Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Multifaceted

My liking for small, unusually shaped buildings meant that I was immediately drawn to this one, an octagonal structure near the sea at Bexhill. I wasn’t at first sure exactly what it was – a café? a meeting-place? a seaside shelter? It turns out that it is known as the Bexhill Coronation Bandstand, and was commissioned by the 8th Earl de la Warr in 1895, as part of various improvements that he made to the town, most of which his family owned. The listing description, however, suggests that it may originally have been a seaside shelter and became a bandstand later – apparently it is described as a bandstand on a photograph of 1927 and there are other early photographs of musicians playing inside it. The window back then looked slightly different, openable and with less woodwork, to let the sound out to listeners on the surrounding paved areas. Musicians still sometimes play in front of the bandstand, but these days it’s a multi-use building fulfilling all kinds of needs. When I was there, it seemed that its main purpose was to shelter people who were enjoying an ice-cream and admiring the view.

The structure looks good after its recent restoration, and its colourful paintwork is just the kind of thing that seems right for the seaside. Some of the decorative touches hint at an Indian source – the horseshoe arches of the window frames and the repeating star-like motifs that run along the lower walls. This reflects a number of buildings nearby in a similar, Mughal-inspired style, which I’ll cover in a separate post. But the bandstand is not a purely Mughal-style building. The roof tiles are typically Sussex in appearance, and the wavy bargeboard beneath them are the sort of thing one sees on ornamental buildings of many different styles Seasides need buildings like this, structures that provide a bit of decoration and a dash of the unusual. This one manages to achieve this by finding a middle way between the tawdry and the dull. Hoorah!

Sezincote, Gloucestershire

Nabobbery

Walkers of the Heart of England Way going south through Gloucestershire leave Bourton on the Hill confident that their path is well named. The stone houses of Bourton, the rolling terrain, the sound of English birdsong, and even the smell of English cowpats: it’s all there. A few fields along the way, the farming landscape changes subtly. The pasture is punctuated with mature trees, giving the sense that we are entering the park of a big house. And beyond a small wood, there it is on the crest of a rise: a most surprising and un-English country house – Sezincote.

Sezincote was built for Charles Cockerell, who inherited the estate in 1798 on the death of his elder brother, John. Both were nabobs, men who had made their money in India, and Charles asked another of his brothers, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, to build him a house in the Indian style. The plump central onion dome shows instantly what they were about, but there are many other telling details lifted from Indian Islamic buildings – the little corner turrets with their own tiny onion domes, the bracketed cornice that runs around the building, the chimneys on either side of the main dome, the flattened central arch, the ornate windows on the little pavilion on the far right (there are similar ones on the curved greenhouse wing just visible on the left). Even the stone has what is said to be an authentically Indian orangey tinge (specially stained, according to some authorities).

This astonishing house was begun in 1805, and in 1807 the Prince Regent came to visit. No doubt his stay at Sezincote partly accounts for the prince’s enthusiasm for the Indian style, which John Nash adopted for the remodelling of the prince’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1815. Brighton’s Pavilion, so outré with its cluster of domes and intricate fretwork, so famous because of its owner’s character and colourful life, is now far better known than Sezincote. Which is good in a way because the nabob’s house* still has the power to surprise us and to remind us that here in the heart of England there are still things that pull us up short with an architectural jolt and remind us of the multifarious cultural and economic links that make up British history.

*This building is celebrated as "the nabob's house" in John Betjeman's autobiographical poem Summoned By Bells.

Lower Swell, Gloucestershire

Eastward ho!

Only a couple of miles from the Stow house in the previous post is this cottage on the edge of the village of Lower Swell. Very unusually, it’s in a style influenced by the architecture of India – what the builders of the 18th and 19th centuries, taking a wild linguistic lunge at sophistication and missing the target somewhat, called the ‘Hindoo’ style. It’s not that like a real Indian building, but it is heavily influenced by the great Cotswold house of Sezincote, all onion domes and lantern-like pavilions, begun in 1805.

This cottage was built a couple of years later as a spa, a chalybeate spring having been discovered nearby. The spa was not a success, but the building remains, now a house, its pineapple-finialled doorway, ogee-topped windows, and fir-coned dormers testimony to a very English idea of ‘the East’. The windows in the flanking cottages, just visible in the photograph, have the kind of multifoil tops, as if made with a pastry-cutter, that you also see at Sezincote. It’s weird, but just right.