jeweller’s message, especially when the glazing is backlit by the lights inside the shop so that it glitters invitingly. Who can blame later owners of the premises for retaining the panel?†

And yet this sort of decorative-informative glass was not so exclusive in the 19th century. It’s just the sort of thing we’re apt to find on the most loudly decorative of Victorian pubs, saying ‘Public bar’ or ‘Ales and stouts’ and often garlanded with etched images of flowers, foliage, and even songbirds. How appropriate, then, that this building was recently in use as a Pizza Express and glittering not with diamonds or best bitter but with the fizz and amber glow of Italian beer. Alas! I read online that this branch of the restaurant chain was closed permanently last year. Quiet again.

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* For more on these glass techniques and their use in 19th-century public houses, see Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (Yale Uinversity Press, 1984).

† The building seems to be listed as part of a group with the George, but the shop front is not mentioned specifically in the text of the listing.

Euston Road, London

A fire station – with knobs on

I’ve always admired the Fire Station in London’s Euston Road. It’s something to do with the restrained irregularity of it – all those canted bays sticking out at different heights, and the irregular roofline, and the variety of window sizes and shapes, the whole ensemble held together by the unifying and very Londonish palette of red brick and white Portland stone. Two openings below the delightful lettering (classic stuff, down to the substitution of V for U in ‘EVSTON’) originally marked the entrances to a pair of bays where the fire engines were housed. Later the building was given a single-storey extension to the right containing more such garages, and the two visible in the photograph were turned into offices.

There is more of the same winning mix of brick and stone round the corner on the left – it’s an L-shaped building, but I don’t have a photograph that shows this front. That’s because this is not an easy building to photograph. It’s tall, and demands that you stand back a long way to get it all in the frame. It’s also bounded by major roads – there’s nearly always a big red bus going slowly along Euston Road and blocking the view. And if you step back any further, the fire station starts to disappear behind the buildings on either side of Upper Woburn Place to the south (one such late-20th century block is just visible on the right of the frame).

So to take a photograph that does some justice to the architecture one has to step back – but not too far back – and wait for the buses to pass. I also found it helps to ‘lose’ the rest of the traffic in shadows as much as possible, when the red brick glows against a border of blackness. Who was responsible for this bit of architectural wizardry? The fire station was the work of the London Country Council Architects’ Department at the very beginning of the 20th century. Around this time there was a whole sub-department dealing with fire stations, which were being built in many parts of London. The man on this job is said to have been either H. F. T. Cooper or Percy Erskine Nobbs, who the year after this fire station opened moved to Montreal, where he taught in the university and worked on some major Canadian buildings. If Nobbs was involved, this was Canada’s gain and London’s loss.

Page Street, London

Fit for service

In the years before World War I, few people could afford to run a car. Most car owners were rich, and many were rich enough to employ their own chauffeur, who’d usually double as mechanic – which was important, since motor vehicles were nowhere near as reliable as they are today. If you didn’t have a chauffeur, it was as well to have at least basic maintenance skills, but, in larger towns especially, there was enough demand for the first garages to start in business. Many mechanics worked in a large shed – maybe a wooden or corrugated iron structure – with enough space to work on a car and to store tools. But some garage owners went for something bigger.


One such firm was Charles Jarrott & Letts, who built their garage in London’s Page Street in 1913. Amazingly, the building is still there and traces of the owners’ names are still visible on the front. I didn’t know what it was when I first saw it, but the open door provoked my interest and I did wonder if it was a place where cars were once repaired. It seemed to have what was needed – plenty of space inside without columns getting in the way, so that you could drive cars in and turn them around; good headroom to accommodate larger vehicles and to allow air to circulate and fumes to find their way out; decent lighting (although this was provided by modern strip lights when I passed by).


Browsing through the excellent English Heritage book Carscapes,* I found a little more out about the building and its owners. Charles Jarrott was one of Britain’s first racing drivers, and one of the most successful of the period. Sir William Letts was chairman of Crossley Motors of Manchester, a company that had begun by making engines and industrial machinery, branching into car manufacturing in 1903. They had showrooms in the heart of London, in Great Marlborough Street. The Page Street premises were where vehicles were repaired and serviced.


Like many a garage, it’s not a beautiful building. A substantial cornice and pediment are the main architectural ornament. The rest of the visual interest would have come from the signage – the owners’ names above the double doors and in the pediment above, the single word ‘GARAGE’ in large, widely spaced capitals. Just a little more than the basics, then, but enough to ensure that the building paid its way long after Crossley Motors ceased to be an independent company in the 1940s. Above all, this not quite basic building shows how even such a structure can embody interesting history, reminding us that the early development of the motor car involved a variety of personalities – not just a prominent industrialist and a successful racing driver, but also the many anonymous mechanics who got the cars on the road and kept them there.


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* Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minns, Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England, Yale University Press, 2012

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Put your hands together for Mr Matcham…

During the pandemic, with its various attendant prohibitions on gatherings and unnecessary voyages out, the Resident Wise Woman and I have enjoyed numerous streamed and recorded performances by the likes of the National Theatre as welcome substitutes for the real, live thing. At various times of our lives, the live theatre has been important, and these offerings have been very welcome. But there is nothing like the atmosphere of a live performance in a proper theatre, and once or twice recently I’ve caught myself remembering some of the notable nights out we’ve had in months and years gone by.

Something triggered a memory the other day of my very first visit to the theatre. I was a small boy, and I’d read somewhere about theatres, and seen, I think, an illustration of one in a book. Whatever the book was escapes me now, but the illustration was of a magical place, all gilded decoration, glittering lamps, red velvet, and baroque curlicues – though I would not then have known what a curlicue was, let alone what the term ‘baroque’ means. But I had this image of a theatre in my mind, and when I was told I was going to go to the theatre I hoped it would be somewhere like that. I’m not sure how old I was (eight? nine?), but I know I was (already, so young!) not unprepared for disappointment. It couldn’t, could it, be quite as ornate, as glittering, as wonderfully other and different, as the theatre in the book?

But it was. The interior of the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, was every bit as extraordinary, from the crystal lamp hanging in the centre of the ceiling to the red plush on the seats, from the golden putti on to the balcony fronts to the intricate decoration around the proscenium arch. Little did I know that I was in a building designed by the doyen of theatre architects, Frank Matcham. Matcham, who died in May 1920, had a hand, as builder or rebuilder, in some 150 theatres. It was what he did, mainly, and he did it very well. Not only was he brilliant at this kind of late-Victorian and Edwardian baroque fantasy decoration, but he also understood the theatre. He knew that the whole audience needed to be as near the stage as possible, and that seats with views interrupted by pillars were a pain. He was up with the latest in theatre technology, from electric lighting to crash bars.¶ He could work on a large scale or (as at Cheltenham) on a restricted site. He knew how to make a theatre adaptable – Cheltenham’s theatre, originally built as an opera house, has an orchestra pit that can be covered to fit in more stalls seating when (as is usually the case these days) the show needs no band.

As you can tell, I’m a fan of Frank Matcham. But back in the sometimes absurdly destructive years of the 20th century, many did not share my enthusiasm.* Matcham’s fancy decor (sometimes baroque, sometimes classical, sometimes Italian Renaissance) and traditional theatre layouts fell out of favour and many of his buildings were demolished. I’m glad that a number – the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, the Richmond Theatre, London’s vast Coliseum, Cheltenham’s little Everyman, and some 20 others – still survive and are now much loved.† Matcham’s theatres are, as they say in the business, dark now. But they’ll glitter again, and audiences will be doubly grateful for them, and they’ll resound with laughter and applause.

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¶ Crash bars: the bars on theatre exit doors that open when you push them; Cheltenham’s theatre was the first building to have them fitted.

* An excellent article in The Guardian cites a telling comparison made by architectural historian Andrew Saint. Matcham’s fate has sometimes been like that of Charles Dickens; the novelist was sometimes sneered at by academics (especially F. R. Leavis – but there have long been Dickens supporters in academe) for being popular or lacking in seriousness. Dickens’ reputation is safe these days; that of Matcham is too.

† Matcham’s other buildings include Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom and the magnificent County and Cross Arcades in Leeds.

Photograph: Copyright © 2020 Everyman Theatre Cheltenham 

Dartmouth, Devon

Star turn

I was instantly drawn to the brightly coloured tiles on the outside walls of the Dolphin Inn, Dartmouth. I don’t know much about the building or the tiles, except that it’s a 19th-century inn and was clearly made over in the late-19th or early-20th century.* I’ve posted about tiled pubs before. The dominant colour of the tiles is often bottle-green, but here there’s a different palette – dark blue, a paler blue, turquoise, yellow, and a splash of red around the white star that symbolises Star Ales.

The lettering is striking, and there’s a daringly vertical arrangement for the brewery name. Why daring? Because when you stack the letters on top of each other, thinner letters like the ‘I’ have empty space on either side of them, risking an unpleasing effect. This kind of layout works better with the chunkier Bs, Rs, and Es. I especially like the ‘R’, with its large loop and curvy diagonal leg, and the ‘E’ with its lively serifs and slightly curved cross-bar.

The framing tiles on either side of the lettering are very architectural – they’re pilasters, essentially, from the vocabulary of neoclassicism, but with extra decoration provided by the diamond-shaped panels and all that colour. I’d love to know which company produced the tiles that make this facade sing out, catching the eye – probably even the eye of people who spot them, glistening, from across the market place as they shop, do business, or pass idly by.

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* The Plymouth Breweries company name was first registered in 1889, so the tiles must be after this date.

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.

Marylebone Road, London

Maestoso, etc

I often walk along Marylebone Road and I usually admire the Royal Academy of Music as I pass. The other day I did what I’ve always meant to do, and stopped to take a photograph. It’s a building of 1910 by Sir Ernest George, a good late-Victorian and Edwardian architect known for his country houses and his versatility (his practice designed all kinds of buildings from Golders Green Crematorium to mansion flats) but always rather in the shadow of his even more successful pupil, Edwin Lutyens.

I like the well-mannered baroque of his Royal Academy design. The materials, red brick and Portland stone, are thoroughly at home in London, the facade looks rather like a country house, with its side wings, but is also urban, somehow – perhaps it’s the sense of height conveyed by those vertical ranks of windows and the tall chimneys.

Towards the top it gets very fancy, with those round oeil de boeuf windows, the curved pediment, the reclining figures with musical instruments to hand, and the extraordinary window in the centre of the pediment, that can’t make up its mind whether it’s oval or rectangular. It’s majestic, but also very lively – in musical terms, maestoso, but with decidedly allegro passages. Altogether, it’s a building that enlivens my days when I pass, as the work of some of its alumni enlivens my evenings.