Leicester

Going somewhere

I was once at a literary festival event where a panel that included Joan Bakewell and Jonathan Meades were discussing their favourite buildings. Joan Bakewell, eager to put in a word for Elizabeth Scott, the pioneering woman architect, was making the case for Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre (this was before its recent remodelling), her most celebrated design. Meades wasn’t convinced, and when Bakewell insisted, ‘Isn’t it like a glorious ocean liner?’ he delivered the coup de grace: ‘Well, maybe. But it isn’t going anywhere.’

‘Ocean liner architecture’ – long lines, strip windows, nautical-looking railings, curves relieving the rhythm of straight lines and right angles – was popular for all kinds of buildings in the 1930s. There are apartment blocks, hotels, and lidos in the style. Here’s a bus shelter (was it originally a tram shelter?) in Leicester that’s in a similar mode. The overall shape, the row of windows, and the overhanging roof give the shelter a strong horizontal emphasis and the lack of pillars at the corners is just the kind of thing modernist architects liked to do to show off. Look, no visible support! The natty angled glass panes at the corners draw attention to it.

Most striking of all, though, are the curvaceous ends of the overhanging roof. As well as providing some extra shelter, they give this little building an overall form not dissimilar to the round-ended city trams of decades gone by. I remember seeing shelters like this when passing through Leicester as a small boy with my parents on trips to visit family in Lincolnshire. Even then they seemed rather special, modern, new (in spite of the fact that they were already maybe 30 years old), and rather like the kind of thing I could build with LEGO. Although I would not have thought to put it like that in those days, they seemed, indeed, to be going somewhere.

Leicester

Letter set (1)

Little things can make a big difference. When it comes to architecture, one of those little things is the quality of the lettering used in signs, inscriptions, date stones, and the rest. Here's an example that caught my eye: the name and date stone on a chapel in the centre of Leicester. To harmonize with the classicism of the building the person who cut this inscription used what Alan Bartram, authority on lettering on buildings, calls the English letter. What he means is a letter form in which there is quite a big difference between the thick and thin strokes and in which the change from thick to thin in, for example, the curving bowl of the C here, or the P, can be quite sudden. On the whole the thick strokes are verticals. The serifs (the tiny protrusions at the ends of the main strokes) are generally bracketed, in other words the main stroke flows into them. But in this particular example the bracketing is quite subtle in some of the letters.

You can find English letters all over Bath, where they are used for the street names, which are carved directly into the stone walls. Elsewhere they pop up in all kinds of places, and are often, as here, to be found when you look up. They vary quite a bit in style –some have less heavy thick strokes than these. Many have fuller serifs. But if the letters are well proportioned and evenly spaced, they are all satisfying. Especially in the sun.

Leicester

Built to last

Just along Granby Street from the Turkey Café described in the previous post is this large Victorian bank. It’s such a show stopper of a building that I couldn’t photograph it all (there are more pictures of it here). The Victorians liked to build big, imposing banks, and employed all sorts of styles for them from solid classical, through ornate Italian Renaissance revival, to the Gothic employed here. Now empty, formerly a branch of the Midland Bank and HSBC, this 1870s building was originally the head office of the Leicestershire Banking Company. Its designer was Joseph Goddard, who, like Wakerley of the Turkey Café, was a prominent Leicester architect. In fact several generations of the Goddard family have practiced architecture in Leicester. Goddard originally intended to design the bank in the classical style, but his clients wanted something different from the classical National Provincial Bank up the street, so he went for this red-brick Gothic, with trimmings of stone and terracotta.

The part of the building shown in my photograph is the banking hall. Its dominating features are the tall Gothic windows – I left a passing pedestrian in the picture so that you can see just how tall they are. I especially like the way Goddard used pale Portland stone to contrast with the brick – the stripy arches are an effective touch, as is the mix of stone and terracotta at cornice level above them. Slender shafts flanking the windows, decorative terracotta panels, and little bands and rosettes of carved stone provide plenty to entertain the passer-by. It’s a building full of Victorian confidence, soaring above the modern shops that surround it on this street in the centre of Leicester and speaking of the city’s prosperity when the hosiery, textile, and engineering industries were at their height – a time when bankers and their architects built to last.

Leicester

Gobblery

The histories of architecture are full of the big names, the people who changed the course of the art and transformed our towns and countryside: the Wrens, Vanbrughs, and Gilbert Scotts. Less well known are the local practitioners, architects who did important work in a particular town or area but are generally unsung outside their local patch: men like Watson Fothergill of Nottingham, the Jearrads of Cheltenham, and Arthur Wakerley of Leicester. Wakerley was a prominent figure in his city – a Liberal, councilor, and mayor. He served as president of Leicester’s Society of Architects and as president of the Temperance Union. His many buildings in the city range from a synagogue to a number of factories, from a hotel to streets of affordable housing.

The Turkey Café in Granby Street is one of his smaller buildings, but its central position, unusual style, and rich decoration make it one of his most noticeable. Wakerley designed it in Art Nouveau style in 1900, with the odd-shaped arches and colour scheme indicating a certain Oriental influence. The decoration was done by Doulton’s W J Neatby, the ceramic artist who worked on the Royal Arcade in Norwich and the Everard Printing Works in Bristol, both previously noticed on this blog. Wakerley devised a complex façade enlivened with multifoil arches, big windows, and a bowed central section. Neatby covered the walls in green and white tiles, adding a dazzling multicoloured turkey at the very top and two three-dimensional ceramic turkeys at entrance level. He picked the café’s name out in curvaceous Art Nouveau style lettering.


When the building opened in 1901 cafés were enjoying a heyday. Leicester boasted several cafés, establishments that were celebrated by the temperance movement that Arthur Wakerley embraced. Cafés were also favoured by women. At a time when pubs were rowdy, male preserves, women lacked places that they could go safely on their own or with women friends. Cafés and tea shops (the famous ABCs run by the Aerated Bread Company, for example, and the Lyon’s Corner Houses that came slightly later) filled this gap. Many Edwardian cafés were richly decorated buildings, marketed as modern, hygienic, and chic. Leicester’s Turkey Café, with its dazzling façade, fitted this bill, and did so with considerable style.


For more about W J Neatby, see my post here.