Pershore, Worcestershire

Crinkle-crankle

You can’t beat an old brick wall as a boundary to a garden. The pleasant, variegated colours of old brick, the feeling of warmth, the shelter, the sense of seclusion – all of these things can be fostered by an English brick garden wall. But for something even more special, how about a crinkle-crankle wall, one that undulates like this one in Pershore?

Crinkle-crankle walls have been around at least since the 18th century. They’re unusual, and more common in Suffolk than anywhere else (‘crinkle-crankle’ itself is said to be a Suffolk dialect term meaning ‘serpentine’). I have read that people built them because a sinuous wall can be built soundly with only one thickness of bricks, saving materials. A straight wall built this way would easily fall down – you need a double thickness, and sometimes buttresses too, to give it strength. A curving wall can stand up on its own, its curves providing rigidity, like the corrugations in corrugated iron. With a serpentine wall the total length is greater, but not double that of an equivalent straight wall, so you need fewer bricks. On the other hand, the wall also needs more land.*

Another reason to build such a wall might be that it’s aesthetically appealing – many people find curves more pleasing to the eye than straight lines. Yet another might be that a crinkle-crankle wall, oriented correctly, is good for growing fruit against – the indentations provide a bit of shelter from the wind, and if the wall is south-facing, it catches the sun and makes pockets of warmth. This brings us to the town of Pershore, in the part of Worcestershire (the Vale of Evesham and nearby) which is traditionally a fruit-growing area. In this region there are numerous fruit farms and commercial orchards (and were once many more); Pershore itself is famous for its pears. Private gardens had fruit trees too, so the town’s crinkle-crankle walls could be part of this story. For those of us who appreciate these things, it is not just Pershore’s impressive Georgian houses where bricks have born attractive visual fruit.

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* Money-saving might possibly a factor that became more important when bricks were taxed.

Pershore, Worcestershire

 

Pershore beasts, Pershore plums

I’ve noticed the former church of St Andrew near the abbey in Pershore several times, and my photograph of the medieval carving on the tower is not actually the first I’d taken of this curiosity, although it’s the first in which strong sunlight picks out the details. Admiring this carving, and wondering exactly what the beast it depicts actually is, made me look closely at its bared teeth, bulging eyes, and bushy tail. Hitherto, peering up at it (it’s quite high up) in poor light, I’d wondered if it was Jesus’ donkey with a palm tree in the background. A better look at the teeth through a zoom lens made me inclined to think it might be a muzzled dog. But in that case, is that really a tree behind it? And is that the faint impression of a face, popping up above the creature’s back?

No reference book I have seems to throw any light on this carving. Pevsner mentions some ‘grotesque carvings’ and moves swiftly on. The listing description says that the grotesques adorn buttresses, which is true, but says no more. Maybe there’s not a definitive solution to this question; many such carvings are the result of artistic whimsy.*

Curiosity did at least make me look up the history of the church. In the 1060s the crown gave much of the land in Pershore to Westminster Abbey. The abbot of Pershore refused tenants of Westminster the right to worship in his abbey, so the church of St Andrew was built to give these people somewhere to worship. After the abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII, the monks’ church became available to the locals and the two churches continued side by side. Nowadays the parishioners worship in the abbey church and St Andrew’s is used as a parish hall. The abbey rents the land on which St Andrew’s stands for a very small sum, and one that speaks of one of the drivers of the local economy. The annual rent is one pound of Pershore plums. Truly they are plums beyond price.†

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* However, see the update, below. Nevertheless, to make a general point, I was pleased to hear no less an authority than the medievalist Professor Paul Binksi refer to medieval grotesque carvings in this way in a recent Zoom lecture I attended. He sees such church carvings – grotesques, sheela na gigs, and the like – as equivalent to the whimsical marginal illustrations in some medieval manuscripts, in which images, sometimes apparently outrageous or even erotic, appear in the margins of serious, often sacred texts.

† I have only an online source for the ‘pound of plums’ story. I do hope it is both true and still current.

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Update One of my readers suggests that the carving represents a wolf with the head of St Edmund. This is almost certainly correct and I am kicking myself for not having picked up this allusion. St Edmund was killed by Viking raiders, who shot so many arrows at him that he bristled, then cut off his head. The king’s men heard cries, and found the body and head guarded by a wolf. When they put the head back on the body, the parts fused together. Miracles were attributed to the king, and he was made a saint. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey, and the links between Pershore and Westminster make this interpretation of the carving very likely indeed. I am indebted to my reader ‘Per Apse’ for this suggestion. 

Pershore, Worcestershire

Judge’s lodgings

Further along Bridge Street, Pershore from the town house in my previous post is one with more pretensions to grandeur. Instead of the multitude of small sashes of its near neighbour, Perrott House shows off with a smaller number of large windows. There’s a big Venetian window in the middle of the first floor, with canted bays on either side. The ground-floor canted bays, with their arched front openings, echo the proportions of the Venetian window on the floor above, as does the doorway, which has a smaller fanlight than the one at number 3, but one that makes up for that with a strong pattern of glazing bars and chunky voussoirs around the arch.

Perrott House, it struck me as I looked at it, was clearly built for someone who either wanted to make their mark or who’d made their mark already – the latter, as it turns out, for the owner was Judge George Perrott, Baron of the Exchequer, who sat in courts of equity in the second half of the 18th century. No doubt like other residents of Bridge Street, he must have made good use of Worcestershire’s improved transport links to the capital. His architect (it’s not known who it was) provided the judge with an impressive house, albeit with a facade made up of standard motifs (Venetian windows, quoins, pediment, and so on) of Georgian architecture. It’s what you’d expect in the house of a rich and prominent person in the 1770s living in a wealthy town in the provinces. I’d love to see inside, because we’re told* that the interior, with its fine Adam-style stucco work and marble fireplaces, was a cut above the provincial norm and was probably done by good London craftsmen. Those transport links, it seems, paid off.

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* See for example the Worcestershire volume of Pevsner; the listing text for the house even speculates that Robert Adam may have been the architect.

Pershore, Worcestershire

Good honest building

Pershore – a town dominated by the abbey in the Middle Ages, by trades such as wool-dealing and glove-making on either side of the dissolution, and by market gardening after that – must have been both prosperous and fashionable in the Georgian period. Some of the 18th-century houses in the town centre are outstanding. Back then, even if you were clattering through the streets as the London coach gathered speed (Pershore was the first stopping place out of Worcester) you very probably noticed the array of solid brick walls and smart sash windows. The sharp-eyed traveller might even haver made out finer details such as the showy fanlights and carved keystones.

My photograph shows one of my favourites, right in the centre of the town. Number 3 Bridge Street is a whopper: seven bays wide and all the windows bar one of the same size – no one was bothering here about making the windows on the first floor larger, to signal the comfortable main rooms that would have been on this floor, the Italian piano nobile. Plain ‘six over six’ sashes were good enough for the owner of this house. But when it came to the doorway they allowed themselves a bit of ‘look at me’ swagger: a broad door topped by a huge fanlight with glazing bars patterned in interlocking circles and circles within circles, a design that leaves the beholder wide-eyed with amazement. This was a window both highly practical (it made for a light hallway inside) and decorative. In addition, I was interested to note, just visible through the glazing on the upper floor, evidence of inner windows with ogee-arched lights, suggesting a form of double glazing that looks very well made. In fact the whole house – big but unpretentious – looks well made, what I’d describe, borrowing an old phrase, as ‘good honest building’.

Pershore, Worcestershire

Stamp of approval

I suppose quite a few people must have looked at the front Pershore’s Town Hall on the town’s High Street and thought that its neo-Georgian style was not inappropriate for a place with quite a few Georgian brick buildings. It’s well proportioned, substantial without being overwhelming, and seems to have a air of authority about it. But this building hasn’t always been the Town Hall. It was built in 1932 as the Post Office – and the qualities seem just as fitting to its original purpose. When you’re there you can guess the building’s former use from the royal monograms and crowns on the keystones above the doorway.

In the interwar period, and again for a few years after World War II, this kind of neo-Georgian was used widely for town Post Offices. If they hoped to convey such virtues as reliability and authority by using neo-Georgian, the style also went well with Royal Mail’s the signage – now gone, of course, from this particular building – with its Classically inspired lettering.* Now, when many of the GPO’s originally services have been hived off, many Post Offices in major towns are mere counters in branches of the Co-op or W H Smith. In such a context, Post Offices like Pershore’s seem to come from another world.

It’s good that this example has found another role. It would be a shame to loose that neat Flemish bond brickwork, all those glazing bars (especially the ones on the ground floor, with the central window subtly different from those flanking it), the segmentally headed dormers, the elaborate tops to the doorways with their carved keystones. I’m sure most Pershore residents give the building their stamp of approval.

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* There is an example of the lettering in a previous piece I wrote about Post Offices, here.

Pershore, Worcestershire

Two ways with brick

‘What can that be?’ asks the Resident Wise Woman, pointing across the square at a couple of buildings that stick out, more than somewhat, from Pershore’s Georgian townscape.
‘Something civic?’ I say.
‘Or something educational?’ she responds.
Something religious, we suppose, as we approach and discover the place to be festooned with posters issued by the Baptists. It’s actually something educational and religious: a Baptist schoolroom.

Hidden behind this building, it turns out, is Pershore’s Baptist chapel, a structure of 1839–40 by S. W. Daukes. Here in front are two newcomers in brick. To the right, the 1860s polychrome brickwork of the manse and earlier schoolroom, as jazzy and different from Pershore’s prevailing sober Georgian red brick as you could get using nominally the same material. To the left, the freer Tudor-cum-Gothic schoolroom of 1888, with shields bearing appropriate virtues to which pupils might aspire (faith, hope, charity, peace) and big windows to admit light by which the Word might be read. The architects were Ingall and Son, and they did a better job, it seems to me, than whoever designed the jazzy manse. I especially like the line of the gable and the way its pointed protrusions reflect the shape of the dripstone over the window. The lower part of the facade is perhaps a bit busy and unbalanced, but if it's busy it's also businesslike.

And if both buildings stick out rather, in this civil Georgian town, the schoolroom, at least, does it with some style. Is it so bad, after all, to proclaim your differences and to announce values such as charity and peace? ’Tis the season for it.