Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Looking sideways, reaching skywards

I mentioned in a recent post the perils of concentrating on ‘what one should be looking at’. My point was that in going in search of, say, the rightly celebrated early-Georgian houses of Bridgwater, one might miss a Victorian shop front, an Art Deco clock, and other delights. So you will sometimes find me taking a perverse look in an unpredicted direction – going to Bath and looking not at Royal Crescent but at public lavatories, or finding Gog and Magog in Norwich rather than medieval churches, or when I am in a medieval church, making time for some modern fixtures and fittings as well as the more obviously ‘interesting’ Norman carvings. It’s my version of what the designer Alan Fletcher called The Art of Looking Sideways.*

In Cheltenham, the town where I grew up and near where I now live again, I’ve had several decades to look sideways in many different directions. Cheltenham, of course, is a Regency spa. But there’s much more to it than that. Most visitors, their eyes on the town’s Regency terraces and squares, its spa buildings, the shops in its Promenade and Montpellier, don’t look, for example, at the town’s collection of 19th-century churches. And Cheltenham has some fine, not to say extraordinary, churches, the fruit of an interesting religious history in a town that embraced both Tractarianism and a vigorous evangelical revival – both high and low Anglicanism, in other words (not to mention most other branches of Christianity, from Roman Catholicism to Unitarianism).

Here’s one of my favourite Cheltenham churches. It’s Christ Church, built in 1837–39 to designs by the brothers R. W. and C. Jearrad. Although its architectural components are in many ways standard Gothic ones (Early English or 13th-century-style Gothic mostly, with a Perpendicular or 15th-century-style tower) they are wielded with such originality that the building makes you stand and stare. There are acute-angled gables, pointed-topped buttresses, and little spires on the tops of stair turrets everywhere, all sending the gaze relentlessly upward, as do the narrow lancet windows. The tower’s walls are more ornately carved walls than the rest of the building, but its slender corner pinnacles and tall windows continue the upward pointing theme, as do the curious gable-like features that frame the clock faces half way up. The gable visible on the face of the tower in my photograph makes it look at if the tower is set some distance back from the west front, but actually it’s hardly set back at all.

How to sum up this extraordinary building? Pevsner can do no better than quote the description of Harry Goodhart-Rendell: ‘An outstanding fantasy in the style of a Staffordshire china ornament, that could stand on the largest chimneypiece in the world. There is also a tall Perpendicularish tower with a lamentable expression; you expect it to sob.’§ That’s apt, and gets to the heart of this design. In a way, it’s a decorator’s idea of a Gothic church, the fulfilment of the idea that Gothic points heavenward and uplifts us, with a surge of verticality. It is then, above all, a design that’s keen to provoke emotions in the beholder, in a way that 19th-century churches did much more than those of the previous period. But then (and this is perhaps where the sob comes in) it’s a design that seems to lament the fact that as mere mortals we can never quite reach as far into the sky as we’d like.

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* See Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon Press, 2001)

§ For Goodhart-Rendell’s description, see his English Architecture Since the Regency (Constable, 1977)

¶ The way the Victorians placed emphasis on a building’s ability to move its users is excellently expounded in William Whyte, Unlocking the Church (Oxford University Press, 2017), which I reviewed here.

Huntley, Gloucestershire

Gothic on speed

Set back from the main road from Gloucester to Ross, St John the Baptist, Huntley, is a church I’d been past many times before the Resident Wise Woman and I took the trouble to pull in and have a good look. And we were pleased we did. It’s one of the most interesting Victorian churches I’ve come across. Apart from the tower, which is 14th century, the whole church was rebuilt in 1862–3 by Samuel Sanders Teulon. There must have been a very generous budget (provided by the rector, Rev Daniel Capper) because this little building shows what Teulon could do when he threw everything he had at a church.

Huntley: the window of the organ chamber

The style is a kind of Decorated Gothic, the style of the 14th century that is marked by flowing window tracery, much carving, and a rich approach to decoration generally. But here at Huntley, Teulon gave it many special twists and turns. He elaborated everything: the Decorated window tracery flows more curvaceously than ever, the carving is more profuse, the painted chancel ceiling glows jewel-like. The elaboration starts before we even get inside, with an extraordinary trefoil-headed window (above) that looks like the top of a conventional Gothic window, but with the lower part replaced with a row of five little blind arches filled with decorative carving. The reason for the lack of glazing lower down is that the organ is installed behind – it’s signalled, indeed by carvings of a couple of musical figures that adorn the window. And this is just a hint of what awaits us inside.

Huntley: one capital or two?

Here architectural sculpture breaks loose from its bounds. Profuse isn’t a strong enough word for this interior and its decoration. At the tops of some of the columns are not simply capitals, but what almost amount to pairs of capitals (above), one over the other, the two levels of carving separated by a band of masonry studded with polished stones. The nave roof is supported by carved stone corbels – but there are more carvings immediately below them, framed by banded masonry and picked out with gilding. Teulon was able to employ one of the best Victorian carvers, Thomas Earp, whose work on the reredos and pulpit was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1862.

This is just a sample from this rich and absorbing little building, a Gothic revival structure that’s so elaborated it’s like no medieval church. The architect and critic Harry Goodhart-Rendell wrote an essay, ‘Rogue Architects of the Victorian Era’, in which he included Teulon in a group of pushers of the architectural envelope, men who broke rules triumphantly, who trumpeted their innovations with noisy visual glee, who had, presumably, the kind of pachydermous skins that made them oblivious to the criticism of more conventional souls. How good that they did, and that they found patrons like Capper who gave them the resources to work in the way they wanted.

Huntley: the angels have gilded wings and haloes

Vincent Square, London

When brick works

I’m not usually a fan of yellow brick, but this building makes it sing. It’s part of the Westminster Kingsway College building on the corner of Rochester Row and Vincent Square in an area of London I suppose you’d call Victoria. When I saw it my jaw  dropped and, frankly, I just stood there and stared in silence while people walked past, eyeing me suspiciously as if they were wondering what on earth I could be looking at. I didn’t know what it was, but it was obviously a modern building – 1950s – and was unashamedly decorative without trying too hard to make a point. The result, with its crosses and diagonals of brickwork, its pierced parapet, and its tower (stairs, presumably) with those slanting glazing bars) is enjoyably and inherently brickish, as if the building has learned what the Victorians could do with its material, shaken this up in some sort of imaginative kaleidoscope, and come up with something modern.

The architect, I learned when I got home and loped the building up, was Harry Goodhart-Rendell, designer of St Olaf House in Tooley Street, a wonderful church in St Leonard’s, Sussex (a favourite of mine), and other churches, and a great defender of Victorian architecture back at the time when defending such a thing was neither profitable nor popular. His building in Vincent Square has a steel frame, and indeed mostly very utilitarian metal-framed windows, but wraps these in this attractive, and no doubt efficient, brick covering, which looks as comfortable as the textile that it reminded me of. People say that this building is as good to use as it is to look at. Why didn’t we learn?

Victoria Tower Gardens, London

A little roguery

Having admired the façade of St John’s Smith Square the other day, I glanced away from Smith Square towards the river and this wonderful little structure caught my eye. It’s the Buxton Memorial Fountain, and I’ve often noticed the way it adorns the Victoria Tower Gardens near the Houses of Parliament. But I’d not seen it from this angle before, its ornate Gothic arches and pointed roof aligned with the end of the street.

This little building was commissioned in 1865 by an MP, Charles Buxton, to commemorate the work of his father, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the group of colleagues who had campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade. It originally stood in Parliament Square but was taken down in 1949 and moved to its current happy location in 1957.

The fountain was the work of Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812–73), a Gothic architect who designed a multitude of churches, vicarages, and allied buildings and who was designated by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel as one of the ‘Rogue architects’ of the Victorian era. What Goodhart-Rendel meant was that these architects were original to the point of eccentricity, designing buildings that were Gothic, but not as we know it. They would combine styles from different sources, introduce jazzy patterns, and use vibrant, sometimes brash colours.

The Buxton Memorial Fountain begins like a conventional, if highly ornate, structure of Gothic arches. But the roof is something else – a brightly coloured extravaganza of enamelled iron tiles that sings in the sun and enlivens a dull day. In this part of central London, with its familiar mixture of brick and stone buildings, this jewel-like roof comes as a surprise, and a welcome dose of colour. Sometimes a little roguery is not such a bad thing.