Chastleton, Oxfordshire

 

A spirit of place and time

I have visited Chastleton House before, but the other week the Resident Wise Woman and I decided that it was time for a revisit, so once again we found ourselves parking in the designated car park and walking along the path across the field and past the dovecote, to arrive in front of one of the most perfect of English Jacobean country house facades. As I’ve shown this front before in a previous post, I want this time to dwell on the interior, its unique contents, and the unusual way in which the National Trust has preserved it all. When the house came to the National Trust in 1991, it was remarkable not just for its architecture of 1607–12, but also for the fact that many of the 17th-century contents were still in place, and nothing substantial had been altered. None of the inhabitants had been rich, so there were no makeovers, and no money for anything but the most basic necessary repairs. The effect was not much different from that described in a Country Life article of 1919: ‘one of those rare things that once seen can never be forgotten…for the retention of its ancient furniture, fittings, pictures, pewter, glass and tapestries…it stands out as a wonderful survival’.*

What the curators at the National Trust saw when they took over in 1991 was something very similar – but with an added element. The house was also testimony to the owners who had hung on, living in the house but doing very little with it. The evidence of their lives was all around them – recent inhabitants had included an art critic and a scientist – the cups and plates they used every day, boxes of chocolates, the books and magazines they read, the glasses they wore while reading them. The place was a time capsule, but evocative of two eras: the early-17th century and the mid-20th. How to preserve this legacy?

The Trust decided not to restore the building to what it might have been like in the Jacobean heyday, but to preserve it very much as it was in 1991 when they took over. They adopted the minimal of alteration, only the most necessary repair, to lay, as Mark Drury put it, ‘as light a hand as possible on Chastleton, to arrest 150 years of progressive decay with an almost imperceptible tightening of the reins’. So no wholesale repainting or regilding of surfaces, just touching up here and there, while retaining the overall feeling of flakiness; no new curtains but gentle repair of what was there; and so on. And in addition, retaining the marks of a life lived in the house – magazines left open on the bed or table; a teapot waiting to be poured; a half-empty decanter, old guidebooks to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds in a rack near the entrance.

The approach has always been controversial. There are some who believe that a place as beautiful as this deserves a more interventionist approach, to take it some way back towards its 17th-century glory; one good friend of mind calls the Trust’s approach at Chastleton ‘brilliantly wrong’. There are indeed ways of doing this without wholesale restoration and the SPAB and those who follow its tents have established best practice for conservation. But I’m more sympathetic. I love the way the house pays homage to both its original builders and its 20th-century owners. I also admire the way the house’s custodians can keep something so fragile in this precarious state indefinitely. But I’m also aware of the problems of doing this. All conservation is difficult, expensive, and painstaking; keeping this fragile place just so must be even more so. And as I stroll around the house with other visitors, our feet pounding the floor and staircases, our breath changing the humidity, our hands leaving marks on banisters, I realise that I and all the other visitors are ourselves part of the problem, a strain on the building, while also providing funds for its upkeep. And yet at moments, when one is alone in a room, there is an atmosphere, a spirit of place and time, like nowhere else in the world.

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* Quoted in The Art Newspaper, 1 December 1991

Chastleton house, teatime tableau

Burford, Oxfordshire

 

Street-facing

When you turn into the Oxfordshire town of Burford from the A40, you descend the High Street, the first part of which is called The Hill, towards the centre of town and the shops, the Tolsey (the market house and also, now, the town’s museum), and the parish church. The Hill is lined with houses of various dates, and one that I admire is Glenthorne House, the one on the left in my first photograph. This has a handsome 18th-century front with sash windows arranged in pairs, each window with a prominent keystone, each pair surrounded by a raised band of stone. There’s a central door with a pedimented surround and above it a blocked window, and the whole front is book-ended by stone quoins and topped with a plain parapet. It’s as pleasant a Cotswold-stone late-18th century composition as you could wish for and one might suppose that the whole house dates from the same period.

Perhaps the roof, however, is a bit of a giveaway. It’s not low-pitched and hidden behind the parapet, but higher and with an asymmetrical bow to its ridge that suggests something older. If you walk a little further up The Hill and look at the side of the house, the picture is very different. The building is emphatically not the symmetrical box implied by the street front. From the side, it can be seen how far back the house goes and how it has mullioned windows that suggest a rather earlier date – much of this probably represents a 17th-century remodelling of a medieval house. Pevsner reports that there’s a 14th-century stone archway inside the building. This side view also shows that the street front is an add-on, built against the house to present a once-fashionable Georgian face to the street.

Many house owners smartened up their street frontages like this. Often the position of the windows or proportions of the facade are incorrect, betraying a building of irregular or asymmetrical design behind. In this case, the proportions are just about right, and the makeover has been achieved with some style and grace. No doubt the house attracts as many admiring glances as it must have done in the 18th century. A few of the glancers, looking at the side elevation as well, will reflect that the human habit of responding to changing fashions has been around almost as long as architecture itself.

Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025

Abingdon, Berkshire*

Theme and variations

I was reminded the other day of how I first found out about a late-17th century house in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire. My friend Peter Ashley¶ told me to glance in my rear view mirror as I drove around a bend in the village – I’d see something I’d like, he informed me. The house, which I had to stop to have a look at, features in a blog post of years ago. It’s one of those typical late-17th century houses – symmetrical, with a hipped-roof, dormer windows, classical doorway, of brick with stone dressings. This theme, of a box-like, symmetrical house, was repeated and developed for over a century. It’s the basis both of grand country houses and of many smaller houses in towns and villages.

By the 18th-century, there were many variations on the theme. Casement windows were replaced with sashes, roofs were sometimes gabled rather than hipped, there were endless varieties of doorway design and decorative carvings on keystones. I was reminded of the town of Abingdon (once in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire), which has several such houses. Looking in my picture files, the best photograph I have from Abingdon is not of the grandest such house, but a good one nonetheless. It’s in East St Helen’s Street in the centre of town and dates to 1732.

The front elevation feels a little squashed, as if the unknown architect was determined to get in the full complement of five windows across the first floor. There are virtually no stone dressings – but there are several such houses in the town that lack this feature, making do, as here, with variations in the brickwork – the chequered pattern and the use of banded brickwork for the quoins and of bricks for the arches above the windows. The keystones to the window arches must be stone, but have been painted white to match the woodwork.

The effectiveness of this design has its roots in a very pragmatic use of elements of classical architecture – symmetry, quoins, pilasters, and so on, without the full-blown apparatus of a portico with columns and a pediment (as in the library building in Stamford that I posted recently). Much 18th-century British architecture uses this vocabulary as a kit of parts that can produce visual harmony. I’d argue that the result is often even more characterful when, as here, it’s combined with elements of local style and material, such as the red and silvery bricks that make up the facade. It’s not trying to be grandiose, rather creating polite architecture on a modest scale. To my mind, the house achieves this very well. It has the quality of elegance but also a sense of strength – there’s nothing about it of what the Resident Wise Woman calls the frou-frou. I hope it’s as pleasant to live in as it is to look at.

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* I use the old county to remind myself and readers that Abingdon is in the Berkshire volume of such guidebooks as Pevsner's Buildings of England series. 

¶ Author and photographer of the Unmitigated England series of books and many others; see his Instagram feed @unmitigatedpete

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

A last resort

Taking some brisk urban exercise in Chipping Norton, I decided to walk up the gentle rise on the Banbury side of town, aiming for a building I’d often passed in the car, the attractive wooden cupola in my eye corner, but never paused to look at properly. If I tell you that the cupola tops an octagonal roof and that there are two further wings projecting from the octagon on the other side, some of you will guess what this building originally was. It was a Victorian workhouse, a place designed to house the poor and homeless in a structure so spartan, and under a regime so harsh, that only the most desperate would take refuge there.

Workhouses in their most familiar form came about in the 1830s, when a combination of bad harvests and unemployment reduced large numbers to dire poverty. Under an Act of Parliament passed in 1834, support was only given to the poor if they would enter the workhouse, where accommodation was given in return for arduous and soul-destroying labour, such as picking oakum for ships or breaking stones for road-building. This law led to the construction of large numbers of workhouses, many designed by the young George Gilbert Scott, who built up his architectural practice with this work.

The Chipping Norton Union Workhouse was designed by George Wilkinson* of Witney in 1836. The layout follows the panopticon principle, devised† originally for prisons, with a central office area with wings extending outwards. The wings contained the accommodation,§ the central block was where overseers could keep watch on the inmates inside and in the courtyard. The interiors would have been very plain and basic, although there’s a separate administration block, which is altogether more classical and ‘civilised’ in style, for the offices of the union that ran the institution.

Workhouses declined in importance with the gradual development of the welfare state in the 20th century. Chipping Norton’s was eventually converted into housing in the 1990s. The place now exudes the quiet atmosphere of middle-class life in a country town. During a chance encounter with a resident, walking her dog, I learned that the houses form a pleasant enclave in which to live. A transformation indeed.

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• No relation

† The panopticon concept is often attributed to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham himself gave his brother Samuel credit for the idea.

§ Men and women (even married couples) were accommodated in separate wings. The enforced separation of married couples, many of whom had been together for decades, was one of the most inhumane features of workhouse regimes. Radical journalist, social reformer, and M.P. William Cobbett tried to introduce an amendment to the Poor Law Act to permit couples to be accommodated together, but this was rejected in parliament. The conditions of workhouse life were purposely designed to make it a last resort for the poor.

Cogges, Oxfordshire

Sixty years a queen

The diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 inspired a host of commemorative items, from plates to trays, medals to jugs, including some jugs made by Doulton of Lambeth emblazoned with the legend, ‘She wrought her country lasting good’. I don’t know how much good Victoria did her country, how much her influence has lasted, but such commemoratives are certainly still highly visible, as a visit to any antiques fair will show.

One can also find Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee commemorated on buildings. Jubilee clocks are still keeping time on some public buildings. There are also ceramic plaques like this one attached to the lychgate to the churchyard at Cogges, telling us that the gate itself was built in Jubilee year. The 1880s and 1890s were a great age of ceramic decoration on buildings – terracotta sunflowers and sprigs of foliage were a favourite motif of builders constructing houses, especially the larger than average houses of well to do streets in the suburbs. A builder could buy standard sunflower or foliage tiles or order bespoke panels bearing house names and insert them into the walls as the courses of bricks went up.

This Jubilee plaque is on a still larger scale. A profile portrait of the monarch, like one from a coin or a postage stamp, is surrounded by a roundel, a band containing her title ‘Empress of India’ and a border naming her other principal domains, from Gibraltar to New Zealand. Lions and crowns fill up the remaining spaces, as if we needed the imperial idea to be emphasised still further.

A number of these plaques survive on buildings in Great Britain and, for all I know, in the countries of what was then the British Empire. They were made, I believe, at Stanley Brothers Brick and Tile Works in Nuneaton. This one on a lychgate would have been seen every Sunday by those going to church. Others, I’m sure were on still more prominent buildings on High Streets in major towns. As we know from recent decades, British people still know how to celebrate a jubilee, but in its memorialisation of empire and dominion, this commemoration belongs to another age.

Ewelme, Oxfordshire

Take notice

There has been a lot in the news recently about the polluted state of many of Britain’s rivers. The River Wye, for example, is undergoing an ecological crisis due to the levels of phosphates in its waters, a state of affairs that has been attributed to run-off from the many intensive poultry farms near its banks.* Other rivers have enormous amounts of untreated sewage dumped into them, because Britain’s sewerage system cannot cope with the demands placed on it by an increasing population and climate change. This is a situation that needs urgent attention.

I was reminded of this by an old sign I spotted in Ewelme, when my mind was on other things (the church, the almshouses, and so on). Its message: don’t dump things in the local river, and don’t allow anything ‘injurious to health’ to run into the water from your home or business (please click on the picture for improved legibility). I don’t know how old this sign is – I’d go for a vague estimate of something like ‘early-20th century’, though it could be older. It certainly goes back to the era of admirable hand-painted lettering, which is what drew me to it before I even read what it says. Looking at it as a piece of craftsmanship, I like its bold heading and the careful italic script of the main message. I admire the trouble people took with painted signs when there weren’t computerised versions that are easy to produce – although ease of use should not be confused with the ability to come up with a visually pleasing result.

But I’ll resist getting dewy-eyed about the past. At least since the industrial revolution, people have been large-scale polluters, and there need to be both exacting laws and proper enforcement to prevent damage to the environment. The people of Ewelme, clearly, tried hard to protect their brook. Perhaps the sign was enough to make a few local malefactors think before taking the easy way with waste material. Now we need a more national, and more hard-hitting, effort to deal with our rivers and with those who pollute them. And this needs to happen soon.

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* See for example this newspaper report.

† See this, from Surfers Against Sewage.

Ewelme, Oxfordshire

 

God’s House

Alice de la Pole (1404–75), granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Countess of Salisbury then Duchess of Suffolk, was a member of England’s rich and powerful upper class, who had several homes. Her favourite was at Ewelme, in Oxfordshire. Her house has gone, but the church, school, and almshouse she built remain, standing in a tight cluster above the river valley where the village grew up. The almshouse is one of the most beautiful medieval domestic buildings, consisting of dwellings for 13 residents (originally all men), who, in return for their accommodation, were tasked with praying for the souls of Alice and her family, thereby easing their benefactors’ passage through Purgatory into Heaven. In other words, this foundation was a chantry. Henry VIII abolished chantries, but in this case, although the prayers for Alice’s soul ceased, the almshouses themselves remained.

The dwellings are arranged around a quadrangle, which can be entered through several doors, one close to the church, others giving access to the gardens. My first photograph shows a magnificent brick doorway, complete with stepped gable, gothic cusped arch, and buttresses. Its a grand piece of architecture, reminding one of the building’s importance to Alice de la Pole and evoking its serious purpose as a chantry, but the houses themselves, visible to the left, are architecturally quite modest.

This combination of modesty and elaboration is also seen in the quadrangle (below). Here the structure of the building is revealed as a timber framework with brick infill, with access to the individual doors via a lean-to covered cloister onto which the nearby church tower looks down. In the middle of each range is an opening leading to the central cobbled courtyard, and lovely carved wooden Gothic arches top each of these openings, an appealing bit of decoration and visual punctuation. The resulting combination of the domestic and the holy is summed up in the name of the building: God’s House. It’s worth a pilgrimage.

Faringdon, Berkshire*

 

A long view

They called it ‘Lord Berners’ monstrous erection’; they called it ‘the last folly’. But Lord Berners’ Folly will do, in memory of the versatile peer who was a modestly successful composer of modernist music and the occasional comic song, an able memoirist, and a rich eccentric of the old school who would entertain his friends by such exploits as dying his doves in brought colours and inviting Lady Betjeman and her horse to tea inside his house.

On his estate lies a hill, wooded at the top, which had been the site of fortifications – of King Alfred the Great, later of Queen Matilda – centuries ago. When the local council got permission to fell the trees for timber, Berners stepped in, bought the land, and saved the trees. He then employed the architect Gerald Wellesley to build this folly tower on the top of the hill. The story goes that the patron specified that the folly should be in the Gothic style but Wellesley, who disliked Gothic, made it Classical, until Berners discovered what he’d done and insisted on a Gothic lantern at the top. In truth the plain brick walls and arched windows are not very classical, and the octagonal lantern that capped the tower doesn’t look all that Gothic either – its pinnacles are plain, unlike the crocketed adornments of a latter-day Boston Stump. The folly is its own thing, a tall rather plain tower with a viewing room from which his lordship could admire the surrounding countryside; the vista stretches for many miles.

Apparently the locals weren’t too keen when they discovered that Lord Berners was building a tower on the hill above their town. But they got used to the idea and now people seem to embrace it, admiring the architecture and taking the chance to enjoy the view on the regular occasions when the folly is open. Eccentrics and good views: two things that the English traditionally like…and still, in most cases, have time for.

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*Or Oxfordshire, in modern parlance

Banbury, Oxfordshire

 

Brush up your Shakes

Some time ago I remember wondering why a shop in Parsons Street in Banbury had a bust of Shakespeare above the window. On my most recent visit, I wondered again, while also smiling at the lucky combination of an old sculpture of Shakespeare next to a sign saying ‘Sheila’s Shakes’: shakes, clearly, without peer.

The answer to my question is the obvious one: there used to be a pub here and it was called the Shakespeare. And so this bust of the bard is added to my collection of three-dimensional pub signs, along with all the White Harts, Swans, Lions, Elephants and Sugar Loaves I’ve noticed over the years. There’s not much to say about the sign. It’s rather crudely made – although generations of paint have probably obscured some of the details, but it has a certain charm about it. And after all, the available early images of the English national poet are hardly great works of art – this one looks as if it has been based on his monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity church at Stratford, a bust which the literary critic John Dover Wilson said made him look like a ‘self-satisfied pork butcher’. The Banbury bust could perhaps do with some of the care and attention lavished on the one in Stratford.

One can trace the pub through various 19th-century directories and census records, which list the innkeeper’s name and mention additional jobs as well as that of publican. For example in 1871 the main occupant was William Reed, stonemason and beer seller; in 1881 it was John Sole, coach builder and innkeeper; in 1901, Maurice Horan, beer house keeper and groom. This range of activities may be an indication of 19th-century Banbury entrepreneurship, but is more likely the result of this being a small pub or beer house, not a big enough business to support a family. One hopes that the business of ’shakes’ is a more prosperous one.

Banbury, Oxfordshire

 

Things like dips and feed

I remember when visiting Banbury many years ago as a teenager that I was struck by a shop with an abundance of painted signage on the upper floors. Back then, I’d never seen a building with so much writing on it. Even now, I’ve seen few to rival it, all repainted and spick and span as it is. Was it still functioning as a seed and forage merchant when I first saw it in the late-1960s? And what was its history?

Looking online, I drew a blank at first, but then I caught a glimpse of a name…which rapidly disappeared behind another screenful of information. The name was Lamprey. Surely this was the word I saw on the shop long ago, a name that reminded me then not of agricultural suppliers but of eels slithering along in the River Severn, near where I lived. And yes, Lamprey’s were in business in the late-1960s, and were using a mill on another site as a warehouse in 1969.*

So Lamprey was the name, John Lamprey and his son William, who were supplying a large hinterland of farmers who needed seed, animal fodder, and the like. Perhaps they had a rep who travelled around the farms, like the speaker in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Livings’ (‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed’). Banbury was an agricultural centre, and Banbury market became one of the largest livestock markets† in the country. This building is at one end of the market place, an ideal position. But the Lampreys did not stop at dealing in seed and feed. As their building’s inscriptions proclaim, they were also coal merchants. They had lime kilns near the canal, hence ‘LIME’ among the repainted ghost signs on the wall. They had a brickworks nearby too. They must have been Victorian go-getters, keen to be involved in any business that would make them money, whether related to the burgeoning building trades or to the prevailing agricultural markets. Their wall of advertising suggests they weren’t about to let anyone forget what could be bought from their premises.

From memory, the painted signs were rather worn when I first saw them. Clearly they have been repainted recently, and have come up looking fresh without losing all of their character, with the widths of the letters adjusted freely so that the words fit between the windows. Not quite genuine ghost signs, left faded but old, but still a lively bit of townscape that helps remind us of what this place was like once. The kind of agribusiness I could buy into. It’s gone now, and the building is occupied by very different concerns – a recruitment firm and an estate agency. I’m not sure how long the seed and feed business lasted, but, to paeraphrase Philip Larkin, perhaps it was time for change, in nineteen sixty-nine.¶

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* I’m indebted for this information to an article posted by the Banbury Museum, here. 

† Perhaps the largest.

¶ See ‘Livings’ in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber and The Marvell Press, 1988)

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

 

Caring

It took me many visits to the Oxfordshire town of Chipping Norton before I came across the former hall of the Oddfellows, a philanthropic association that dates back in documented records to the 18th century and which still exists, in various forms, across the world. When I saw it, I was immediately struck by the street front with its segmental curved doorway, the shaped gable above, and especially the carved lettering and coat of arms. Somebody took pains to make the public face of this small hall special, and Pevsner tells me that the architects were a Birmingham firm called Hipkiss and Stephens. The building dates from 1910–11.

I could find little else about the history of the hall and was content to admire the way the lettering’s base line follows the curve of the doorway and how the coat of arms likewise fits the shape of the gable above. Another source of admiration is the carving of this relief, especially the images of care and what I take to be Christian charity that stand on either side of the arms. The stone and the Arts and Crafts idiom of these details sit well with the hall’s home in a small Oxfordshire town.

Web research led me in one other interesting direction. According to the excellent website Cinema Treasures, the Oddfellows in Chipping Norton were showing movies from about 1910, and by 1919 this hall was renamed the Picture House. It remained a cinema until it closed in May 1950, before reopening as the Norton Hall. It is now used by a private company offering post-production and media facilities and looks to have been the subject of a sensitive, caring conversion to meet the needs of the business. One feature of the conversion is that the current occupant’s signage does not mask or overshadow the old Oddfellow’s carved sign and arms, so there’s no barrier to the sort of architectural appreciation that I – and my readers – enjoy.

Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

Open again

First, I offer my apologies to those regular readers who have come to like my posts of old and interesting English buildings. A prolonged bout of post-covid exhaustion, together with a rush of things to do, left me with little energy for blogging lately. Now, as the clouds lift a little and other activities become less pressing, I am ready to begin again.

I saw this sign at the entrance of the church at Stanton Harcourt, and thought that it looked good enough to photograph. The letterform is similar to the typeface Albertus, one of my favourites; I like the blue too. But browsing through my photographs it occurred to me that it would make a good symbol to appear here, because it marks my resolution to resume blogging once more, at whatever pace I can keep up.

So I declare this blog open again for business – the business of occasionally recording my encounters with interesting old buildings, and, especially, sharing bits of architecture and related items that have not, it seems to me, received the notice they deserve. So look out for my usual mixture of the familiar, the unfamiliar, the quirky, and the unregarded in the coming weeks and months.

Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire*

For the birds…and the rest of us

One of the incidental benefits of church crawling is the other buildings one encounters on the way or near the destination. Before I’d even entered the church at Compton Beauchamp I’d already glimpsed the neighbouring big house (too private to photograph) and as I walked up the path to the church, this little building met my eyes almost at the same time as the pale chalk walls of the church itself. It’s a wooden dovecote, and is best appreciated from inside the churchyard, where it sits on the edge of its own small enclave, behind a yew hedge, in a part of the churchyard apparently set aside for one or two secluded graves. There’s even a nearby bench on which to collect one’s thoughts.

Weatherboarded walls, a roof of stone ‘slates’, and a tiny structure on top, too small to be a turret, too slight to be a cupola, too open and louvreless to be a louvre. Pevsner assures us that the nest boxes are still within, and one would be tempted to introduce a dove or three and see if they took to it. It’s said to be 18th-century, and what my picture above doesn’t show is that it is raised on staddle stones, those mushroom-like structures usually used to raise granaries away from the ground and impede the progress of rats and other grain-eating rodents.

Albeit unoccupied now by birds, this building is a small delight. If it’s a reminder of an unsentimental time when people removed the young doves or pigeons (known as squabs) for the cooking pot, it’s also a testimony to a way of building that could make even a modest structure pleasant to look at. We’d do well to have a bit more of that today. 

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* Formerly in Berkshire, while as a devotee of the old county boundaries I fell compelled to mention; also because it is still included in the Berkshire volume of the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

Staddle stone supporting dovecote, Compton Beauchamp

Rousham, Oxfordshire

 

Dashing for the post

I always make a point of looking at old post boxes. The post (‘snail mail’) has always been a major part of my life. Before email (and its precursor, the fax) I was always always popping round the corner to the local post box, or dashing to the post office to get some urgent missive or piece of text dispatched. So it was not unusual that I paused by this wall box close to the big house at Rousham. A Victorian box, I thought. Nothing unusual about that – there are quite a few of these wall boxes, well over one hundred years old and bearing the ‘VR’ monogram of Queen Victoria, still in use, often in remote locations. But then I looked a little closer and saw that this one was a slightly different design from those I’ve seen before. It’s quite tall in relation to its width and instead of the Queen’s monogram being right at the top, it’s further down, beneath the inscription ‘Post Office’ (at the very top, just about visible) and ‘Letter box’ (just below the slot). In addition, the words ‘Cleared at’ appear below the monogram, acting as a heading to the label below, which gives the times at which the box is emptied. A further touch: the box is topped with a triangular pediment – most wall boxes are simple rectangles.

All this is so much fine detail, which is not interesting to everyone (are you still reading?). But it reminds us that many different designs of post boxes were produced and that preserving such valuable and useful bits of street furniture isn’t simply a matter of counting (‘We have n-hundred Victorian boxes, does it matter if we lose one?’); it’s about checking the details, and making sure we don’t unknowingly let go of something unusual or unique. Looking at images of similar ones online, this one may be a National Standard No 2 Small Wallbox* design, which goes back to about 1859.

Hanging on to this kind of thing is also about respecting the histories of the people and firms that made them. Cast into the metal at the bottom of this box is a manufacturer’s name. Alas I can’t make it out, because it’s encrusted with layers of paint, but the final word is ‘Birmingham’, so that’s where the makers were based. Names associated with this kind of box include the Eagle Foundry and Smith & Hawkes, both of Birmingham. Next time I go to Rousham, I must look again at the name on this box, armed with these names, and see if one of them fits.

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* The very name suggests that it’s one of numerous different designs of large and small wallboxes in use alongside a further variety of free-standing pillar boxes.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

A touch of the baroque, 2

My second photograph from Rousham shows a doorway in the stable block* near the house. The stable block has a central pediment under which is a tall, narrow round-headed arch; blind windows and minimal capitals abound, giving the whole facade a heavy appearance that is relieved to a certain extent by an octagonal turret capped with an ogee cupola. The smaller doorways like the one in my picture have Gibbs surrounds – alternating long and short blocks with the long ones protruding – plus heavy lintels with prominent keystones.

Gibbs surrounds can look very refined on Georgian townhouses in London or Stamford, where they will have smoothly finished blocks. Here the effect is more rustic, because of the roughness of the stone, the simple plank door, and the plain window above. That, perhaps, is not inappropriate for a service building of a great house, and other evidence of good upkeep (such as the pristine paintwork here) makes me feel sure that the estate is keeping an eye on the stonework – this place is as well looked after as the very fancy chickens and cockerels that cluck and crow in the yard. In all it’s not, I’d say, a bad sight to greet the eye as one drives under the adjacent arch to park and emerges, ticket in hand, to enjoy a masterpiece of English landscape gardening.

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* It’s ‘almost certainly by Kent’, Pevsner opines.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

 A touch of the baroque, 1 

After my recent visit to Stowe, I was inspired to revisit another favourite landscape garden, the one at Rousham in Oxfordshire. As at Stowe, the work of the architect and designer William Kent is seen here, but the garden is much smaller than at Stowe and the mark of Kent is writ large on it – in fact it’s almost as it was when Kent left it after working here in the first half of the 18th century, except that the trees are of course older and maturer.* It’s still the miniature Arcadia that it was said to be in Kent’s time. 

I’ve posted about this place before, but I wanted to show a detail or two that struck chords with me after my visit to the much larger garden at Stowe. One of the architects who worked at Stowe was William Kent’s predecessor Sir John Vanbrugh, a baroque enthusiast whose work there included a ‘Pyramid House’ that does not survive. Rousham, however, still has its Pyramid House, actually a gazebo designed to provide somewhere to sit and contemplate views across the landscape towards distant eye-catchers.

The Rousham Pyramid House is small, fronted with a classical arch, and with a pointed roof that gives the building its name. It’s thought to be a small homage by Kent to Vanbrugh and its chunky proportions and pyramidal roof give it a baroque air that the elder architect might well have admired if he’d lived to see it. The roof is not the only Egyptian touch: there are sloping buttresses that seem to recall the battered walls of Egyptian temples and the small carved relief in the pediment also has an Egyptian look.

There is something generous about a landscape in which structures like this, which enable one to sit, rest on one’s walk, and take in the view. In a similar way, the owners of Rousham are to be commended on the generous way in which they open their garden. There’s a fee, of course, but you buy your ticket with a minimum of fuss from a machine near where you park, and you wander around impeded only minimally by barriers or ‘keep out’ signs. While I’m at Stowe, I feel awed by the scale of everything and amazed by the sheer verve and grandeur of the buildings; at Rousham, I feel pleased I’m in an 18th-century version of a rural paradise.

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* Or are more recently planted replacements.

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

Columns in the sun or The Architecture of Looking Sideways 

Chipping Norton’s Town Hall seems oddly planned when you first look at it. The big portico is not in the end wall, which faces the Market Place and is where, on the face of it, you’d expect the door to be. Instead it’s on one of the long sides, facing a narrow street. One reason for this is that the ground slopes quite steeply, falling away from one side of the plot to the other, meaning that the end is on the slope, meaning in turn that an end with a grand portico and big central entrance would be a challenge. So you go in through the side, the part visible in my photograph.

The architect of the hall was G. S. Repton, son of the more famous Humphry Repton, of landscape gardening fame. G. S. Repton had trained with the elder Pugin. He had also worked in John Nash’s office, which must have given him a good grounding in classicism and in working in a busy office to tight schedules. By 1842, when this Town Hall was built, he was in practice independently, and designing this building with its very plain Tuscan portico must not have been a challenge. It’s a very simple, neo-Classical frontage, with plain stone walls punctuated by a couple of niches and the big central portico, which gets its effect from size and discreet mouldings.

Sunshine also adds hugely to the building’s impact, bringing out details and casting deep shadows. Here as so often this kind of neo-Classicism works best in strong warm side light. Even better, looking at it slightly side-on – which the narrow street encourages us to do – makes the effect still stronger. The great designer Alan Fletcher encouraged us to cultivate ‘the art of looking sideways’,* by which he meant applying lateral thinking to visual matters. Here, looking sideways in the literal sense seems to work too.

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* See Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon Press, 2001)

Westwell, Oxfordshire

Lives cut off

Cotswold villages: I live among them and think I know what to expect. Stone cottages, cottagey gardens, church towers, a background of hills. Nearly everything is built of the oolitic limestone for which the region is famous – from the churches to the shallow soil flecked with bits of pale flaky rock, it’s all about the stone. Then a Cotswold village presents me with something that makes me pause. Like this: a menhir-sized lump of limestone mounted on two gigantic stone steps. What could it be?

It turns out to be a war memorial. An inscription records that it was put up by Stretta Aimee Holland, who lived at Westwell Manor, to commemorate her two brothers who lives were lost in the First World War. Second Lieutenant Harold Price, who served with the 3rd Battalion Royal Fusiliers, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres on 24 May 1915, the worst day in the war for the Royal Fusiliers, who lost 536 men. Lieutenant Edward John Price was a submariner whose vessel was stranded in the Dardanelles. He was taken prisoner by the Turks and died in a prison camp in central Turkey, perhaps a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic.

The brother’s names are inscribed on an odd-looking brass plaque, which turns out to be a numeral from the clock on the old Cloth Hall at Ypres that was salvaged by Harold Price after the First Battle of Ypres. I find this rather odd memorial strangely moving. Its combination of salvaged French metalwork and local stone not only recalls the battle but also embodies lives lived, tragically, both at home and abroad. And am I fanciful in seeing the memorial’s rough-hewn state as a vernacular version of the broken column on some monuments and symbolic of lives not simply ended, but unfinished or broken?

Burford, Oxfordshire

 

Bricks come to Burford

For me and everyone else, it has been a year in which travel has been restricted. Like the rest of the British population, I have been in lockdown, or in some voluntary state of semi-lockdown in which I’ve tried to risk unnecessary exposure to Covid-19, or in a state with a little more freedom but still the fear that travelling any distance might take me into an area of the country that is in lockdown or otherwise restricted. One of the compensations for all this has been that it has forced me to focus more closely on buildings that are closer to home. Many of my recent posts reflect this.

I’m fortunate to live not far from an abundance of interesting walls to stare at. Here’s one such interesting wall, one of many in the glorious High Street of Burford, just on the Oxfordshire side of the border with Gloucestershire and near the eastern edge of the Cotswold Hills. Like so many of Burford’s buildings, this one has ancient origins. There’s timber framing of the 16th century (or perhaps even earlier) round the back. But from the street the Bull Inn presents this attractive and arresting brick and stone front.

The date of the frontage must be about 1700 – estimates vary from 1690 to 1715 – during the period when William Tash and his son John were landlords. William Tash took over an inn with a long history. Records of it go back to 1397, although the building was used for a long spell in the 16th century as a butcher’s shop. But in 1610 it was an inn again and later in the century it’s said that Charles II and Nell Gwynne stayed there. By the time the facade was updated, Burford was a prosperous town, a stopping point on the route from Wales to London. The inn’s new frontage helped it stand out.

According to the Bull’s website, it was the only brick building in Burford back then. Even now, nearly all the buildings in this street have fronts of Cotswold stone or timber framing (sometimes rendered) but the Bull mixes stone and brick, with stone used not just on the ground floor but also for the pilasters, keystones and other details above. Those other details add to the building’s eccentricity and, I’d say, charm: very chunky aprons beneath the upper windows and trapezoid stones on the upper corners of the window surrounds. All this, combined with the mix of red and darker bricks makes for a winning result and a real eyecatcher for those with time to stop and look.