Halifax, West Yorkshire

Looking up in Halifax

Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale in the late-Victorian period. I was particularly struck by a number of streets such as Southgate and Market Street. The clue is in the latter name – this is a block that contains the town’s covered Borough Market. From the streets (especially the two streets I’ve named) the architecture is very imposing, punctuated as it is with turrets, big semicircular windows, tiny windows topped with pediments, variations on the classical orders, and arches with rusticated stone blocks. There’s more than a touch of French Renaissance about all this, but it’s pumped-up French Renaissance, and Nikolaus Pevsner, in the first edition of his Buildings of England volume on West Yorkshire, was rather snooty about it: ‘in an undisciplined French Renaissance style,’ he noted.

And yet Pevsner was a greater invoker of the Zeitgeist. He often praised architecture than reflected the moods and manners of its time and this building surely reflects the confidence and flamboyance of the era in which it was built. When you get inside the market, though, the place lacks the size and theatricality of, say, the great arcades in Leeds. Everything is on a smaller scale, but there’s still an impressive iron and glass roof, with a dome in the middle, which does a good job of getting light into the market, bounded as it is on all four sides by the French Renaissance shops. Those who look up see clear glass (5850 square metres of it), fan-shaped windows with iron tracery, the octagonal dome itself, and a small forest of iron columns holding everything up. This is where the discipline is in this building – the discipline of good engineering that makes everything fit together in a neat and well balanced way and where the Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty) are very much in evidence. The local architects, Leeming and Leeming, did a good job in the 1890s, and their building has stood the test of time: it still seems well used.*

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* There’s more on the history of the market here.

Edithmead, Somerset

Tin tabernacle

As regular readers will know, I’m a great fan and regular user of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England books, to which I refer all the time and which also inspire many of the explorations of English buildings that lie behind this blog. I am in no doubt that the series, with its comprehensive coverage of architecture – first in England and then in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland – is one of the greatest works of art history ever, in any country.* If I have a reservation about the books it’s that, even in the fat revised volumes that are still appearing, they often stop short at even passing coverage the more modest buildings that in many places play a huge part in defining local character – the lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh, maybe, or the hovels of the Vale of Evesham, or plotland bungalows, or minor industrial buildings in some towns.† Or corrugated iron buildings, a personal obsession of mine, even though buildings made of this material are widely seen as minor and often temporary. There are, though, plenty of corrugated iron structures that are vital to their community and that have histories going back over a century.

I was pleased, therefore, when browsing in the Somerset: South and West volume of Pevsner to find a corrugated iron church mentioned at Edithmead, close to Burnham-on-Sea. Recently I was nearby, and stopped to have a look. What I found was a charming, white-painted ‘tin tabernacle’ not especially churchlike in appearance, except for the miniature spire and the bell at one end, but attractive nonetheless. If the rectangular windows and tiny structure without a separate chancel look unecclesiastical, there’s a reason. This building began life on another site, at East Brent, where it was an ‘Adult School’. It was brought to Edithmead in 1919 to serve the small local community as a daughter church to the one in Burnham-on-Sea. The congregation look after it well – although maintenance of a building like this is easier that the upkeep of a stone building; the main jobs recently have, I think, been painting the building and replacing the wooden window frames.

Thanks to the congregation, the tiny church with its modest spirelet and delightful cresting along the ridge of the roof, still looks good and locals were able to celebrate its centenary on the site in 2019. Hats off to the people of Edithmead – and to the authors of the Pevsner guide for pointing me towards a place of which, until the other day, I’d not even heard.

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* The revised volume for Wiltshire is the latest one I’ve acquired, and I plan to review it shortly here.

† All of which may be built in part of corrugated iron.

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

 

Palatial

The other day I found myself in Trowbridge, strolling around the town centre looking at the rich mixture of industrial and domestic buildings that contribute so much to the visual character of this town. The industry was cloth-production, and I’ve already posted an example of its architecture – the Handle House for drying teasels, with its remarkable pierced brick walls. Here’s an outstanding domestic building, one of the palatial clothier’s houses built in the 18th century. I like this one in Fore Street, built for Nathaniel Houlton in the early-18th century, for its baroque features. What I mean by this is the quirks of design that take it beyond the highly satisfying but straightforward classical ‘box with sash windows’ that gets its effect mainly from its pleasing proportions. I’m thinking of the banded pilasters, the heavy string course and cornice, and above all the handling of the central part of the frontage. This breaks away from the standard window sizes with narrow, round-arched windows on either side of the doorway and central window. The whole central bay steps forward from the flanking bays, and then the central section of this bay is emphasised with columns (Tuscan on the ground floor, Corinthian above), above which the cornice and strong course break forward still more than the rest of the bay. Much effort has been put into all these design details, and they’re set off to advantage in glorious ashlar limestone masonry. The facade is one of many quiet triumphs in this town.

On my recent visit to Trowbridge I did not have with me the new edition of the Pevsner volume for Wiltshire, which is published this week. I see it covers this house and many more, pointing out details that will no doubt send me back to the town, looking again and finding buildings I’ve missed before. I plan to review the book some time during the next few weeks, but I’m already finding it both useful and absorbing.

Endnote My apologies to the 40 readers who saw this post when it was headed Trowbridge, Worcestershire. Trowbridge, of course, has never been in Worcestershire and for it to be so would entail a boundary change that is unimaginable, even in the context of the mess that has been made of county boundaries in the past. Call it a slip of the finger, or a brain in neutral.  

Dorset reperambulated

Michael Hill, John Newman, and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Dorset
Published by Yale University Press

Another year, another small clutch of revised volumes in Pevsner’s revered Buildings of England series. I’ve chosen Dorset for review because, although it’s not a county I know intimately, it’s a fascinating part of England and one that has given me a lot of pleasure, from its coast and coastal  towns such as Poole and Lyme Regis to inland places like Blandford Forum. I have therefore used the old 1972 edition of Dorset (in which Pevsner himself wrote about the churches while entrusting the secular buildings to John Newman) quite a bit over the years. Dorset has so much interesting architecture: great houses and historic castles, some terrific churches, and a lovely coast – lovely both scenically and architecturally, from Lyme Regis to Poole.

To reflect this richness and like every recent revision in the series, Pevsner’s Dorset has grown considerably (from just over 500 small pages in 1972 to 780 larger pages today), thanks to the addition of new buildings, more detail on those already covered, and the inclusion of structures that lay outside the original remit or that Pevsner and co simply missed – for even Homer nodded, and the busy compilers of the Pevsner epic, especially in a rich county like Dorset, a place of shady nooks and sunken lanes, may be permitted to have nodded in their turn. But Michael Hill, reviser of Dorset, can have left few stones unturned. A major centre like Poole now has a substantial section, incorporating various changes to the built environment and the generally beneficial effect of the conservation areas designated after the 1972 edition came out. The town’s new development is treated with discrimination – the Dolphin quays development criticised for its too-large scale (seven storeys dwarfing the nearby historic buildings), the RNLI College given praise. Poole is also a place to note what Pevsner does not cover. I’ve recently become fascinated by the use of architectural ceramics in Poole. Some of this is mentioned (the Poole Arms on the Quay, with its glowing green tiled gabled front, for example), but some isn’t.

Hill, like the other revisers of books in this series, treads around the original text with care. Gems from the old book remain, like the opening of the entry on Shaftesbury with its yearning quotation from Thomas Hardy’s Jude, all ‘vague imaginings’ and ‘pensive melancholy’, and the 1972 book’s comment on this: ‘Hardy was easily thrown into a pensive melancholy, but these are the right thoughts with which to approach Shaftesbury’. The original description of the famous Gold Hill is retained too, but in the new volume it merits a photograph, and a mention of Gold Hill Museum and its extension of 2011.

Some places, such as Lyme, benefit from large amounts of new detail. Lyme now has three perambulations instead of one, and some of the new detail makes me want to return to the town and look again. There’s apparently a 1930s cinema, unremarkable outside but with an interesting interior (a ’minor Art Deco gem’) and several other older buildings that the original edition did not notice. Hill also updates the coverage of Eleanor Coade’s wonderful house Belmont, with its ‘frenzy of decoration’, covering its recent restoration and the alterations to it which are controversial, but through which Hill tiptoes with tact. When new scholarship is available, Hill is informed by it. In Blandford, for example, Hill is sceptical of the role of the Bastard family as architects of the rebuilt 18th century town and notes that master mason Nathaniel Ireson may well have been responsible for the baroque touches in the town’s Georgian architecture.

The new Dorset is illuminating, then, and manages to incorporate the essence, and much of the text, of the old volume while adding much to it. The photographs are good as usual and there are several of the maps and plans that make the revised volumes still more useful than the old ones. Dorset, then, does well by this small but enchanting county and confirms that the old series in its new guise it still very much alive and kicking.

Southwell, Nottinghamshire

The Leaves of Southwell

When posting about one of the carvings in the chapter house of Southwell Minster the other week, I inevitably got down from my shelves my copy of The Leaves of Southwell, Nikolaus Pevsner’s short book about this building’s extraordinary late-13th century sculptures of the leaves of plants and trees. I did so to look at the excellent photographs of Southwell’s stone leaves – oak, ivy, maple, buttercup, hop, vine, and other species. I ended up rereading the text of the book as well.

The Leaves of Southwell is in the King Penguin series, which are short hardback books published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959.* The format for the series consists of an essay (usually of about 30 pages, though Pevsner’s is double that length), followed by a series of illustrations. The photographs, by F L Attenborough, then Principal of University College, Leicester, and father of Richard and David Attenborough, are exemplary: detailed, well printed, and with just the right amount of contrast. From the patterned cover to the photographs, the book is a pleasing object.

The text is good too. Pevsner combines the virtues of a good art historian: a perceptive and inquisitive eye, a knowledge of contemporary history and intellectual context, and the wit to understand how the visual and the historical might relate. He picks out several qualities to admire in the Southwell carvings – the way the artists balanced pattern and background, the interplay between the architectural structure and the ornament that adorns it, the naturalism of the carvings and how this is modified or stylised in places. It’s this naturalism that is the remarkable thing about the carvings – they date to the point at the end of the 13th century when sculptors had turned away from the highly stylised ‘stiff leaf’ ornament of the previous decades and before they’d hit upon the slightly more formal style of carving that came later. Pevsner also enlisted a botanist to advise on exactly which species are represented, although the results aren’t always conclusive.

Pevsner also writes about the intellectual context of the carvings. He discusses how early-medieval herbalists and encyclopedists write about plants. Most of these writers, he says, are not really very revealing. They tell us a few facts about a plant and maybe some of its herbal uses, but they don’t go into much detail and their information is mostly copied from other writers, not based on observation. The exception, says Pevsner, is Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), Dominican friar and bishop, scholar of Aristotle but also of the great Muslim writers Avicenna and Averroes. When Albertus writes about plants, he does so in a much more specific and observational way, as if he has actually seen what he is describing. This way of writing marks a change, and it occurs just before the Southwell carvings were made in the 1290s.

Pevsner is not saying that the master mason of Southwell read Albertus. He is pointing out that this new realism and respect for specific detail was in the air at the time – it is part of what he calls the spirit of the age (his translation for his British readers of the German word Zeitgeist). It’s a spirit that encompasses the preaching of the friars, the growth of busy towns, the worldly love and nature poetry of the wandering scholars, the rejection of superstition, and the new openness to both Classical art and the ideas of Islamic philosophers. It’s a spirit, then, that accommodates with ease naturalist sculpture like the leaves of Southwell.

At one point in his text, Pevsner remarks that Southwell is probably the least visited of all Britain’s cathedrals. If the chapter house were in France, British people would flock to see it, he says. Seventy-five years on from Pevsner’s account, it’s still very quiet – a handful of people were visiting when we were there before Christmas. The cathedral authorities are on a mission, though, to ensure that those who come will be able to appreciate the carvings and the stories behind them. In conjunction with a major project to restore the cathedral’s roof, they are also planning work on the chapter house – to provide heating and better lighting, and to present more information about the carvings; a video here, with more shots of the carvings, explains more. I hope that more people will see the carvings as a result, and appreciate their extraordinary qualities of naturalism, observation, and openness.†


Photographs by F L Attenborough, from The Leaves of Southwell
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* The King Penguin series, of which Pevsner himself eventually became General Editor, was miscellaneous in its subject matter: there were natural history titles, books on history, places, and on subjects such as heraldry, British military uniforms, and the history of toys. Any subject was considered, if it would benefit from treatment in the series format of ‘essay plus a series of illustrations’. Some of my favourites feature the work of interesting British artists of the period: Edward Bawden’s Life in an English Village, John Piper’s Romney Marsh, Barbara Jones’s The Isle of Wight, and Kenneth Rowntree’s A Prospect of Wales.

† Perhaps the 19th-century iron capitals on the station platforms at Great Malvern are the fruit of looking at 13th- or 14th-century Decorated Gothic carvings like these.

Oxfordshire revisited

Around this time of year English Buildings becomes a book blog for a week or so, as I cast an eye over some recent books on subjects that I write about here. First, a new volume in a familiar series of architectural guides – but no less impressive for that...


The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire: North and West by Alan Brooks and Jennifer Sherwood
Published by Yale University Press


It’s time to ease the cork out of another bottle of the fizzy stuff in the Wilkinson household when another revised volume in Pevsner’s invaluable Buildings of England series comes out – especially if, as is the case with the latest, Oxfordshire: North and West, it covers an area close to my home. In the original edition, Oxfordshire (written jointly by Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood) was covered in a single volume, so this is a substantial expansion as well as a revision – it includes the bulk, in terms of area, of the county, leaving the city of Oxford and the southern part of Oxfordshire for another volume.

The revision is by Alan Brooks, who has already revised the two Gloucestershire volumes, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire. He did a fine job on those, and doesn’t disappoint with Oxfordshire either. Revising a ‘Pevsner’ is not a simple task. It’s not just a question of bringing the book up to date by adding new buildings and deleting those that have been demolished. It also involves taking in corrections, adding buildings that the original authors missed, noticing alterations to fabric, and, perhaps most importantly of all, incorporating the results of new research. Alan Brooks, for example, has benefitted from recent publications, especially on the vernacular architecture of the county, and is an expert on stained glass, so has strengthened the book’s coverage of that subject considerably. This adding of new detail demands a gentle touch. Brooks has been able to preserve a lot of the wording of the original book, although the words get moved around to accommodate new research and occasional changes of emphasis or modifications of opinion. Alan Brooks deserves congratulations for keeping all these balls in the air while delivering such a wealth of architectural information.

Looking at familiar places with a ‘Pevsner’ in hand is usually a revelation, all the more so in this case, for someone who has been used to using the 1974 first edition of Oxfordshire. Looking at places I’ve visited recently, I notice enhancements and interesting additions everywhere. At Fifield, for example, the architect who did the church’s 19th-century restoration is named, and we are told more about the artists who produced the stained glass. At Hook Norton there’s an extended description of the brewery, a wonderful building given short shift in the first edition. In many places there is more on small (and not so small) houses – at Horton-cum-Studley we are given more on the almshouses, cottages, and a timber-framed house that even merits a diagram. I was pleased to see the inclusion of the occasional bit of background, such as the expanded coverage of the stained glass at Horspath depicting John Copcot, a 15th-century student at the Queen’s College, Oxford, famous, we are told, for killing a wild boar with his copy of Aristotle. This is all about filling in detail on buildings that could have been given better treatment first time round. But there have also been changes in Oxfordshire’s villages. For example, North Oxfordshire’s great set piece village, Great Tew, has been transformed from the sorry state of dilapidation noted in the 1974 edition to the revived and thriving place of today. Brooks notes that ‘much solid conservation work has been carried out by the estate’: how true.

Towns get markedly better coverage. Chipping Norton for example, has much more detail about houses, shops, former hotels, and schools, sometimes with more precise dating than in earlier editions. Visiting the town with the new edition in one’s hand, one emerges with a better understanding of the place’s vernacular architecture, its notable local baroque buildings, and its 20th-century architecture. I’ll be returning to Chipping Norton, to look more closely at various buildings, from the masonic hall to the former workhouse, now converted to flats. Banbury and Burford, to name just two other towns I know quite well, will repay further visits with the new Pevsner. Repeated and redoubled visits, indeed. It will take a long time to drink dry the deep well of information marshalled in this latest Pevsner. Meanwhile, I’ll raise another glass of fizz.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Off my piste

Catching the eye with white-painted walls and ogee hood moulds picked out in black, this building in Shipston-on-Stour stands out from its mainly red-brick neighbours. Although I’ve been to Shipston dozens of times I’d not been down this side street, so had no idea the building was there – not until I started using the recent revised edition of Warwickshire in the Pevsner Buildings of England series.*

The revised and extended editions of the Pevsner guides certainly do their job of picking out exceptional buildings in obscure places. My example is the very last thing in the entry on Shipston: “with ogee windows and hood moulds; originally a police station and lock-up, built c. 1840,” says the guide, which was enough to send me off to find Old Road, where the building stands. Those curving window tops are very typical of the early Gothic Revival and they’re certainly the first thing to notice. But I’d also point out the shape of the building – the broad curve with which it turns the corner. The metal glazing bars delineating tiny panes of glass and small three-pane opening panels are also delightful, especially their Gothic pointed upper panes.

Backstreet England. As Pevsner shows, it’s so often worth your while to stray from the main drag, to go those extra few yards from your usual route, to poke around in corners. You never know what you might find.

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*The Buildings of England: Warwickshire, Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner (Yale University Press, 2016). My review is here.

Shakespeare's county

The next of my handful of new book reviews is of the latest addition to Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. For many, these books are self-recommending. But now the revised editions are coming out, many of them getting on for twice the length of the original books, it seemed a useful idea to have a closer look at the benefits of revision – and it’s certainly not just a case of deleting demolished buildings and adding newly built ones...

Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Warwickshire
Published by Yale University Press

The arrival of a new revised edition of one of Pevsner’s Buildings of England volumes has me rubbing my hands with glee, especially when it’s on a county in my local area. As I live in north Gloucestershire, not so far from the border with Warwickshire, the new edition of Warwickshire is right up my street.

Pevsner’s original Warwickshire came out in 1966, so a full update was due. As seems usual these days, the new Warwickshire has 800 pages (there were just 529 smaller pages in the 1966 edition), but unlike its processor it doesn’t include Birmingham, which will appear in a forthcoming volume on Birmingham and the Black Country. There’s plenty of space, then, for new extended entries on Warwick and Coventry Universities, and for many individual new buildings (Pevsner’s account of Coventry Cathedral, a new building in 1966, is reproduced with little change, apart from some notes on recent minor alterations and additions). The old buildings (and there are some belters in this county: Warwick and Kenilworth Castles, Baddesley Clinton and Stoneleigh Abbey) are covered in more detail. The book also includes much more information about many places – small towns such as Bedworth and Atherstone, for example, are covered in much greater depth. We get a richer picture of this fascinating county as a result.

One huge gain in the revision process is the scope to draw on the results of new research about all kinds of buildings. Recent books on the architect Sanderson Miller (very active in his native Warwickshire) are a case in point. Andor Gomme’s work on the architect and builder Francis Smith of Warwick is another. Recent research also throws light on the designers of important houses such as Compton Verney. And on rediscoveries. Why didn’t the 1966 Pevsner tell me about the wonderful Norman tympanum in the church at Billesley, I wondered? Answer: because it was only rediscovered in 1988! The new book includes it, and provides a photograph of it too.

It didn’t take long before I got out and about with the new Warwickshire in my hand. It throws light even on places that are familiar to me, as I discovered when I took it on a journey through parts of the south of the county. There was much more than in the original book on the large village of Brailes, for example, and about smaller ‘hidden’ places like Idlicote, with its church, house, and dovecote, and about places I’d driven through hundreds of times, like Halford, a village on the Fosse Way with a good church (another bit of excellent Norman carving (who said Herefordshire had all the best Norman sculpture?) and some elegant early-19th century houses. I finished my trip in Shipston-on-Stour, which I thought I knew like the back of my hand. But the Pevsner encouraged me to explore more closely a former nonconformist chapel I’d overlooked before, and introduced me to a bit of the town I’d not visited, where it pointed me towards an extraordinary former police station with, of all things, 19th-century Gothick ogee windows.

So Warwickshire doesn’t disappoint with the familiar places. And I’m already noting down buildings I don’t know that I want to see. I think the list will continue to grow for some time. Anyone with any kind of interest in Warwickshire, its history, and its buildings, will I’m sure react in the same way. There’s no need to hesitate to buy this latest Pevsner.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

The art of seeing

My recent post about the wonderful mosaic floors in the National Gallery prompted a couple of people to say to me that, having spent years telling people about the discoveries they can make by looking up, I am now telling them to look down as well. How true. But there’s a bigger message, best summed up in the instruction: ‘Be inquisitive’. It was a point I first heard made years ago by that fine natural history writer Richard Mabey, who was talking about being inquisitive about the natural world; his books, especially classics like Weeds and The Unofficial Countryside, exemplify this virtue, teaching us to look at familiar plants in unfamiliar ways, and at unlikely places in open-minded ways.*

So. Be inquisitive. Go around the back, poke about in corners, talk to people in pubs, walk up unlikely alleys…and you’ll find unexpected interest and delight. In Shipston-on-Stour the other day I was reminded of this as I passed an alleyway I’d glanced up on previous occasions. The building at the end is a former Baptist chapel.With Y-tracery windows and attractive banded masonry around the window heads, it’s a good if unobtrusive example of what a local builder could do in the mid-19th century. I was pleased to see that the chapel is mentioned in the newly revised edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Warwickshire† (it wasn’t in the first edition) – and the new book supplies a date for the building: 1866. It’s a quiet corner worth a few moments of anyone’s time.

As I left the alleyway, though, I spotted something I’d never noticed before: next to some wiring, an old painted sign warning us of the consequences of smoking or ‘otherwise committing a nuisance in this entry’. The once-familiar street sign ‘Commit no nuisance’ was a command, aimed particularly at men leaving the pub and answering the call of nature in the street rather than holding out until the proper place is reached. Such signs are not common now, so I was pleased to find this one, put up by the chapel trustees maybe 100 years ago. The Pevsner book doesn’t mention it – its business is with architecture after all – but it’s a nice example of the rewards of keeping the eyes open, of being inquisitive, even in familiar places. 

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*The Unofficial Countryside, which explores the animal and plant life of such apparently unpromising places as docks, canals, railways, factories, and waste land, originally appeared in 1973. I bought it a few years after it came out and it taught me as much about looking as any architecture book. There’s a good reprint available from Little Toller Books.

† I hope to review this excellent addition to the Pevsner series later in the year.

Around the house

Spring has been in the air for a while now, albeit on and off (my Facebook feed seems to alternate between images of bluebells and snow), so it’s the time of year for English Buildings to turn temporarily into a book blog. In the next few posts, I’ll be offering my thoughts on a number of books that have struck me in the last few months, mostly new publications, but also a couple that have come my way recently even though they’ve been out for a while. I start with the beginning of a new series: Pevsner Introductions…

Charles O’Brien, Houses
Pevsner Introductions: Published by Yale University Press

The name Pevsner needs no introduction to readers of this blog. The Buildings of England series, county guides to England’s buildings by the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, now revised and expanded by a team of scholars, is the bible for anyone looking at our buildings or writing about them. The Pevsner team have already developed the series, adding the counties of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and creating the Pevsner City Guides. Now come introductory architectural guides on specific building types.

Houses by Charles O’Brien is the first of these introductions to come my way. It covers the history of the English house, working chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present. All the key phases are described, concisely but in enough depth to give the reader a real sense of the character of each period – in the way houses were planned, in their architectural details and embellishments, and in the overall look of the architecture of each era. The book features a good sample of the great houses, but covers more modest dwellings too, from cruck-frame buildings in Herefordshire to weavers’ houses in Macclesfield, council flats to 1960s SPAN houses. There’s useful information on structures (for example medieval timber frames) and on key developments in architecture and building (the ‘great rebuilding’, the orders, the way leaseholder development worked in the Georgian period, and so on). 

Houses is an excellent primer of architectural styles through the ages, but it’s more than this. At certain key stages, it gives a real sense of the ideas and turning points that drove architectural change. To take one example: the increasing use of chimneys in Tudor houses is explained and the book points out how this not only benefited the comfort of the inhabitants but also led to changes in the way houses were planned, to accommodate the chimneys and fireplaces. Or another example: an extended caption on houses in Essex Court, in London’s Temple, neatly summarises the new type of house built after London’s 1666 Great Fire: the point at which brick-faced, stone-quoined houses with modillion cornices and narrow bands of stone separating the storeys became fashionable, defining a kind of house seen widely in the following decades. Or yet another: the way in which the ‘Mock Tudor’ style became fashionable in the 1920s, in part because of its promotion by builders and by the newly expanding building societies, which made mortgages more widely accessible and brought this brand of domesticity to a growing band of buyers. Developments such as these are explained with great clarity, although the process does entail the use of specialist architectural terms. The author defines the key ones as he goes along, but non-specialists might find it helpful to get a copy of Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary, which provides more detail. There’s a concise bibliography to help you follow up specific areas.

In short, this is an ideal book for anyone with an interest in historic houses – for the country house visitor looking for some architectural background, or for the lover of historic towns and villages who wants a clearer sense of the ways in which cities like Bath or London or Birmingham came to be the way they are, or for the owner of a period house who is on the lookout for guidance on the relevant styles and fashions. It’s written with admirable clarity and is highly illustrated with well chosen examples, informatively captioned. And coming from the Pevsner stable, the book makes you feel you are in a safe hands.

Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire

Growing old

The Ancient House, Tudor Cottage, The Old House. England is full of houses named for their antiquity. Such names beg the questions: ‘How old? When was it actually built?’ The answers, as we know, are rarely simple. Almost any English house older than a few decades has had alterations, extensions, modifications: we tinker, upgrade, downsize, adapt to current needs, endlessly. Any building that’s really (really?) old is likely to have had this done to it several times. How old? It depends on which bit you mean.

This Old House had me scratching my head even before I saw the name. There are wooden uprights and struts, but these look very much like later additions to make the place look old; the front wall seems not to be timber framed, after all. There are interesting bay windows, but their shape has something of the late-19th century about them – not notably old by English standards – and yet the leaded lights, especially those in the downstairs windows, have an older look to them. Ornate patterns of glazing bars like those were much used in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

Back home, I try to absorb the collective wisdom of Pevsner, the house’s listing text, and sundry online sources. The house, they confirm, is originally old – 16th or 17th century, but as Pevsner puts it with a little of that disapproval that he reserves for buildings that are not lit fully by the lamp of truth, ‘but much faked up inside and out at various times’.* A timber-framed core, then, encased in brick at some point, then painted white and adorned with faux timber-framing and rather delightful bay windows, some of which preserve earlier leaded panes. That could be about the size of it, though someone who knows the house well might be able to correct the story or fill in more details.

Does it matter if not everything is quite as it seems, that it’s ‘faked up’, as Pevsner puts it. When I was growing up and first reading about buildings, many writers and architects were very much influenced by the notion that a building should be true to its materials, that it should not dishonestly try to hide its origins or its structure. That’s a view influenced by generations of truth-seekers in architecture and design, from Ruskin and William Morris (both harking back in their different ways to their view of the Middle Ages) to the designers of the Bauhaus in its various incarnations. Attitudes are different, and more varied, now. I for one try to adopt a more open-minded approach to buildings like this. I like it that a building presents a puzzle, that it asks more questions than we can answer, that things like this can be fun to look at and think about. And as I myself get older, I like it too that buildings offer different ways of thinking about what it means to be old.

* As I’m quoting here from the revised edition of Pevsner’s Buckinghamshire (the 1994 printing), I’m not sure whether these are the actual words of the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, or of revisers Elizabeth Williamson and Geoffrey K Brandwood. But they certainly sound like Pevsner himself.

Langton by Spilsby, Lincolnshire

What shape is a house?

I checked the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Lincolnshire before setting out to find the severe classical church of Langton by Spilsby, all red brick and box pews, but I didn’t notice the book’s two lines on this nearby cottage: ‘E of the church an eminently picturesque cottage orné,* circular, with a conical, thatched, overhanging roof.’ Fortunately this eye-catching product of the Picturesque movement was the first thing I did notice when I pulled up by the church.

Pevsner gets it right, more or less. He might have mentioned the mud and stud construction, the Gothic pointed windows, the elaborate pattern of the glazing bars (a mix of elongated octagons and lozenges), and the fact that the roof overhang is supported by slender columns, but we get the idea. There’s an odd thing though. Would you call this cottage circular? Its footprint seems to me octagonal, with fairly crisp corners to the wall and a column at each corner. The thatched roof smooths out the shape, as thatched roofs do, but still has more or less obvious facets. By the time your eye reaches the top of the roof, you’re gazing at an elliptical chimney pot. So: Circular? Octagonal? Metamorphic, perhaps.

There have been at least three big houses at Langton – an old hall, a rebuild of 1822 that didn’t work out because of bad foundations and was demolished, and a third, a Victorian hall, that has also been pulled down. This small but striking cottage, perhaps built in the early-19th century to please the owner of the estate and house servants or farm workers, has outlived them all, a survivor in a quiet lane by the church and the ubiquitous Lincolnshire farms.

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* Cottage orné Rustic house of picturesque design, as the English Heritage definition has it. Cottages ornés were built in the 18th and 19th centuries and have features such as polygonal plans, thatched roofs, pointed or quatrefoil windows, and ornate or rustic woodwork.

Launceston, Cornwall

Architectural notes

The volumes in the Buildings of England series, written originally by Nikolaus Pevsner and added to and revised  by later scholars, are invaluable, one of the greatest works of cultural history and commentary ever produced. The recent edition of the Cornwall volume (a revision and expansion by Peter Beacham of the very first volume in the series, issued originally in 1951) is exemplary: packed with information, building on the original work, fillings gaps in it, updating it, and adding something of its own: a real sense of Cornwall as a distinctive place. And yet sometimes, in towns especially, I like to wander without Pevsner in my hand, noticing things for myself, and occasionally missing things of course, and seeing what my own eyes lead me to.

So it was that I stood and admired this small stone plaque in High Street, Launceston, boggling that it was just plonked there, apparently (with a later bit of shop front plonked in turn over part of the left-hand scroll). An angel playing the lute while another helpfully holds a scroll bearing a stave. What religious purpose could this angel-adorned building have had? I looked, admired the carved faces and feathery wings, tried unsuccessfully to work out whether there was any actual music on the stave, photographed the curiosity and walked on.
 

Round the corner in Church Street, finding a full blown and very architectural shop front, I dug out Pevsner from my bag and read the details. A shop of c. 1870, designed by James Hine in a sophisticated Italianate style as – the inscription makes it clear – Hayman’s Pianoforte Warehouse. That inscription is a striking piece of work, as are the front’s arches, keystones, capitals, and other details, though I was prevented from taking satisfactory pictures by the presence of a large van that was parked there, very close to the facade, for the whole of my time in the town.

Pevsner, what’s more, explains that Hayman’s premises went right through to the High Street, where there’s a relief of angel musicians. Mystery solved. The angels don’t signpost a religious building at all. Like the wonderful lettering on the shop front, they advertise a business where the Victorians could buy pianos (grand or upright, depending on budget and available space) and no doubt harps too and perhaps even lutes (although 1870 is rather early for the early music revival). Advertising built to last.

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Postscript Having years ago written about another musical building adorned with angels – or with putti at least – I should have known.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

In the sun

My visit to Hook Norton reminded me that it was almost exactly seven years since I went there to look at the brewery. And, since my post about the brewery was my third-ever blog post, it’s almost exactly the seventh birthday of the English Buildings blog too. It’s hard to believe I’ve been maintaining this blog for so long, and that it has remained constant (though constant in its variety, I hope) through a period that has seen so much change: a global recession, the substantial reconfiguring of the industry (publishing) in which I work, the advance* of social media in such varied directions that mere blogging seems old-fashioned at best.

I’m not one for navel-gazing§ but it does seem to me that blogging still has something to offer me and my readers. Although my posts are rarely long, a blog does give one the space to say more than the usual Flickr caption, more than one expects to read on Facebook, more, of course, than a tweet.† And so for seven years and through nearly 700 posts I’ve set down my thoughts about many an English building, including a large number that have not otherwise been much noticed.

Amongst these unregarded pieces of architecture‡ have been, this year, a number of outstanding public lavatories, a few prefabs, some corrugated iron, a gasworks, and several odd things in churches. Among other things, I’ve weighed up the quality of lettering on buildings, gazed at gazebos, and pondered what we think about when we think about ruins. I’ve tried, then, to concentrate on the architecture that most books (and most people come to that) don’t notice or have time for and to show that even close to home there are things worth looking out for, and looking at.

John Russell,¶ who wrote so much and so well about art, and occasionally about places, in the 20th century, said that in wartime, the short journeys that were permitted by the restrictions of time, movement, and petrol rationing, could, in their way, carry just as much significance as the grander tours that were undertaken in more favourable circumstances. This blog, too, is in its way a testimony to the satisfactions of small journeys, the joys of the passing glance, and the glory of the ordinary. Thanks to those of you who've stayed with me on these wanderings, and also to readers who have joined me occasionally, for the interest of the ride. I've enjoyed, and benefitted from, your comments and nuggets of further information about the places I've visited. In the process, I hope I’ve given a lot of little known buildings some time in the sun.

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Photograph: Door knocker, former Sun Inn, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

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*If you can call it that
§Not if the navel is my own, anyway
†I have a Twitter account, but cannot bring myself to do anything so avian as to Tweet.
‡ Pieces of architecture: I use this phrase in allusion and tribute to the great Nikolaus Pevsner, cataloguer and analyst of the buildings of England, who said, ‘A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture’. It’s because I talk so often about mere buildings that this blog has the title that it does, but readers will know that I often find the quality Pevsner attributed to architecture in ‘low-status’ structures such as public lavatories, sheds, and workshops.
¶ Not the most famous of art critics (too gentle and forgiving for many), but one whose work opened my eyes to the visual arts when I was young; I think his book on Bacon is still well worth reading, his Matisse Father and Son is fascinating, and Reading Russell, a selection of short pieces, gives an idea of how his writing enlivened the (London) Sunday Times and the New York Times for years.  

Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire

Five early pieces: 1

To celebrate the fifth birthday of the English Buildings blog, here’s a reprise of the very first post I did in July 2007, with a short postscript and an extra picture.

You’d have to go a long way to find anything like this, the Spa Buildings in the middle of the small Worcestershire town of Tenbury Wells, which became a spa when saline springs were discovered in 1839. The 1862 design, by James Cranston of Birmingham, isn’t much like any other building – it’s a mixture of false-half-timber and greenhouse, with a bit of Victorian brickwork thrown in, all making a bizarre cocktail that contemporaries called "Chinese Gothic".

The big clue is in the word "greenhouse". Cranston had been working on some glasshouses and got the idea of adapting greenhouse structure to a building for people. Out went the glass panes and in came steel roofing sheets and wall panels, to make one of the world’s first prefabricated buildings. The system was flexible enough to produce a pair of halls, a bath complex, and an octagonal tower to house the well with its pumps, which dispensed 20 gallons of mineral water per hour.

Roof detail, showing ornate edges of prefabricated panels

Like later prefabs, the Tenbury Spa Buildings were probably not intended to last that long. And they certainly never caught the admiration of the architectural powers-that-be. Nikolaus Pevsner, in the Worcestershire volume of his Buildings of England series, described them as "much like Gothicky or Chinesey fair stuff, i.e. without seriousness or taste". The people of Tenbury thought better of their unusual spa, though, and restored it at the end of the 20th century. With galvanized roof panels and a strengthened structure, the building is now better than ever.

Postscript 2012 I might have noted that James Lees-Milne, in his 1964 Shell Guide to Worcestershire, was more appreciative of these buildings than Pevsner, although he got the date wrong. He wrote: “The baths no longer function, but there are some engaging remains (c. 1911) in a rusty tin pagoda tower and adjacent structures of tin with multicoloured brick entrance, a sort of expensive prototype of the Nissen hut.” Also, soon after I wrote the original piece I got hold of Alan Brooks’s excellent 2007 revised edition of Pevsner’s Worcestershire.  In it, Brooks quotes the original “Chinesey” description, but gives a fuller and more generous account of the restored buildings, no longer rusty. He also notes that the spa was aimed at “the middling and working classes, [providing] every convenience at the lowest possible price”. Like Alan Brooks, I commend the building to you all, of whatever class – working, middling, and the rest.

Mountsorrel, Leicestershire

 
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A place in the sun

Long ago when I was a teenager, I occasionally accompanied a relative of mine on journeys to do with his business, taking the opportunity to discover bits of the country I’d not normally have known about in the process. One regular trip was to Loughborough, and the last leg was up the A6 from Leicester. We didn’t have much time for places like Mountsorrel, a small town on the A6 that I remember as being full of grime, noise, and fumes from the cars and lorries on the main road, which carved its way straight through the centre. ‘A decayed market town,’ Pevsner called it, and no wonder. And as for the church. Well, who would bother to pay attention to a building so pulled about, patched up with brick, apparently unloved, its walls of local granite graying over with dust? Added to which, it always seemed to be raining.

When I revisited Mountsorrel a couple of weeks ago I was amazed how different my impressions were. The main road now skirts the town, the place has been cleaned up, and, wonder of wonders, the sun was shining. The granite buildings were glowing with a pinkish hue and even the brick patching on St Peter’s church had a warmth to it that made me want to look, not turn away. The building is still a strange mixture – the gable, aspiring to be a classical pediment but not quite making it, sits oddly with the Gothic windows (in the Decorated style of the 14th century) – a state of affairs that is the result of successive remodellings (in 1794 and the 1880s) of an originally medieval building. But I like the way that its chequered history is visible in the morning light, the lines of brickwork embodying in a ghostly fashion the shapes of past windows and doorways, and I was pleased that when I passed by, the building had found its place in the sun.

Pevsner and Oxford: Part Two

This is the second of two guest posts by Susie Harries, author of the acclaimed new biography, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life. Having introduced Pevsner’s attitudes to Oxford in her first post, Susie now shows how his appreciation of Oxford developed in the 1940s, and how this appreciation was bound up with the idea of the ‘picturesque’, which became a key concept in planning as architects turned their thoughts to reconstruction after World War II.

Pevsner’s ideas on Oxford were set out long before the publication of the Buildings of England volume, most conspicuously in an article published in the Architectural Review in August 1949 entitled ‘Three Oxford Colleges’. The article appeared as the fourth in a series of ‘reassessments’ in which the Review attempted to persuade readers to look differently at familiar buildings. In Pevsner’s case, the aim was to look not at individual buildings but at the layout of colleges as a whole, and of the university as a whole. What would later delight him in St Catherine’s – a uniformity of mood and style, the sense of an engineered unity embracing every detail – was quite absent from the three colleges he had chosen, and yet there was no lack of plan. ‘It can safely be assumed that those who added new to old buildings, and new to old quad were fully aware, as a rule, of what they were doing, and delighted in the same surprises, contrasts and incongruities as we do.’

Corpus Christi College, Oxford, front quad

Each of the three colleges – Christ Church, Corpus Christi, St Edmund Hall – is a man-made landscape, wrote Pevsner, of a quintessentially English kind, deriving its harmoniousness from the English virtues of tolerance, humour and flexibility rather than from any superimposed order – displaying the instinctive manners by which Oxford, it seemed, set such store. There is little that is symmetrical about Christ Church: it was Wren’s enjoyment of the ‘free mixing of contrasts’ that prompted him to create Tom Tower. The ‘dramatic rough mass’ of the Library contrasts sharply with the smooth Palladian finish of Peckwater Quad. Again, at Corpus a ‘comfortable, businesslike’ quad leads into one that is compressed and intricate, classical leads into Tudor and the cosy into the forbidding. St Edmund Hall, ‘the epitome of collegiate picturesqueness’, is a jumble of different colours, textures and heights. ‘One’s curiosity never flags as one walks from one court to another, coming suddenly, for instance, from a dark passage into an open square,’ and, concluded Pevsner, ‘the same experience can be had in most of the other colleges, unless they are as exceptionally unlucky as Balliol’.

‘Three Oxford Colleges’ was one of the few finished products of some thinking that Pevsner was doing for a book in these immediate post-war years. At the instigation of the Architectural Review’s proprietor, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, he was exploring ideas on the English tradition in planning with a view to advocating the principles of informal picturesque planning as a guide in post-war reconstruction. The book never appeared, but in 2010 Pevsner’s draft was edited and filled out from his notes by Mathew Aitchison and published as Pevsner’s Townscape: Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

Oxford features prominently, and to support the book Aitchison and the Getty Institute have wonderfully recreated online the Oxford perambulation which Pevsner recommends to anyone wanting to get the full effect of a very English form of planning. (An interview with Mathew Aitchison elaborates.) Using the photographs by Hans Gernsheim which were taken to illustrate the original ‘Three Oxford Colleges’ piece, a slide show helps us to replicate ‘the spatial experience, an experience undergone in time, as one walks along and looks this way and that’, an experience which, in Pevsner’s words, ‘reveals some of the qualities that the 20th century, with its deeper understanding of the English landscape tradition, is beginning to appreciate as the result of something more than happy accidents.’

Pevsner in Oxford: Part One

This is the first of two guest posts by Susie Harries, author of the recently published Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, that I’m honoured to publish. Pevsner’s work is indispensable to students of English art, architecture, and design. His An Outline of European Architecture has introduced countless students and amateurs to the subject; books such as Pioneers of the Modern Movement and A History of Building Types still engage specialists; above all, his monumental survey of The Buildings of England (over 40 volumes, county by county) is the guide and one of the most important art-historical projects ever. And yet Pevsner was an outsider to England, a German who showed the English what to look for in their architecture and helped shaped the culture he described. Susie Harries’s fascinating biography explores this remarkable character and his work. It’s one of the best biographies I’ve read in the last few years.

In this post, Susie Harries looks at Pevsner’s reaction to Oxford.

Nikolaus Pevsner was never at home in Oxford as he was in Cambridge, a more austere and Protestant place, although he learned to come to terms with what, on his first encounter, he called Oxford’s ‘ghastly miasma of humanism’. As a congenital outsider, in his own mind at least, he always had a deep-seated desire to belong, and Oxford is notoriously a hard place to infiltrate. ‘Every sentence, every lecture, every book, every conversation here means something quite different from what it would mean at home,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘The words mean something different, the brain itself is wound differently.’

On his first visit to England in 1930, three years before he was obliged to leave Germany for good, Pevsner had been a guest of the 2nd Viscount Harcourt at Nuneham House, a Palladian mansion in grounds landscaped by Capability Brown with views over the water meadows to the towers and spires of Oxford. Its park was the setting for several scenes in Through the Looking Glass, and Pevsner –who was spending the rest of his English stay in low-grade B&Bs – found himself frequently as bemused as Alice by the customs and conversation of the natives. ‘One Oxford college has a motto – Manners Makyth Man’, he told his wife, implying that this was a rule of life in the locality. Not only was his own appearance at lunch at Nuneham ceremoniously announced by the butler, so was the arrival of every course, and dessert was interrupted by a liveried servant to enquire whether the hostess would care to send a wreath for Lord Birkenhead, who had passed away. ‘Just like the films,’ Pevsner told his wife, ‘and I’m in the midst of it. I have to be very careful not to make any faux pas.’

Forty-four years later, when his Oxfordshire was published in 1974, he was, it seems, still afraid of the faux pas. ‘To an Oxford man no doubt gaffes of nomenclature and gaffes in the little snobbery concerns which one disregards at one’s peril have been left in my text, apart from more serious mistakes.’ His social unease may perhaps have jaundiced his overview of the city in his introduction, where he is very bracing indeed about the image of the ‘dreaming spires’: ‘Nonsense in every respect. Surely, in spite of St Mary, All Saints, and the cathedral, and now Nuffield, Oxford is remembered less for them than for Tom Tower, the Camera, and Magdalen tower. It is the variety of the shapes which makes the skyline. And as for “dreaming”? Stupor say the enemies, inertia say even some of the friends, serious search for truth among the undergraduates, search for knowledge among the dons, less serious search for publicity – single out what you will, dreaming is not a figurative Oxford quality, by criteria either of the mind or the eye.’

Pevsner’s opprobrium was, of course, directed more against the people than the place. Oxfordshire does contain some of his most scathing epithets – ‘elephantine’ (Sir Thomas Jackson at the Examination Schools), ‘retardataire’ (Sir Edward Maufe with his Dolphin Quadrangle at St John’s), ‘totally unrousing’ (G.G. Scott in his additions to Magdalen) but equally it is full of loving descriptions of buildings – not least, his favourite of all contemporary university buildings, Arne Jacobsen’s St Catherine’s College. ‘Self-discipline is its message, expressed in terms of a geometry pervading the whole and its parts and felt wherever one moves or stops... It has a clarity of structure and at the same time a serenity such as no other new college building has.’

What appealed perhaps most to Pevsner about Oxford, however, was less the individual college buildings, ‘incomparably beautiful’ as they were, than their relationship to one another. Again and again he would take Oxford as a prime example of the Picturesque planning he so much admired – a place that had evolved organically, but not without design.


The university as it had developed over the centuries now possessed all the key qualities of the Picturesque – surprise, variety, intricacy, irregularity, with formal quadrangles set next to narrow, twisting lanes, Baroque college buildings next to workmen’s cottages and Victorian chapels. Set pieces like the Sheldonian Theatre and the Radcliffe Camera were not designed to dominate, as they might have done in a more rigid, classicising layout, but were placed as accents in an informal composition. The High (above) achieved its effect not as a single triumphal statement but as a series of small disclosures, making it ‘one of the world’s great streets. It has everything. It is on a slight curve so the vistas always change.’

Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire

Compton in the Hole

At last, from the hill that’s home to the windmill in the previous post, I got my glimpse of Compton Wynyates. This north front is not, I have to say, the most spectacular side of the house, but still gives a good impression of the character of the place – the mostly Tudor brick walls, the tall chimneys, the dormers in the roofs, the purely ornamental crenellations, the different levels. Above all, this cluster of brick wings and pitched roofs gives an impression of the way the house must have grown over the years with bits added here and there before a major revamp of the eastern part of the building – the part of the left of the picture is an addition of 1867 by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt in a style in harmony with rest of the house.

Looking at the house in its tree-lined valley one can understand what has usually made people enthusiastic about it. John Russell, in Shakespeare’s Country, noticed how the surrounding hills and trees rise up around so that ‘the house is seen as if in the bowl of an enormous spoon’. W H Hutton, in Highways and Byways in Shakespeare’s Country, called it ‘a wonderful picture of rose-tinted restfulness’. Pevsner, with his eye more focused on the ball, found in it the picturesque mode that so attracted him: ‘the perfect picture-book house of the Early Tudor decades, the most perfect in England of the specific picturesque, completely irregular mode’.

Writers are apt to get lyrical about this place, but Hutton reminds us that Camden, referring to its setting, called it ‘Compton in the Hole’ and records a local ‘rustic’ showing a visitor around, remarking, ‘Did ye ever see sich a hole?’ Some hole.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Have you got the scrolls?

Pevsner’s Dorset volume says that the old Greyhound Inn, in the centre of Blandford Forum, takes façade decoration to ‘Bavarian extremes’. Although there’s a hint of Saxon (or even Lutheran) hauteur about that comment, he doesn’t mean that the gloriously named John and William Bastard, architect-builders of Blandford who reconstructed the town after the fire of 1731, had been at the beer when they conceived this building, but that the decoration is less restrained than the norm in this town and more like the ornate baroque pastel and white facades of Central Europe.

English Georgian architecture can come over as rather plain, getting its effect not from decorative curlicues but from order, proportion, and restrained classicism. We think of Georgian building in terms of simple brick walls and rows of sash windows, relieved by the occasional pilaster, stretch of rustication, or fancy fanlight, and given form, in the best examples, by craftsmanship of the highest quality – meticulous brickwork, fine carpentry, and so on.

The facade of the Greyhound seems indeed to come from a different world. The decoration around the triangular pediment is from the top drawer, an encrustation of classical details. The Corinthian capitals below it, too, are exceptionally ornate and full of delicate fronds and curves. And then there’s that central window: the big plain keystone at the top and the protruding ‘ears’ at the upper corners are the kind of things seen on many a Georgian window. But the generous scrolls up the sides, the lavish moulding around the sides and top, and the fancy-shaped apron below the sill set this window apart. Even better is the small face in the middle of the apron. Is it a drunken satyr, bearing grapes and welcoming us to the inn? That’s the answer, then: it was wine that the builders were drinking that day.