Clifton, Bristol

Small differences

Growing up in Cheltenham, I got used to Georgian and Regency architecture very early on. Many of the town’s streets were terraces, crescents, or squares of tall, stucco-fronted houses, many with ornate iron balconies, and when I first went to Clifton, there were many similarities. Not surprisingly. Clifton expanded at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, when Bristol was booming as a port.

However, there were also differences in the architecture. I’m relying on my memory here, but I’m sure my young eyes noticed two things, neither of which are much in evidence now, except on the occasional house, like the one in my photograph, which is on Sion Hill, Clifton and dates to the 1780s. What I noticed was that a number of the balcony roofs were striped black and white, and that many of the windows had shutters. These were unfamiliar things to me and seemed to my uneducated eyes to give the houses an exotic quality, like something out of a story book.

In a way, I wasn’t far wrong. External shutters are much more often seen in Continental Europe than in Britain. I’ve pulled external shutters closed to keep the hot sun off inward-opening casement windows in Italy, but not in Britain. Here, I wouldn’t often want to. As for those stripy roofs, well…even though they weren’t as colourful as deckchair fabric, they seemed even then to give the area a holiday atmosphere.

Looking at the place with an older eye, I can see other differences now. The balcony fronts have a different pattern, and the metalwork is much thinner than usually in Cheltenham – it doesn’t look so much like cast iron, more like wire work, at least in places. And then there are other interesting bits of ornate carving and unusual Classical orders and more rounded bow windows than in Cheltenham. In a way, the place reminds me of Brighton more than my home town, but a Brighton as it would be if it were miles away from the seaside.

I don’t know when this balcony canopy (and the two next to it) were painted in this way. I found one old photograph on the web dated 1945, in which they are not striped. Perhaps stripes came into fashion in the post-war period, or in the 1960s, when I first went to Bristol Zoo and had my first sighting of Clifton. Or maybe they are more recent still. Whatever their vintage, they give the street something of a holiday air – a little more festive than Bath or Cheltenham. Such are the small differences that give a place its character.

Use and ornament

Roger White, Cottages Ornés: The charms of the simple life
Published by Yale University Press

As the Christmas period approaches, I’m reviewing a small clutch of recent books that I’ve enjoyed and that might give pleasure to readers interested in architecture. First, a book on a kind of house that stands out in landscape and villagescape: the cottage orné…

The ornamental cottage – a small rural dwelling made more visually pleasing than the standard worker’s dwelling by means of various decorative embellishments – is one of the most charming phenomena of the 18th and 19th centuries. It has found an enthusiastic and well informed chronicler in Roger White, who begins his survey investigating the roots of the genre in mid-18th century rustic estate buildings before exploring the fashion at the beginning of the 19th century for housing rural workers in picturesque cottages with thatched roofs partly held up with rustic poles, verandahs, bits of timber-framing, fancy bargeboards, and other ornamental features.

From here he moves on to the larger, still more ornate and more varied middle-class cottages that were built in the Regency and Victorian periods, and the cottages enjoyed by the aristocracy and even the royal family. The range covered here is immense, from buildings based on designs in pattern books to glorious one-offs. Among the latter, the expected examples are here – the wonderful A La Ronde in Devon, Plas Newydd at Llangollen, the Queen’s Cottage at Kew, the Royal Lodge at Windsor. But it’s the sheer scope and variety of the lesser known examples that impresses, and the account takes in a broad geographical sweep too, with chapters on cottages ornés on Britain’s ‘Celtic fringes’, in mainland Europe, and further further afield.

We get glimpses of the owners of these places – a smattering of vicars and retired sea captains, unconventional bankers, pairs of spinster ladies like the creators of A La Ronde and several other cottages ornés. We discover the specific areas of Britain especially rich in this widespread architectural type – the Isle of Wight, Sidmouth, the Lake District. We take in a specific, Picturesque, view of the pattern book tradition, in which bargeboards and Tudoresque chimneys are more important than the Classical orders. And we luxuriate in a variety of images (both photographs and prints) of such things as shell rooms, stump houses, rustic masonry, and walls lined with quatrefoil windows.

People are apt to think that there’s something rather frivolous about cottages ornés.  But Regency landowners were quite serious about housing their workers in attractive houses so that they would be happy and more inclined to work hard, and theorists of the Picturesque were serious about the life-enhancing importance of a good view. In any case, one little regarded purpose of architecture is to entertain: Cottages Ornés shows that this is not an ignoble aim, and both the aim and book are worth celebrating.

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.

Glynde, Sussex

Palladian geometry

Coming along the main village street of Glynde, past cottages and an almost absurdly quaint smithy with horseshoe-shaped doorway, there is an abrupt change of gear when you reach St Mary’s church, a Palladian structure of the 1760s, which itself acts as a kind of prelude to the cupola-topped Georgian stables of the big house, Glynde Place, just a little further beyond. The west front of St Mary’s is all triangles and semi-circles. It would be a rather severe exercise in Palladian geometry, but its small size tempers the severity and gives it charm.

The architect was an amateur, Sir Thomas Robinson, and he made good use of flint for the main walls and neat ashlar for the porch and the triangular pediments. Like virtually every church architect using this kind of classical architecture, Robinson found no real solution to the problem of combining a “classical temple” frontage with a bell turret. So the turret looks a bit odd atop the pediment, but its triangular top and semi-circular arch echo the triangles and arches below, giving the design some consistency.

The charm continues inside, with an interior full of box pews that features a wooden west gallery and other Georgian furnishings. Best of all is the plasterwork around the east window, with its rosettes set in octagons. This is a lovely touch and isn’t quite spoiled by the stained glass by Kempe, in a sort of Renaissance revival style of the 1890s, which would look better in a Victorian church. But even it includes semi-circles and triangles, continuing the geometrical theme and maintaining a certain harmony.

18th-century round-up

I've now added a page to my blog, accessed here or via the PAGES menu in the right-hand column, which covers the architecture of the Georgian and Regency periods – roughly from 1700 to 1837.

As with previous round-up pages, you'll find a brief description of the key features and styles of English architecture during this period, with links to examples that I've included on posts in this blog.

Croome, Worcestershire

Winter blooms

Croome is historically important because it is the first major work of the great landscape gardener and architect Lancelot Brown, known as ‘Capability’ Brown because of his habit of assuring prospective clients that their grounds had great ‘capabilities’ for improvement. At Croome, Brown designed both the house and the park, although his work was supplemented in the house by Robert Adam, who worked on the interior, and James Wyatt, who designed some of the ‘eyecatchers’ around the edges of the park.

The park itself, created for the 6th earl of Coventry from 1747, was designed to feature a river, imitating the nearby Severn, and a large curvaceous lake with an island. Stately trees punctuate the views, as do a fascinating selection of garden buildings, including a grotto, guarded by a Coade stone statue of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. Some of the buildings were designed by Brown, some by Adam, and James Wyatt added several of the more distant eyecatchers, including a ruined ‘castle’ that I included in an earlier post.

I was planning to do a post about Brown’s grotto at Croome, but on the frosty afternoon I walked around the park the other day the statue of Sabrina was swathed in wrapping, put to sleep as it were for the winter under a protective puffy green duvet, as were the other statues and urns dotted about the park. So instead, here’s a building called the Temple Greenhouse, which was designed by Adam.

Today it looks more like a temple than a greenhouse, because the windows that were once fitted between the columns have been removed. So it can no longer contain exotic plants, but still makes a noble feature in Croome’s landscape. Adam included symbolic sculptures to complement the vegetation that once filled the greenhouse: overflowing cornucopias and this brimming basket of flowers. These vigorous reliefs are full of life, with a variety of blooms turned this way and that, and leaves twisting, as it were, in the breeze. They bring a welcome bit of summer to the frosty winter landscape.


* * *

Croome Park is owned by the National Trust, and there are some stunning photographs of it here. The house, Croome Court, is owned by the Croome Heritage Trust, and is leased to the National Trust, which is managing its restoration.

Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire

The Shock of the Old

Locks and lock-keepers’ cottages, warehouses, little storage buildings and sheds, and hump-backed bridges taking vehicles and pedestrians across the water – the canal-building boom of the late-18th and early-19th century produced a lot more than the waterways. The traffic itself – all those converted narrow-boats – can be picturesque too, and when I lived by the banks of a canal for a while I saw how tempting the slowed-down pace of inland waterways can be. None of which prepared me for this, a footbridge over the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal at Drayton Bassett, not far from Tamworth.

The Birmingham and Fazeley Canal was built in the 1780s as part of the effort to link Birmingham with other parts of the Midlands and with the southeast – it links to the Coventry Canal, which in turn joins the Oxford Canal. At Drayton Bassett the builders decided to put up this little Gothic towered structure to take walkers across the canal and over the passing barges – each tower contains a little brick-built spiral staircase to the elevated walkway. It’s a perfect and amusing bit of canalside Gothic and no doubt many more people would notice it if they weren’t looking for the entrance of the Drayton Manor theme park on the other side of the main road.

Pointed windows and battlements were popular at this time in all kinds of buildings from sham castles to cottages, and the proximity of this mock-medievalism to the ultra-modern canals must have amused people in the 1780s. Perhaps it annoyed some of them, too. Carts couldn’t drive across it, so a wood-and-metal swing bridge had to be provided in addition. One side of this structure is just visible behind and to the right of the left-hand tower in the photograph, the practical and the picturesque still close neighbours.

Adam Street, London

Nowadays people think of Robert Adam as above all else a master interior designer – pastel shades, plaster cameos, and elegant fireplaces were his forte. But his many country house projects show that he could design on a grander scale and he wanted to do so in London. So in 1768 he and his architect brothers leased a site between the Thames and the Strand, planning one of the biggest mixed developments the capital had seen. The project, known as the Adelphi (from the Greek for ‘brothers’, adelphoi), was made up of rows of houses, set above cellars with river access that were to be let for the storage of wine and coal.

It was a grand scheme, designed to high specifications, and the houses were decorated by the best artists of the time. But it proved expensive to build and the houses were slow to find tenants. The brothers finally got permission to run a lottery to finance the completion. Sadly, the Adelphi didn’t last. Many of the houses were altered in the 19th century, and more still demolished in the 20th. Now only a few houses remain, together with the impressive headquarters of the Royal Society of Arts. For many passers-by, the street names (John Adam Street, James Street, William Street) are the only reminder of the brothers’ project. This is one of the best surviving Adelphi houses, its white strips of decoration marking it out as an Adam building. It maintains its neoclassical dignity, in spite of being dwarfed by the office block behind.