Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire

 

In the wind

I’ve featured a number of windmills on this blog, because they fascinate me as ingenious structures in which a distinctive architectural form is well adapted to do the job it needs to do – housing heavy machinery such as large rotating millstones and supporting a set of sails that harness the power of the wind. There needs to be a means of pointing the sails in the right direction, so that they catch the breeze, and the whole structure has to be at once robust, to withstand the considerable forces exerted by the mechanism, and lightweight, as at least part of it has to rotate. From conical brick tower mills, with their rotating caps, to wooden post mills, the whole of which can be turned by hand, windmills do this job elegantly. There’s another type, a kind of wooden tower mill, that’s polygonal with a turning cap that often looks rather like an upturned boat. This sort is known as a smock mill* and one of the best preserved examples is the octagonal one at Lacy Green in Buckinghamshire.

Lacy Green Windmill is generally accepted to be the oldest surviving smock mill in England.† The machinery inside dates to somewhere around the middle of the 17th century. There is an old story that the mill was moved from Chesham to Lacey Green in 1821. It’s certainly possible to move a windmill in this way§ but researchers who have trawled the archives and archaeologists who have examined the alleged original site doubt that this was mill was moved. It seems more likely that the mill had a major overhaul in 1821, when perhaps much of the structure was rebuilt and the machinery upgraded. There are certainly records of a mill at Lacey Green before 1821.

The windmill ran for almost a century after this rebuild, finally ceasing work in 1915, after which it was used as holiday accommodation for a while. However, by 1930 it was in a poor state due to water penetration. There was a restoration, but by 1969 the mill was once again close to collapse. A team led by the engineer Christopher Wallis set about removing the cap and the single surviving sail, straightening the twisted structure, and restoring the frame, sides, and floors. This process was complex and took years – an account of it is on the mill’s website. The restoration seems to have been effective, and the mill currently appears to be well looked after – our oldest smock mill looks to be good for many more years.

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* Because the overall shape is said to resemble a peasant wearing a smock.

† It’s not entirely simple to come to a judgement about the age of a wooden building, since many parts of it can be replaced, like the notorious ancient broom that had had many new handles and several new brush heads. Here the machinery seems to be the oldest part.

§ See my blog post about the wonderful post mill at Thorpeness, Suffolk.

Somerton, Oxfordshire

 

A moment of confusion

Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare as hens’ teeth, I said to myself. And the figures are characterful and ooze charm – Jesus sits with the head of the apostle he loved best (normally said to be St John the Evangelist) on his lap; one diner seems to be refusing a drink; another pours from a jug; yet another gesticulates, as if in conversation. The faces, some with curly hair and beards, are delightful. The story is that the reredos was removed from its place behind the altar at the time of the Reformation and hidden away. It was, say different accounts, reinstalled during a restoration of the church in 1822, or after another in the later-19th century.

And in the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt. If something seems too good to be true, as they say, it probably is. Setting aside such normally authoritative sources as Pevsner and the listing description of the church, I do another Google search. This time I find a short piece on a website called The Antiquary. Here, the historian Dr Allan Barton gives a different story. That the figures, damaged beyond repair during the Reformation, was at some point restored. The restorer remade the faces and other details (handles, vessels, etc) using plaster of Paris attached to the surviving 14th-century stone (the arches, table, the bodies of the figures) by means of wooden dowels.

Barton does not give a source for his account, although it would no doubt be possible to tell the difference between stone and plaster on very close examination. But this version of events seems plausible. It would account for the style of the facial sculpture, which is rather more like Romanesque sculpture than 14th-century Gothic. And it would account for the good condition of the faces, which are surprisingly crisp for medieval survivors that had been removed, hidden and reinstalled.

There are problems with this kind of restoration. It is, of course, going against longstanding principles of historic buildings conservation to replace old work with new, and if damaged medieval carving was destroyed in the process, this would be cause for great regret. However, if the iconoclasts of the Reformation had hacked off whole faces and limbs, one’s attitude to a later sculptor adding new work would be more accepting. Even so, disguising the difference between old and new is also a problem. It should be clear what has been done and where the original ends and the repair begins. 

The usual 21st-century attitude to such items is to condemn them as fakes or forgeries. But we are where we are. Simple pleasure at what we are left with now is also a legitimate response.† It would be fascinating to know more, however. How does Barton know what material the additions are made of, and how they’re attached? Who modelled these faces and when, and was their intention to pull the wool over our eyes or just to renew something in their own way? What did the reredos look like in its damaged state? Oh to know more.

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* The Somerton in Oxfordshire; there are others.

† Albeit with questions about what if any medieval work was sacrificed during the restoration. 

Ampney St Mary, Gloucestershire

Beaten tracks

Anyone who happens to glance to their right at a particular point when driving along the A417 from Cirencester to Fairford is rewarded with a glimpse of St Mary’s church, Ampney St Mary. This tiny medieval building is isolated in a field – you reach it via a path, which curves around the building from the north to the south side, where you cross a small bridge across a stream to access the churchyard. The church is actually about half a mile from the village – it’s slightly closer to Ampney St Peter, which has a church of its own. There’s always something striking about a church in the middle of a field. Why is it there, we ask, and where is the community it serves? The answer in this case seems to be that an outbreak of plague, presumably the Black Death of 1348, led to the abandonment of the church by the 15th century and the wholesale movement of the village to a hamlet called Ashbrook, which is where it remains to this day.* The building had to wait until 1907 for a restoration  (with further work in 1913–14), by which time church repairs were often a good deal more sensitive than those of the high Victorian period. Ampney St Mary was fortunate in that the architect doing the work was F. C. Eden, a man with Arts and Crafts interests indicated by his membership of the Art Workers’ Guild.§ Unlike many of his forbears, Eden did not try to “improve” the architecture of churches he restored, proceeding with a light and tasteful touch. A number of interesting medieval features therefore survive at Ampney St Mary.

In this post, I’l look at one feature in particular: the medieval wall paintings. As is so often the case with such paintings, they are fragmentary and hard for today’s visitors to interpret, but there is one survivor with more detail than most. This is an image of a man apparently sighting along something looking rather like a pole; a wheel floats above. The “pole” is probably the spoke of a wheel, making this character a wheelwright. The context seems to be an image painted as a warning to Sabbath-breakers. The ,medieval Catholic Church was insistent that Sunday was kept as a holy day. You were expected to go to church and people were generally forbidden to work. There are lots of documentary records of churchmen encouraging priests to insist that their parishioners attend church on the Sabbath. In 1213–14, Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton ordered the parish priests in his archdiocese to tell their parishioners to attend church on Sundays and not to go to markets. Other orders went out to ban people from working on Sundays. There were exceptions – farm workers looking after their animals, merchants travelling with their goods, pilgrims and others were exempt from the ban.† The Ampney image of the wheelwright at work seems to be part of a “Warning to Sabbath-breakers” painting.

A friend of mine noticed the very individual style of drawing in this painting, and asked whether medieval artists copied one another, or learned from books or manuscripts that were passed around. I replied that they would start as apprentices, as stonemasons did, and that they would first of all learn from their master (who might well be their father or another family member). They’d see his work, and the work of others, at churches on which they worked. Some might well have collected reference drawings too, and if they got the chance to visit a monastery, or even to work on a monastic church, they would take any opportunity they could to examine the illustrations in the monks’ books. For all this, no combination of heart, hand and head is the same, so a painter would evolve his own style of drawing, as this one did, as he provided a bit of social comment and moral instruction for the people of a remote Cotswold village perhaps 600 years ago.

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* Plague is a common explanation for deserted or transplanted villages, but it is by no means the only reason for tghese phenomena; a move to be nearer to good agricultural land, destruction of buildings by storms, and land enclosure are among other reasons why villages were deserted or moved.

§ Eden also designed church furniture and fittings, and stained glass hence his connection to the guild. He became a Fellow of the RIBA in 1922.

† For more examples of clerics complaining about sabbath-breaking, see Nicholas Orme’s excellent book, Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021).

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

 

Bardsploitation?

On my many visits to Stratford-upon-Avon, I’d not paid much attention to the sign of the Hathaway Tea Rooms. It’s in a street I don’t often walk along, and if we want tea or coffee in the town, the Resident Wise Woman and I have places where we regularly go. If I noticed it at all, I probably silently condemned it as another arbitrary connection with the Shakespearian reputation (for those who don’t know, Anne Hathaway was the woman who became Mrs Shakespeare). ‘Bardsploitation,’ I might have muttered. ‘What’s Hathaway to them or them to Hathaway?’

Well, the town is full of Bardic references on buildings, so why should Anne Hathaway not get a look-in too? The name gives a good excuse for a pleasant pictorial sign of her cottage, a famous tourist destination in the nearby village of Shottery, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and open to the public. The word ‘LUNCHEONS’ on the beam from which the sign hangs is very much a period detail – it’s a word redolent of the first half of the 20th century.

As is the business itself, and its long life (‘Established 1931’) is something to crow about. It may also be relevant architecturally. Apparently this impressive late-medieval timber-framed building was restored at around that time or a little before, along with its next-door neighbour. Someone (maybe the Georgians) had plastered over the wooden framing and the 20th-century restoration removed this covering, exposing the many timber beams and uprights, adding another bit of ‘black-and-white’ architecture to the town’s centre.

Of course these days we know that blackened beams like these are not a medieval look: structural oak was usually left untreated, so that it achieved a silvery-grey colour. So this ‘black-and-white’ architecture is itself redolent of another time – the Victorian period and later. Any building of this age is likely to bear the marks of several different periods, and such a story of evolution is as interesting as the fact that its origins are ancient. Food for thought over your tea and buns.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Wenhaston, Suffolk

 

Thank you, rain

It’s pouring with rain today and I’m sitting indoors thinking of another rainy day long ago. In 1892, workers reconstructing the east end of Wenhaston church in Suffolk removed a whitewashed wooden panel that blocked the upper part of the chancel arch. They took the panel apart into its constituent oak planks and moved them into the churchyard ready for recycling or a bonfire. That night it rained and the whitewash on the planks began to dissolve. By the morning, parts of several painted figures were revealed.¶ 

The boards were quickly moved indoors for safety and expert restorers cleaned away the remainder of the whitewash to reveal most of a late-medieval Doom painting – the image of the Last Judgement, when the dead rise up from their graves and are sent either to heaven or to hell. This was a poplar subject in church art in the Middle Ages, and numerous Doom paintings survive, in whole or in part, usually on the wall above and around the chancel arch.* Very few panel paintings designed to fill the upper part of the arch now exist, and the one discovered with the help of restoration, good fortune and the weather at Wenhaston is the most clear and complete of these. What’s more, the rebuilt chancel arch was no longer the correct size for the painting, so it has since been displayed elsewhere in the building. It’s now in the north aisle and this position makes it one of the most visible of all medieval Doom paintings.

At the top of the painting Christ, sitting on a rainbow, presides. Facing him are two kneeling figures, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, the two most prominent saints who were said to intercede with God on behalf of human souls. To the right and slightly lower down are two souls of the dead rising from their graves as the Last Trumpet sounds.

The lower level of the Wenhaston Doom contains four main groups of figures, separated by blank spaces in front of which statues of the Virgin Mary, Christ crucified, and John the Evangelist once stood. The left-hand group (the least well preserved) shows figures in front of the heavenly mansions. Next comes St Peter, key in hand, with a group of souls who bore high rank on earth – their headgear reveals them to be a king, bishop, cardinal and queen. Next comes St Michael weighing souls, his work disrupted by a large devil. Finally, on the far right, devils push the souls of the damned into the monstrous mouth of hell. Beneath the imagery run verses from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, beginning, ‘Let every soul submit to the authority of the higher powers for there is no power but of God’.† 

The low position of the painting on the aisle wall enables visitors to see details that would have been hard to make out when it was in its original elevated position – the faces of the devils with their bent noses and boggle-eyes, their chains and flesh-hooks, the teeth of hell’s mouth, the care with which St Peter’s robe and the hats of the souls meeting him are painted, the shroud of the rising figure on the far right, and so on. It’s astonishing to be able to see all this close-to. Even though the painting fails to show terror on the faces of the damned, as we’d perhaps expect, the power of the image is still palpable. For once, back in 1892, the rain was something to be pleased about. 

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¶ Please click on the photograph to enlarge it.

* I have previous blogged about such a painting in Salisbury.

† These words seem to have been painted over an earlier, now illegible, inscription.

Droitwich, Worcestershire

 

Transformations

The walk around Droitwich that inspired this and the previous post was only my second visit to this town, the previous one being many years ago. As a result, the building above took me completely by surprise: I didn’t remember it at all, yet surely if I’d seen it I would have recognised it. The reason is that until recently its facade was hidden behind a wall of rendered brickwork: there was little hint that there was a timber-framed structure behind. Recently, this timber-framed building, actually the wing of a much larger house, has been conserved, and the later brickwork removed.

What was left behind the brickwork was not much at ground-floor level: three stout timber posts, which supported a largely complete wooden structure above. The restoration involved building new woodwork to go between the posts and repairing the upper storeys. This work is now largely complete, producing an attractive wood-framed frontage, wholly appropriate to the structure of c. 1420 of which it is part. The transformation is remarkable, a tribute both to the original builders and to the 21st-century architects, craftspeople, campaigners, and funders who made it possible: hats off to all.

The building now visible is the solar wing of the house: that’s to say the wing containing the private living apartments of the original owner. Adjacent one would expect to find a more ‘public’ or formal room, a great hall. What is left of the hall is in the building to the right. It is said to be even older that the wing in my photograph, but is disguised by a later facade, just as the now restored wing was until recently. This building would originally have contained a large, full-height hall, with no first floor, although, as is clear from the frontage today, it now has an inserted upper floor. I don’t know whether there’s enough of the ancient structure to warrant a refurbishment like that given to its neighbour. Such an ancient hall would be more remarkable still.

Hereford

Interesting old rubble

Back in November last year, the Resident Wise Woman and I made a trip to Hereford, with the aim of revisiting the cathedral (see my post Pigs in Blankets from back then) and doing a little early Christmas shopping. One of the joys of exploring once more a building of the size and age of a medieval cathedral is that there’s always some detail to find that one hasn’t spotted before, or that had escaped one’s memory – the joy of rediscovery is almost as great as the wonder of a totally new find.

I can’t remember seeing this pile of architectural fragments before. They’re kept in a passage off the cloisters, and are testimony to the sort of change and upheaval that is very much of the essence of large medieval buildings. All the great English medieval cathedrals, with the partial exception of Salisbury, are the fruit of centuries of extension, rebuilding, and design alteration – much of which took place before the Reformation brought its own cataclysmic transformations. Usually this history of change is perfectly clear from the fabric of the building – changes of architectural style from one part to the next, joins in the walls that don’t quite match, differences in the design of windows and vaults, and so on and on. Occasionally though, there’s another kind of evidence, in the form of preserved fragments like these.

All too often pieces of stone that came from a demolished or altered part of the building were reused or simply discarded as so much old rubble. Here some have been kept as a miniature museum of architectural oddments. A lot of the Hereford fragments are carved capitals from the Norman or Romanesque period. Whoever put them here clearly admired the artistry of their carving, even if they no longer felt they were worth actually keeping in situ. Among them are quite simple scalloped capitals, quite a bit of vigorous interlace design, and the occasional monster. But there are also other gems of medieval carving – a bird, a small capital from a shaft with some stylized Gothic carving, a foliate head with tongue sticking out flanked by leaves, a beast with exaggeratedly spiralling horns.

Who knows who put these carvings here, or when? Hereford cathedral suffered many vicissitudes between the 17th and 19th centuries. It was damaged during the English Civil Wars, repaired after a tower collapse in the 18th century, and comprehensively and somewhat drastically restored in the 19th century by Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, his son (also Nockalls), and George Gilbert Scott. Major alterations to the west front were done in the early 1900s by John Oldrid Scott, George Gilbert Scott’s son. Any of these could have been responsible – part of the work of ‘restoration’ was ‘correcting’ what was seen as uncouth non-Gothic medieval work with fabric in a style of Gothic that the Victorians thought better. We can be thankful for the small mercy of these preserved blocks of stone.

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Long ago I did a post about another collection of medieval fragments, here.

Little Comberton, Worcestershire

Restoration

Reading the entry in the (excellent) Pevsner volume on Worcestershire did not make me especially keen to visit the church at Little Comberton, a village I’ve passed through several times. But the other day we paused in the village anyway, and although the church was locked, found several things of interest. This is a buidling that was heavily restored in the Victorian period by an architect called William White.* White was not in the front rank of Victorian church architects, but was prolific: some 250 church projects are attributed to him, and he also designed many parsonages and schools. Like other more famous Victorians (Butterfield and Teulon, for example) he was interested in the architectural use of colour, and this is reflected here in the bands of dark red stone used around windows, up buttresses, and in quoins.

My photograph shows a tiny window in the Norman style, a partial replacement by White of an original Norman window. Even this small opening shows the effect of contrast produced by the different coloured masonry, laid out symmetrically. But at the top, symmetry is broken and White preserved the original Norman stone that forms the rounded head of the window, complete with the band of cable ornament that runs around it. If the result is more Victorian than medieval, it could be seen as an effective compromise, which preserves the most ‘artistic’ part of the old window, while renewing the remainder in a way that fits in with the style of the other windows in the restored church.

It’s also revealing about 19th-century attitudes to restoration. Literally, ‘to restore’ means to put something back, to return the building to the state it was in when it was new, or at some other ‘ideal’ time in its past. In practice, the Victorians often used restoration as a way of ‘improving’ churches, of making them more ‘correctly’ Gothic or ‘properly’ Romanesque than the often hybrid or mongrel or unevenly proportioned buildings that the Middle Ages in practice produced. Victorian architects were also of course at pains to make ancient buildings suitable for 19th-century worship, which would also mean architectural and decorative changes. Here, this fragment of 12th century carved ornament shows that White did not want to sweep away everything, that he was happy to respect the art and craft of his ancient predecessors while also introducing a different visual approach, which was very much his own.

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* William, White (1825–1990) was great nephew of the naturalist Gilbert White.

London, on the overground, southbound

Scene with cranes

Back in October 2008 I wrote a post about Battersea Power Station, then in sore need of care, which I spotted as I passed it on a train. I began my post with these words:

It would take a Piranesi to do justice to the shell of London’s Battersea Power Station, vast, roofless, and decaying by the side of Chelsea Bridge. I was reminded of it recently as I crossed the bridge in a train from Victoria on my way to a meeting, and I photographed it hastily through the dirty window of the carriage. Hence this picture, as far a cry from Piranesi as possible.

After lamenting the building’s condition, I described it and its history very briefly, dwelling on the huge size of its brick structure, the role of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in designing its Art Deco details, its influence on later power stations, and the various schemes that had been hatched to restore it.* The other day I passed it again on the overground and aimed the camera of my mobile through the window. This time my photograph was a little brighter, even though the weather that day was far from sunny and I had just missed being drenched in a downpour.† As I looked at the building with the various bright new structures appearing around it, all surrounded by a forest of cranes, I wondered if its prospects were similarly bright.

What I could make out as the train accelerated towards Clapham Junction was the power station’s four fluted chimneys, made of pre-cast concrete blocks, and one stretch of brick wall, recessed in a pattern of verticals. Everything else is hidden by scaffolding and other buildings, completed or under construction. I was glimpsing a work in progress then, which will see the power station as the heart of new ‘mixed-use neighbourhood’ incorporating shops, offices, and apartments, a mega-scheme that is clearly proceeding apace. The power station itself is being redeveloped by architects WilkinsonEyre (no relation) to provide some of the most prestigious apartments in the complex. Many of the essential elements of the building will be preserved, others will go, but the new work will, we are told, “pay homage to its history”. A lot will be different – there’ll be a bit poking out at the top, for a start§ – but the corner towers and chimneys will remain, at least, and buyers are promised interiors that “resonate with [the original building’s] irrepressible character”.

Well, I hope the character won’t be repressed. We’ll see. But looking at the plans and the buildings that are already up, it seems unlikely that I’ll be seeing much of it from the train, though I might from a river boat. In the meantime I’m crossing my fingers that the noble structure is not totally subsumed by new build, and that the resulting flats are bought by people who actually live in them.

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* There had been a clutch of such schemes, involving everything from flats to a theme park.

† At least some of the brightness is due to the better quality of smartphone cameras these days.

§ There is so often a bit poking out at the top. Sometimes, aesthetically, it is a disaster.

Bridgwater, Somerset

An Englishman’s home…

A few weeks ago I was in Bridgwater and wondered if Castle House, long hidden under scaffolding and protective sheeting, was at last visible again. I decided to have a look, but I was a few days too early. I’ll explain…

I first came across Castle House in 2004, when I was writing the book for the second series of BBC2’s programme Restoration. I learned that the house was built in 1851 and is a very rare early example of concrete construction. It was conceived and built by John Board, a cement manufacturer, and was designed as a showpiece for the material – in particular a way of showing that concrete was as good as conventional masonry at producing the kind of ornamental architecture that the Victorians loved. So the concrete was designed to look like stonework, and it was covered with ornamental flourishes – bands of interlocking circles, Tudoresque dripstones over the windows, scrolls over doorways. The building was designed as a family house, but it  also contained rooms for Broad’s offices: no doubt he was keen to show clients the potential of the material he manufactured and championed.

By 2004 the building was fire-damaged, derelict, decaying, and propped up with scaffolding. It had been empty for years and Historic England once called it ‘the most endangered historic building in the South West’. Its importance was championed by SAVE Britain’s Heritage,* and slowly, over many years, the plans and funds for its restoration came together. When the action got going, the painstaking work went on behind a swathe of scaffolding poles and sheeting.† And now the work on the walls and roof has been completed and the covering has been removed. The interiors are still to be completed, but the building is sound and watertight, and can at least be seen from the outside. I’ll have to return to Bridgwater and have a look for myself in the New Year.

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* The photograph at the top of this post comes courtesy of SAVE Britain’s Heritage.

† The architects for the restoration are Ferguson Mann Architects, who have been involved with the project since 2009.

Hastings, East Sussex

Phoenix

I was delighted to learn last night* that the Royal Institute of British Architects has awarded its annual Stirling Prize for Britain’s best new bulding to Hastings Pier. Going back to 1872, the pier was a popular entertainment venue, but closed in 2008 after storm damage. In 2010 there was a fire, which nearly finished the pier off for good.† But the people of Hastings and its council rose to the considerable challenge of restoring and rebuilding the structure, raising money locally, enlisting the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and finding 3,000 shareholders to buy a stake in the project at £100 a share.

A RIBA design competition was won by dRMM Architects, who have masterminded the restoration and creative reimagining of the pier. The 19th-century structural ironwork, hidden below deck, has been painstakingly restored and strengthened. The surviving Victorian pavilion, one of two buildings on the pier, has been transformed into an open plan, glazed café-bar.

The vast pier deck has been set aside as an uninterrupted flexible expanse for large-scale concerts, markets and public gatherings. The new timber-clad visitor centre building in the centre of the pier has a viewing deck on its roof providing a dramatic space for visitors to experience epic views along the coast and across the English Channel. The architects have used timber throughout the project, much of it reclaimed from the original pier. The reclaimed timber has also been used to create the pier’s striking new furniture, manufactured locally as part of a local employment initiative. It is a cause for celebration Hastings once more has the pier it deserves and that the project’s quality has been recognised by RIBA.

Hastings Pier: new building with reclaimed timber cladding

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* I share this information in part for British readers who may have been distracted from it last night by Hallowe’en or by television (apparently there was the final of some sort of cake-baking programme on).
† I posted about the fire damage here.
Photographs James Robertshaw (top) and Franceso Montaguti (bottom)

Shepton Mallet, Somerset

Deal-maker

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed my liking for market buildings of all kinds, from medieval mutli-arched halls to the glass-roofed markets of the 19th century. I also like market crosses – the focal points of market activity that still stand in many towns, many of them medieval and elaborately carved.

Market crosses, like this one at Shepton Mallet, are partly shelters for stall holders, partly three-dimensional signs to indicate the site of the market, and partly religious buildings that reminded medieval traders and shoppers that their business took place under the eye of God – and probably that deals agreed under the cross had an oath-like and binding force.

Shepton’s handsome stone cross dates from the year 1500, although it has been much altered and the precise dates of its various parts aren’t entirely clear. The central shaft looks largely original (though it may have been restored in the Victorian period). The surrounding hexagonal structure with its shallow elliptical arches has a 17th-century appearance, so may replace an earlier set of arches, it being unlikely, though possible, that the shaft originally stood without the surrounding structure propping it up. Above the arches are six very Gothic-looking pinnacles that seem out of keeping with the Jacobean arches but very much in keeping with the central shaft: perhaps they date from the 19th-century restoration, when the outer structure was Gothicized, to make it more like the original cross. There is a lot more detail about the history of this building on the local Shepton Mallet website.*

Whatever the exact story, the market cross still forms a focus in the town square.† Shepton is, I think, no longer quite the bustling place it was – although I was last there on a quiet Sunday and it may well be busier during the rest of the week. But the town has obviously looked after this beautiful structure for over 500 years, and I hope it attracts more people to the town’s shops. I hope to be back soon on a weekday, when they’re open.

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* For example, the website gives evidence for work on the cross in 1841, with various accounts including one that says only the upper part of the cross was rebuilt at this time – though we are not told exactly what ‘rebuilt’ means in this context. However, this online account is itself a very shortened version of a much longer study. See the website for more details.

† One more thing hat adds to the historical interest of the market cross is an old iron road sign, attached to one corner, that shows distances to various towns and cities. I did a post about this sign some time ago, here.

Malmesbury, Wiltshire

Now and then

The entrance to Malmesbury Abbey contains some of the most celebrated Romanesque sculpture in England but, in this blog’s spirit of searching out the unregarded, I’m featuring today not the great carvings in the porch, but one of the bosses from the ceiling in the church itself. I’m not claiming greatness for this carving, just suggesting that bosses can give pleasure if we take the time look at them – armed perhaps with what their medieval creators could not have imagined, a pair of binoculars or a camera with a telephoto lens.

This boss, then, is not a great piece of carving, but has some nice touches, such as the swirling hair and flanking leaves, to compensate for the rather small mouth and lack of modelling around the chin. I don’t know who it portrays – some say that it represents Margaret of France, second wife of Edward I. Margaret died in 1307 and the vault is early-14th century, so that’s a possibility. She was not formally crowned, so the carving’s lack of a crown doesn’t mean it cannot portray her.

The other interesting feature of the boss is the colour. I believe this was added during a restoration in the 1920s, but the yellow and terracotta shades and the gilding are probably not too far from the medieval colouring. However the overall effect is more modern somehow. Is it the blushing cheeks? Or the use of flesh tones that make it look as if the subject has naked shoulders? Whatever the case, the carving is now an interesting hybrid, part of the evolving and transforming history of the building that contains it.

King's Cross, London

Decluttered

A friend recently lent me a bound volume of copies of the Illustrated London News from 1852. What had struck my friend about this volume was the extraordinary amount of space devoted to the Duke of Wellington, who died on 14 September 1852. This coverage is indeed remarkable, but amongst the various special supplements on Wellington's life, the pages of reminiscences, and the exhaustive illustrated account of the Duke's funeral, are scattered a few items of news about London's buildings.

One that I thought was particularly timely is headed 'Great Northern Railway' and records that 'The buildings for the passenger traffic of this railway at King's Cross are fast approaching completion.' The article dwells at some length on the station front, with its two imposing arches, each of a span of 'no less than 71 feet', marking the ends of the arrival and departure platforms, and its clock, brought here after being displayed at the Great Exhibition. The piece also quotes the analysis of the facade in The Builder, which notices how 'great plainness prevails; the architect depends wholly for effect on the largeness of some of the features, the fitness of the structure for its purpose, and a characteristic expression of the purpose.'

In 1852, as the image in the Illustrated London News shows, there was plenty of space in front of Lewis Cubitt's facade, affording room for all the Victorian bustle that surrounded such a place – carriages, wagons, omnibi, sandwichmen, and the pedestrian host.

By the last decades of the last century, however, our eyes were distracted from the size, plainness, and purposefulness of this frontage by the sorry accumulation of additional buildings that had been piled in front. Now, as part of the restoration of King's Cross station, these have been swept away and, although parts of the square in front of the building are still boarded up, people can bustle and the amazing facade may be seen again. True, the architects of the restoration and upgrade have provided a discreet canopy that cuts through the small lower entrance arches. But this seems a small price to pay for the clearing up of the frontage and the chance to see clearly the two magnificent arches once again.

Lyme Regis, Dorset

 Which former glory?

Finding myself in Lyme Regis recently, I decided to try to find Belmont, a house that was familiar to me as the home first of Eleanor Coade, manufacturer of Coade Stone (a successful artificial material used widely for casting architectural ornaments and statues) and later of the novelist John Fowles, author of such major works as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. I found the house easily enough, but when I got there I found that the Landmark Trust, who have owned the building for the past few years, had the builders in, making it difficult to photograph it and preventing access.

Belmont, entrance front detail showing Coade Stone blocks, keystones, and banding

Looking at the entrance front, Belmont is a detached house built some time before 1784 with a symmetrical classical front. What is outstanding about this front is the decoration. The blocks and keystones around the door and windows, the horizontal band running across at first floor level, and the frieze are all made of Eleanor Coade's artificial stone. The heads of Neptune and Amphitrite in the keystones and the decorative horizontal band are quite delicately detailed; the blocks around the windows are mostly formed to give a rough surface effect usually known as vermiculation. A few of these (the impost blocks) bear reliefs of sea creatures, reminding us that this is a house near the sea – a maritime villa in the language of the 18th century. Around the back are later additions, including an observatory tower, presumably giving the inhabitants stunning views from this already elevated site (the house is not called Belmont for nothing) over the sea.

As part of their restoration, the Landmark Trust have received permission to demolish the later additions at the back of the house, returning the building to its 18th-century form and preserving the observatory as a free-standing tower. There will be a permanent exhibition about the history of the house and its owners in the stables, while the main building will be conserved and let for holidays like the rest of the Landmark Trust's impressive collection of historic properties. Belmont will therefore get back some of its integrity as a Georgian villa, while losing a slice of its history. This plan has proved controversial, but there's a decision here that has to be made by many people working on old buildings. The media talk airily of bring a building 'back to its former glory', but this phrase begs the question, 'Which former glory?' The gem of a villa lived in by Mrs Coade? The rambling 19th century house of residents such as Dr Bangay, who lived in the house in the 1880s and 1890s? Or the much loved home of John Fowles? And how can one best address the issues of how the building will be used while repairing and conserving the fabric?

The changes to the house, planned after much research, have gone through the planning process but the campaign for funding is still ongoing. The Landmark Trust website contains information on the history of the house and the Trust's appeal for funds; an article here outlines some of the controversy surrounding the project; another article describes proposals to incorporate a centre for young writers into the building, though it's not clear how this squares with the Trust's stated aim for holiday accommodation and a museum. Meanwhile, as discussions continue and passers-by like me stand at the gate and squint at the ornate front of Belmont, the fundraising continues.

Ludlow, Shropshire

The Buttercross, before...

Last time I was in Ludlow, which was last year, I noticed the way the stone of the Buttercross, a building I’d long admired, was glowing in the sun, and took the photograph above. This building, part market, part Town Hall, was built in 1743–4 to designs by William Baker (1705–71), an architect who was busy in Shropshire, Staffordshire, and neighbouring counties in the middle of the 18th century. Pevsner, describing the architecture of the building, says while it is “not polished, [it] has an attractive robustness”. The classical portico with its four Tuscan columns is offset by less formal details, such as the semicircular window and the clock turret, with its lovely cupola. The whole thing is a worthy centrepiece to this part of the town centre, and looks good from Broad Street, where I took the picture.

Since last year, the builders have been in, doing major works to the roof. Then, in November, disaster struck in the form of falling chunks of plaster from one of the ceilings. Further internal problems have since been discovered and Ludlow’s council have a much bigger and more complex restoration project on their hands. The plaster seems to have come down without much provocation. According to the Shropshire Star, Ludlow’s Mayor, Martin Taylor-Smith, said, “We think the initial fall was when the clock-winder went up, just from the vibration.”

Now the Town Council, which used the upper part of the building, has found alternative accommodation, work has begun on finding a new use for the Butter Cross. An application in underway to turn the building into an education and interpretation centre, where, for example, traditional building skills might be shown. Here’s hoping the extra funding can be found to make the repairs and preserve this landmark.

South Leigh, Oxfordshire

Seeing double

St James the Great, South Leigh has some of my favourite medieval wall paintings – although some of these paintings are probably not quite as medieval as they seem. One of the most striking is this wonderful St Michael Weighing Souls. The archangel stands with his scales next to the Virgin Mary, who, with the aid of her rosary, pushes the scale pan to ensure that the soul receives a favourable weighing; to the right, devils, including one with a flesh hook (a medieval kitchen utensil) try to push the scales the other way. Through prayer, the image seems to say, Our Lady will intercede on our behalf, the flesh-hook-wielding devils will be defeated, and all will be well. Both the Virgin and St Michael are drawn with flair: Mary is calm and graceful, her robes falling in generous folds; the Archangel has wonderful feathered limbs and an enormous sword that a mere human would need two hands to brandish.

Look more closely, and the painting reveals another secret. A horizontal band runs past the shoulders of the Virgin and St Michael and turns vertically downwards, forming part of the frame of an earlier painting; between the two saints is the faint image of another, much smaller, figure – seemingly another portrait of the Virgin. She forms part of an earlier depiction of the same scene, at a smaller scale. So we have a large image of the Soul-Weighing, together with part of a smaller depiction of the same subject, together with the upper and right-hand parts of its frame. At some point, someone repainted the image, hoping to do it more justice by giving it more room.

When was the image repainted? For a long time the large version we see today was accepted as 15th-century, with the smaller version dated as maybe 14th-century. But more recent accounts, including that in the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire and another in an article by John Edwards in Oxoniensa, suggest that it’s the work of Victorian restorers Burlisson and Grylls, working in the 1870s. The church’s original medieval paintings, having been whitewashed over in the 17th century, were rediscovered during the 1870s restoration and partly repainted, and the Soul-Weighing picture seems to have been increased in size in the process. Burlisson and Grylls obliterated the earlier, smaller soul-weighing and its ghostly frame, but this was rediscovered in a subsequent restoration in 1933. So now we have a double image to confuse us.

I suppose the scholars are right: it’s a Victorian image, although its palette, the fading areas, the costumes, and details from scales to flesh-hook certainly have a late-medieval feel. What does feel completely Victorian, though is the border. This must have been painted by someone who knew about William Morris. And Burlisson and Grylls, who started out as stained-glass artists, were certainly disciples of Morris at the beginning of their careers. Burlisson, Grylls, their employer the vicar Gerard Moultrie (Tractarian, hymnologist, educationalist), the restorers of 1933, the various artists who influenced them all, and the anonymous medieval painter who started the whole process going: English parish churches were made by many hands and the marks made by those hands are many, varied, and fascinating.

Onibury, Shropshire

Art and craft

As a final post in this short series about buildings in the Ludlow area of Shropshire, here’s the interior of the parish church of St Michael at Onibury, a mainly 14th century church, but with older portions, such as the very plain chancel arch, surviving from the Norman period. Still more visual impact, though, comes from the restoration at the beginning of the 20th century. And, unlike many church restorations, this was very much for the good, because the job was done in the Arts and Crafts tradition by Detmar Blow.

It’s the furnishings that catch the eye – oak pews and stalls, lights on upright posts with simple metal and glass lampholders, and the elegant west gallery, its front a grid of oak verticals and horizontals. Blow’s fittings beautifully set off the pale plastered interior with the semi-circular chancel arch and the rough but beautiful woodwork of the nave roof, just visible beyond the arch in my photograph.


A finishing touch is provided by the royal arms of the then new king, Edward VII, with their characterful lion and unicorn supporters. There’s so much going on in these arms – don’t miss the king’s monogram, ‘ED VII’ on either side of the helm and crest at the top; or the elegant black and white uprights (I’m not sure of the correct heraldic term) on which the lion and unicorn lean; or the foliage on either side of the date at the bottom. It’s an accomplished design carried out with painstaking attention to detail: art and craft indeed.

Clevedon, Somerset

Back on track

The pier at Clevedon sits on top of hard limestone and mud in water with a dramatic tidal range of about 46 feet and currents up to 5 knots. This made building it a real challenge – the team of men on the job in 1867–69 took three months to build one of the 100-foot spans, although some of the other spans went much faster.

But it was worth the effort. They achieved one of the most elegant pier structures, with a series of delicate arches made of recycled rails from the defunct South-West Railway. The rather pagoda-like pavilions at the seaward end add to the effect and provide welcome shelter in the stiff Severn breezes.

Like many of our piers, the one at Clevedon was looking past its best by the 1960s and structural engineers recommended testing it every two years to make sure it was still safe. So the pier was regularly subjected to a rigorous loading with tanks of water and in October 1970 the structure collapsed during one of these tests.

For years the pier languished unrestored, and potential costs mounted as the need for further repairs became apparent. But at last, in 1989 the pier reopened and the entire restoration project was completed in 1998. The reborn pier was a triumph for local fundraising and effort plus grant-aid and the repair process was helped further by the lucky discovery of some of the old South-West rails in storage. A fine end for a fine pier.