Ludlow, Shropshire

 

Mermaids revisited

One morning recently the Resident Wise Woman and I, finding ourselves in the middle of nowhere in northern Herefordshire, realised we were not far from Ludlow. Lunchtime was looming so we decided to make our way there for refreshment. It was a no-brainer to pay a visit to St Laurence’s church, one of the largest and best in the country bordering Wales, while we were there. We’d visited this church before, but we knew there was more than enough there to make another visit rewarding.

I headed for the chancel, where the choir stalls have a lovely set of misericords, those seats that tip up to provide a ledge to lean on during the long periods of standing required during the medieval liturgy. Beneath the seats, invisible when they’re in the ‘down’ position, are delightful carvings, many of which are designed to make a moral point in an amusing or entertaining way. One of my favourites is a carving of a mermaid, the subject of my previous post about church graffiti.*

The Ludlow mermaid is in generally excellent condition. (Click on the picture to see her more clearly.) Nearly all the standard features of a medieval mermaid are intact – her long hair, exposed breasts, scaly, fishy tail, and the mirror she holds in her right hand. Only her left arm has gone, together with what it held, which would have been a comb. The mirror, though, is enough to remind the viewer that in the Middle Agers the mermaid was a symbol of vanity, and of the way she was said to use her physical attraction to lure men into the sea. A moral lesson in a visual form, carved with care and vigour – those tresses, those scales.

This misericord is also a reminder of the fascination of the sea. The mermaid was not the only monster to lurk there – think gigantic krakens ‘battening on huge sea-worms’,† sea-serpents, sirens, all threatening, rumoured presences, coming to get the unwary sailor or preying on one another, as Shakespeare said that monsters of the deep were wont to do.§ The pair of supporting carvings on either side of the Ludlow mermaid are chunky toothed fish who look as if they’d willingly chew on a mariner’s foot. ‘Stay away from the fishes’ realm,’ they seem to say. Yet their fascination, and that of the mermaid, endures.

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* On such graffiti, see also Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (Ebury Press, 2015)

† See Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Kraken’ (‘There he hath lain for ages, and will lie | Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep…’)

§ King Lear, Act IV, Scene ii (‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, | Like monsters of the deep.’)

Newport, Shropshire

In the sun

As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s another shopfront, this time from the 20th century. The building behind and above the shopfront is interesting in its own right, but for what is hidden from the street as much as what can be seen. The brickwork above the shop window is Georgian, as in my previous post, but this time it’s an 18th-century refacing of an earlier building. What is behind is apparently a 17th-century structure that incorporates an earlier, 16th-century, timber-framed building – a palimpsest of periods that’s typical of English towns, though the accumulation is often hidden from the casual passer-by.

But as I’ve already hinted, it was the shopfront that made me stop and stare. This seems to be a shining example of Art Deco, the style of decoration and architecture that flourished from about 1925 to the start of World War II. So we have a glazed door with a pleasing pattern of panes, all neatness and straight lines. But what’s going on above is more remarkable. The transom, the glazing bar that separates the large lower part of the shop window from the part at the top, rather than being a straight horizontal as is usually the case, describes a gentle continuous curve, reaching its highest point in the centre of the shopfront, above the doorway.

The glazing in the upper section of the window (the transom light, as it’s called) makes three very graphic patterns of clear glass, frosted glass, and leading – in the centre, a sunburst (a classic Art Deco motif) and on either side a more angular, geometrical version of the same design. How revolutionary and modern this must have looked in around 1930. How redolent of its era, a time of glamorous cinemas, brightly coloured fabrics, and Clarice Cliff ‘Bizarre’ coffee sets, it seems today.

Newport, Shropshire

Gilded glamour

The time-honoured advice to ‘look up’ when walking down a street in a town or city seems spot-on for the centre of Newport, Shropshire, where one can see good quality Georgian and earlier buildings standing proud above much later shop fronts. It’s also worth pausing to look at the shop fronts, though. This is one of the best. I don’t know its exact date, or what the business was that put it there, but I’d say it’s 1880s or 1890s, and the building’s listing descriptions concurs, with an estimate of ‘late 19th century’. By the end of the Victorian period, many High Street shops were being fitted with quite lavish fronts, as retailing became highly competitive and shopkeepers vied to catch the eye of everyone who passed by. Increasingly too, shopping was becoming a leisure activity for the middle classes and, as some of this leisure was window-shopping, the people behind the counter liked to put on a good show to lure the window-shoppers inside. Part of this tendency was also about glamour or exclusivity – a fine shop front projected an upmarket image.

The designer of this shop front was given the scope to produce something outstanding. Polished pink granite, a popular material in the 1880s and afterwards, was used for the pilaster running up the front on the left – the stoneworker added vertical flutes to the upper part for extra visual interest and an elaborate cartouche design above with scrolls and a green oval. Polished grey stone lines the sloping stall riser (the strip beneath the bottom of the windows) and the windows themselves are large and lined with only slender metal columns. The panes would have been smaller in the 19th century – the big sheets of plate glass that we see today are modern.

The really special part of the front is the central section, with a dark wooden glazed door and a stunning panel above. This panel with its gilded scrolls and putti, plus the ironwork, also partially gilded, beneath, oozes quality. I wonder if this was a jeweller’s shop, or if it belonged to a seller of some other type of luxury goods. My photograph of this centrepiece also shows another telling detail., The ceiling of the entrance lobby has a dark wooden frame holding four pieces of mirror glass. This was a cunning trick to make the doorway a little lighter, while also giving those entering the odd sensation of seeing the reflection of the tops of their heads. I’ve seen this trick at least once before, above the entrances to what was originally the big ‘flagship’ store of Boot’s the Chemist in Nottingham. In combination with the gilded putti and scrolls, this makes a stunning shopfront that must have impressed the people of Newport in the 1890s and still impresses me today.

The complete frontage: Georgian above, Victorian below

Highley, Shropshire

Any excuse…

…for a bit of corrugated iron and an old advertising sign. Yes, they’re things I am particularly drawn to. I like corrugated iron because it’s adaptable, can take colours well, and can form the material of serviceable, attractive working buildings. I like old signs because I’m fascinated by the visual effects of their colours and letterforms, and also because they recall historical products and businesses, many of which have not made it into the 21st century. Both wrinkly iron and old signs are in abundance on preserved railways lines, notably the two closest to where I live, the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway and the Severn Valley Railway.

This shed is at Highley Station on the Severn Valley Railway, where it is used, I believe, as a workshop. The line was once part of the Great Western Railway network, so the shed is painted in the GWR’s usual muddy light brown. The enamel sign running along the top is a particularly large and handsome example of the sort of metal sign popular in the early decades of the last century. The deep blue background was often used on enamel signs and works well with white lettering, as here. The letters in the name are both bold and well proportioned, and well spaced too: I’d say it was a very effective sign.

It comes from the factory of Charles Taylor of Birmingham. Taylor’s made things like lathes and machine tools. Taylor’s started in 1860. The founder died in 1899 but the firm continued through the 20th century. The excellent Grace’s Guide records them as being prosecuted for keeping a dirty factory in 1874. However, a series of advertisements through the early-20th century suggests an increasing range, so that by 1937 they list lathes, chucks, cutting machines, jigs, vices, and sawing and bending machines among their products. They also introduced new innovations: they filed patents for improved chucks and pedal mechanisms in 1920 and 1954. Their factory was finally pulled down in 1999 and the sign was rescued and has ended up here, where the railway mounted it on top of this workshop building. It’s just the place for it to catch the eye of travellers and tourists on the Severn Valley Railway, an audience very likely to appreciate the bit of engineering history that it evokes.

Bridgnorth, Shropshire

 

Tribute bands

It’s easy to be dismissive about this sort of thing: a pattern of faux-timber framing painted on to a brick wall. ‘It’s not real,’ people say, hinting that it’s such a complete fake that it hardly exists at all. It’s the sort of thing you see quite often in counties such as Shropshire and Worcestershire, where there’s a long tradition of genuine timber-framed buildings. You’ll enter a ‘black and white’ village and stand at one end, admiring the view. Then you walk slowly forwards, realising as you go that, while many of the timbers are real, structural wood, a few are of this painted variety…and that there might also be some that are indeed genuine timber but are merely ornamental, tacked on to make the building look old.

There’s another ‘authenticity’ issue to consider when looking at this kind of thing. The familiar and much loved ‘black and white’ pattern of timber-framed buildings is itself something not quite original – most such buildings were constructed of oak that was left untreated, so that it aged to a beautiful silvery grey; infill panels were sometimes coloured with some natural pigment. Pink and grey, anyone? You can find this combination right across England now, from Tewkesbury to Lavenham.

So painted timber framing on a building like this one in a corner of Bridgnorth is obviously fake. And yet I’d not always want to remove it, to reveal the colour of the brickwork in a gesture of architectural ‘honesty’. Why? Because fake timber framing is itself now part of the history of many buildings. It is, one could argue, as much a part of the story of vernacular architecture in the West of England as oak beams and cruck frames. And it speaks of many things – an interest in history, or a respect for and tribute to the appearance of genuine timber frames, or a desire for a building to ‘fit in’. I’d not want every building to be like this, but I’m happy to find them here and there, wearing their artificial struts and showy braces with pride – and making some of us smile as we realise what’s going on.

Moreton Corbet, Shropshire

 

Gorgeous and stately

Looking at this end-on view of the ruin of Moreton Corbet Castle’s south range, you’d not think it was a castle at all, in the strict medieval sense . The same would be true of a view across the fields taking in what is left of the long south front of which my photograph above shows one corner. What is here are clearly the remains of an Elizabethan country house, and one of some grandeur. It was built by Robert Corbet at the end of the 16th century, who was extending the work done by his father, Sir Andrew, who had begun to transform the structure of his family’s ancestral medieval castle.

Sir Andrew turned his castle into a more fashionable residence by building new rooms against the old curtain wall. Ruins of these are still seen on the other half of the site, to the left of the building in my photograph. Sir Andrew died in 1578, and Robert was more radical, adding this new south range to create what Camden called a ‘gorgeous and stately house’. Its curvy gables, classical pilasters and large, rectangular mullioned windows will be familiar to anyone who’s seen more famous houses of this period – Blickling in Norfolk, for example has similar gables and windows; so does Montacute in Somerset.

So this is high-status building, and the amount of effort and expense involved in its construction is confirmed by the details, especially the pilasters and attached columns, together with the friezes they support (photograph below). These feature a variety of roundels, bits of strapwork, and carved animals of various kinds, some from the standard repertoire of the time (decorative flourishes influenced, like the house’s gables, by contemporary Flemish architecture), but also the heraldic beasts of the Corbet family.

Why is this marvel of late-Tudor architecture now a ruin? During the English Civcil Wars there was much fighting around the house (which was then occupied by Sir Vincent Corbet, who was on the royalist side). As a result, the house was badly damaged, and although the family continued to live in it, they abandoned it in the 18th century. There were plans to build a new house on the site but these came to nothing and the building was left to decay. It is a magnificent, if tantalising, ruin.

Hughley, Shropshire

Wood works

The church at Hughley looks charming from the outside – it’s very small, without any architectural separation between nave and chancel, and has a wooden medieval porch and one of those timber-framed bellcotes that nearly always make a small church look picturesque. None of this compares one for the building’s great treasure: the internal division between nave and chancel is effected with a wooden screen of great craftsmanship and beauty, a work of art more delicate and sophisticated than one would normally expect in such a modest building.

The panelled lower section is topped by bands of lace-like carving below the row of larger openings. Above this is more lacework in wood and at the very top of the coved section that would have once supported a rood loft. This curving support is carved with a pattern of radiating ribs in imitation of stone vaulting. Looking at all this more closely (below), one becomes aware how much fine detail there is in the carved portions. The central parts of the ‘vault’ are carved with ornate quatrefoils. The openwork sections a little lower down have tracery like windows, and the horizontal carved bands at the top of the screen and lower down feature more quatrefoils, tiny arches, fleurons, and even one or two faces in roundels. It’s outstanding workmanship and has survived well since it was made in c. 1500, albeit with a few small breakages and missing bits.

Pevsner’s Shropshire volume tells us that this remarkable high-class screen has siblings in three churches in the adjoining counties of Cheshire, Denbighshire and Herefordshire. More churches beckon, then, to pursue the work of this fine carver (or group of carvers), who in a time when many people traveled hardly at all, worked their way up and down the English-Welsh borders doing marvellous work that’s familiar mainly to specialists now. It deserves to be known more widely.

Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire

On tap

On my previous visit to Bishop’s Castle I saw much to catch my attention, but I missed the Three Tuns Brewery, a stone’s throw from the town centre. I was pleased to find it when we returned to the town the other day because it’s a nice example of a small late-19th century tower brewery. There are still quite a few Victorian breweries around,* but many smaller ones like this have disappeared, prey to takeovers and the large-scale corporatisation of Britain’s brewing industry which was turned from one of small-scale local distinctiveness to one of big business greed – a change which also entailed a sorry deterioration in the quality of the beers served in many of the country’s pubs. Already in my late teens I was cottoning on to the fact that there was something better than the ubiquitous Watney’s Red Barrel and appalling ‘lager’ that was only made remotely drinkable with the addition of lime juice. Surely there was something better than this. A friend was was a member of a local Morris side† and a consummate folk fiddler, took me to one side and pointed me in the direction of a pub that served Wadsworth’s 6X: proper beer. I was converted.

Thankfully, some small provincial breweries have survived these upheavals and still brew decent beer with its own distinctive character. Three Tuns is one such, and its origins go back far beyond the Victorian period. The first brewing licence was issued here in 1642, making this, so it’s said, Britain’s oldest brewery – architecturally too, since part of the structure is 17th century.§ The tall central section that now dominates the site was the result of an expansion when the Roberts family bought the business in 1880. In the Victorian period the tower became the standard form for a brewery. As the brewing process demands shifting the liquid from one container to another through several stages, it makes sense to hoist (or pump) the ingredients to the top, start the brewing there, and let the force of gravity do the lion’s share of the work involved in moving the beer from one vessel to the next.

I didn’t realise until I looked at the company’s website that in the early 2000s the brewery was in difficulties, with a proposal to convert the site to housing. But it’s now refurbished and very much alive and kicking, and the tower is resplendent with its hand-painted sign. I didn’t sample the goods in my recent visit to the town,¶ but in line with the times its beer is available not only in the adjacent Three Tuns brewery tap, but also in a number of pubs in Wales and the English border counties, as well as via the brewery’s online shop. So now there’s no excuse.

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* See, for example, most posts about Hook Norton, Lewes, and Devizes.

† Morris dancing, of course, often takes place near pubs. For obvious reasons.

§ There is, of course, more than one claimant to this distinction.

¶ Too much driving to be done.

Upton Cressett, Shropshire

At end of the road

Frustrated at driving miles along a narrow windy lane, negotiating a tractor towing a long trailer and opting for the purgatory of scratched paintwork to avoid the ditch of despair and damnation, only to find Upton Cressett church firmly locked and no one, apparently, around to open it up, we consoled ourselves with a partial sight of Upton Cressett Hall and a slightly closer view of its beautiful gatehouse. The Hall is one wing of what must have been a large house of 1580 in glowing Tudor brickwork. The gatehouse, shown in my photograph, is of the same material and probably the same date. Looking from the lane, one can glimpse the symmetrical entrance front – the entrance itself obscured by the bushes and a flank wall. At the far left of the picture is an octagonal corner turret, one of a pair on that side, which is on the ‘inside’ of the gatehouse, suggesting that these turrets are more ornamental than defensive.

Indeed the entire effect of the gatehouse is ornamental: there’s diapering (two-coloured brickwork laid in lozenge patterns) between the two rows of windows on the entrance front, and the windows themselves and framed by nicely moulded bricks. The chimneys lack the frenetic spiral brickwork of some Tudor designs, but are still attractively set at 45 degrees to the stacks. Pevsner speculates that the turrets, which now have little roofs of tile, were once topped with ‘something shapelier’ – ogee cupolas, perhaps.

The effect of the whole, surrounded today by trees and foliage, the bricks now turned pleasantly pale – probably due to lichen – is certainly handsome. The owner commemorated with his initials on painted panelling inside the house, Richard Cressett, local lord who served a term as Sheriff of Shropshire, must have been proud of his home.

Battlefield, Shropshire

More tiles, Maw tiles

In the great transformation in church buildings that took place during the 19th century, a key element was the revival of medieval architecture, especially Gothic architecture. Although Gothic buildings had been erected in every century since the end of the Middle Ages,* the Gothic churches of the mid- to late-Victorian periods were Gothic in more thoroughgoing and self-conscious ways. The style became part of the movement to make churches more visually attractive, more moving, more full of symbolic meaning, more redolent of what members of the high-church Oxford movement referred to as the ‘beauty of holiness’. Central to this was the encouragement of church art – carving, metalworking, mural painting, and ceramic tiles. Architects and designers studied the tiles in medieval churches like the ones in my previous post about Buildwas abbey, and copied them or designed similar ones.

Among the companies that made these tiles, combining different coloured clays ands glazes to often beautiful effect, were Minton, Godwin, Craven Dunhill and Maw. Maw and Company started in Worcester but moved to Benthall in Shropshire (not far from Ironbridge) in 1852 and were soon one of the biggest tile-makers.† Maw’s made many of the tiles laid when the church at Battlefield near Shrewsbury (originally built after the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403), was restored – indeed virtually rebuilt – in 1861. It had originally been a grand collegiate church in the fields, very near to the site where the battle was fought during the Wars of the Roses. Now its 19th-century wooden roof timbers, carved stalls, stained glass, and tiled floors give it the atmosphere of a grand Victorian college chapel.

These tiled floors combine secular and religious symbolism – coats of arms of numerous English kings, motifs such as crosses, and heraldic symbols of the Corbet family, one of whose homes was in a nearby castle (now vanished) and who paid for the church’s restoration. The tiles in my photograph feature charming squirrels, not just a favourite of those who like English mammals but also one of the Corbets’ heraldic beasts. A squirrel forms the family crest – the beast at the top of the coat of arms, just above the shield. Here on the floor of the Corbet chapel in the church at Battlefield, squirrels sport in quartets, occupying roundels made up of four tiles. This use of four tiles to make a roundel was a medieval trick, and the little crosses in the corners of the tiles and the cross-like motifs that abound in this floor were also drawn from medieval sources.

If the imagery has a distinctly medieval feel to it, the crispness of the tiles, their deep colours, and the hard, complete surfaces make them unmistakably Victorian. So does another feature that we do not usually see in medieval work – the name of the tiles’ makers, ‘MAW’, in beautiful ornate lettering, the ends of the cross strokes of the ‘M’ and ‘W’ elegantly looped, the strokes terminating in not a bifurcated but a trifurcated shape, and the ends of the word filled out with curlicues. The company’s pride in their work is understable, I think. Our Victorian predecessors, painstaking and brilliant when they were given scope to shine, deserve to be remembered.

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* For convenience, I take the Middle Ages to end in 1500. Another date used is 1485, when the Wars of the Roses ended and the first Tudor king, Henry VII, began his reign.

† With Maw and Company at Benthall and Craven Dunhill in nearby Jackfield, the encaustic tile industry was strong in Shropshire. Craven Dunhill still make tiles in their works at Jackfield, where the factory and the adjacent tile museum can be visited. The museum is a cornucopia of tile history and visual delight.

Buildwas, Shropshire

Well floored

Buildwas Abbey, where the Resident Wise Woman and I were pleased to find ourselves on our own in an atmosphere of almost monastic quietude recently, is an enchanting monastic ruin. It’s best known for the almost intact ruins of its church, built in the second half of the 12th century in a transitional style that bridges Norman and Early English Gothic – chunky round stone piers, arches that look semi-circular at first glance but which actually come to a very subtle point. The other glory of the place is the chapter house which, with its more slender columns, seems to be moving still more towards the Gothic.

If the columns and vaulting of the chapter house are admirable, even better to my mind is the collection of medieval tiles that paves part of the floor. These are not I think in their original place, but have been brought here and arranged in a pleasing jumble after excavation elsewhere on the site. Some of these tiles are fragments, some have been broken and pieced together, some of them are whole; all are faded. Yet even in this condition they have a serene beauty and as one looks across the floor one can see an engaging range of decorative touches and motifs – birds, flowers, leaves, grotesques, abstract designs from roundels to chequerboards, and elements such as the fleur de lys.

A few of the tiles give an idea of the richness that the colours must have had when they were new: strong terracotta ‘flower-pot’ reds, darker reds, rich ochres. A reminder that if the lives of the Cistercian* monks at Buildwas were austere, the visual stimulation they enjoyed was not only a matter of the natural beauty of the nearby countryside or the sight of an occasional richly illuminated manuscript. Even when their eyes were cast down, they had something interesting to look at: art and craftsmanship, indeed, to look up to.

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* Buildwas began as a Savignac foundation, but like its ‘mother’ house, Furness, Lancashire, it became Cistercian in 1147 when the two orders merged.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

 

Not quite doomed

We know it’s all fleeting now, don’t we? In these times of pandemic and climate change we know that things we’ve taken for granted are no longer the certainties we thought. To mourn the demise of long-distance air travel or petrol cars might seem trivial when human life itself is so fragile or when swathes of houses and alas their occupants succumb to floods and mudslides in Germany or wildfires in Australia or North America. But briefly, and because I came across it the other day, here’s a building that seems to be symbolic of the loss of a kind of ‘motoring’ that’s already long gone. It’s a garage on one of the roads into Much Wenlock, a structure of wood and corrugated iron that cannot have cost much to build but must have serviced cars and small commercial vehicles for decades.

The main body of the building is a large workshop, with glazed sides to admit plenty of light – at the front it has a bright blue door to the right, behind the furthest petrol pump, big enough to admit a car or largish van. This side of the door is a lean-to containing a small shop full of old cans, oily rags and Ferodo fan belts, and next to the shop, also under the lean-to roof, is a trio of petrol pumps. These represent three generations of pump: an early slender-topped pump,* a later tall one with an analogue, clock-face style dial probably dating to the 1940s or 50s, and in the centre one (of the 1970s perhaps) with a mechanical digital display in which slowly turning numerals register the amount of petrol and the cost. None of these have their globes to show the brand of fuel on sale, and all have flaking paint but look restorable.

From the well painted but slowly vanishing lettered sign to the humblest rusting file inside, this garage is a bit of motoring history, testimony to thousands of fill-ups, oil changes, and repairs. Clearly, as the paint flakes and the corrugated iron on the roof acquires another layer of rich iron oxide patina,† its decline continues as it becomes another vanished thing people once took for granted. And yet. The day after I took this photograph I passed by again to discover that someone had come along and wrapped those three pumps in a protective tarpaulin. To what end? To help preserve them in situ ahead of a restoration job? Or in preparation for a move to a place where they’d be cared for? I don’t know. But perhaps it’s a lesson not to assume too much. Not quite everything that seems to be going is necessarily rotting away. Let’s cling on to that.§

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* I’m not sure of the exact dates of these pumps; I’ve seen ones similar to this early one dated to the 1920s.

† Iron oxide patina. Yes, that’s rust to most of us.

§ The best book on the architecture of motor vehicles is Kathryn A Morrison and John Minnis, Carscapes, (Yale UP, 2012); for a brief treatment of the small out-of-town garage see also Llyn E Morris, The Country Garage (Shire, 1985)

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

Made to measure?

Wall boxes are quite a common feature of Britain’s streetscapes. They’ve existed since the 1850s and provided the Post Office with an economical way of providing letter boxes in places where a smaller capacity than that of the familiar free-standing pillar box was sufficient. Country road junctions, small rural Post Offices, and town sites away from the busy centre are all places where one still sees wall boxes, some, like this one in Much Wenlock, survivors from the Victorian period. There are various designs, mostly very simple, featuring the monogram ‘VR’, a lockable door with a plate for displaying collection times, and a slot for the letters. According to Jonathan Glancey,* many Victorian examples have had their slots widened to accommodate the larger envelopes that came in during the 20th century – this one may have a widened slot, although any tell-tale joins have been masked by generations of red gloss paint.

What struck me about this box was the way it’s set into the wall. Rather than being flush with the brickwork in the usual way, it sticks out and is framed by neat, curved bricks. I assume that this is because the wall is not thick enough to fit the full depth of the box, which would stick out into the interior otherwise.† If the building were a Post Office, space might be made inside, but this one isn’t, so the brickwork makes space on this street side. A robust solution, ensure that the people of this part of Wenlock could get their letters in the post with a minimum of effort. And judging by the recent ‘Priority Postbox’ label beneath the slot, presumably they still do.

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* Jonathan Glancey, Pillar Boxes (Chatto and Windus, 1990)

† If anyone knows better, I’d be interested to hear.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

A house in a day?

This house in Much Wenlock is called Squatter’s Cottage. The implication is that it was built by a squatter, who put up a dwelling on common land, taking advantage of a right that a person had to erect a house on a common, provided that the building could be constructed in a day. There was a condition to this right that was no doubt designed to limit the take-up: your completed 24-hour house had to include a working chimney. So while it was possible, at a push, to put up a wooden house in a day, adding a safe masonry chimney in the same time-frame was difficult. But not, it seems, impossible. Typically, the body of the house would start timber-framed, but in time, once the builder had settled in, would be rebuilt or enlarged in brick or stone. Perhaps, too, the chimney regulation was interpreted loosely, so that a timber-framed house with a ‘smoke bay’ at one end was accepted, so long as there was a fire burning there within 24 hours.

However these feats of construction were achieved, there is plenty of evidence of squatter’s cottages being built in both England and Wales. They are often found in small clusters on commons – I’ve already posted about an example of this at Hollybush, near Malvern in Worcestershire. Shropshire, it seems, had its share. This one is on the edge of a town and the visible part at least retains in its stone structure the compact simplicity that must have prevailed from the beginning. There might have been two rooms on the ground floor; there clearly is a room in the roof space too. And a solid brick chimney does its vital work at one end.

Such cottages were a result of rural poverty in its many forms. The enclosure movement, which saw landlords dividing up big open fields and common land into smaller fields and taking them over, deprived many country dwellers of the land they needed to grow crops and pasture an animal or two so that they could feed themselves. Squatting and taking over a small patch of common land offered a solution for many. It could offer independence: a place to grow food, a route out of reliance on a landlord to charge an affordable rent, and a way of avoiding the wage labour under appalling conditions that faced many country people who migrated to the city in search of a job in a factory. Such houses might seldom be noticed today, but in the period of social upheaval that existed between the 16th and 19th centuries, they could be a lifeline.*

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* See Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (Five Leaves, 2002) for a good account of the history of the squatting movement.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

Gothick delight

I caught sight of this house on a late-afternoon walk in Much Wenlock. I’d already noticed one or two other examples in the town of this kind of architecture – early-19th century Gothick, in which pointed windows with Y-tracery set off the facades of quite modest buildings, often in combination with other features – pilasters, pediments, curved gables – that aren’t associated with the medieval Gothic style at all. This house is a good example of the decorative mélange that can result: pointed windows in pointed recesses, pilasters running up each side of the frontage,. a sloping cornice rather like a broken pediment above the central door and its accompanying windows, and, topping it all, a striking rounded gable that steps halfway down to turn from a convex to a concave curve. All this fronts what is otherwise quite a modest structure of rubble masonry and brickwork, all painted white.

The effect of the facade belies common misconceptions: that Georgian Gothick is filigree and delicate and that ornate gables like this are confined to eastern England, where the Dutch influence on English architecture was strong. So this building has left behind the delicate filigree Gothic of Walpole’s house, Strawberry Hill, rebuilt back in the 1740s, for something that’s frankly chunky and more suited to the abilities of a provincial builder; no doubt it was also to the taste of the owners of small houses in late-Georgian Shropshire. As for ‘Dutch’ gables, they were popular in coastal Lincolnshire and East Anglia a century and more before this house was built, and were by now another idea that had become assimilated. Pointed windows and curvaceous gables were, it seems, a matter of local fashion and choice. I’m glad those choices were made here.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Looking up, looking down

St Laurence’s, Ludlow, is a large parish church (the largest in Shropshire) and its tall crossing tower is a fitting crown for the building and the beautiful town where it stands. And yet Ludlow’s tightly packed streets make the rest of the church difficult to see in the town centre, and hard to photograph. A good view is to be had from within the castle, from which the way the tower dominates the surrounding countryside is clear. It’s also clear that the architecture of the tower is 15th century, in what was fittingly called the Perpendicular style by 19th-century antiquarian Thomas Rickman and those who followed him. The quality of verticality is embodied not only in the sheer height and the upward-pointing corner pinnacles, but also in the perpendicular mouldings that cast shadows across he middle part of the tower wall and the mullions of the windows, which stretch from the bottom of the window almost to the very top, rather than getting interrupted by complex patterns of tracery as they usually did in 14th-century architecture.

The interior is high, airy, and full of windows in the same style. But one feature that has engaged me on several visits to this outstanding church is the carving of the misericord seats. Looking through some of the very few photographs I have kept from before the digital era, I see that shadows and backache seem to have prevented me from getting decent images of many of them – when visiting churches it is just as important to look down as to look up, but this can be a painful business! This is a shame since there’s a rich array of medieval carving in these stalls, from satirical images such as the fox preaching to the geese, through bits of everyday life, to heraldic designs, such as the falcon and fetterlock badge of Richard Duke of York, lord of Ludlow. Here is a rather splendidly leonine king to give readers who’ve not seen the originals an idea of the quality of the carving. I must return when I can, and see if the churchwardens still allow photography.

Highley, Shropshire

Job done

These are probably the humblest of all railway buildings. They’re lamp huts or tool sheds, and these corrugated iron versions, just 6 ft wide by 9 ft long, were ubiquitous on the Great Western Railway, and no doubt on other lines too. You found them by the trackside, near stations, signal boxes, and anywhere else where lamps, tools, and other small items needed to be stored. They were cheap, utilitarian, and supplied in flat-pack form, for easy erection on a prepared base in a matter of hours. Corrugated iron made assembling these structures quick and easy. Prepare a base, order up the flat pack, assemble, add a coat or two of paint – and the job was done. Whether they were building the roof of a large train shed in a city or putting up a little shed at a country halt, the Victorians looked on corrugated iron as a marvel of the industrial age.

Usually you find these huts on their own – if you needed more space, the flat-pack building firms like Boulton & Paul of Norwich or Samuel Taylor of Birmingham could supply something larger. But here on the Severn Valley Railway at Highley there are a couple, close together, painted in GWR colours, like the little platform shelter I posted recently on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway at Hailes. Most of them are admirable examples of the way heritage railways find old, worn-out structures, restore them, and give them new life.

People used to look down on corrugated iron structures, especially small ones like this. ‘It’s just a tin hut’, they’d say. ‘What’s so special about that?’ But they were economical, readily available, easier to put up than a chest of drawers from IKEA, long-lasting, and simple to customize with a coat of paint in your railway’s livery. These days, more people appreciate these qualities of corrugated iron, and more and more I notice garages, sheds, and fences in the gardens of private houses, even in the cosseted Cotswolds where I live, many of them put there by people who haven’t necessarily chosen this material because it’s cheap. From a lamp hut to a barn for your 4 x 4, this Victorian wonder material is quietly but effectively doing its job.

Bishops Castle, Shropshire

Shop prop

This photograph was taken through a shop window in the small town of Bishops Castle in Shropshire. It’s a detail that opens up a whole aspect of shop design that most people don’t notice: how to hold up the building’s structure when almost the whole of the ground floor is glazed. Back in the Georgian period and before, shop windows were relatively small, and this wasn’t such a big problem. In the Regency period, windows got larger, and shops with rows of Classical columns became fashionable, creating a facade that looked a bit like an ancient Greek temple (there’s a detail of such a row of columns on a shop in Oxford here).

By the mid-Victorian period, however, shopkeepers were going for still larger windows, so that the shop front became made up of little but glass and glazing bars. And so it became the thing to prop up the front of the building with columns on the inside, just far enough from the glass to allow the window display to overlap them and make them disappear. Since the columns weren’t meant to be noticed, they are often quite plain, and these days end up being painted white, so that they blend quietly into any window display.

It’s the top of one these internal columns that is the subject of my photograph. But as you can see, the people who made this example weren’t content with a plain column. On the contrary, it’s very ornate, with a spiral band running up the body of the column and a decorative capital at the top. The capital isn’t from the standard range of Classical design (it’s not Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian) but is made up of a combination of standard motifs – scrolls, stylised leaves, a fleur de lys – combined together to created a design that a Victorian builder might simply have labelled ‘fancy’. ‘We could do a plain column, sir, but for a stylish shop like yours, I’d recommend the fancy.’ And with the client’s approval, the builder would order up a set of fancy columns from an iron foundry and the shopkeeper would be proud to have the latest thing in elegant shopfitting.

Such columns were not uncommon. I have seen similar, but not identical ones in the Kirkgate Market in Leeds, propping up the roofs of cast-iron stalls. Kirkgate Market was put up in 1901–1904, and I’d not be surprised if this column was of a similar date. It was still propping up the shop a couple of years ago, when I passed by and took my picture through the window, much to the surprise of the other pedestrians on the street, who, no doubt, had not seen this bit of architect’s or ironworker’s fancy.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Hurrah for Jesse Boot!

When searching among my Ludlow pictures a couple of days ago, I came across this one, the mark of one of the most familiar names on the UK High Street. Jesse Boot was an exemplary businessmen of the 19th century. In an age of quack medicine and dodgy ingredients, he sought to sell only pharmaceuticals that were made of pure ingredients and that had the effect that was claimed for them. In a period when it was common for bosses not to care about staff conditions and wellbeing, he made these things a priority. At a time when many were driven (as when are people not?) to accumulate a huge fortune and use it for selfish ends, he gave away vast sums on education and workers’ welfare. He worked hard, and drove himself so hard that he risked seriously damaging his health – but was saved by a forced holiday…on which he managed to meet Florence, the love of his life, who became equally influential in the business they built together.

Among the many things, it is said, that Jesse did was to design his company’s logo, the distinctive wordmark with ‘Boot’s’ in a flowing script, usually enclosed in an oval. That symbol, dating from 1883, is recognised all over the country. Like any good logo, it has been used everywhere, from invoices to shop signs, advertisements to paper bags. Here it is below the window of a Boot’s premises in Ludlow, made, for a change, in mosaic. This method was often used to attach the shop name indelibly to an entrance, on the ground in front of the door. Here it works just as well on the narrow strip (the stall riser, in archi-speak) beneath the window. Making a sign of such durable materials, and ones needing a craftsman and plenty of time to produce, is a testimony to the way companies like Boot’s took a long view of their business. A shop with a sign like this was not going to be here today but gone tomorrow. Nor was it gong to reinvent itself every five minutes, in the way businesses have wanted to do more recently. Boot’s developed, to be sure, but it was still Boot’s. And to millions of shoppers, sick and healthy alike, that spoke volumes.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Building out of the box

No apologies in these travel-restricted times for going back to my archive once again to look at another place I’ve posted about a few times before: Ludlow, a small town with enough food shops and decent restaurants to satisfy the hungriest of visitors, and about 500 listed buildings as well. This time it’s the Angel, a building on Broad Street (where virtually every building is listed and quite a few, like this one, are timber-framed magpie structures from the 17th century or thereabouts. This one is 17th century too. It is basically a wooden box-framed building and has plenty of carved and enriched bits of old timber in it to interest even the most casual building-fancier.

But in many ways the stand-out feature is among the later modifications. The facade boasts a number of 18th- and 19th-century sash windows that would make any purist of early timber-framed buildings wince. Strictly, a building like this should have casement windows, not sashes.* But if my head questioned their presence here, my heart was won over by the two first-floor oriel windows, semi-circular and resting on rather Georgian-looking moulded bases, topped with leaded roofs, and sporting sets of sash windows that are curved to fit the rounded shape.

Adding features like this must have taken a lot of effort and skill – attaching the weighty structure to the timber frame, forming the bases, and doing the joinery to make the curved sashes. The result was a front that looked perhaps a little incongruous, but spoke of the owner’s awareness of current fashion, and of a desire to make the interior lighter and perhaps more airy. I’ll settle for that.†

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* Sash windows came in during the late-17th century, but this would be a precocious provincial building if it had them installed originally.

† The building has had various uses over the years. I think it is currently a restaurant, although an online search also reveals a hairdressers at the same address. One hopes that these businesses will survive the current troubled times.