London, Bristol, and more...

Tile round-up

One reader's enthusiasm for my previous post on an Edwardian tiled pub facade made me think how many posts I've done on tiling from this period. Builders and architects in the late-19th and early-20th century used tiles on all kinds of buildings, and did so for a variety of reasons – because tiles are colourful and eye-catching; because they can be used to create ornate decoration relatively cheaply; because their wipe-down surface makes them hygienic; because all these advantages helped to make them fashionable; because this fashion generated a ready supply. Tiles were popular in the interwar period too, but I thought I would post a series of links to a dozen or so previous posts that together give an impression of the colourful variety of Victorian and Edwardian tiles.   

Everard's Printing Works, Bristol: tiles depicting printers Gutenberg and Morris, designed by W J Neatby and made by Doulton

More tiles by Neatby creating an exotic effect on Leicester's Turkey Café

Still more Neatby tiles, including striking art nouveau lettering, at the Fox and Anchor pub, Smithfield, London

Doulton tiles, this time by John H McLennan, used indoors, in the Strand, London to create a phantasmagoria of flying fish

Tiles with religious imagery inside All Saints' Margaret Street, London

Tiles in the oriental style, for a former Turkish bath, London

Pork butcher's shop featuring pictorial tiles with piggy portrtaits, Cirencester

More butcher's animal tiles, King's Lynn

Enormous words built up from tiles: lettering in Kettering

Tiles for advertising at Leicester Square Underground Station, London

Maida Vale Underground Station, London, showing a typical tile-clad design in the style developed by the architect by Leslie Green: tiles that create a corporate identity

Ceramic lettering on another Underground station in London

A dazzling tile-clad former nurses' home, also shown above, in London

The pub in Gloucester that started me looking back at these posts

It strikes me that there are things missing from this list. I've not said much on the blog, for example, about terracotta, the widely used unglazed ceramic material that is usually brick-red and was seized upon by Victorian. Arts and Crafts, and Edwardian architects to clad buildings decoratively. Terracotta sunflowers, scrolls, leaves, patterns: they are all over the place and I'll be looking out for some to share with you soon.

Kettering, Northamptonshire

Local hero

Regular readers will known that I sometimes amuse friends and acquaintances by announcing that I have visited, for pleasure, places they’d not normally associate with tourism. St Austell before the Eden Project, say, or Kidderminster more recently.* Why go there when you can visit the oodles of beautiful towns and villages, stuffed with listed buildings and interpreted for our delight by dedicated heritage-wallahs? Well, I visit my share of such places too, but there are many towns, off the tourist map or lacking the stereotypical array of picturesque streets or quaint shops and houses, that offer rewards to the curious. It was with such thoughts in my mind that I ignored the snorts of laughter and made my way to Kettering.

I recently posted about a lovely cooperative building in the town, which grew in the Victorian period as a result of the Northamptonshire shoe industry. Very close to the centre one finds streets of 19th-century brick-built terraced houses next door to factories of the same period. None of these factories are huge, so there’s no sense of conflicting scales. Some of them still make shoes – the celebrated Loake’s shoes are still produced in Kettering, for example. The town also has some wonderful schools. One of the best is Stamford Street School (actually in Montagu Street), which is in a red brick Tudor-revivalish style with this stand-out tower.

The relief carving and openwork on this tower is truly jaw-dropping, a cut or two or three above what’s usual for  board-school architecture, which is generally purposeful and functional, with sometimes to odd bit of carving or terracotta decoration here and there, depending on the local budget and the commitment (or not) to produce a building that reflects civic pride and gives the inmates something to inspire them. The huge roundel on this tower is extraordinary: was it meant to be a clock face? Was it ever used as such? There seem to be no vestiges of painted numerals or holes for the hands. As for the elaborate openwork, I’d taken it to be intended to allow the sound of a bell to be audible. But the recent revised Pevsner Northamptonshire volume describes this as a chimney tower, so presumably it’s to do with heating and ventilation. It’s functional, then, but you’d rarely see anything so ornate adorning a locally funded school – even considering that the date is 1892, taking us back to a period in which architectural ornament was enjoying a burgeoning heyday.

The firm of architects responsible for this wonder was local practice Gotch and Saunders.† I’ve known of John Alfred Gotch for years because he wrote books¶ about historic architecture, especially Elizabeth and Jacobean architecture, so it was a pleasure to find his work dotted all over this town. He was prominent in his profession, serving as President of the Architectural Association and of the RIBA, the first provincial architecture to be honoured by the latter post. A local hero, then, who did well by his town, helping an outwardly unassuming place to shine.

Notes
* Kidderminster still has several striking former carpet factories, about one of which I posted here.
† The practice continues locally as Gotch, Saunders and Surridge (GSS Architecture)
¶ Gotch’s books include Early Renaissance Architecture in England (1914), The Architecture of the Renaissance in England (1894), and The Growth of the English House (1909).

Kettering, Northamptonshire

Bake off

I know, I know. I don’t always pick the most obvious destinations for my architectural explorations. A while back, a neighbour of mine actually laughed when I said I wanted to go to Kidderminster, but I enjoyed looking at the carpet factories there nonetheless. The same went for Kettering, where I hoped to find shoe factories but, as usual, I found more than I was expecting.

Tucked away amongst the Victorian red-brick houses and shoe factories, for instance, and hemmed in by white vans and old mattresses, was this Co-operative Bakery. It seems to have been converted to flats, but it’s still a neat example of a medium-sized factory in brick, dating from 1900. It’s lifted above the commonplace with the eye-catching stripy design on the corners and up the walls, by the shallow relieving arches above the windows, and by a couple of stand-out details.

The most obvious of these is the lettering: huge capitals made up out of white tiles. They’ve clearly been specially made – look at the bespoke bits of the B and V – and they leave no doubt about what this building is, or about the Co-op’s pride in it. The other detail is smaller: the graphic devices, in cast iron, set along the side. They spell KICS, for Kettering Industrial Co-operative Society. A lovely touch, on which the raised outlines of the letters catch the sun.

Kettering Industrial Co-operative Society certainly left its architectural mark – there’s a factory and a warehouse in neighbouring streets, too, and its impact was reflected in numerous stores in the town and surrounding villages. And the Kettering Co-op was responsible for at least one major milestone in the story of the Co-operative movement: the town elected the first-ever Co-operative Member of Parliament, in 1918. If a lot of these buildings no longer fulfil their original function, their design very effectively reminds us of their history – and made my journey more than worthwhile.