Wooler, Northumberland

In continued admiration

Up a street leading away from the town centre of Wooler I glimpsed the needle-like spire of a church. Intent on architectural wonders after the Black Bull Inn in my previous post, I climbed the upward-sloping street and quickly found that this was no ordinary church or at least no ordinary church tower, for the rest of the building in truth did seem rather ordinary, a plain nave with a flat wall to the street and a row of simple pointed windows. The tower, however, was something else.

I think of the style of this tower as Arts and Crafts Gothic with a dash of Art Nouveau. That’s to say, the architect (it’s George Reavell again) has taken the basic elements of the Perpendicular Gothic of the 15th century (pointed arches, window tracery with pronounced vertical elements but also transoms,* stone panelling that looks like blind windows, gargoyles, crenellations) and added other features that you’d never seen on a medieval building. Chief of these added things are the chunky pinnacles that lack the spirelets that top medieval pinnacles having instead little roofs with a curvy profile. Another such feature is the way in which the crenellations have tops that curve and dip towards the middle of each section. The curves up here are less Gothic than Art Nouveau and add a fin-de-siècle twist of lemon Victorian Gothic. 

Hats off, then, to George Reavell, who made this building over and gave it its outstanding tower in 1904 for the Congregational (now United Reformed) Church. There’s almost a touch of the admirable late Gothic of J. D. Sedding’s magnificent Holy Trinity Sloane Square, dubbed ‘the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts’ by John Betjeman. Not quite a cathedral, but an outstanding bit of architecture of which this modest Northumberland town should be proud. *

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* Apologies for the less than perfect picture. It was impossible to photograph this tower without at least one car and one overhead wire getting in the way. From this angle, the tower conceals another pleasing Reavell detail: a small louvre and spirelet crowning the nave roof. 

Wooler, Northumberland

 

In(n) admiration

At first glance the main Wooler seemed, how shall I put it, a somewhat plain vanilla place, but refreshment drew us here and as we made our way across the street towards a coffee shop I was brought up sharp by the Black Bull Inn. There was nothing ordinary about that enormous double-height bow window nor, now I came to think about it, was the whole facade at all bad – those many-paned upper sashes seemed redolent of Arts and Crafts and the careful contrast between the ashlar stonework around the windows and the rougher masonry surrounding it was also quietly impressive. I began to revise my opinion.

Other details confirm that something creative was going on here in c. 1900. The very good downpipe – fancy brackets, elaborate hopper head with relief decoration – is notable. As are the details in the metalwork on the bow window – the gilded nailheads, Tudor rose and fleur de lys, the ornate but not to showy lettering and mongram, and (yes) the date, 1910.* Pevsner confirms that the inn was remodelled in 1910 by George Reavell, a local architect (he went to school in Alnwick and opened his first office there), who was clearly in touch with current fashions. I don’t know much about him but I see from the Northumberland Archives website that his daughter, Mary Proctor Cahill, trained as an architect and joined him in his practice. So as well as a competent designer he was also one of those who opened up a male-dominated profession to women.

I sipped my coffee reflectively, thinking that I should know better than to underestimate a small English town. I recalled the wise words embossed on the cover of Jonathan Meades’s book Museum Without Walls: ‘There is no such thing as a boring place”.† I will return to Wooler and the work of George Reavell in my next post.

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* Click on the image to seew the details more clearly. 

†  Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls (Unbound, 2012), first hardback edition.