Ledbury, Herefordshire

Sweet 

This beautiful sign in Ledbury has a special resonance for me, because I had a much-loved relative who was a confectioner. R, a cousin of my mother’s, could do the lot, from chocolate work to making boiled sweets, from seaside rock to luxurious coconut ice or fudge. For a while he had a shop next to a venue – a combined cinema and theatre – where famous stars performed. Many of them dropped in for something sweet and some came back whenever they were performing next door. The demise of live gigs there was a blow, and he moved on.

His wares were good enough to sell without advertisement, and his shop didn’t have a wonderful glass sign like this. But what a joy it is.* That graceful lettering with its gradually widening and narrowing stroke widths is a delight: how difficult it must have been to do that in glass. Just as good is the crazy-paving style background, made up of glass so richly coloured it reminds me of Fruit Gums.¶ I know, I know: there weren’t blue Fruit Gums. But the raspberry red, lemon yellow, lime green, and orange seem to fit the part.

Not knowing for sure the date of this glazing, I’m going to suggest a vague ‘early 20th century’. I like to imagine glazing like this lit from behind on a dark night, so that the colours glow. Bulbs placed behind the sign could also shine their light downwards, to illuminate the goods in the window, drawing the eyes of passers-by, making their mouths water, and luring them inside. Delicious!

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* It will be even clearer if you click on the picture to enlarge it. 

¶ Rowntree’s Fruit Gums: fruit sweets that were part of my childhood and which turn out to be still available, in the UK at least.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Putting up a front

In the same street as my two previous posts is this building, one that has caught my eye before as I’ve driven past. It’s very much the kind of facade that makes you want to do a double take. On foot, this was possible, and the photograph is one result. It turns out to be a former Wesleyan Methodist chapel, built originally in 1849 but upgraded in 1884, when this elaborate frontage was added. It’s quite a statement in a sort of free Romanesque style: twin towers that decide to become octagonal partway up (they contain stairs to internal galleries), big windows, a really large rose window, yellow brick dressings contrasting with the red. A hundred years on from the refronting, the central part of the ground floor was altered – a pair of exterior staircases to the upper level were taken out and the rather dull central doorway block substituted. That was no doubt practical but seems to have been unfortunate visually. Now to make matters worse the whole building seems to be empty.

I don’t know more of the chapel’s history, but it’s very grand for a small town. However, judging by the large 19th-century houses further up the same street, Ledbury was clearly prosperous in that period. It’s in a rich agricultural region (lots of hop fields, together with mixed farming) and the town must have benefitted from the railway link. Ledbury was linked to the West Midlands Railway in 1861 and a branch to Gloucester was added in 1885. Some of the town’s Methodist population may have benefitted from the town’s new opportunities and put some of their profits into the church. What they built reminds us how bold some nonconformist architecture could be, and how the design of some of these buildings could draw on the variety of styles available during the most eclectic periods of the Victorian era.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

TA very much 

This is one of a row of four shops that make up the ground floor of a large timber-framed building in Ledbury, not far from the door canopy in my previous post. The building was once quite a grand town house, built in the 17th century and altered in the 18th. I often wince when I see more recent shop fronts inserted into ancient buildings, sometimes with little or no regard to the structure above. An example in Banbury that I posted a couple of years ago is an example. But times and needs change. Towns evolve, and buildings are altered in turn – I don’t want to pursue a Darwinian metaphor too far but the evolution can enable the building to survive.

And then, looking a little closer, I find that there are actually things to admire in the later additions. The blue and white shop front next door has a good frontage. It’s a hardware store, hard to see architecturally when the shopkeeper’s wares spill out on to the pavement, but the shopkeeper is more interested in making a living than in my impulse to clear gardening equipment or bedding plants out of the way so I can admire the architecture. But, briefly, there’s some unusually shaped panelling and a nice curved console bracket, its flutes picked out in white. A Victorian carpenter must have been pleased with that 150 years ago.

But it’s the shop front next door that my picture shows more fully. It’s plainer, but it’s nicely dentilled. There’s jazzy black and white tiling just visible beneath the doormat by the entrance, and I wonder if those upper panes of glass are the size of the originals (maybe – plate glass got quite large after 1851). The wall of the entrance porch looks as if it has been ‘done’ in faux timber-framing, but even that has its charm and is black and white, to match the building as a whole. More than this, recent owners have made something of the frontage. There’s some pleasant gilded lettering in the lower part of the window and the painted sign up in the fascia is very well made, in attractive serif letters (even if the small numerals in ‘1966’ are a little squashed for my personal taste).

Established 1966: it doesn’t seem that long ago. I can remember 1966. But hang on – if I can remember it, it doesn’t mean it’s recent, I’m sorry to say. A business that has continued for 55 years is something to be proud of these days. Especially when the High Street is expected or obliged to reinvent itself every five minutes and is threatened by online competition, out of town malls, and lockdowns. In summary, the signs both look good and tell us what we want to know – that it’s a fruit and veg shop, that the proprietors’ names are MA and TA Jenkins. I hope they can carry on much longer. TA very much.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

A word in your shell-like 

Walking along the main street in Ledbury during a past pre-lockdown trip, I chanced upon this small gem. It was an example of having the chance to look slowly at part of a street I’d previously only driven along, and the subject of my photograph was one of several small pleasures hereabouts. It’s a door canopy marking the entrance to an otherwise unexceptional looking house that had been made over to a retail use of some sort and happened to be on the market when I passed. I couldn’t find out anything much out about it but the front seems to be that of a small early-Georgian house, four windows wide with a dentil eaves course and two dormers in the roof. The brick has been painted white.

This shell-like door canopy is the stand-out feature. It’s a kind of design not uncommon in the early-18th century, in which the canopy over the door is fashioned like a ribbed scallop shell. The ribs converge at a central feature, in this case a tiny head (more often it’s a scroll of some sort). The ribs in this example have been ornamented with rows of protruding hemispheres that diminish in size as the space gets narrower towards the centre. A dentil course runs around the outer edge of the canopy and the whole thing rests on scroll brackets. I’ve seen similar ones dated 1720, and mounted on rather bigger houses than this one – it’s a delightful and rather swanky adornment to an otherwise modest house.

The canopy and the brick front are maybe an addition to a much earlier house. The building next door, which also has a brick frontage, apparently has an old timber-framed structure hidden behind and Ledbury has many Tudor and Stuart buildings. But who knows? It’s enough for me that it yielded this charming Georgian door canopy to admire on a dull morning, helping to make a short trip more pleasurable.

Ledbury. Herefordshire

Well worth the trouble

The shops of F W Woolworth were a feature of British high streets until they closed, during the financial crisis, in 2008. Quite a few Woolworth’s shop fronts remain, albeit adapted with new signs and often new colour schemes. Once you get your eye in, you start to spot signs that a building used to be a Woolworth’s – floor mosaics by the door with the Woolworth’s ‘W in a diamond’ symbol, lion masks, sometimes the lovely early-20th century doors with polished finger-plates and kick-plates. Some of their fronts were Art Deco designs from the 1920s or 1930s, but the company also built neo-Georgian facades in some towns – perhaps mindful of the need to fit into streets where there was plenty of historic architecture.

That’s the case in Ledbury, where historic buildings abound and Woolworth’s built this brick frontage in 1937. Although I could see no floor mosaics or lions, the shop window, with its broad lobby, narrow mullions, and stall riser clad in polished granite are very much the kind of thing the Woolworth’s went in for. The glazing bars must have been repainted bright red – many Woolworth’s window frames were done in a bronze finish.

The neo-Georgian part above the shop window is neat and polite, in the sense that it doesn’t impinge on the character of the street, which includes a mix of Tudor timber-framed, Georgian, Victorian, and later buildings. A very Woolworth touch is that the sash windows have opaque glass, as usual for an upstairs floor in one of their stores, because the stockroom was generally on this floor. The company that took the shop over have knowingly capitalised on Woolworth’s heritage by adopting a similar name. They have been here a while now: no doubt their former Woolworth’s premises have proved a good home.

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For more on the history of Woolworth’s, see Kathryn Morrison’s excellent book Woolworth’s: 100 Years on the High Street, which I reviewed here.

Much Marcle, Herefordshire

On the curve

I remember a few years ago a conversation with a friend about garages and what they look like, how most of them are either very boring or very unpleasant to look at, but now and then, one stands out from the crowd. Before long, one of us said, ‘Do you know the garage on the road between Ledbury and Ross on Wye, at Much Marcle?’ and the other one instantly said, ‘Yes! Isn’t it terrific!’ We’d both been admiring the building for years, and I can’t remember which of us mentioned it first. There are several things I like about it. The way it stands at a slight angle to the junction. The gentle curve of the roof, a curve followed by the attractive lettering on the front. The mixture of corrugated iron and wood. The building began life as a World War I aircraft hangar. It was bought by the Weston’s Cider Company, who are based nearby, in 1926, and they used it to maintain their vehicles as well as offering a general garage service. In the 1990s, Weston’s sold it, and it continues as a garage serving the general public.

Not everyone admires this kind of thing, of course. It doesn’t happen often that I find myself at odds with the Shell Guides, old books that I admire because they still have a lot to tell us about architecture and the sense of place. In the 1955 Herefordshire guide, author David Verey found much to like in Much Marcle, but his admiration was ‘in spite of its approach from the Ledbury road being marked by an ugly new garage’. Verey couldn’t wait to get on to the village’s old church and houses, the place’s polite architecture, as they say. I, on the other hand, wanted to linger here on the main road, taking in this small landmark as the motorcyclists whizzed by enjoying the challenging mix of bends and straights on the way to Ross and perhaps themselves registering, through an eye corner, a curving metal roof and a painted garage sign.

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Footnote: Garagistes may like another post that I did a while back, about two garages in Upton on Severn.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Ballflowers

During the 13th century the Early English Gothic architecture described in the previous post became gradually more ornate, its surfaces and details more complex. Window tracery – the intricate patterns of stonework in the top of each window – developed and masons played increasingly elaborate variations on its design. Foliage carving became more naturalistic. There were new forms of arches and moulding. And vaults, in buildings that had them, got more complex too, their patterns of ribs mirroring the lace-like patterns of the window tracery. By the beginning of the 14th century, these developments had gelled to form the style that is now known as Decorated Gothic.

This window, in the parish church at Ledbury, is an example of the Decorated style in which the window tracery forms small pointed arches within the window’s larger pointed form, while in turn within these arches are fourfold lobed shapes called quatrefoils. This interplay of shapes and stone glazing bars of various thicknesses shows the 14th-century masons’ skill in creating patterns and rhythms.


Look closer, and it shows something else: their use of the spherical ornament called the ballflower. There must be hundreds of ballflowers on this window, running up the mullions, along the arches, and around the quatrefoils and other shapes. Their spherical bodies and three-lobed openings catch the sunlight and form strong shadows, breaking up the smoothness of the masonry and reminding us, if we need reminding, that Gothic architecture is always a matter of the play of light. The repetition of the ballflowers at Ledbury is almost obsessive, and one of the most extreme examples of a fashion common in this part of the west of England – such flowers run around the 14th-century windows of dozens of churches in Herefordshire and the neighbouring counties, from the humblest parish church to Hereford Cathedral itself. They form a signature motif of the western masons and a testimony to their artful manipulation of light and shade.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Colours of history

Long ago in another life I was an editor of illustrated books and many was the discussion I had with my colleagues about the merits and otherwise of the various artists who worked as illustrators. I remember one occasion when we were discussing illustrators of historical subjects and the work of a particular artist came up in the conversation, someone who was known for artwork that was both historically accurate and highly atmospheric – but in which the atmosphere was often pervaded with clouds or stormy weather. ‘Ah,’ said a colleague. ‘It was always raining in the ancient world.’

Even in these days of colour reproduction and the electric glow of the internet, it’s all too easy to think of history before the Renaissance as taking place in a palette of greys under a cloudy sky. Most medieval churches no longer have their wall paintings and stained glass; castles have lost their banners and heraldry; we talk about black-and-white houses and silvery stone; we imagine peasants grubbing around in dingy hovels. This view of the Middle Ages is way off target, of course, as I've noticed before.

We know more about the colour and comfort of the Tudor period, from the surviving great houses. The grandest Elizabethan rooms were heated with big fireplaces and walls hung with thick tapestries. But how were smaller buildings decorated? What options were open to you if you couldn’t afford rich tapestries? A look inside most small Elizabethan houses today and the chances are you’ll find a very simple colour scheme – pale plasterwork and perhaps, if the building is timber-framed, the same ‘black and white’ effect as on the exterior.

But it wasn’t always like this. In Ledbury is the rare survival of a 16th-century colour painted interior. Here the walls were decorated in a pattern that imitates the designs of contemporary tapestries – stylized flowers and fruit within intricate borders resembling the formal hedges of an Elizabethan knot garden. Their splashes of red, blue and gold must have glowed 500 years ago.


In addition there are panels bearing inscriptions, quotations from the Books of Psalms and Proverbs, instructing us how to live our lives. ‘Better is a dinner with greene hearbes where love is, then a fat oxe and hatred therewith.'* According to some sources, the presence of these sententious moral comments may relate to the fact that this building might once have been used as a local court – probably a court of ‘pie-powder’, dealing with the running of the town’s market and related matters. I'm not so sure: the sentiments seem more domestic to me.

Whatever their origins, these rare painted walls give us a precious insight into the way provincial buildings could be decorated in the 16th century. At least some people aspired to the kind of colour more readily accessible to the upper classes. And the setting of history was not always black, white, or grey.

*Proverbs 15.17, Geneva Bible. Thanks to the readers who identified the translation.