Great Bardfield, Essex

The carpenter...and Mr Pepper

My other personal favourite from Edward Bawden’s illustrations for Life in an English Country Village is the carpenter. Watching my father carefully mark out the edge of a door to fit a lock (and the corresponding strike plate on the jamb), then cut the required holes, deep for the lock itself and shallow for the plate, made me wonder how he’d got such skills, how he could achieve the necessary precision with such ease. He’d had various jobs in his life, from farm worker to supervisor in a factory, none of which required carpentry skills, and I knew that the tiny village school he attended would have had no facilities for teaching him the basics of woodwork. How then, did he wield a mallet and chisel so expertly? How did he even know where to start?

At first, when I asked him, he just said that it was years of trial and error – trying things, getting them wrong, then trying and getting a little better, and so on. Fail again, fail better, as Samuel Beckett had it. But at the end of his life, when reminiscences flowed more freely, he mentioned his boyhood fascination for what the village carpenter did in his workshop. Walking home from school, he and a friend used to peer surreptitiously through the open door of the carpenter’s shop. Eventually, someone saw them gawping, thought they were creating a nuisance, and shooed them away. The carpenter – who I seem to remember was called Mr Pepper – looked up. ‘No. Let them stay,’ he said. ‘They can watch. As long as they don’t touch anything.’

And so, every day for a while, my father stopped at the door of Mr Pepper’s and watched the craftsman at work. He was never allowed to try anything himself – those tools were too sharp and dangerous, and also too valuable to spoil – but he looked, and remembered. And occasionally, when things were quiet in the workshop, Mr Pepper would explain what he was doing. When, a little older, my Dad was working and could buy one or two tools of his own, he had a flying start, and the process of private mistake-making and trying again began.

They say there’s really only one way to acquire a practical skill – by doing it. And up to a point, that’s right. But there is more than one way of learning. You can also pick up a lot by watching someone who is really good at what they do. I think of that when I look at Bawden’s carpenter at work, with his glue on the heat, his saws, augurs, planes, mallet, and hammer within reach, his endless little boxes (every available size of wood screw?) stacked on the shelf, his spartan shop, which has what looks like a corrugated iron roof and wooden walls. It doesn’t look big, but there will be a yard out there where he can work too, and inside, the windows throw enough light on to the benches.

I sometimes think that I didn’t learn much from my father, whose work skills ran to an ability to grasp practical problems, learn manual skills, and manage people. Where did the gene that enabled that hand and eye coordination go, for a start? Vanished into air, into thin air. The carpenter’s skills are not the kind of abilities I put to use as a writer, perhaps. But I was taught that you can learn by looking. And I try to do that every day.

Great Bardfield, Essex

The tailor...and the tailoress

We have a shelf of King Penguin books – small, hardback volumes published by Penguin in the 1940s and 1950s, on a range of subjects. The books’ approach combines a text essay with a collection of pictures and the range is wide – there are a lot of natural history books, a few on places (Romney Marsh with illustrations by John Piper, The Isle of Wight illustrated by Barbara Jones), a few on subjects relating to historic buildings (The Leaves of Southwell by Nikolaus Pevsner, for example). These are all favourites of mine, but the one I like best of all is Life in an English Country Village, illustrated with a series of lithographs by Edward Bawden.

I am a great admirer of Bawden and I’m pleased that by owning this little book I have have a few of his works in a form that wasn’t ruinously expensive. I also like it that Bawden based his illustrations on people and buildings in Great Bardfield, the village where he and a number of other artists lived, making the place a hub of creative activity like few others – the local characters, and Bawden’s keen observation, shine through. If the palette is quite limited, the line is always clear and telling. And there’s a more personal reason I like this book. It reminds me of my mother and father.

My parents weren’t artists and didn’t live in Great Bardfield. But two illustration in particular remind me of stories they told me when I was growing up in the 1960s about what things were like when they were growing up in the 1930s. When she was small, my mother and her parents lived with her maternal grandparents in a large northern city. My great-grandfather was a tailor who worked from home. He had met my great-grandmother through her work, because she had the same trade as he did – she was always referred to as a tailoress, a term I’d not herd before and which seemed to suggest something a bit better than a seamstress. She could cut a gentleman’s suit, and do a good job too, although the mores of the time would perhaps not have allowed her to measure her customer’s inside leg. By the time my mother had arrived on the scene, the tailoress had given up her scissors and work table for domestic life (although she always made my mother beautiful clothes). My great grandfather continued in his work, however, and my mother told me how, as a very small girl, she would creep under his table while he sat on top, sewing away, just like Bawden’s tailor in the illustration. My grandmother, a rather strict woman, did not officially permit her daughter to go into the workroom – she’d distract the man at his important tasks – but the tailor was of course only too glad to have his only grandchild’s company as he snipped and stitched away.

All this passes through my mind as I look at Bawden’s illustration. The room the tailor works in looks as if it may be some outhouse or shed – I’m thinking of the ceiling, which looks like a pitched roof clad inside with tongue and groove boards. But I may be wrong: it could just as well be an opportunistic house extension. It certainly doesn’t look like the spacious front room of a Victorian house, the setting of my great grandfather’s tailoring. But both rooms are light, and both no doubt equipped with what it took for a man to do his job, a job which needed sharp vision, concentration, and excellent coordination of hand and eye – qualities needed by an artist like Bawden too.

The joy of Essex

For the next ten days or so, I am offering a small clutch of reviews of recent books that might appeal to readers of this blog. First of all...

Gillian Darley, Excellent Essex
Published by Old Street

There used to be lots of county books: county histories, county guidebooks, meandering accounts of counties by bellettrist old “countrymen” full of clichés about nestling villages and “delightful churches”. There’s not so much of this about now, and some say we think less about counties than in the days of before local government changes messed about with county boundaries and names in the 1970s. That’s debatable, but people certainly have prejudices about counties, and none more so than about Essex – Essex Man and The Only Way is Essex are familiar parts of Britain’s media landscape. Gillian Darley’s Excellent Essex blows all this out of the window, and wafts some welcome fresh air into the idea of the county book.

Excellent Essex does a good job of evoking the great variety of Essex, which is part rich countryside, part London fringes, part absorbing towns, with a very long coastline thrown in too. And of confronting the contradictions of a place that’s widely pro-Brexit but has always welcomed newcomers. Darley knows her Essex, and gives us absorbing nuggets of history and topographical fact about all these aspects of the county. Essex is full of memorable architecture, much of it there thanks to the wealth coming in from local industries – whether it was Courtauld’s textiles, Bata footwear, or Tiptree jam. Interesting and sometimes highly influential ideas have been born, or at any rate bred, in Essex, which has been home to future American Pilgrims, Tolstoyan anarchists, and women’s suffrage campaigners.

Darley, who has an honourable track-record of writing about architecture and its contexts, is the ideal author for all this, and is alert to the county’s sometimes surprising buildings and their stories. Essex is where we will find historical wonders like Thaxted Guildhall and the pargetted quaintness of Saffron Walden. It is home to Critall metal-framed windows, the Bata buildings of East Tilbury, and the glorious “seaside modern” houses of Frinton – all at the heart of English modernism of the 20th century. The county is also, of course, the site of the memorable and wonderful House for Essex, created by the architectural practice called FAT along with Essex man and artist Grayson Perry. The county also has its share of plotlands and the various offbeat joys of Canvey Island. All human culture, oner might say, is here, from the music of Gustav Holst (who spent a lot of time in Thaxted) to that of Sandie Shaw and Wilko Johnson, from the art of the Great Bardfield painters to that of Alfred Munnings or, yes, Grayson Perry.

Essex is, then, as diverse in its combination of old and new, high and low art, idealism and entrepreneurship, inventiveness and conservatism, as England as a whole. Gillian Darley does a superlative job of portraying this, and her account, rich with history and anecdote, also makes the trip to Essex a highly entertaining ride.

Shugborough, Staffordshire, and more

Retrospective (3): Feline tales

It has been said à propos of social media that, having invented the most sophisticated form of communication yet devised by humankind, we use it for sharing pictures of cats. I offer no apologies, though, for this short selection of cat posts, offered as my third retrospective to celebrate a decade of this blog. These, after all, are architectural cats, and the image of the feline form, used as an embellishment on or near buildings, says something about our fascination with these intriguing, beautiful, and sometimes infuriating creatures.* My handful of posts contains cats from the mid-18th to the late-20th century, but which show artistic influences stretching back thousands of years. And that is proof enough that not just our relationship with cats but also our artistic engagement with them is far, far older than the internet.

A sea-going cat in Staffordshire

A church cat in the Cotswolds

A museum mouser in Hereford

A landmark cat in...Catford

The Egyptian-style cats of Mornington Crescent

A ginger tom in Thaxted.

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* The novelist Raymond Chandler referred to his cat Taki as his 'secretary' because whenever Chandler tried to write anything, the creature would drape itself over his notepad or sit on the copy he wanted to revise. I have had this experience with a cat myself and have found it beguiling and maddening by turns.

Saffron Walden, Essex

The antidote to beige

Hanging around in Saffron Walden a few months ago, waiting for the Fry Gallery to open and some friends to turn up, I admired the nearby cottages, with their coloured walls. Where I live in the Cotswolds, nearly everything is made from limestone – “gorgeous, honey-coloured limestone” as the tourist brochures, never shy of a cliché, like to put it. Well, Cotswold stone is handsome stuff, and it has a colour palette that extends well beyond the brochure’s honey, embracing a variety of subtly varying shades from pale silvery grey to a sort of toffee brown. But sometimes, especially when not softened by flowers or greenery it can feel a little, well, beige. So I can find something to admire in a bit of colour wash on the walls of town houses, and have posted in the past about my love of pastel shades in places from Warwickshire to Lyme Regis. Coloured walls go back a long way, though centuries ago the results were more likely to be plaster tinted in yellows, ochres, or blood reds than these shades from the paint box. But, old-style shades or new, hats off to the people of the colourfully named Saffron Walden for putting some colour on their houses too.

Thaxted, Essex

Weather forecats

Plain vanes or pennants often, fish now and then, foxes and hounds, ships, and human figures occasionally, and the ubiquitous cockerel more frequently than not; sometimes a stag, a horse, or a beast from the field of heraldry; a dragon or grasshopper or two. That list sums up the iconography of weather wanes (or wind vanes, or weathercocks, as in ‘That weathercock’s a fish!’), though no doubt my readers can think of some more examples.

There are also a few weather vanes that are famously unique landmarks: Old Father Time at Lord’s Cricket Ground, Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s ship The Rodney at Rochester, Erasmus seated the wrong way round on a horse in Whitechapel.

My picture shows one that’s more humble than these examples, and far from unique. But I’ve not often come across feline weathervanes, so wanted to share this cat in Thaxted, set on his pleasantly scrolly mount. His tail is scrolly too, and his markings admirable, although I wondered when I saw him if they had faded from a deeper ginger. Whether or not that’s so, he still stands guard effectively, catching the eye, and the wind.

Coggeshall, Essex

Paycocke's displayed

Last for now in my line of posts about timber-framed houses is Paycocke's, the beautiful merchant's house in Coggeshall, Essex. Paycocke's was built in 1510 for Thomas Paycocke, a member of a rich family of cloth merchants. Although the house was much altered in later centuries, this street frontage is very much how it would have been in 1510 – there was a restoration in 1910, when some of the woodwork was replaced (with carving by Ernest Beckwith), but much 16th-century timber survives. And there is a lot of timber, because this frontage is close-studded – in other words the framework is made up of a large number of closely placed vertical posts. This was a high-status way of building, only available to a client with the money for lots of wood, but for those who could afford it both very satisfying to look at and very strong structurally. Close-studding is particularly associated with the prosperous towns and villages of East Anglia, although close-studded houses can be found in many other parts of England too.

Another thing a rich owner could afford was decorative carving, and Paycocke's has a lot of this – on the big horizontal beam, on the windows, and elsewhere. Snaking vines, carved heads, and the initials T. P. and M. P. (presumably for Thomas Paycocke and his wife Margaret) all feature on the carved front. This ornamentation, together with the mullioned windows and flattened arches, is very much in the Gothic taste of the time. The Renaissance was late coming to this part of England, but the house is none the worse for this – its creators were artists of the late Gothic as accomplished as the builders of many medieval churches.

The quality of this building, with its fine timber frame and herringbone brick infill, has long been recognised. One of its greatest champions was Lord Noel-Buxton, who bought the house in 1904, commissioned the 1910 restoration, and presented the building to the National Trust in 1924. The Trust give more details of the house here, and there is even a Paycocke's blog.

Badmin's England (1)

When I'm not actually looking at buildings or reading about them, I often seem to find myself looking at pictures of them. One of the artists whose work I have admired for longest is S R Badmin (1906–89), a British painter whose artistic responses to landscape were celebrated because of their clarity, detail, and sensitivity to the character of places – and because they were much used to illustrate the covers of magazines such as the Radio Times and British editions of the Reader's Digest. I first came across Badmin as the illustrator of the Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs, a classic of the 1950s. But I didn't realise until later that the hand that could delineate both arboreal verdure and the architecture of branches and twigs was also at home with actual architecture. If Badmin was brilliant at trees, he was also rather good at buildings.

The books that brought this home to me were two that Badmin illustrated for the children's series Picture Puffins – Sir George Stapledon's Farm Crops in Britain (which includes a striking depiction of an upland northern farm – and the lovely book Village and Town, which Badmin both wrote and illustrated. Here are a couple of illustrations from Village and Town, a book that is much concerned with the ways in which traditional architecture varies from place to place.

A Timber, Plaster and Thatch Village, from Village and Town

These villagescapes are generic: they don't, I think, represent specific places, but bring together examples of the building types and styles of particular areas of England. This first is titled "A timber, plaster and thatch village". It is of a place somewhere in eastern England – in Essex, perhaps, or the eastern part of Hertfordshire – where the lack of good local stone meant that people used timber for framing and thatch for roofs. In some of the houses, the timber frameworks have been left exposed, but in many buildings the frame is hidden behind a coat of plaster, which is sometimes coloured pale pink, sometimes, as in the house on the left, white and decorated with the moulded patterns known as pargetting. Some of the buildings – such as the shed or small barn in the foreground and the church tower in the distance – are boarded, and the tower is topped with a kind of splay-footed spire found quite widely in the south and east. If there is any stone, it's flint, as in the flint and brick wall next to the pargetted house.

 A Brick and Tile Village, from Village and Town

The other picture shows "A brick and tile village" and must be in Sussex or Kent, another area where there is not much good stone (though, again, there is some flint, as in the wall behind the pigs), but where there is plentiful clay for brick- and tile-making. Some houses are brick-walled, some have timber frames with brick filling the gaps between the timbers, and some have tile-hung upper storeys. Other wall finishes on display include weatherboarding, this time painted white, as is the stucco-fronted shop towards the top of the street.

These two illustrations wonderfully show how use of local building materials gave places in different parts of the country their own visual character. But they also show what is less often noticed: that vernacular and traditional architecture are not just about materials but also concern local fashions and aesthetic preferences. The timber, plaster and thatch village shows a love of plaster decoration that is much more common in eastern England than in the Midlands or west. The close-set vertical timbers of the central building – apparently now a pub – are another visual feature common in the eastern counties. In the brick and tile village, on the other hand, delight has been taken in the patterns of hung tiles and the clean lines of white-painted boarding. All these features, from the plasterwork to the white boarding, show local visual sensibilities at work. People in past centuries were not slaves to their materials and made aesthetic choices just as we do – and S R Badmin clearly realised this too.