Burford, Oxfordshire, and beyond

Retrospective (2): A handful of fragments

As my next short sequence of backward-glancing links to celebrate ten years of blogging, I'm concentrating on fragments – those broken bits and pieces that can tell us so much about history – or occasionally fox us – while also being so evocative. Whether it's bits of medieval stained glass or chunks of old masonry, such unregarded scraps have often surfaced on the English Buildings blog over the last ten years. Here are a few you may have missed...

Tantalising bits of stained glass in Oxfordshire

Old bits of pottery put to architectural use in Northamptonshire

Traces of a mason's yard in Shrewsbury

A revealing broken pinnacle in Somerset

A whole wall of fragments in Gloucestershire.

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

On the road to recovery

There will be celebrations today in Shrewsbury, with the announcement that one of its major buildings, which has been 'at risk' for years, has been allocated a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Ditherington Flax Mill (also known as the Flax Mill Maltings) looks set for a fresh start.

This is an enormous building and was made still larger when it was converted to a maltings. The original part, the flax mill on the left built in the 1790s, contains some 30,000 square feet of factory floor ranged over five storeys. But the key thing is not the size, but the structure. It's held up by a framework of iron – not just iron columns, but iron horizontal beams and tie rods too – and this makes it the world's first fully metal-framed building.

The mill was designed by wine merchant, textile manufacturer, surveyor and engineer Charles Bage. Bage's interest in the use of iron in building wasn't surprising – the first iron bridge at Coalbrookdale was not far away, there was an iron foundry in Shrewsbury, and he was a friend of civil engineers such as Thomas Telford and William Strutt of Derby, a builder of mills who had already employed iron columns in his structures but hadn't gone the whole hog and used iron beams as well. Bage made that extra step to a full metal frame.

The advantages of this kind of building were clear – modular construction, minimal interruption of the floor space by the slender columns, and resistance to fire. The fire-resistant quality of a building made of an iron frame supporting brick walls and arches was especially attractive to mill owners, although this building was not truly fireproof – the metal would have buckled at high temperatures. Bage used cast iron and, although later engineers would later prefer wrought iron, and then steel, for structural frameworks, he had made a beginning, one which would make possible the rise of the skyscraper, and all that has entailed.

I'm pleased that this landmark building, one of countless historical industrial buildings that has lain unused because of the substantial repair and conservation costs, is now a big step further on the road to a secure future.

Flax Mill, interior showing iron columns and brick-arched ceiling
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There is more about the Flax Mill here.

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

We want a rockery

In the Abbey Gardens by the river in Shrewsbury is an interesting rockery, made up largely of tantalizing fragments of old buildings. This very special rubble got here because the land was once a stone yard of belonging to a local family of builders, sculptors, and architects, the Carlines. The place is easy to miss as you hot-foot it across the river on the way to the abbey, but it’s well worth a pause. The collection includes various statues, a carved stone head, part of an Ionic capital, a clock face, a coat of arms, and other fragments of moulding and carved stone. Presumably they came from altered or demolished buildings, and most of them must have found their way here in the 19th century.

For the most part, it’s not known which buildings these carvings came from. The main exceptions are the fragment of Ionic capital and the figure of Justice, shown with her scales and accompanied by ears of wheat, a cornucopia, and the Shropshire coat of arms. These came from the town’s old Shirehall, a building designed by a local man, Hiram Haycock, and demolished in 1834.

Justice has seen better days. Her surface is flaking and only part of her iron scales survives – they’re vulnerable in this position. And yet I like the way these stones have been unselfconsciously preserved by being incorporated into a rockery, finding a use that would have surprised their creators but must have given pleasure to locals and visitors alike. I’ve never fancied a rockery of my own, but if it could be like this I might change my mind.

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

The daily round

Many people know about the abbey at Shrewsbury because it features in the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, and is the home of the eponymous monk. But apart from the church, itself much truncated after the dissolution, little remains of the buildings of Cadfael’s monastery. The church is surrounded by roads, one of which slices its way through the site of the cloister, where the domestic buildings of the monks would have been sited.

This is one tantalizing fragment that has survived. It is a pulpit, and was originally part of the monks’ dining hall or refectory. Monks were expected to eat in silence, the only sound in the refectory being the voice of one brother, who would climb the stairs to the pulpit and read to the others as they ate. The lives of the saints were favoured for mealtime readings.

The ornate pulpit was built in the early-14th century. It is vaulted inside and carefully designed with broad openings, so that the reader could be heard, and small carvings to inspire those who looked up towards it. Cadfael, however, had he really existed, would not have known this delicate piece of stonework – he was a monk of the 12th century. He would probably have known a much plainer, round-arched pulpit, but the regular ritual of readings, like the continuous round of liturgy in the church, would have been the same.