Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Health resort

To Malvern (again) for coffee, book browsing, exercise, and architectural appreciation. Malvern is one of my favourite nearby places, and not just for its magnificent hilly scenery. It keeps on giving me food for thought architecturally, with everything from medieval tiles to a rare Bini dome. It is, as they say in the trade, ‘well bookshopped’, boasting shops selling new books, a good vendor of second hand books, and a couple of charity bookshops. And its hilly terrain means getting around gives me good exercise.

It was ever thus, or has at least been thus for a long time. Malvern is, famously, a spa town. The health-giving qualities of the water at Malvern Wells were discovered in the 16th century, but the place really began to grow in the period around 1810, in part at least as a result of the great success of the spa at Cheltenham. Various wells were exploited, hotels were built – and more. Those who came to take the waters needed other things to do to. Cheltenham offered circulating libraries, a harp and pianoforte warehouse, assembly rooms, and so on. So in Malvern, next to the pump room and baths, the grand Royal Library was built.

The library is on a corner site, and turns the corner with some style. This corner is actually a junction at which two side roads meet the main Worcester Road towards the summit of the town centre’s hill. The setting gives the end of the library great prominence, and the architect, John Deykes, exploited this to the full with a full height semi-circular bow in the classical style of 1818, when he drew up his plans. The main ground floor, actually raised slightly above the ground because the land falls away so sharply, is particularly splendid. Tall, 9-over-9 sash windows are separated by Ionic columns that support a balcony above with a balustrade of pump uprights. Above this, the upper-floor windows are set back, but echo the semi-circular shape. It’s a striking composition, and must have impressed visitors as they slogged their way up the hill.

The library building was part of the same structure as the assembly rooms, so inside it was not all about the books. As well as a reading room and an extensive lending library there was also a music library, a billiards room, and a room for card playing. The building also contained a bazaar where, according to an information board down the street, ‘anything from a Bible to a firescreen could be purchased’. All this, together with increasing numbers of shops, gave the spa visitors plenty to do, and served the town well through the Regency and Victorian heyday of the spa. When I visit today, walking, browsing, and imbibing, not to mention admiring the architecture, I feel I’m following in those 19th-century footsteps.

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.

Sherborne, Dorset

Surprised in Sherborne, 2

Sherborne’s Cheap Street is a very attractive jumble of architectural styles – from late-medieval timber framed structures to stone buildings from virtually every later date: a hotch-potch, mostly with recent shop fronts, but much of it given unity by the glowing stone. Even in this good company, the bow-fronted building above is outstanding. Living near Cheltenham, I’m used to stucco-covered Regency buildings decked out with classical cornices, columns and iron balconies, but even so this one made me pause. It’s small, with just a single window on the upper floor of its curvaceous facade, but what a window – the full Venetian, with a pair of rectangular sections bookending a round-topped central portion, the whole surrounded by elegant mouldings and highlights picked out in white. A neat cornice and parapet, balustraded in the centre, complete this upper floor, which rests on four stone Ionic columns that frame the modern shop window. The iron balcony is the finishing Regency touch, vital for the safety of those inside who want to open the big window, which extends down to the floor.

As with the shop front in my previous post, I wondered what this building was used for when it was first put up in the early part of the 19th century. The upper room looked to me like the spacious drawing room of a middle-class house, the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place in Brighton. But there was no clue to what was originally where the modern shop window is now. The answer turns out to be that the building belonged to the Sherborne Savings Bank, who erected it in 1818. 

This was the formative period for savings banks in England. These banks were set up to provide banking facilities for poorer people – those who were not normally the customers of the established banks, whose accounts did not normally bear interest at this time. Savings banks welcomed small investors, including those who could save only intermittently, as their incomes were unreliable and varied according to the seasons or the availability of work.* Although savings banks did not help the very poor, who found it impossible to save any money at all, they were attractive to those such as artisans, small farmers, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, among whom were many who had a little money to save and who liked the idea of self-help. Savings banks were not perfect: in an era before elaborate state regulation of financial institutions, some folded as the result of fraud or incompetence. But for many they played a useful role.

Whoever designed the Sherborne bank’s building did their best with what was clearly a confined site. Ideally, the sweep of the bow front should stick out over the pavement area, so that it can make an impression whichever way you approach it. But the building to the right already sticks out, so this wouldn’t have worked without invading too much pavement space. So here it sits, standing proud of one neighbour and slightly in the shadow of the other, making its impression nonetheless.

The delicate architecture of this frontage is not what I normally associate with banks. The banks I’ve admired on this blog in the past have been rather chunky buildings, with the kind of solid-looking masonry that suggests strength and security. They seem to tell you that your money will be safe here. This building is very different. It’s impressive, but in a gentler, more domestic way. Its columns and the overhang they make possible offer shelter from the rain and seem inviting. ‘Come in,’ they say, ‘and you’ll receive a warm welcome.’ The effect seems wholly appropriate for a savings bank set up for those not previously used to dealing with the estanlishged banks or money markets. It still works its charm, on one passer-by, at least.

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* Small investors could also entrust their money to Friendly Societies, but these had regulations – often requiring members to deposit money regularly, that did not suit those with irregular incomes. Savings banks did not have such rules. 

Llanwarne, Herefordshire

Ionically…

The variations on the classical orders of architecture – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, Tuscan – are legion. They’ve been the subject of posts on this blog before, but I don’t think I’ve covered a Jacobean variation. This is from a wall monument inside the ruined church at Llanwarne that I featured in my previous post. Maybe some dedicated pursuivant of heraldry could work out whose monument it was from the coats of arms on it. Perhaps it commemorates the person who paid for work on the church in the 17th century, including the south porch – but that’s speculation and in this post I’m concentrating on one small detail of the monument’s design.

Even now the stonework is weathered, the amount of effort expended by the carver is clear, and one focus of that effort was to delineate a variation in the Ionic order that’s very much of its time. Even the shaft is distinctive, with its deep, curving convex mouldings, in contrast to the concave flutes that are more usual on classical columns. There’s additional fine detailing between each moulding that looks as if the sculptor has created a series of miniature flutes topped with tiny roundels. The necking ring above is very deeply moulded, and above it is a band ornamented with tiny hemispheres in groups of five, arranged in a pattern that’s repeated in the capitals above. Between the capital’s spirals is what looks like some egg and dart decoration, but this has worn rather flat. Adjoining the shaft and capital to the right are the rolls and scrolls and flat patterns we now called strapwork, something typical of 17th century English interiors.

In other words, this detail shows an English carver doing what English carvers so often did – taking a classical motif that we associate with ancient Greece or Rome and giving it a character that’s both more local and very much of its time. True, some of the ideas may come from pattern books published in France or the Low Countries, go-to sources for much English Renaissance design. But the effect – vigorous, rural, but showing visual flair – is very English, and shows, as so often, that the orders were an adaptable starting point for craftworkers who’d learned the classical ropes.

Wells, Somerset

 
Slightly foxed

At the weekend I was teaching a course about architectural ornament and the participants were amused and, I think, charmed by a number of variations on the classical orders that I showed them. I wanted to demonstrate that the orders weren’t necessarily regarded by masons, carvers, and builders as a set of hard-and-fast rules. They could be starting points on which the craftsman played variations. A particular hit was a Corinthian capital with a bird fluttering among its acanthus leaves in Birmingham. It reminded me that there are capitals featuring animal heads on a building in the High Street at Wells. They occur on the Bath stone facade of a bank of about 1880. But what kind of capitals are they? And what are the animals?

The official listing text for the building describes the capitals as “quasi-Ionic”; the text doesn’t mention the animals at all, not concerning itself with such trivialities. The Ionic element is the spirals, although there are also some acanthus leaves lurking at the back, so it might just as well be “quasi-Corinthian” I suppose. The beast is an oddity: the Resident Wise Woman suggested an attempted fox, observing that the ears seem to be turning into a leaves. A mythical beast? Or just a poorly carved one? No matter. It’s a bit of fun however you look at it.

St Endellion, Cornwall

Sun-up

There is much to like* about the church of St Endelienta, at St Endellion, Cornwall, and the interest begins before you get inside the door. Many parish churches have sundials near the entrance – churchgoers need to know whether it’s time for mass, or communion, or whatever term they use, and anyway church doors often face south. This one was put up by (or in memory of) churchwardens Jonathan George and Digory Gray in 1826.

The sundial is a lovely mishmash of motifs, from Ionic columns to the sun itself. At first glance, you could dismiss those columns as rustic Ionic – a simple version of the real thing. But actually, they’re not bad. The columns are fluted, the spiral volutes on the capitals are carefully cut and there is a hint of egg and dart decoration between the spirals. The carver has even included the abacus – the bit just above the capital. When you look closely the sundial has all kinds of other winning details: the row of stylized acanthus leaves marking the top of the square ‘frame’; the tiny interlaced semicircles just below them (just about visible if you click on the detail image above); the designs that fill the quadrants at bottom left and bottom right and look as if they’ve been taken from patterns for part of a plaster ceiling by Robert Adam. The Sun, complete with face, keeps watch above all, and he is set in a panel that’s not arched, not triangular to fit the line of the roof above, but scalloped, another Regency touch. Best of all, the numerals are confidently cut with lots of contrast between the thick and thin strokes – a feature that was highlighted for me as the sun appeared from behind white clouds, transforming a chilly morning and bringing out the best in the carving. Good timing.

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*As is my wont, I’ve concentrated on a single detail. This church also boats beautiful roofs, carved angels and bench ends, and more. Plus a notable music festival, associated particularly with the conductor Richard Hickox and continuing after his death.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Colour and capitals

I was looking out for another example of the use of colour in architecture, when I came across this in one of Cheltenham’s Regency squares. The use of a pale colour (blue, grey, buff, even orange) has always struck me as effective in this kind of architecture, especially when combined with details in low relief picked out in white. The effect, especially with blue or grey walls, is reminiscent of cameo jewellery or Wedgwood pottery.

This house is a lovely example of that effect, but as I looked more closely I was even more impressed by the classical details, particularly the Ionic pilasters. The Ionic, say the textbooks and manuals of ornament, is the order with the spiral volutes in the capital. True enough, but what wonderfully spiralling volutes these are, with their rings and rings of not-quite-parallel mouldings turning towards their centres. And that’s just the start. This Ionic pilaster has much more in the way of ornament, and it's easier to make this out if you click on the picture to enlarge it. At the top, just above the volutes is the part called the abacus, here consisting of a narrow ornamental band. Looked at closely, it reveals itself to be a band of egg-and-dart ornament – yes, it’s made up of alternating ovoid and pointed shapes. Between the two spirals (the bit called the echinus) is another row of slightly larger egg-and-dart, with a narrow band of interlace just above it. And then beneath the spirals is the band known as the necking, which is adorned with a central palmette (a motif based on fan-like palm leaves), flanked by flower-like ornaments. Just beneath these, before the flute pilaster proper begins, is yet another moulded narrow band.

The ancient Greeks, and those in later centuries who copied or adapted their designs, played countless variations on these motifs. These examples are based on the capitals on the Erechtheion (below), the glorious, asymmetrical temple on the Acropolis at Athens. This is perhaps appropriate in Cheltenham, because the town’s famous caryatids – which I’ve noticed in previous posts – also derive ultimately from this temple. It’s good to see the influence working wonders once more.

Ionic capital, the Erechtheion, Athens
Photograph by Eusebius (Guillaume Piolle), used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Lewes, Sussex

Fossils and flutes

Every architectural history and glossary will tell you about the classical orders, the sets of rules defining how columns, capitals, and the structures they support should be designed. They will tell you that there are five orders – three (the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) invented by the Greeks, and the other two (Composite and Tuscan) added by the Romans. They were imitated and adapted by the architects of the Renaissance, and became fashionable in England thanks to classical architects such as Inigo Jones and the legion of classicists who came after him, from the 17th to the early-20th centuries.

But this is not quite the whole story. Regular readers of this blog may remember a post about the curious ‘Gothic order’, invented in the Georgian period and used on a building in Ludlow. There’s another variation on the orders in Castle Place, a house in the High Street in Lewes. The porch is in the Ionic order – the capitals, with their pairs of spiral volutes, are straight from the builders’ pattern books of c 1810 when this house was built. But what is this on top of the fluted pilasters that bookend the façade? Not spirals in the Ionic mode, but pairs of fossils, ammonites in fact!


The ‘ammonite order’ was the brainchild of George Dance, who used it in London in 1789. It was taken up enthusiastically by Amon Wilds and his son, also called Amon, builder-architects who did a lot of work in Sussex, especially Brighton. Perhaps they liked ammonites because the name afforded the opportunity for a visual pun. Fossil-collecting was already a popular pastime by 1810, and ammonites, or ‘snake stones’ as they were often called, were prized by collectors. Their likeness fits wonderfully, if eccentrically, on top of the pilasters on this Lewes house, and no doubt acted as a kind of advertisement for the builders. In 1816 Castle Place was bought by a Dr Gideon Mantell, who was a geologist. No doubt he liked the ammonites too.

Victoria, London

Capital!

When it comes to architecture, Victoria is not the most illustrious of the great London railway termini. It lacks the great iron and glass conservatory-like sweep of Paddington, the very resolved design of King’s Cross, or the restored glamour of St Pancras. It’s also structurally slightly confusing, partly because of its history of serving two railways – the South Eastern and Chatham and the London, Brighton and South Coast. It’s still a station of two halves, with the old South Eastern and Chatham platforms on the left as you stand on the concourse looking towards the tracks, the London, Brighton and South Coast platforms on the right.

There are still some little noticed but still notable details at Victoria, though. My picture shows one from the London, Brighton and South Coast side of the station, a cast-iron Ionic capital from 1898, when the LB & SC rebuilt their side of the station in red-brick Renaissance revival style. The roof is held up by impossibly tall Ionic columns, each terminating in a capital like this one beneath the arches that support the metal and glass roof.

This is a Victorian interpretation of a Greek capital: the curvaceous spiral volutes and egg-and-dart moulding are variations on what would be found on a Classical temple or Renaissance palace, the swags below them are a more fanciful addition, though probably copied from some Renaissance source. The capital and its cousins are hardly visible from down on the station concourse, but as I dashed up the escalator towards Victoria Place on my way to the Passport Office this morning, I found myself quite close to the roof and face to face with this capital. Trying to ignore the mystified glances of passing commuters, I aimed my mobile phone to record a bit more unregarded architecture for your delectation.

Sunningwell, Berkshire*

Classicism, Tudor-style

St Leonard’s church, Sunningwell, is a small parish church mostly built in the medieval period and restored by the Victorians. It has one extraordinary feature: this seven-sided porch at the west end, added to the church just after 1550. I’ve no idea why the porch should have seven sides, although the number seven is a widespread one in Christian symbolism, from the seven days of the rcreation to the seven last words of Jesus on the cross. The porch is interesting not only because of its seven-sided form, but also because of its mixture of architectural styles – it’s half-Gothic and half-Classical.

This strange stylistic mix is very much of its time, the second half of the 16th century. In this period, rural buildings were still using the Gothic style of the previous century, with its pointed arches and cusped window openings, though the pointed arches had got flatter (as in the doorway here) and the windows were sometimes rectangular rather than pointed. More adventurous builders, though, were learning about the Classical style of ancient Greece and Rome – but their Tudor Classicism is often an insular affair, in which the standard designs of columns and capitals aren’t in quite the right proportions (there is often the addition of decidedly unclassical ornament, too).

At Sunningwell, the columns are of the Ionic order, the one with the spiral volute decoration, but the spirals here are much smaller than on Greek or Roman buildings. And whereas Ionic columns are usually fluted, these are plain. So these details represent a rustic form of Classicism, but they’re still remarkable – Sunningwell may be the first English parish church to have Classical columns supporting part of its fabric.

The reason for this unusual stylistic adventure in a rural church is that the porch was paid for by a man of great learning and international connections. John Jewel, scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, theologian, apologist of the Anglican church, and eventually Bishop of Salisbury, began his church career as rector of Sunningwell in the 1550s. His learning no doubt influenced the design of the porch, setting a trend in architecture in the unlikely setting of a quiet English village.

*I'm using the traditional county divisions here, as does Pevsner's Buildings of England series. Postally, the village is in Oxfordshire.

Bristol

Bristol brickwork (1)

Passing through Bristol last week, I thought I’d take a look at a favourite building I’d not seen for a while. When I last went past, one side of the structure was covered in scaffolding. Maybe this time the poles would be gone. But to my surprise, the building, the Tramways Generating Station, on Counterslip near the river, was covered in even more scaffolding and netting than before, so the photograph I show above is actually from my previous visit.

In 1895, having had horse-drawn trams for some twenty years, Bristol became the first city in the United Kingdom to build an electric tram service and in 1898–99 this new power station was constructed to supply electricity for the quickly expanding tramways network. This power station was designed by a young architect, William Curtis Green, who later became better known as the creator of buildings such as London’s Dorchester Hotel. The Bristol power station contained four steam engines coupled to four generators, and supplied power to the tramway system until 1941, when one of the many bombs dropped on the centre of the city struck a nearby bridge and severed the power lines.

To house the power plant, Curtis Green created a building of neoclassical grandeur. The details – columns, windows, arches, and doorways – are picked out in Bath stone and stand out beautifully from the red brick walls. The façade on Counterslip, shown in the photograph, is rather narrow, and this emphasizes the height of the structure, making it seem even larger than it is. In a way, the effect is rather pompous. The very grand Venetian window on the ground floor, the row of four Ionic columns at second floor level, the triangular pediment at the top with the tiny window in the middle – it’s a busy, unbalanced, and over-the-top composition.

But it makes you look, and it makes you think: the Bristolians were clearly proud of their tramway and their electrification scheme, and it’s not such a bad thing to build a public transport system to be proud of. Not for the first time, I came away impressed by the swagger and confidence of the buildings in England’s southwestern metropolis.

New Street, Birmingham

ORDER, ORDER (2)
In spite of blitzkrieg, modernism, decay, and demolition, there are still plenty of Classical buildings in England. And so architecture buffs, who know their metopes from their triglyphs, get used to recognising the Classical orders. But how often do we really look at their details, the curving spiral volutes of Ionic capitals, the curly acanthus leaves of the Corinthian?

Of course, capitals are usually high up on a building. You need binoculars and toned neck muscles to look at them closely. One of the joys of visiting the great cities of the ancient world – Istanbul is supreme in this respect – is the amount of Classical rubble lying around on the ground. In places like that you can look at all kinds of architectural sculpture close-up, without craning your neck.

Now and then in England, though, the accidents of building design bring you face to face with this kind of detail.This Corinthian capital is in the New Street branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in the centre of Birmingham, which occupies the former Midland Bank, a building of the late-1860s designed by Edward Holmes. The style is a grand, confident Classicism. It’s just the kind of thing for a High Victorian bank but the generous spaces also make it a good setting for a large bookshop.

The stairs afford interesting glimpses of some of the Classical details, and the invention and craftsmanship that went into their creation. The picture shows the capital atop one of the giant Corinthian pilasters inside the shop. Face to face with this capital, we see the Corinthian order, or an eccentric Victorian adaptation of it, afresh. Crisp acanthus leaves curve inwards and outwards, spirals thrust up and forward like springs, and the whole thing supports, not an entablature or lintel, but another piece of decoration, an even bigger piece of foliage. The most striking touch of all, though, is the centrepiece – a bird opening its wings amongst the scrolls and leaves. All praise to the Victorians for their whimsy, and to Waterstone’s for their conveniently sited staircase that gives us this close-up view.

Ludlow, Shropshire

ORDER, ORDER (1)
You know the Orders, the modes, as it were, of Classical architecture? Doric, with its fluted columns topped with square abaci, Ionic with its spiral volute capitals, Corinthian, with its gorgeous bunches of acanthus leaves? The Orders were designed to provide builders with a complete architectural vocabulary, a set of standard designs for the key bits of a building – columns, with capitals on top of them, and entablatures on top of them. Everything standardized. Everything in order.

It was never quite like that, of course. The ancient Greeks rang changes on the orders and the Romans introduced two others (Tuscan and Composite). But there was still a sense of correctness, of decorum, to use a Classical word, about how to use these bits of architectural vocabulary. When English builders get their hands on the orders, though, quite different and bizarre things sometimes happen. What, for example, if you were to combine the idea of a Classical Order, with its column, capital, and entablature, with the pointed-arched Gothic style of the Middle Ages?

What you get is this Gothic doorcase of 1768 on the Guildhall in Ludlow. It’s all there – column, capital, entablature, but the columns are slender triple shafts, and the entablature is adorned with little quatrefoils, details straight from the visual vocabulary of the medieval parish church. And so between the columns is a doorway topped not with a flat Classical lintel but with a gently curving arch above which is a pointed Gothic arch. It’s a delightful combination, architecturally incorrect and very English. Capital!

Corn Street, Bristol

Less famous than the cathedral (see previous post), but even more ornate and just as amazing in its way is the former West of England and South West District Bank, now Lloyd's TSB, in Bristol's Corn Street. The picture shows a small section of the upper floor and cornice of this building, built in the 1850s and modelled on St Mark’s Library, Venice. The Italianate proportions (using the plain Doric order on the ground floor, the more elaborate Ionic order above) are impressive. But what really sets this building apart is the carving with which it is smothered. Using pale Portland stone to stand out from the Bath stone of the main structure, sculptor John Evan Thomas let himself go, with the arms and symbols of the towns and cities where the bank had its branches and up in the entablature, a host of putti busy working away as bankers. How unlike the bankers of today these innocent figures seem.