Dungeness, Kent, and more

Retrospect (1): a poetic handful

To celebrate ten years of blogging, I am going to do a short series of retrospectives, each highlighting a small selection of posts on some of miscellaneous themes that have preoccupied the English Buildings blog over the past decade. These past posts are some of my personal favourites, and all but the most dedicated of regular readers will have missed quite a few of them, so I hope the following links will give them another place in the sun.

The sun is relevant to the first of these posts, but the overriding theme here is poetry, and the way my encounters with buildings have reminded me of some favourite poems...

John Donne and Derek Jarman in Dungeness

Philip Larkin and doors in St John's Wood

Thomas Hardy and wagonettes in Worcestershire

P J Kavanagh, mourning, and temperance in Fulham

C P Cavafy and Patrick Leigh Fermor in Gloucestershire

Village England

Then and now

I have been known to complain that buying books online is never quite the same as visiting a traditional, bricks and mortar bookshop. Online, you get what you search for – and I’m grateful that the search engines, again and again, turn up just what I’m after. In a real shop, on the other hand, you are more likely to browse and make surprise discoveries – and that can be even more interesting and enriching than getting what you expect.*

The other day, however, my expectations were confounded when I received something I’d bought online that was indeed a surprise. Having read a reference somewhere to a publication called The Observer’s Village England (1979), I looked online and found myself a secondhand copy. I expected a book to arrive, but what I got was actually a series of pull-out extracts from the Observer newspaper’s colour magazine, which had been collected together and preserved in a leatherette† binder. It amounts to a book, but the way it displays its origins makes it more interesting and pleasurable to handle.

Each section concerns a region of England, and contains a series of entries on villages and small towns, together with short pieces by various writers, mostly well known at the time, about particular places that they know well: the playwright Ann Jellicoe on Dorchester; the poet P J Kavanagh on Cirencester; the historian W G Hoskins on Uppingham; and so on. The series is subtitled ‘A guide to the best villages and small towns in the country’, and this emphasis on quality plays in its favour. It means the editors could be selective, not trying to include everything but featuring places with something special to offer, whether it was architecture, scenery, a pub, good shops with local produce, whatever. One of the pleasures is the photographs, by people like Roger Mayne§ and Alain le Garsmeur, many of which include people – either the proprietors of notable shops or people going about their rural business thatching or shoeing horses. There is an extraordinary picture of a boy riding a bicycle on the grass in front of Oakham Castle, the greensward populated with wooden chairs – apparently he was practising for an obstacle race. 

It also tells us the state of things in 1979. I’ve not yet read deeply into the collection to see exactly what has changed where, but I’m already noticing differences on my own patch of England – Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds. The gorgeous thatched village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire was still dilapidated in 1979, with broken windows and holes in the thatch, even in some of the inhabited houses…just how I remember it back then. Cirencester was still a major centre for the Cotswolds and was a working town then as it is now. Stroud was not singled out as a good place to visit as it would be now. And so on.

Julia Butcher’s cover illustration (above) sums it up. If her image of Village England is idealised (immaculate white houses, cricketers, swans) it also stands for some of the things that are, as the subtitle says, ‘the best’. It’s a beautifully composed image – the reflection of the bridge, the pub, the Jolly Farmer paired with a real jolly farmer (or cow hand anyway) driving his cattle across the bridge. It’s redolent of summer (the swallows and the cricketers, even if they don’t seem to have fielded a full eleven). And it’s fill of interesting details like the windmill in the distance. Village England. I’m glad I found it.

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*I sometimes try to create architectural surprises of a similar nature on this blog.

† The sort of material used back then to encase reprints of the classics, ‘tooled’ in mock-gold. A phrase I remember from the advertising was something like, ‘Bound in luxurious red Skivertex’, stuff that must have been mass produced by the mile, to adorn, if that is the word, sets of Dickens, Russian novels, or the complete works of Shakespeare. Autre temps, autre livres. 

§ Roger Mayne was married to Ann Jellicoe and they created the Shell Guide to Devon together. There’s an exhibition of Mayne’s work currently at London’s Photographer’s Gallery.

Fulham High Street, London

Still there – just

It must have been in the 1970s, when Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse came out, that I first read and was moved by a poem by P J Kavanagh called ‘The Temperance Billiards Rooms’. In it, the poet remembers how he used to walk past the Temperance Billiards Rooms with his wife, who died tragically young. Aged just 33, the poet salutes the Billiards Rooms alone. He makes the building stand for continuity, in this moving poem about carrying on after a disaster: ‘it just goes on, as I do too I notice’. But it’s also fragile (‘something so uneconomical’s sure to come down’) and so is the grieving poet. It’s a touching poem, and Kavanagh’s description of the place, ‘in red and green and brown, with porridge-coloured stucco in between and half a child’s top for a dome…it’s like a Protestant mosque!’ has a melancholy humour.

I wonder if this is Kavanagh’s building. It’s now a pub (The Temperance), is repainted a rather sorry dark grey and is offering special deals on cocktails. There’s still a dome, still bits of stucco decoration, still stained glass in red and green, still the hall to the right which must have contained the billiard tables. If it’s not the building in the poem, it’s one very like it. Designed in 1910 by Norman Evans, it was one of several such buildings, built for Temperance Billiard Halls Ltd in northern England and the suburbs of London. Their art nouveau glass and decoration, and the chance of a game of billiards, were meant to attract punters away from the temptations of the demon drink, part of a movement that began in the middle decades of the 19th century and saw a late resurgence in 1900–1910. As late as 1908 there was a bill in Parliament to reduce the number of licenses to sell alcohol and ban the employment of women in pubs, a bill that was vigorously supported by temperance campaigners, and equally loudly decried by others, especially those, such as the Barmaids’ Political Defence League, who stood up for the barmaids who were to lose their jobs. The bill was defeated in the end, and the temperance movement declined.

This billiards hall, at any rate, is still there, although the dark paint spoils what looks it had. It’s also fiendishly difficult to photograph, hemmed in by road signs, wires, aerials, railings, and continuous traffic along the Fulham High Street. The best I could do was to include one of the most interesting vehicles that went past as I stood outside, a Mercedes Benz 280SL that takes us just about back to the 1960s, when Kavanagh wrote his poem. Like him, I’m glad the building is still there, although I cannot, like the poet, say that there are, ‘for all I know men playing billiards temperately in there’.

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For more about architecture and temperance, see Andrew Davison’s essay ‘”Worthy of the Cause”: The Buildings of the Temperance Movement’ in Geoff Brandwood (ed), Living, Leisure and Law (Spire Books, 2010).

For P J Kavanagh’s account of his loss, see P J Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger (1966)