Radstock, Somerset

Set in stone

The last of my trio of stone details from Radstock is this sign for the Bell Inn. I’ve posted quite a few inn signs in the past – a search of there blog will yield all kinds of three-dimensional animal ones, some lovely wrought iron, a couple of unique pub names, and one that overhangs an entire street. This is more modest, but I like the way it is integrated into the building, asserting its intention to remain a permanent fixture. And the inn is only part of the story. When it was rebuilt in the late-19th century, it adjoined a bewery, one of several hereabouts owned by the Coombs family and part of the Coombs’ Clandown and Radstock Breweries and Hotels company. Their Clandown bitter was well known in the West Country in its heyday, but now only part of the brewery building survives – but this sign, with the initials G.C. for George Coombs on the bell, still stands proud.

Just before I sat down to write this post a fortunate coincidence occurred. I was looking for another reason entirely at Ian Nairn: Words in Place, Gillian Darley and David McKie’s excellent book on Ian Nairn, one of the heroes of this blog. As I glanced at a page, the word ‘Radstock’ jumped out and I was reminded that this Somerset town was one of a number listed by Nairn in The Observer in January 1965 in a list of ‘threatened towns’. When I’m not snowed under with other work, I’ll have to look up the back issue of The Observer and find out what Nairn said about it – no doubt he appreciated the chunky industrial buildings and evidence of the mine working, and no doubt he liked the way the buildings had got grimy, the very grime giving character to the place and acting as a record of years of history and work. He could enthuse such qualities, in a way few could back in 1965.

At least one of Nairn’s readers, Graham Fisher (an admirer of Nairn), demurred. Nairn wrote back to him, thanking him for his comments and adding, ‘If you don’t see what I saw in Radstock, that’s marvellous: you’ve gone there and looked and assessed.’ That, above all was what Nairn asked of his readers: go, look, respond. He went his own way, and encouraged others to do so too. Nairn’s way inevitably was via a pub, and I like to imagine him drinking in here – before the drink got to him and ruined his health. His responses to places were often provocative, but always honest – they were what he felt, and made all his readers look, and respond, anew.

Radstock, Somerset

More scrolls

I want to share one more stone detail from the Somerset town of Radstock, to add to the one in my previous post. It’s the name stone for the Victoria Hall, obviously, and the building bears the date 1897. That was the 60th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and the hall’s name apparently marks this milestone in the life of a queen who held, until the current queen surpassed it, the record for the country’s longest reigning monarch.

The building’s name plaque shown in my picture is one of a couple of carved plaques surrounded by small scrolls that adorn the front of the hall. The other gives the date and notes the commemoration of the queen. From all this, one would be forgiven for thinking this a hall of 1897. But beware of dates on buildings. They’re not all quite what they seem. This is in fact a building of 1866, which was enlarged in 1897. It was originally a Working Men’s Institute – a place, then, where men could attend informative and enlightening lectures, and where they would find other beneficial facilities, probably including a reading room.* However, in 1902 the hall’s function changed, when it became council offices, and it has now found another life as a community arts centre.

The building looks well made and solid, with some pleasant touches – the round-headed windows and the ornate gables, for example. The central gable boasts a pair of large scrolls, and scrolls, too, make their appearance as a decorative motif in the frame of the name plaque. The lettering is also decorative. It has not, it is true, broken out into the outré and curvaceous style of Art Nouveau lettering,† but it has its moments – especially the capital V, with its curving left-hand stroke, splaying to a forked termination at the top and its right-hand stroke, straighter but ending with a long flourish. That flourish is also interrupted by a tiny indentation about one third of the way along the top,§ so that the whole stroke looks like a raised leg with the foot enclosed in a tight-fitting shoe. Not so Victorian, then, after all.

- - - - -

* For more on institutes, see a post I did long ago on a building in Banbury.

† There is an example of full-blown Art Nouveau lettering here.

§ My apologies if the small picture makes this detail difficult to see. I promise you, it’s there, and not a product of my imagination!

Radstock, Somerset

Ups and downs

When I looked up Radstock in the Pevsner volume Somerset: North and Bristol, I had to smile. It seems that my perception of the town has changed, and that this alteration reflects exactly a change in the way the great architectural guides have seen the place. When I first saw Radstock, passing through with my father some time in the late 1960s, it seemed dark, dusty, and, frankly, ugly. It was a small mining town and, although there was some interest to be gleaned from passing trains and trucks and clanking machinery, it didn’t seem as if the place need detain us. The other day, the sun was shining, the buildings in the town centre were clean, and the architecture revealed interesting details; the pit had long gone, of course.

Pevsner, writing in 1958, found Radstock ‘really desperately ugly...without dignity in any building’. But his successor Andrew Foyle, in the revised volume of 2011, commented ‘...yet Radstock is among the best survivors in England of a small Victorian colliery town’. Tastes have changed, of course, and architectural historians are now open to a wider variety of subjects than they were in 1958 – thanks, it has to be said, in part to the work of Pevsner himself.

What struck me the other day was an array of buildings in clean, pale stone (white lias, I believe), festooned with interesting details. Most of these structures were part of a redevelopment by the Waldegrave family in the late-19th century, and they range from public buildings like the Victoria Hall to shops and a hotel. The peculiar capital in my photograph is a detail from one of the buildings. It must be an adaptation of a Classical order, perhaps the composite, but instead of a pair of downward-curving spiral volutes, there is a kind of scroll, in which one spiral goes upwards, the other down. For further adornment, there’s a rosette in the middle of each scroll. In spite of the worn stone, it’s still a charming detail, one small confirmation that there was plenty of room for inventiveness in this small, long unregarded, Somerset town.