Dungeness, Kent, and more

Retrospect (1): a poetic handful

To celebrate ten years of blogging, I am going to do a short series of retrospectives, each highlighting a small selection of posts on some of miscellaneous themes that have preoccupied the English Buildings blog over the past decade. These past posts are some of my personal favourites, and all but the most dedicated of regular readers will have missed quite a few of them, so I hope the following links will give them another place in the sun.

The sun is relevant to the first of these posts, but the overriding theme here is poetry, and the way my encounters with buildings have reminded me of some favourite poems...

John Donne and Derek Jarman in Dungeness

Philip Larkin and doors in St John's Wood

Thomas Hardy and wagonettes in Worcestershire

P J Kavanagh, mourning, and temperance in Fulham

C P Cavafy and Patrick Leigh Fermor in Gloucestershire

Dorchester, Dorset

Urns and tuns

Looking at this elaborate attic feature, with its scrolls, urns, and terracotta swag, one would be forgiven for thinking it comes from some grand house or perhaps the offices of a department of local or national government. But the metal-framed windows and arches below are industrial in their size and close observers will be able to pick out the 'EP' monogram of Eldridge Pope: this building began life as a brewery.

Part of a large brick complex in Dorchester, the brewery was built in 1880 to designs by G R Crickmay of Weymouth. It was constructed on the crest of a wave of expansion – the brewery became the town's biggest employer, their beer sold widely, and the owners later floated their business as a public company. Crickmay, who had been for a while the employer of the young Thomas Hardy, had a successful local practice. For Eldridge Pope he produced a design that combined industrial purposefulness with polychrome brickwork and classical decoration. This kind of mix of the functional and the dazzlingly ornamental seems to have been something that especially attracted Victorian brewers. Several of the breweries on which I've posted in the past make such bold architectural statements. Like Hook Norton Brewery in Oxfordshire, Wadworth's in Devizes, and and the Anglo-Bavarian Brewery in Shepton Mallet, this building was not only an efficient beer factory but also a powerful three-dimensional advertisement for their owners.

Sadly, beer is no longer brewed on this site in Dorchester, but the buildings are being preserved as part of a large mixed-used development. Looking up, shoppers, hotel guests, and other users of the site, can still see the monogram and remember Eldridge Pope.

Wingrave, Buckinghamshire

On the hoof

The previous post about Spiegeltents set me thinking about the other kinds of “portable architecture”, from caravans to yurts and gers, that one sometimes sees in the English countryside. I found this example among some pictures I took a while ago in Buckinghamshire. It’s apparently a version of the classic shepherd’s hut,* the movable shelter traditionally used by shepherds on the downs and wolds when they needed to be near far-flung flocks. These wheeled huts, then, are the opposite of the wonderful lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh, about which I’ve posted in the past.

The heyday of the shepherd’s hut was probably the 19th century – one thinks of films of Hardy novels. But their history goes back much further. One website on the huts traces it back at least to the late-16th century, when an agricultural writer described how in some places the shepherd “hath his cabin going upon a wheele for to remove here and there at his pleasure”.

The huts were originally made mainly of timber, with a wooden body, wooden wheels, and a curved canvas roof, waterproofed with tar, on a wooden frame. Later, corrugated iron was often used for the roof, and now versatile corrugated iron sheeting is generally used to clad the walls too, which may be finished with timber tongue-and-grooved panelling inside. Spoked metal wheels on wide axles are common. This variation seems to have a wooden body on some modern wheels. The stable door, curved roof, and chimney are all features that hark back to the traditional hut.

People are still making shepherds’ huts, and finding uses for them as home offices, summerhouses, even shops at visitor attractions. They’re an inspiring example of how a traditional structure can find new roles, its wheels helping it to migrate from the downs to the backyard.

* Or perhaps a road-menders' hut: see the comments on this post

Kemerton, Worcestershire

Waggonettes, Worcestershire, and Wessex

Buildings get under our skin for all kinds of reasons and often it’s the most incidental detail that catches the eye and stays in the memory. So here for me, it was not the double-fronted stone house but the brick extension, and most of all the sign above what must once have been a shop window. Not quite faded enough to be a ghost sign perhaps, it still comes to us as if from another era.

The sign looks Victorian in style – both the curlicues around the lettering and that final full stop have a 19th-century feel about them. But it could as easily be from the interwar period, a time when both horses and horse-drawn vehicles were still in demand, especially in the country – this village is several miles from the nearest town.

The carriages on offer provided transport for several passengers in two strikingly different forms. In a landau, with its pair of seats, passengers sat facing one another across a central dropped foot well, rather like travellers in an old-fashioned railway compartment, either facing the horse or with their back to the horse. With a top that could be left down or pulled up against the rain, it was a rather sophisticated vehicle. In a waggonette, by contrast, the pair of seats were set parallel to the road, with just the driver’s seat facing ahead. I think of waggonettes as usually open-topped vehicles with hard wooden seats, seen more often in the countryside than the more comfortable and urban landau. They were the minibuses of their time.

The waggonette, then, seems a kind of carriage that would have been at home in rural Worcestershire. As it was too in Hardy’s Wessex, and when I saw the sign I was instantly reminded of Hardy’s poem, ‘At Castle Boterel’, in which the poet pauses at a junction familiar because of something important that happened there when he was much younger:

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And rain bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.

Hardy doesn’t explain exactly what happened all those years ago – could it have been a declaration of love? – but emphasizes its significance. As the poem goes on (you can read all of it here), the twin scenes – the young poet and the ‘girlish form’, the older poet looking back – are seen against a broader picture of passing time. There was never a moment of such quality, Hardy says, as that first time all those years ago, even though we’re all transitory beings in the context of ‘Earth’s long order’. In such a setting, vivid details such as the sodden waggonette become moving in a surprising and rather unnerving way.

Looking at an old sign advertising forms of horse-drawn transport triggers an association for me because I happen to have read Hardy’s poem. For some, it’s just an old sign. But such scraps and fragments of former days shown forth in old signs – waggonettes and landaus, seed potatoes and hay, Bovril and Bile Beans – are apt to act as bridges to former times in this way, bringing us suddenly into close connection with the past. And some of the backward glances they illuminate are as bright and arresting as Hardy’s on that rainy byway long ago.