Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Endangered species

The White Bear in Shipston-on-Stour is one of those old inns with large bay windows and an elliptical arch to one side, leading to a yard where there would have been stables for patrons’ horses, or for horses to draw coaches if the inn served the coaching trade. It’s not, perhaps, one of the most outstanding of such buildings, but it occupies a prominent position in the middle of the town and it’s memorable to me for having this three-dimensional sign, a characterful carved-wood bear, who at the moment is placed on ground level, near the door to welcome guests. The bear no longer does duty as the sole identifying sign: the Donnington Brewery, who own the premises these days, have seen to it that the building also has one of their ‘house style’ black-and-white painted signs too. The old wooden bear stands as a memorial to the time when a simple wordless sign was the best advertisement an inn could have.

As far as I can remember over the years I’ve been passing through Shipston or pausing in its High Street, the bear has spent time out of view, and also time outdoors in a brown, unpainted state. Pavement level is a good place to appreciate the deeply cut lines of his carved fur, and the purposeful pointed cut of his snout. However, he seems to have got knocked about a bit, and I hope his owners find a way of looking after him before he loses more legs, paws, or other appendages. It must be worth conserving him, because a sign like this is still a good advertisement, as well as the kind of thing people like me, who appreciate old buildings, their distinctive details and the folk art that produced great pub signs, both two- and three-dimensional. And because carved animals like this are now an endangered species.

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.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

A world of wood

Perhaps it should be one of the rules for the architectural traveller. As well as ‘Look up’, ‘Walk along alleys’, and ‘Go around the back’, the axiom ‘Look over walls’ has a place in the inquisitive traveller’s rule book. I am often to be seen looking over walls, in search of unusual outbuildings, garden structures, and other buildings likewise hidden from immediate view. Here’s an example from Shipston-on-Stour, the upper half of which, at least, is freely visible above a brick garden wall. It seems to be an octagonal wooden gazebo or summer house, with Gothic style pointed windows and walls made up of short logs arranged in geometric patterns. There’s a lovely fish-scale roof, too.

I don’t know how old this building is. Self-consciously rustic garden buildings go back at least to the 18th century, and they owe their form to various sources, from writers’ ideas about the earliest building of all (the ‘primal hut’) to hermitages, or people’s ideas about what a hermitage should be like. In a setting of trees, a brick wall and passing pedestrians, inquisitive or not, this wooden wonder enlivens the streetscape – and brightened up a dull day as I passed.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Top shop

On either side of a traditional shop front are vertical features called pilasters. They frame the façade and may be topped with a kind of bracket (known as a console) that helps to support the signboard. Pilasters can take various forms, from plain wooden or tiled uprights to full-blown classical half-columns that reveal how, somewhere in the genetics of shop-front design, the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome is lurking. Few of these designs draw attention to themselves. The shopkeeper wants us to look at the stuff in the window, after all, not at the pilasters. Very often, therefore, designing a traditional shop front is an exercise in restraint.

Now and then, though, the inventiveness of Victorian design was unleashed on a shop front with all the ingenuity of Rube Goldberg solving a simple problem. The results include this stunner in Shipston-on-Stour. Here the pilaster is an unlikely mixture of vaguely classical and vaguely Gothic elements, with the addition of a stylized plant that looks as if it’s been borrowed from some Arts and Crafts source. But from plain fluted base to pointed finial it works, and the black-and-white colour scheme sets it off well. Small towns like Shipston, which still have their fair share of small independent local shops, are full of such gems, though few are quite as dazzling as this one.

One of the joys of this blog is being able to share finds like this with you all, and to benefit in turn from the sharp eyes of others. I’m reminded of this because friends who often go to Shipston once told me about this shop front, and encouraged me to do a post about it. I’d noticed it before, as it happens. But their encouragement made me look again, and appreciate it more, and tap it to make sure it was made of wood. Such small acts of togetherness and connection are shafts of light in a sometimes gloomy world.