Sharpness, Gloucestershire

A port with no sea…but lots of wood

Sharpness is on the River Severn and in the early-19th century was the starting point of a canal that took large ships to Gloucester, then a busy inland port dealing in goods from all over the world. Gloucester’s on the Severn too, but the river is far less easily navigable higher up, hence the need for the canal. Indeed even downstream, the river is not a straightforward one – although wide, it varies greatly in depth and its tidal range is the world’s second largest.

Today, the huge Victorian warehouses at Gloucester docks remain, but they’ve been converted to other uses – a museum, shopping, offices, apartments – because the docks were going into decline from the later part of the 19th century. The main reason for this was that ocean-going ships had become too large to use the canal, but they could sail up the Severn as far as Sharpness. So Sharpness, originally used mainly as the entrance to the canal, became a port in its own right, playing host to ships carrying timber, coal and above all grain.

The two most impressive structures at Sharpness are the two extraordinary wooden piers that stretch out into the river. Seen at the low point in the Severn’s vast tidal range, their remarkable framework of wooden uprights and horizontals can be seen quite clearly, although, when the place is deserted on a Sunday (the best time to get a good view) it’s hard to appreciate their actual scale. The tiny red marks on the top in my photograph are life belts and the pier’s uprights are some 11 metres in length. They are made of greenheart (Ocotea rodiei), a timber of huge density and immense durability, with acid qualities that repel fungi and insects. Some of these timbers are original, from the 1870s, although a programme of repair and replacement keeps the piers in usable condition.

For me these are structures that represent extraordinary construction skill, especially the northern pier, with its gentle curve. Standing by the riverside, near a patch of grass designated as a picnic area, but occupied only by two couples, getting close to one another on benches at the far end, and so quiet not even a gull seemed to be calling, I simply stared. Only Gateshead’s much longer Dunston Staiths rival it in my opinion. Looking at them, one’s first thought is that it’s amazing anything made of wood can last more than a few years in this place of such brutal tides. But of course the piers’ very openwork structure is a hidden strength: the tide runs through it, rather than battering against it. As so often, Victorian builders and engineers knew what they were about, and today’s shipping companies, albeit in smaller numbers now, still benefit.

Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire

‘Do not forget me quite, O Severn Meadows’

Newnham on Severn is a small town overlooking the west bank of the Severn, once a port on the river, now a pleasant and in my experience rather quiet place – as quiet, that is, as is compatible with being on the main road between Gloucester and Chepstow. There’s a curving High Street, a long green, and a variety of brick houses, some dating from the 18th century. 

And then this. A 19th-century-looking shopfront, unremarkable in itself, but displaying a marvellous collection of signs, stickers, and printed material. I particularly like the old ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Swan’ pen signs with their bird symbols and distinctive name. Not ‘fountain pens’, but ‘Fountpens’, to make it that bit more memorable, I suppose, unless a ‘Fountpen’ is a specific species of pen of which I’m not aware.

The window also contains a collection of printed material from the archive of the Severnside Press, whose shop this is. It’s full of gems. British readers will recognise the style of several election posters, which are of various dates from the 1920s onwards. The real star is the large poster headed ‘PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION’, a list of polling stations and their locations in this part of the county. This extraordinary poster is a litany of names (Awre, Corse, English Bicknor, Joy’s Green, Pillowell, Plumphill, Ruardean…) as evocative as the place names in an Ivor Gurney poem. More than this, it’s an impressive print job: a complex multi-column layout in a variety of typefaces handled with a mixture of flair and expediency. The flair is in the balance and the fit of the text, the expediency in the occasional resort to the ‘wrong’ typeface when reasons of space (or perhaps a shortage of type) meant that an alternative sort had to be chosen for a word here and there. The poster is dated 1951, but it’s done in a traditional style that goes back much further – the heading type could be from a Victorian playbill, the more complex layout lower down from a Methodist lay preaching plan, blown up to size.

So, in a small shop window, there’s a reminder that Newnham is a town (albeit a small one) where once many people worked at making things – in the glass industry, at tanneries, even, once upon a time, building ships. Where there were businesses, there needed to be a printer, turning out letterheads, business cards, notices, and the like, using metal type and inky presses, in the days before ‘publishing’ was something people could do on their ‘desktop’. And amongst these printed products were election posters to remind us that towns like Newnham and Newent and Lydney were (and still are, up to a point) centres for a whole network of rural communities, some nucleated villages, some more scattered Forest or Severnside settlements. Do not forget me quite…

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

River works

If you’re familiar with the map of England you’ll know how the country’s largest river, the Severn, curves its way through Gloucestershire, its most dramatic set of bends almost forming an oxbow lake about eight miles below Gloucester. Inside the neck of land enclosed by these bends is the village of Arlingham, and if you go through Arlingham you find Passage Road, a mile of narrow, low-lying roadway, bounded on either side by meadows and ditches, running arrow-straight towards the river. At the point where the road ends is the Old Passage, an early 19th-century house, now a very good seafood restaurant. The exterior of the building is painted a curious colour on the borders of blue and green, which either blends into the surrounding landscape or stands out brightly, according to the light and the time of day.

The large windows of the Old Passage look out across the Severn to the small town of Newnham on the opposite bank. This was once the site of a ford across the river. These days on the Ordnance Survey map about half the width of the river at this point is marked as “Mud and Sand”, but I wouldn’t want to try and walk across this dangerous river with its huge tidal range (I’ve written more about the Severn and its banks here). The building’s large windows also make for a light interior, good for displaying pictures and on Sunday I was there for the private view of the art exhibition “earth.wind.water.sky” – an inspiring collection of prints, paintings, photographs, and other works hanging on the walls of the restaurant. The exhibition, which includes many works that portray the river or take inspiration from its water, light, and atmosphere, runs to the end of the month and is well worth a visit for anyone in striking distance.

Bewdley, Worcestershire

Bewdiful

A recent post at The Dabbler dealt with plotlands, a form of development that became popular in the early years of the 20th century as a way of offloading unprofitable farmland. Estate agents and speculators parcelled up fields as small plots, on which people – often city-dwellers who wanted a place in the country – could build a home, knock together a chalet, or start a smallholding. Plotland houses were often self-built of timber; corrugated iron was frequently in evidence, too; some were even cobbled together from old railway carriages. Detractors referred to them as shacks, but they provided a rare opportunity for people with a tight budget to build (and in the days before the “property-owning democracy” own) a home – their buildings form a fascinating if unspectacular vernacular.

Probably the best known plotland developments were in Southeast England. Peacehaven in Sussex is a maybe the most famous. The Dabbler mentions Jaywick and other Essex plotlands. There are also examples in the Thames Valley and, as I was reminded yesterday when my travels took me through Bewdley, in the Severn Valley too. I knew about this particular development from a memorable film by Jonathan Meades, Severn Heaven (1990), part of his Abroad in Britain Series. Meades revelled in the rich bricolage that the owners of these houses had created, the melange of corrugated iron sheds, garden ornaments, chain-link fences, and boskage, both old and imported. Back in 1990 the houses themselves looked crudely but lovingly hammered together – now many have been replaced by slick tongue-and-groove structures that could almost be part of a pine-lodge holiday park. But some of the old houses remain. Here’s one, lovingly painted in green with fancy white bargeboards, clinging to the slope below the Severn Valley Railway, which swishes and hoots in the background.

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There’s more about this plotland development at the Liberal England blog.
Jonathan Meades’ film is available on DVD as part of The Jonathan Meades Collection, BBCDVD2601

Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire

Investment product (1)

To Stourport-on-Severn, to admire the locks, basins, bridges, and waterside buildings of one of England’s most fascinating canal towns. But as usual, my eye was caught by something I didn’t quite expect. This building is called The Tontine. The central part was an inn, and the flanking portions contain houses. There are more houses in the wings, which extend out from the back of the building to give the whole thing a plan like an enormous capital E. It was built in the 1770s, although the porch was added about 100 years later. The whole building is being redeveloped as houses, and is festooned with ‘For Sale’ signs. Its red brick and neat windows look well, and the rooms at the front enjoy views across the lawn to the River Severn.

But why was it called ‘The Tontine’? A tontine was what today might be called, to use a kind of language I usually avoid, an ‘investment product’. As I understand it, it worked like this. A group of shareholders clubbed together to buy an investment, such as a property, and shared the income. But there was a twist: the shareholders couldn’t sell their shares, and when they died, their shares passed to the other shareholders. The last surviving shareholder struck gold, inheriting the entire scheme. One presumes that the newly developed houses in the building are being sold with a more conventional tenure arrangement.

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.

Saul, Gloucestershire

Peace be with you

Wandering around the Gloucestershire village of Saul at the weekend, I noticed that several of the houses bore carved or plaster figures. Some, apparently depict the masters of ships who settled here, mostly in the middle decades of the 19th century, and built houses for themselves, according to the Victoria County History, with their own hands. Gloucestershire, one of England’s inland counties, has a venerable maritime history because it contains the tidal stretch of the River Severn, enabling the port of Gloucester, far from the sea though it is, to welcome sea-going ships in its docks. The Sharpness Canal was built to cut out the Severn’s big bend and some difficult stretches of the river, and Saul is close to the canal. Hence the ships’ masters’ presence here.

So I was all set to write a light-hearted post about houses called Dunsailin (although the houses mostly have much more decorous names), jolly jack tars and replacement windows, when I came across this pair above the entrance porch of a house in the main street. They’re said to represent twin brothers who married a pair of sisters, but who both drowned in the Severn. No jokes today, then. Just a respectful recognition that the Severn, with its enormous tidal range, treacherous mudflats, and sudden variations between depths and shallows, can be a very dangerous place. Peace be with you, twins of Saul.