Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Bursting from the shadows

In 1818 Cheltenham architect George Allen Underwood was elected to his local Masonic Lodge. Two years later, work began on the Lodge's new hall, near the centre of the town, and Underwood was the designer. Underwood was a pupil of John Soane, and Soane would have been impressed, I think, with this building – the confident niches, the mix of carving and stretches of plain wall, the way it looks massive although it's not much bigger than a couple of three-storey houses, the fact that the facade manages to work even though it has virtually no windows. The way it stands there like a rock amongst the pale stuccoed facades and delicate iron balconies that its neighbours present to the world is also remarkable. I have been admiring this exterior for years, and others agree: "probably the finest of the early purpose-built Masonic halls," says Pevsner, and John Russell in his Shakespeare's Country calls it a masterpiece of occasional architecture.

One day, not the day on which I took this picture showing the building bursting out of the shadow that envelops its lower portion, but on another occasion when the light was more even, I loitered across the road for a while, admiring the building and watching the passers-by. There were quite a lot of people walking past because a couple of hundred yards to the right is a large car park and a couple of hundred yards the other way is the centre of the town. Not one person appeared to pay any attention to the building at all. Of course these were probably busy men and women with work to go to or shopping to do. But is was still interesting that a building that is so assertive, a design that is very much in the Regency style but has little of the delicacy or gentility of much of Regency Cheltenham, a structure that would, I'd have thought, divide opinion quite strongly, inspired hardly a glance. Presumably none of those passers-by reads this blog.

Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire

Compton in the Hole

At last, from the hill that’s home to the windmill in the previous post, I got my glimpse of Compton Wynyates. This north front is not, I have to say, the most spectacular side of the house, but still gives a good impression of the character of the place – the mostly Tudor brick walls, the tall chimneys, the dormers in the roofs, the purely ornamental crenellations, the different levels. Above all, this cluster of brick wings and pitched roofs gives an impression of the way the house must have grown over the years with bits added here and there before a major revamp of the eastern part of the building – the part of the left of the picture is an addition of 1867 by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt in a style in harmony with rest of the house.

Looking at the house in its tree-lined valley one can understand what has usually made people enthusiastic about it. John Russell, in Shakespeare’s Country, noticed how the surrounding hills and trees rise up around so that ‘the house is seen as if in the bowl of an enormous spoon’. W H Hutton, in Highways and Byways in Shakespeare’s Country, called it ‘a wonderful picture of rose-tinted restfulness’. Pevsner, with his eye more focused on the ball, found in it the picturesque mode that so attracted him: ‘the perfect picture-book house of the Early Tudor decades, the most perfect in England of the specific picturesque, completely irregular mode’.

Writers are apt to get lyrical about this place, but Hutton reminds us that Camden, referring to its setting, called it ‘Compton in the Hole’ and records a local ‘rustic’ showing a visitor around, remarking, ‘Did ye ever see sich a hole?’ Some hole.

John Russell

Thank you (3)

I don’t keep up with the obituaries enough these days, so was saddened recently to read about the death of the art critic John Russell in August 2008. John Russell was born in 1919, went to St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1940 went to work as an unpaid ‘attaché’ at the Tate Gallery. The gallery’s pictures and staff were evacuated to Worcestershire soon after Russell arrived, and the young man soon found himself called up, first to the Ministry of Information and then to Naval Intelligence, where he met Ian Fleming.

Russell’s time in Worcestershire must have helped him write his first book, Shakespeare’s Country, for Batsford. His encounter with the creator of James Bond bore fruit after the war, when Fleming introduced him to the Sunday Times, where Russell became Art Critic in 1949. In 1974 he moved to the USA, to work for the New York Times, which he did for many years. He did many other things too, curating exhibitions, writing books (including excellent ones on Seurat and Francis Bacon), and writing for television and film.

I first read John Russell in the Sunday Times in the late 1960s where, week by week, he introduced me to modern art – big beasts like Moore and Bacon, younger artists such as Hockney and Hodgkin. I also read Shakespeare’s Country, because I lived on the edge of it. At first I didn’t realise it was by the man I was reading in the paper every week – the book seemed backward-looking whereas the weekly art reviews presented the new with all its shocks. But then the books of regional travel and history that Batsford published during the Second World War were precisely designed to look back in order to remind people what they were fighting for. At the Sunday Times Russell was engaging in different kinds of looking – whether casting backward glances at the career of Picasso or assessments of everything from Pop Art to Joseph Beuys. Most of his writing, though, was thoughtful, insightful, and appreciative – he liked best to write about what he best liked.

When I first read Shakespeare’s Country, I found the writing rather mannered: the book has a tendency to compare places in England to more glamorous ones overseas, so that the countryside resembles the Italian campagna or a town is like Auteuil. But such comparisons are meant to reassure the 1940s reader that the short journeys then possible could yield pleasures equal to those of grander continental tourism. And I was grateful to be introduced to such pleasures - the isolated church at Strensham, for example, with its chancel full of monuments,romantic and deserted country houses, the backstreets of faded, elegant Cheltenham. It is the territory, of course, of this blog. I came to see too that Russell's style was not always mannered, and that he was at pains to show that writing about places and buildings, though it might look back, did not have to be deadeningly nostalgic, or wallowingly indulgent; that it could embody precision, and impart interesting and useful information. That it could be the result of interested enquiry and that it could provoke further enquiry in the reader. And that it did not have to be, as Russell himself put it, reliant on ‘the strange sexual-anthropomorphic idiom of English country-writers, in which villages nestle, valleys girdle, and rivers are said to have issue’.

And so it was that John Russell fired my growing interest in buildings – their history and context as well as their architecture, starting balls rolling that are still in motion. And that he also helped me to find what I could like in art, and how I might understand it. And above all that criticism isn’t always about, or even primarily about, demolishing things – it can also be about taking them apart to show how they work and why you like them.

For starting me off, and keeping me going, thank you, John Russell.