Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire

‘Do not forget me quite, O Severn Meadows’

Newnham on Severn is a small town overlooking the west bank of the Severn, once a port on the river, now a pleasant and in my experience rather quiet place – as quiet, that is, as is compatible with being on the main road between Gloucester and Chepstow. There’s a curving High Street, a long green, and a variety of brick houses, some dating from the 18th century. 

And then this. A 19th-century-looking shopfront, unremarkable in itself, but displaying a marvellous collection of signs, stickers, and printed material. I particularly like the old ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Swan’ pen signs with their bird symbols and distinctive name. Not ‘fountain pens’, but ‘Fountpens’, to make it that bit more memorable, I suppose, unless a ‘Fountpen’ is a specific species of pen of which I’m not aware.

The window also contains a collection of printed material from the archive of the Severnside Press, whose shop this is. It’s full of gems. British readers will recognise the style of several election posters, which are of various dates from the 1920s onwards. The real star is the large poster headed ‘PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION’, a list of polling stations and their locations in this part of the county. This extraordinary poster is a litany of names (Awre, Corse, English Bicknor, Joy’s Green, Pillowell, Plumphill, Ruardean…) as evocative as the place names in an Ivor Gurney poem. More than this, it’s an impressive print job: a complex multi-column layout in a variety of typefaces handled with a mixture of flair and expediency. The flair is in the balance and the fit of the text, the expediency in the occasional resort to the ‘wrong’ typeface when reasons of space (or perhaps a shortage of type) meant that an alternative sort had to be chosen for a word here and there. The poster is dated 1951, but it’s done in a traditional style that goes back much further – the heading type could be from a Victorian playbill, the more complex layout lower down from a Methodist lay preaching plan, blown up to size.

So, in a small shop window, there’s a reminder that Newnham is a town (albeit a small one) where once many people worked at making things – in the glass industry, at tanneries, even, once upon a time, building ships. Where there were businesses, there needed to be a printer, turning out letterheads, business cards, notices, and the like, using metal type and inky presses, in the days before ‘publishing’ was something people could do on their ‘desktop’. And amongst these printed products were election posters to remind us that towns like Newnham and Newent and Lydney were (and still are, up to a point) centres for a whole network of rural communities, some nucleated villages, some more scattered Forest or Severnside settlements. Do not forget me quite…

Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire

The colour of masonry

We get used to linking localities with building stone: Cornish granite, East Anglian flint, Derbyshire millstone grit, and so on. In Gloucestershire, the best known local stones are the golden limestone of the Cotswolds and the pinkish sandstone of the Forest of Dean. Between them, in the clayey Vale of Severn, though, there is no dominant building stone and many of the older houses are timber framed or built of brick. So what is this curious dark material that forms part of a house in Newnham, by the western bank of the Severn? None of the above, clearly. The surprising answer is that it’s slag, waste material from copper-smelting, and it must have had an interesting journey to get here.

In the 18th century copper smelting took place at Redbrook, on the River Wye not far from Monmouth, and at several sites in the Bristol area. The best guess is that the slag used for this building came from one of these sites and got to Newnham by boat – Newnham was once a river port. There are several buildings in the locality, and in other Severnside villages, made partly of the material.

Some say that the slag was used as ballast in ships, but the material must have been specifically intended for building because it was deliberately formed into blocks. William Marshall in his Rural Economy of Glocestershire (1789), explained how it was used:

‘Until of late years, it was cast away as useless, or was used as a material of roads only. Now it is thrown, while hot, into moulds, of different figures and dimensions, and thus becomes an admirable building material. It is proof against all seasons, in every situation; consequently, becomes an excellent material for foundations; and still more valuable for copings of fence walls; for which use it is sometimes cast of a semi-elliptical form. It is also used as quoins, in brick buildings; in which case, the blocks are run about nine inches square, and eighteen inches long. It is of a dark copper colour and has the appearance of a rich metal; but flies under the hammer as flint.’

It was relatively easy, when the Severn was a busy highway of cargo vessels, to ship this heavy material upstream and offload it at the various ports and inlets along the river’s course. Ever since there have been a smattering of walls like this hereabouts, adding a dark coppery tinge to Gloucestershire’s architectural palette of pink, and gold.