Coventry, Warwickshire

Variety

It has become almost second nature to me to seek out the atypical buildings in places that I visit – to look for Victorian architecture in Regency Cheltenham, to find Art Deco in Georgian Bath, to keep my eyes open for the unexpected, not just the Shakespearian, in Stratford-upon-Avon. In Coventry, of course, there’s plenty to look at from the post-World War II rebuilding. But the place also has some buildings that survived the Blitz – medieval town gates, Georgian houses, and this, the former Gaumont-Palace, from the golden age of cinema.

It was opened in 1931 and its facade is very much of its time, with its moderne straight lines and a colour scheme combining off-white and eau de nil. Towards the top, there are four capital-like flourishes that bracket what look like stylized palm or lotus leaves with a pair of scrolls. This kind of detail is from the vocabulary of Egypt-influenced ornament that became ultra-fashionable in the late-1920s after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the craze for all things ancient Egyptian. Cinemas, where glamorous decoration was just the ticket, were prime sites for this sort of adornment.

The Gaumont-Palace began as a cine-variety venue. This would offer a combination of filmic and live entertainment. An evening programme of a main feature film, a second feature or B movie, and perhaps a newsreel, would be complemented by a sequence of live acts – the comedians, singers, magicians and the like that were the mainstays of the 20th-century theatrical grab-bag known as ‘variety’. Audiences would get a long and varied night out in glamorous surroundings, for a couple of shillings a head.

Like so many buildings in Coventry, the cinema was damaged during the massive air-raid of November 1940 and there was more damage in another attack the following year. But the building survived and was repaired, and continued to screen films after the war. With further modifications (including the fitting of multiple screens), it carried on as a cinema until the end of the 1990s, being converted in 2000 for the media and performing arts students of Coventry University. It is now named after that great woman of the theatre, Ellen Terry, who was born in Coventry.

Leeds

Gigantic Leeds (3)

In his book Historic Architecture of Leeds, Derek Linstrum begins his entry on this building with the words, ‘One of the best-known exceptions to the rule of simple functional buildings for industry is Temple Mills.’ Which is true, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. Little could be further from the usual functional brick walls and repeating rows of regular windows of the normal Victorian textile mill than this facade, with its slightly sloping walls, massive columns with papyrus or lotus capitals, and winged solar discs. It’s riding a wave of the ancient Egyptian revival, and it’s the work of Joseph Bonomi, who came from Durham but had Italian ancestors on his father’s side. That father, also Joseph, was an architect, and there was a brother, Ignatius, who was a prominent architect too. The young Joseph was better known as an artist and Egyptologist. He would have been familiar with the temple at Edfu, on which the facade of Temple Mills was based. Massive and weatherbeaten, his building is one to stop you in your tracks, and no doubt the mill’s owner, John Marshall, wanted to make just such a memorable statement. In a city of big buildings, it more than holds its own.

But a factory is more than a statement, and this mill were unusual in another way. Inside, it’s laid out very much along up-to-date lines for 1838, with rows of iron columns well spaced to accommodate machines for spinning linen yarn. In addition, as a single-storey building, it can be top lit, so Bonomi, or perhaps the engineer with whom he worked, John Combe, specified row upon row of glazed domes set in vaults, an brilliant and original way to spread natural light on to the factory floor beneath. In a final bravura touch, grass was grown on the roof, and a flock of sheep ranged across it, stepping between the domes and cropping the greenery to keep it short. This too is a functional feature – the grass roof helped maintain the humidity that was beneficial to flax-working, keeping the thread supple – and the sheep helped maintain the grass. As sheep don’t take to climbing stairs, a hydraulic lift was installed to get the creatures up to their aerial grazing grounds. Add to this steam heating and baths for the workers, and you have the model of a 19th-century functional mill, albeit in an ancient Egyptian package.

‘You couldn’t make it up,’ as they say. But Bonomi, Combe, and Marshall did make it up, all 18 Egyptian columns and 66 glass domes and what was, when it was built, the largest room in Europe. So the mill was much admired, but it was never as successful as Marshall hoped. A slump in textile prices, together with a period of poor management and poorer industrial relations, saw the business decline and the mill was sublet in the 1870s. Empty and fragile now, it remains a memorial to the optimism and flair of its creators and the city as a whole, a place I’ve called Gigantic Leeds.

Louth, Lincolnshire

Egyptians

While still on Lincolnshire themes, it struck me that when in Louth I really should take a photograph of at least one of the cast-iron street signs that are a feature of the town. These modest items of street furniture make a huge difference to the character of a place. So many towns have modern street signs, made of thin metal (or even plastic) – no doubt cheap to produce and easy to clean and maintain, but totally lacking in character and without much in the way of visual flair.

Louth is one of the places that have preserved a high proportion of their Victorian signs. They score highly for clarity – the bold, clear, lettering sees to that. They are distinctive, because, although other towns have this style of sign, none are quite like the ones in Louth. They are clearly very durable. They do need looking after – repainting every so often, particularly. But it’s a price worth paying in my opinion.

The lettering, by the way, is in the style old-fashioned sign writers and those who care about the design of these things mostly know as Egyptian. That has nothing to do with ancient Egypt, but everything to do with the design of the letters, which are distinguished by the way the serifs have no curves (or very minimal curves) – they are basically short, straight-line embellishments to the ends of the main strokes.* These particular Egyptians are squarish in proportion, and have some variation between the width of the strokes, but not extreme variation. They work really well painted in black against the white background, within the slender black frame line of the whole sign. The other lovely touch is the incurving corners – another bit of distinctiveness. Hats off to Louth for preserving these exemplary signs.

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* If this was a font for printing, I’d be describing the letters as having ‘slab serifs’. But I take ’slab serif’ to be a term from printing and typography. These signs, on the other hand, come from the world of the sign writer and sign-maker, so I use the term traditionally used in that world: Egyptians.

Essex road, London

The reel world

My recent trip to London found me within a couple of streets of Essex Road, so a short detour took me here. I knew there was a former cinema in the street, and had read that it was a good example of ‘Egyptian art deco’, but even this didn’t quite prepare me for this street frontage. Welcome to the former Carlton Cinema in all its glory. A fine work of 1930 by George Coles, an architect best known for the art deco cinemas he designed for Oscar Deutsch of the Odeon chain. Here, though, he was working for the independent cinema company C & R Theatres; the Carlton later became an ABC cinema, then a bingo hall, then a church.*

A vast expanse of white Hathernware ceramic cladding is given the Tutankhamun-accents that cinema (and also factory) designers loved in the late-1920s and early-1930s: elaborately-topped columns,† brightly coloured triangles, striped concave cornices rounding everything off at the top. Looking a little closer there are also decorative relief details around the window openings and a colourful zigzag strip running above the central row of windows.

I alluded to the boy-king Tutankhamun knowingly, because it’s said that the fashion for Egyptian decoration was given a boost by the opening of his tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. Egyptian was also attractive to cinema owners because it was seen as ‘exotic’, and the exotic, romantic, and otherwise unfamiliar and lavish were the kinds of look that they liked to cultivate when taking their customers to another world. Entering the ‘reel’ world of the movies usually entailed leaving the real world outside in the street. But for art deco cinema designers, facades like this were a way of advertising the exotic riches within, and giving even passers-by a taste of movie magic.

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*There’s more on the Carlton, Essex Road at the Cinema Treasures site, which reveals that the venue opened in 1930 with Harold Lloyd in Welcome Danger and closed in 1972 with Reg Varney in Mutiny on the Buses. O tempora o mores!

†Readers who click the factory link will see how the column tops on the Carreras tobacco factory in Mornington Crescent are more lotus-like than the rather stylized ones on the Carlton cinema. The same goes for the more leaf-like decoration on the bases of the factory columns. Since there's nothing ‘authentic’ about these Egyptian buildings, however, this doesn’t detract from the cinema’s design. 

Great Marlborough Street, London

Beau ideal

The light was already going when, just before Christmas, I walked past Liberty’s along Great Marlborough Street, glanced for the umpteenth time at the building formerly known as Ideal House, and remembered that I’d never taken a photograph of it. So the conditions were less than ideal for capturing this monumental art deco block, built as offices for the National Radiator Company in 1928–29, but I went ahead anyway, doing my best to avoid bumping into people as I backed towards one of Liberty’s windows to get the building in the frame.

Ideal House (it’s now called Palladium House) was designed by Raymond Hood and Gordon Jeeves as a smaller cousin of New York’s headquarters of the American Radiator Company, of which the National Radiator Company was the European offshoot. The company started in the 1890s, just as central heating using boilers and radiators was catching on, and did well in both North America and Europe.  In the interwar period, more and more houses were being fitted with central heating: to many people it seemed like the latest thing, even though it had been around for decades by then, and a landmark building in the latest, swankiest style must have seemed to project just the right image.

The most lavish finishes were employed. The walls are covered in polished black granite (in the right light it looks very black) and the cornices and lower window surrounds are done out in gold enamel cladding with touches of red and green. These details are in the Egyptian style (art deco could be very modern and very ancient at the same time): Egyptian decoration was very fashionable in the late-1920s, in part because the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb had got so much publicity. So the radiator-makers would have felt they were getting the latest thing – and in their corporate colours, black and gold, too. Nearly 80 years on, the building is still an eye-catcher, even if most passers-by have eyes only for the seductive windows of Mr Liberty.

Fleet Street, London

Getting your message across

I’m in the process of preparing a course about architectural ornament, and looking through my photographs to find examples of ways in which 20th-century architects turned against the modernist call in the 1920s for architecture that should be functional and devoid, or largely devoid, of the decorative elements that had so preoccupied their predecessors. There are numerous ways in which they made this turn, of course, one of them being the increasing use of ancient Egyptian design as a source: think various cinema facades and factories of the late-1920s and 1930s. To make this point in the past I’ve often used a personal favourite – the old Carreras tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent, with its Egyptian columns and wonderful black cats. Here’s another example, the former Telegraph building in Fleet Street.

The Telegraph building was designed for the newspaper of that name by Elcock and Sutcliffe with Thomas Tait and built in 1927–8. It has a very bold, ultra-imposing facade with a row of giant fluted columns topped by carved Egyptian capitals. Bands of abstract carved ornament run along cornices and over window lintels. The whole thing is designed to make a big mark, to overwhelm the passer-by.  And so it does – look at the way it dwarfs the pedestrians in front of it.

Further decorative touches make a big difference. The clock, itself enormous, lends colour to this stony frontage. Its design is full of the diamonds, jagged edges, chevrons, and radiating, sunburst-like motifs that Art Deco artists loved. The relief above the doorway, by, Alfred Oakley, is another such feature. With its sun-rays, compass rose, Britain at the centre of its hemisphere, and the two caduceus-bearing messenger figures racing out across the empire with news, it symbolises the newspaper’s business of communication, and sets it, and Britain, at a pivotal place in the world that would not have seemed inappropriate in 1927. On the bright day I passed by, some rather dramatic shadows were obscuring some of the detail of this carving, but it’s strong enough to make its point without the direct light of the Art Deco lamp above it.*

As ever, God (or the Devil, if you wish) is in the details. If this gigantic facade does seem over the top, the carving and that jewel-box of a clock give it different accents, and make one pause to look closely. Which is one of the things good architectural ornament can do so well.

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*As so often, the excellent Ornamental Passions blog has more about the carving on this building, with more photographs.

Warwick

Two ways of looking at it

In Warwick a couple of weeks ago, when not contemplating the remains of the old gas works, I found myself admiring the painted Egyptian lettering on a building in the town centre. The strong letter forms (they are part of the word ‘Museum’) work for me, even if a lettering aficionado would probably find all kinds of things wrong with them. The stroke widths are inconsistent, there’s something perverse about the pale ‘shadow’, the tan colour and the mortar merge uncomfortably in places, and as for the spacing, it’s so wide you could drive a bus through it. And yet these very faults, combined with the robust Egyptian forms, give these letters a presence and a character that I like. A shame they’ll probably all have to go when someone takes the masonry in hand and sorts out the pointing – but meanwhile, there is something in the lettering to admire.

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On a weekend when votes are being counted in the European elections, readers might want to find a political meaning in my photograph. No such meaning was intended when I took the picture, but my own interpretation would be that I love my country and I love Europe too.

Stroud, Gloucestershire

Letter set (2)

Having finished the book recommendations that have occupied the last few posts, I return to buildings – but without leaving the world of books and words behind completely, because the other weekend I went to a talk in Stroud by Phil Baines, who is a professor at Central St Martin's School of Art in London. He has written two excellent books on the design history of Penguin books (Penguin By Design and Puffin By Design) and is also an expert on all things to do with type and lettering. I had encountered him a few years ago when he led a tour of central London on an antique Routemaster bus, pointing out interesting bits of lettering as we went.

During the course of the talk he mentioned that he had seen the Stroud Subscription Rooms (a 19th-century classical building by Basevi with its name high up in the frieze), and admired the lettering on them, which is a good example of a form of letter generally known as the Egyptian. In Egyptian letters the proportions are very similar to those of the English letter (see my earlier post on this), but the letters have slab serifs – rectangular, square-cut terminating strokes. The strokes often have a fairly even thickness, but if the letters are very chunky, the strokes can have some variation in thickness. Phil Baines encouraged us to go to the Subscription Rooms in Stroud, admire these letters, and pay special attention to the fine letter R. The letters stand out beautifully from the stone wall and Phil Baines was right, of course, to mention this letter; it has a lovely curve to the leg, which bends elegantly to avoid the large slab serif at the base of the descender. The two big slab serifs on the U, which nearly join together in the middle, and the big, generous D are attractive too. But the R is especially good, and in pointing it out, Professor Baines was showing us that he knows his Rs from his elbow.