Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Public utility

My last post about Kidderminster for now shows a Victorian drinking fountain against the background of one of the town’s carpet buildings. That background structure was built as the offices for H. R. Willis’s Worcester Cross carpet factory in 1879. Birmingham man J. G. Bland was the architect and he chose a plain red brick that looks sober in comparison with some of the town’s polychrome brick structures, albeit given interest by a very large central window and some curvy Flemish gables; behind was the usual single-storey north-light shed for the carpet looms. Willis’s business did not flourish and the building was sold to another Kidderminster manufacturer and carpet production continued there until the beginning of the 1970s.

In contrast to the big red-brick offices is the small stone Gothic drinking fountain, which was given by John Brinton, one of the town’s most successful manufacturers and donor of Brinton Park in the town. In 1876, when the fountain was built, supplies of clean drinking water were still not always reliable and generally in private hands. Then, as now, people complained that water companies were more interested in profit than in the public good and in 1876, cholera epidemics were recent history and germ theory only recently established. People everywhere welcomed reliable sources of clean water. Architect J. T. Meredith gave the fountain enough height, with its tall, spire-like roof, to make it into a landmark, and a touch of colour comes from the red granite shafts that support its pointed arches. Quatrefoils, small ornate gables, and Gothic arches abound. A detail shows the bands of ball-flower ornament, a motif drawn straight from English 14th-century Gothic, together with one of a series of grotesques that cling to the eaves.

All this rich detail, together with the clock faces on four of the eight sides, make this into a delightful little building that was once truly useful too. Now we’re less in need of public clocks and drinking fountains (although many are dissatisfied with our current water companies’ management of their pipe networks, supply, and changing regime). But a structure that affords a bit of beauty in a Midlands town that’s not universally beautiful cannot be altogether bad.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

 

Ghosts’ stories

I have spent my working life writing and editing illustrated books. Doing this meant paying attention not only to the form and content of the text but also to the appearance of the printed volume – its layout, typeface, paper, cover, and so on. Though not myself responsible for these visual aspects, I would work closely with the designers who were, and my interest in graphics was nurtured by these collaborations. A fascination with fonts on the page turned into a preoccupation with lettering on signs, and the relationship between signs and buildings is one that is revealed now and then in this blog. Ghost signs, those fading painted signs that have hung on after the people who put them there have moved on, are now fashionable, but I was captivated by them before they became popular things to post on social media.

People can get overly romantic about ghost signs – the elegant letterforms, the flaking paint giving us a faint glimpse into a past world, the enticement of what John Piper called ‘pleasing decay’. But this attitude can make us forget an important truth. Take this sign on a door in Kidderminster. By the look of the fading paint and the very closed doors, it’s unlikely that lorries are loaded very much, if at all, hereabouts. The building to which this sign is attached is, I think, the former Chlidema* Mill, named for a method of producing bordered squares of carpet invented by the proprietors of what was, from 1887 to c. 2000, one of Kidderminster’s numerous carpet factories.

By the turn of the millennium, the town’s carpet industry was in steep decline and mill after mill closed. In many cases, the large weaving sheds at the rear of each works were demolished, leaving only the office and warehouse buildings that fronted the street. These were often architecturally impressive, although that at the Chlidema Mill (or what is left of it) is actually quite modest, of two and three storeys with plain red and white brickwork and plain stone window sills. Go around the back and you find parked cars, temporary safety barriers, and (photograph below) an even plainer brick wall. This has been painted to show the outline of the roof of the demolished weaving shed, with its saw-tooth profile – sloping tiled sections and vertical windows, to provide even north light to aid the workers who wove luxurious carpets below.

It’s sad that the sheds found no further use and that no other industry arrived to take advantage of these work spaces. Though some of the old carpet factories in the town have been found roles (in retail, in vehicle repair, and other areas), many of the weaving sheds have gone, job opportunities have vanished, and it’s easy to see that the town lacks the prosperity it once had: the fate of so many implied by the flaking paint of a redundant sign.

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* Chlidema comes from a Greek word meaning ‘luxurious’.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

A small glory

Yesterday some inner imp in me made me decide to visit Kidderminster. It’s a sad place, hardly designed to improve one’s mood, where Victorian civic buildings abut large-size charity shops, where once magnificent Victorian carpet factories overlook vacant lots, where an inner ring-road slices through the townscape. And yet there is magnificence (not least those carpet factories, one of which houses the Museum of Carpet), if you look for it.

Here’s one building stuck between shopping centres and car parks that deserves a second look. It’s currently behind a locked gate and signs warning one to keep out, but I could still see enough to make me stare. A church, clearly, but of what denomination? I found myself speculating whether it might be Catholic or perhaps rich carpet-manufacturers’ Methodist. But no, this place of worship, originally built in 1782 but given this impressive front in 1883, is actually Unitarian. What a splendid display of Gothic revival with its 14th-century touches – those pointy buttresses, the horizontal band of quatrefoils running below the big windows, and all those curvy ogee canopies (mostly adorned with crockets) above every opening. All particularly effective when the sun chooses to shine on it, bringing out the ruddy colour of the rock-faced sandstone walls.

It was once more magnificent still – there was a stone parapet running along the top of the gable and that lump of stone in the gable’s centre, as well as bearing an inscription with the dates of foundation and rebuilding, supported a central turret that has gone. What a pity those elements have bitten the dust. I also mourned the closed gate and doors. I’d have fancied a look inside (the church contains a 17th-century pulpit once in the parish church and some late-Victorian stained glass, among other things. Maybe one day.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Winter warmer

I and many of my readers like a good enamel advertising sign, and I’ve not yet tired of seeing old favourites such as signs advertising Palethorpe’s Sausages or Lyons’ Tea. But here’s one I’d not seen before: a cheerful red sign for the Ronoleke hot-water bottle. It takes us back in so many ways. First of all it recalls the times before central heating when British people slept in unheated bedrooms, a heap of blankets and a trusty hot-water bottle being the first lines of defence against the cold. Was that frost on the inside of the bedroom window? Yes, it was.

The sign also takes us back to a forgotten brand – forgotten by me at any rate. The unique selling point, apparently, memorialized in the name, was the leak-proof top. The Chemist and Druggist explained, in an issue dating back to October 1922:

The patent neck is a great improvement and will give satisfaction to your customers. Instead of wiring, you get a solid rubber neck built in the bottle itself. There is no washer to perish. The flange of the screw top engages with a solid rubber platform shaped in the neck. The Ronoleke is the only perfectly water tight rubber bottle and, of course, it is infinitely stronger and will outlast any ordinary make. In every way, it is a high quality production.

The Ronoleke, says The Chemist and Druggist, was backed up with a national press advertising campaign. They don’t mention enamel signs, but this survivor gives us an idea of the approach: bright colour, bold lettering, and an appeal both to those suffering from a multitude of cold-related ailments and to people who want a bottle that lasts for years and doesn’t leak. It’s a busy sign, full of words, but the red background, striped edge, and clear lettering are effective and the brand name stands out loud and clear in its outlined script.

Hats off, then, to the Severn Valley Railway, for finding this sign and putting it up at their Kidderminster station. The heritage railways do so much good work, in so many ways. As well as restoring track, rolling stock, and railway buildings, their efforts to show their stations in period style result in the preservation and display of countless bits of incidental equipment and visual detail, including many of the old signs that were once all over railway stations. Pacing the platform at Kidderminster or Bridgnorth is a real pleasure for anyone interested in the history of design and graphics, or anyone whose imagination is gripped by the social history of bed-warming or smoking or food and drink. It’s all well worth missing a train for.

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Afterword Where are the hot-water bottles now? They are gone mostly, gone like counterpanes, nylon sheets, Goblin Teasmades, and other bedtime impedimenta, although teasmades, apparently are enjoying something of a revival. Anyone who fancies reading an elegy for such vanished things (digs, Ronco, Meccano, proper banks, proper doctors, Kunzle cakes, the Idea of the University), a taxonomy of loss, no less,  should buy a copy of Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did It Go? (Granta Books, 2004). The entry on Bottles, Water, Hot is, in my opinion, worth the price of admission alone.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Huts and boilers

Britain’s railways, which had their heyday in the hundred years after the 1840s, developed an architecture of their own, embracing whole new building types from the vast train sheds of the London termini to the smallest rural signal box. Among the least regarded of these railway structures were the corrugated iron buildings, created by railway companies such as the Great Western Railway to fulfil a range of functions – workshops, platform shelters, little lamp huts. I’ve posted about one of these types before, the elegant pagoda platform shelters built by the GWR, with their distinctive concave roofs – perfect for production in large numbers and easy to erect with whatever labour was available locally. There's the end of one on the left-hand edge of my photograph above.

Still less glamorous were the metal storage huts that were made in huge numbers. Many were lamp huts, small structures with a curved roof and plain walls of corrugated iron on a frame of angle iron. There were also slightly larger huts, like this example from Kidderminster station on the preserved Severn Valley Railway. Although very plain, they can look good when painted, as here, in the railway’s colours – with a row of red fire buckets to help catch the eye.

The curving roof shape is classic for corrugated iron buildings – it’s the same shape, roughly, as that of the roofs of thousands of barns as well as of hundreds of railway buildings. It’s also that of one of the most celebrated (but also derided) early corrugated-iron buildings, the first South Kensington Museum, built in the 1850s and the modest precursor of the V&A. With its three curving iron roofs, this structure was described by The Builder as like a ‘threefold monster boiler’. The idea stuck and it became known, to the embarrassment of the museum authorities, as the Brompton Boilers. Curved roofs, corrugated iron, and escaping hot gases – the railways have always been associated with such things, and all they entail.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Iron eyecatcher

In Kidderminster, while I had my eyes on the towers of distant carpet factories, the Resident Wise Woman (who can spot an edible mushroom at 200 yards through her eye corner while driving at speed along a country road) had her attention fixed on the small but significant things around her: “Look at that!”

“That” turns out to be the one surviving gate pier of Kidderminster’s former cattle market. Having been held on the streets, the market was moved here in 1871, when presumably this pier (and at least one other to match it) was put up, along with the nearby brick Jacobean-style entrance lodge. The pier and lodge are the only market structures that remain on the site, and livestock are no longer sold here, although the town still has a large general street market.

The coat of arms is the one used by the town between the 18th century and 1963, although the colours have been tampered with. The two chevrons and three large roundels should be gold and the four roundels on each chevron black. Battered and bruised, the coat of arms remains on this corroded iron pier that is coming apart but, wonderfully, has resisted the elements, the demolition men, and the heraldic perfectionists to survive to attract and please those with sharp eyes.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Carpet people

For around 200 years between the 1770s and the 1970s, carpet-weaving was a major industry in Kidderminster, a trade stimulated by the construction of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, which, completed in 1771, provided a vital transport artery. The business was initially based around hand-looms, and the Kidderminster weavers were at first reluctant to adopt power looms. After the 1850s, though, power-loom-weaving was introduced, and manufacturers built a number of large mills in the town to accommodate the new equipment. Since the industry declined in the late-20th century, Kidderminster has been redeveloped – there seem to have been major upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new ring road, which, I have to say, has made parts of the town centre very unfriendly to pedestrians. A number of the carpet mills survive, though, and most impressive they are, even when glimpsed behind 1970s shops when one is trying to dodge dashing objects making their way around the town centre.

These factories are not on the vast scale of the multi-storey mills and warehouses of northern England, Titus Salt’s Saltaire, for example. But they’re impressively long, with fronts of dazzling polychrome brickwork in which the varied colours of window surrounds, cornices, string courses, and similar details makes a pattern of masonry, not quite as intricate as a carpet, but nearly so.

This is the front of the mill built for the Victoria Carpet Company in 1869. The architect was T D Baker, a local man, and he seems to have been very confident in his handling of the blue brick and white Stourbridge brick, with which he contrived arched window openings, banded pilasters, and cornices. The overall form is classical, with a centre bay topped by a triangular pediment. But the decoration is a very Victorian hybrid – the mixture of dentils and zig-zag courses in the pediment conjures up an unlikely mixture of classical and Romanesque. The overall impression is one of solidity, but the wayward ornamentation hints that the people inside are up to making something decorative.


These buildings are a tribute to the industrialists of 19th-century Kidderminster, who must have liked the idea that they could build structures that were decorative and solid and durable. It was partly about putting up an impressive front – the weaving sheds around the back would have been much plainer and were no doubt tough, noisy environments in which to work. But the monumental factory facades suggest a pride in good work and must have been effective advertising, as decorative and hard-wearing in their way as the carpets made inside.