Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

The angular meander

Is there a pattern that says ‘Greece’ louder and more clearly than the ‘Greek key’? This motif takes the form of a continuous line that bends back on itself through a series of right-angles, before bending again to resume its forward course. It’s sometimes called the Greek fret, sometimes the meander, and some say its form derives from the Greek River Maeander (or Meander). It was widely used in the architecture of the Greek revival, a style popular in Britain during the decades on either side of 1800.

Here it is in the iron supports of the veranda that runs along the front of the houses in Lansdowne Crescent, Leamington. They were built in the mid 1830s to designs by local architect William Thomas. The uprights with their Greek key design ensure that the canopy above the veranda is held up securely, while also proclaiming the classical heritage of these town houses. The verandas were not so much for sitting out on – they are quite narrow – but more to provide shade for the almost south-facing rooms while also ensuring that if the floor-to-ceiling window is open, no one absentmindedly steps out and tumbles into the area below.

Soon after the residents moved in, Queen Victoria was on the throne and the fashion for elegant middle-class houses would turn from the classical to other styles – Italianate, Tudor revival, or Gothic. But the people who lived in Lansdowne Crescent in the mid-1830s (whether they were permanent residents or visitors who rented a house for the ‘season’, in order to make use of Leamington’s spa) must have delighted in their homes, which were both chic and Greek, courtesy of the angular meanders of their exterior ironwork.

Bristol

En passant

It was a case of ‘park and run’. I’d left the Resident Wise Woman at the top of Park Street, Bristol, and driven further down in search of somewhere to leave the car. On the agenda were coffee and an exhibition, so I didn’t linger long. But near my parking space was this imposing building, atop a rise of forty-odd steps. ’So that’s where it is,’ I thought: St George’s, Bristol (aka St George’s, Brandon Hill), the church by Sir Robert Smirke made redundant in 1984 and set to be turned into offices when the BBC pointed out that, with its excellent acoustics, it would make a good concert hall. I’d heard numerous broadcasts from the building but somehow had missed seeing it before.

It’s dominated at the entrance front by the large and very plain Doric portico, the columns of which turn out to be based on those of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, which, like St George’s, was designed to be seen from the bottom of a slope. Above the portico, Smirke set a round tower, again rather plain, as is the interior, apparently. It’s an austere building, grand in the early-19th century Greek revival manner that was fashionable in 1821, when St George’s was designed. The banners outside advertise cultural events, so presumably its success as such a venue continues. I was glad I’d stumbled across it and seen it in winter when the trees are bare – although perhaps a few leaves soften the building’s hard edges. I resolve to return for a longer look.

Nottingham

As your lordship pleases

Eyes that look along High Pavement in the middle of Nottingham are naturally drawn to this imposing classical frontage, with pediment, pilasters, short Doric columns on the ground floor and some of the tallest sash windows you could wish for. It’s strong Greek Revival stuff. Redolent of the way in which architects of the early-19th century could use the plainest of classical details to make a facade that stands out, it has imposing proportions  – and it is far from bland or boring.

So whatever is it? Some sort of Assembly Room? A gentleman’s club? No. It’s a house, which has a history going back to the late Middle Ages but was remodelled in 1833, specifically as judges’ lodgings (there are law courts in the Shire Hall, on the opposite side of the street). The unusual proportions are at least in part due to the fact that this front was attached to an older building. The big room behind the enormous sash windows is the judges’ dining room, where they could eat in grandeur. The architect was Henry Moses Wood, a prominent Nottingham figure, active as a banker as well as the designer of numerous buildings in Derbyshire and Notts. I find it difficult to dissociate this severely grand frontage from the image, summoned up by the writer John Mortimer, who put it into the mouth of his immortal character Horace Rumpole, of members of the judiciary passing death sentences and then retiring to their lodgings to enjoy muffins. Traditional and severe as it is, though, this facade makes use of what in 1833 was modern technology. Those columns on the ground floor are made of cast iron, like some similar ones in London I wrote about long ago in a post called Kicked a Building Lately?

Walk a couple of yards along the street, immediately to the left of my first photograph, and you find the rest of the frontage, done in another kind of Regency architecture. It’s still classical and most of the front is very plain, with rows of sash windows and a deep cornice, but the centrepiece is very different from the formality of the front of the dining room. This is a more delicate style, with a curving balcony and a door with a rather feminine fanlight like something Robert Adam might have designed. The balcony is held up on brackets with stylised leaf decoration, the balcony has elegant ironwork that might be at home in Brighton. And the iron overthrow with its fitting for a lamp is another impressive bit of the blacksmith’s art, all scrolls and flowers and buds. This facade too is part of the judges’ lodgings and its combination with the dining-room part makes for a rather split architectural personality. But the fact that both are classical helps them live together peacefully, revealing the versatility of the classical style.

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Note The right-hand part with the big windows dates to Wood’s remodelling of 1833. Authorities are rather imprecise about the left-hand part. It looks Regency too, and feels like a different phase, but also looks too late to be from an earlier remodelling of the building in 1742.

Shugborough, Staffordshire

Quite Athenian, rather British

The landscape garden at Shugborough, the ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield, has an impressive collection of buildings designed by James 'Athenian' Stuart, the man who measured and drew Greek architecture and, with Nicholas Revett, published accurate drawings of The Antiquities of Athens in the 18th century. Stuart's work inspired British architects to design classical buildings more closely similar to Athenian ones than before, leading to country houses that looked like Greek temples – and to garden buildings that in some cases resembled these temples very closely.

One of the most prominent of the garden buildings at Shugborough is the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal structure of 1765. The main room, on the upper floor, was designed as a banqueting room. In the 19th century, the downstairs was used as a dairy while the upstairs room apparently became a gambling den presided over by the 1st earl.

The tower at Shugborough is similar in general form to the Greek original, a structure on the agora in Athens bearing a weather vane and various sundials and originally containing a water clock. The Shugborough version is octagonal, and has two entrances and a stair tower. But it is missing the frieze (the original has relief carvings of the deities of the winds) and the sundials that adorn the Athenian tower. The sash windows are of course a very English addition. And inside, there is a ceiling based not an Athenian model but on one from Nero's Golden House in Rome. The little entrance porticoes, however, were designed with a close eye on the original. The capitals are a version of Corinthian, with acanthus leaves but no spiral volutes, that are often now known as Tower of the Winds Corinthian.

Tower of the Winds Corinthian

So this little building is by no means a reproduction of the Greek structure that inspired it and that Stuart and Revett had reproduced so carefully in The Antiquities of Athens. Stuart adapted it to his client's needs, to make a useful building (whether for diners, gamblers, or dairymaids) that was also an ornament in the park. A very British compromise.