A few old favourites

It is well over a year since I last did a “round-up” of favourite posts from this blog, with the aim of interesting readers who are new here and would like to explore further. A comment on my previous post, about military airfields and the hangars at Hullavington in Wiltshire, reminded me of a particular aspect of my posts that has pleased some readers: the way in which they are as much about atmosphere and sense of place as they are about architecture.

How buildings define or enhance or affect the character of a place is a huge subject, and one that can only be touched on in a short blog post. But it’s one I’m often aware of as I encounter buildings, and there are some posts where I think I’ve managed to evoke the relationship between place and building in ways that seem to strike chords with readers. These are very personal posts that chronicle my reactions and memories of a some very diverse buildings and places. They range from thoughts about how nature and architecture interact on the site of a ruined castle to a brief account of the relationship between buildings, lives, and businesses in one tiny, and formerly seedy, London block. Links to these and a few other posts follow.

Restored by silence and fading light: visiting an isolated Saxon church at Farmcote on top of the Cotswolds.

The greening of a ruin: picking a way through the stones and vegetation at Wigmore Castle.

It’s brains you want: ghost signs and why they matter. Looking at a crumbling piece of the sign-writer’s art in Gloucester.

Strangers on the shore: evocative hulks shoring up the bank of the River Severn at Purton.

Coming home: thoughts on buildings as landmarks, in particular a ruined barn at Burford.

Soho revived: uncovering pythons, lap-dancers, and secret passages in Moor Street, London.

An image of the country village: constructing perfection at Great Tew, and a brief addendum on the one-time decay of the village, from which it has recovered.

Purton, Gloucestershire

Strangers on the shore

The British have been building boats for millennia, and sailing them, and wearing them out. When boats are no longer sea-worthy, they end up on the shore, getting recycled in interesting ways. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes lived in a hut made of an upturned boat, like the fishermen’s huts of Lindisfarne. Masts become maypoles. Figureheads are made into garden ornaments. Countless wood-framed houses are said to be built of ‘old ship’s timbers’. As the salmon-fishers at the end of Andrew Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House knew (who ‘like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes’) there are many things you can do with a boat as well as sailing it.

Near Purton, on the eastern bank of the River Severn (there’s a Purton over on the western bank, too, just to confuse us all) old boats have been used in a remarkable way. The Severn, with its great tidal range, challenging currents, and acres of mudflats, is a huge changing ecosystem. It deposits silt here and washes away banks there. In some places the banks need reinforcing, and here, it is old boats that have been used over the years to bring some stability to the shore.

At Purton, more than just the river bank was at stake. The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, built to cut out some of the more difficult and winding stretches of the river on the way up to Gloucester, runs here parallel to the Severn and very close to its bank. In 1909, when the canal bank was threatened, a small fleet of old lighters was beached at Purton to reinforce the land and protect the inland waterway. As the years went by, more and more redundant vessels were beached here. Purton is now Britain’s largest ships’ graveyard.

Full or half-full of silt and tussocky vegetation, some 81 vessels reinforce the bank here. Timbers stick up from the ground; sometimes entire hulls remain, sometimes odd posts and tangles of ironwork. There are concrete boats too, and chunks of metal superstructure, and bits of old gearing.


They make a poignant collection ranging from Island Maid, built in Plymouth in 1863 and beached some time before May 1945, to the unpoetically named FCB 75, built in concrete by the Wates Building Group at Barrow in Furness in 1941 and beached in 1965. They were probably all as tough and utilitarian as FCB, but they had a job to do and they did it. And now they have another job, they do that too.

Purton, Wiltshire

ARCHITEXTS: THINGS WRITTEN ON BUILDINGS (7)
Hexagonal or octagonal buildings often started life as the dwellings of the people responsible for collecting tolls on the turnpike roads of the 18th and 19th centuries – that’s why they’re often referred to as pike houses. They are this peculiar shape for a reason – having sides facing different ways meant that the toll-collector could easily see people coming along the road from more than one direction, and could be ready to leap out and collect the appropriate dues before a traveller slipped swiftly by in his gig or chaise.

By the year 1800 there were around 23,000 miles of turnpike road in England controlled by more than 1,000 separate local turnpike trusts. There are still lots of their former pike houses dotted all over the country. But not many of these survivors bear their old toll boards, listing the fees charged to different kinds of traffic, wheeled and/or hoofed. Tenpence for a score of oxen, fourpence halfpenny for a coach, and so on. This signboard is on a polygonal pike house in Purton, Wiltshire, that was built in the early-19th century by the Swindon, Calne and Cricklade Turnpike Trust. Its occupant would have collected tolls from traffic travelling between Cricklade and Wootton Bassett. It’s good to know that both house and signboard are still there, even though a man doesn’t pop out and demand fourpence halfpenny as one passes.