Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Crossing point

The Palladian Bridge in the park at Stowe was built in 1739 by the first Viscount Cobham, around the time that many of the numerous other garden structures – temples, pavilions, statues and monuments – were erected there. Its design was probably by the great classical architect James Gibbs and he based it closely on the similar bridge at Wilton House, Wiltshire, which went up just two years earlier.The arrangement of an Ionic arcade of four columns between a pair of pedimented end pavilions is beautifully satisfying – no wonder the architect adopted it with few changes. Gibbs did modify the earlier design slightly, however, chiefly by making the structure wider than the Wilton bridge and also lower, so that carriages could cross it as their passengers went on tours of the gardens. It’s the second of the great trio of English Palladian bridges, the other being at Prior Park, Bath.*

The design doesn’t come from any extant structure by the great Italian architect Palladio, although it is based on a scheme he created for a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice that was never built. The Stowe bridge has changed slightly since it first saw the light of day. It originally had open arches on the westward side, but a blank wall on the east (behind the bridge in my photograph). The rationale behind this was that the bridge was near the edge of the park, and the idea was to encourage those on the bridge to admire the view across the water and into Cobham’s grounds. On the inside of the blank wall was a relief carving by Scheemakers of the Four Quarters of the World bringing their products to Britannia. The bridge was never an ideal place for the carving as it was actually quite difficult to see it clearly because you couldn’t stand back far enough from it. So it was removed in 1762 and placed in the pediment of the Temple of Concord and Victory. When this was done the builders fitted a matching colonnade, so that the two sides were identical.

The Palladian Bridge as it stands does not bear obvious symbols of the philosophical and political ideas expressed in many of Stowe’s temples and monuments – buildings such as the Temples of British Worthies and Ancient Virtue, statues such as those of the Muses, and monuments like those to heroes like Captain Cook and Captain Grenville all represent very specific values. However, the elegant classical architecture of the bridge, together with its key position on the Path of Liberty, a long itinerary through the grounds, places it firmly in the same category as these monuments and structures. No doubt ,many of those taking a walk in the grounds were grateful for it too, pausing there to admire the view or taking advantage of the shelter it offered from the rain. The bridge is clearly as useful as its design is beautiful.

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* There’s a fourth, known as the Marble Bridge, in the grounds of the Russian imperial palace at Tsarskoye Sole, St Petersburg. Another structure, at Stourhead, known as the Palladian Bridge, lacks the striking superstructure of the other four, and is hardly Palladian at all.

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.

Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

A symphony of semicircles

John Piper once wrote an essay called ‘The Gratuitous Semicircle’,¶ in which he noticed the use of half-round or Diocletian windows in English buildings – especially buildings in a kind of ‘country Palladian’ style. I’m reminded of this whenever I go through Moreton-in-Marsh. Stopping there a couple of weeks ago for a brief evening promenade,* the Resident Wise Woman and I once more admired this building full of semi-circles as it caught the evening sun.

It was built as a house in the mid-18th century. It’s topped with a pair of very swanky curved gables and a balustraded parapet. Below is a profusion of the kinds of windows§ that were fashionable then. First, the three-part Venetian windows, which provincial builders of this period like to use for effect, sometimes one in the middle of a frontage, sometimes more,† here on either side of the doorway. Second, the half-round Diocletian windows, which fit well under gables but here are deployed right along the upper floor, not because they fit the space especially well, perhaps just because of the way they look, echoing gracefully the curves of the Venetian windows and the old cart door on the right.

Add that to a grand if narrow doorway with pediment and fanlight, raise the whole thing on a high plinth, add a couple of wings with more semicircular windows and you have a big building with a sense that its creator had the elements of the Palladian style at his fingertips, together with a free and easy attitude towards how to lay them out. Nature, in the form of warm, low, early summer sunshine on glowing limestone, does the rest.

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¶ Architectural Review, October 1943

* This post is another of my retrospective pieces, inspired by a visit to Moreton before my recent injury rendered my leg useless, for even such brief strolls, for the moment.

§ Clicking on the photograph to enlarge it makes these clearer.

† There's a good example of the profuse use of Venetian windows here.

Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire

A great arch for a great house

As is well known, England is rich in country houses, but was once richer still. Hundreds of country houses have succumbed to the mallet and swinging ball of the demolition contractor, for reasons ranging from economics to fashion. The vanished country houses often leave traces behind, though, and amongst the most noticeable are lodges and gatehouses, built to mark and guard the entrances to country estates and often kept because they make good houses. A favourite of mine is the domed lodge at Stoke Edith in Herefordshire. Here’s another, the grand Palladian lodge near the B3089 at Fonthill Bishop in Wiltshire.

Fonthill is a name to make architectural historians pause. The place was the home of the most grandiose and bizarre Gothic revival house ever, Fonthill Abbey, built in the early-19th century by super-rich dilettante and author William Beckford. It is long gone (although a fragment remains, which I hope to see one day). But before Fonthill Abbey there was Fonthill Spendens, a vast Palladian house built for Beckford’s father between 1755 and 1770; its park was entered through this lodge.

The round arch, pediment, and blocks of heavily rusticated masonry are emphatically Palladian in style, so much so that some say the building is the work of the original English Palladian architect, Inigo Jones. If so, that would make it a 17th-century building, but it’s more likely to date from the time when Splendens was built. If so, it’s a powerful reminder of the kind of architecture of Splendens, a house that was pulled down in 1807, when William Beckford, a dedicated follower of Gothic fashion, was building his new house. If Fonthill Splendens was as solid as this great archway, it probably did not come down without a struggle.

Piccadilly, London

Space invader

An alien invader has appeared in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It’s a scale model of one of the great unbuilt projects of Russian communism, the Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20 by Vladimir Tatlin and commonly known as Tatlin’s tower. The original was intended to be 400 m high and although known as a monument it was intended to house various functions of the Third International, also known as Comintern, the organization set up in 1919 to fight for communism in Russia and beyond. Inside the tower’s double spiral of twisted metal were to be four structures of steel and glass, each in effect a separate building. These inner structures – in the model they are made of wire – were designed to accommodate separate parts of Comintern. Each was to be a perfect form (a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere) and the three lower ones were meant to rotate at different speeds.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that this monster monument was never built. The constructional challenges were immense and the amount of steel required was enormous. But not for the first or last time, an unbuilt structure started balls rolling. The idea of its intricate steel network inspired architects and engineers, and the tower (and its enigmatic designer) has enjoyed a long afterlife in books about architecture, histories of the Soviet Union, and even fiction. Now architects Dixon Jones have built this replica to accompany the Royal Academy’s exhibition Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-–1935, which is on at the RA until 22 January. The tower looks rather odd against the Palladian-Victorian background of Burlington House. As I was trying to photograph it, I longed for a neutral background. But the contrast between the constructivist steelwork of Tatlin’s tower and the stonework behind is, I suppose, part of the point. It was always meant to stick out and in its new incarnation in Piccadilly it still does.

There are details of the exhibition here.

Glynde, Sussex

Palladian geometry

Coming along the main village street of Glynde, past cottages and an almost absurdly quaint smithy with horseshoe-shaped doorway, there is an abrupt change of gear when you reach St Mary’s church, a Palladian structure of the 1760s, which itself acts as a kind of prelude to the cupola-topped Georgian stables of the big house, Glynde Place, just a little further beyond. The west front of St Mary’s is all triangles and semi-circles. It would be a rather severe exercise in Palladian geometry, but its small size tempers the severity and gives it charm.

The architect was an amateur, Sir Thomas Robinson, and he made good use of flint for the main walls and neat ashlar for the porch and the triangular pediments. Like virtually every church architect using this kind of classical architecture, Robinson found no real solution to the problem of combining a “classical temple” frontage with a bell turret. So the turret looks a bit odd atop the pediment, but its triangular top and semi-circular arch echo the triangles and arches below, giving the design some consistency.

The charm continues inside, with an interior full of box pews that features a wooden west gallery and other Georgian furnishings. Best of all is the plasterwork around the east window, with its rosettes set in octagons. This is a lovely touch and isn’t quite spoiled by the stained glass by Kempe, in a sort of Renaissance revival style of the 1890s, which would look better in a Victorian church. But even it includes semi-circles and triangles, continuing the geometrical theme and maintaining a certain harmony.