Stamford, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire Tuscan

‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is plain and empty and about as simple as you can get, with a ‘dentil course’, widely spaced, either made up of the ends of supporting timbers or suggesting their presence.

Why such plain Tuscan architecture for a library? Not, I thought, in some kind of tribute to great Tuscan poets (Dante and Petrarch, for example). But when I researched the building, I found that it didn’t start life as a library at all. What you can see in the photograph was originally the entrance to a market and shambles,* built to designs by local architect William Daniel Legg† in 1804–8 and converted to make the front of a library in 1906. Those windows and the walls that surround them are additions of the latter phase.

So the Tuscan portico was no doubt a simple and relatively inexpensive choice to create a strong statement at the market entrance – an entrance that’s easy to see from a distance among the shops that surround it. It stands out, while providing a generous central span to allow not only people but also goods to pass in and out with ease.There’s no fancy ornament to get damaged by barrows or carts, just good plain building. It’s a landmark on the street. And now it’s a library, its stand-out design is still valuable in what I’m sure is a much valued community asset.

- - - - -

* A shambles, in this sense, is a row of stalls selling meat, or a row of butchers’ shops often built on the site of former market stalls.

† Casewick Hall, the stables of Panton Hall, and Vale House in Stamford itself are among Legg’s Lincolnshire works. He also designed some gate lodges for Burghley House near Stamford.

Stamford, Lincolnshire

A view of a town

I have recently been watching an old television series called Six English Towns, written and presented by the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor. This was a formative series for me when it first came out in the 1970s – it must have been one of the first things that made me look closely at the buildings around me.* It’s wonderful that these old programmes are available again, and I intended to say more about them.

Clifton-Taylor covers some of my favourite towns, and a lot of the buildings he describes are still there. Stamford in Lincolnshire is a particular favourite: a limestone town of extraordinary grace, once on the busy A1 road but now bypassed – and still bustling and thriving in spite of now standing to one side of this arterial north-south route.

Clifton-Taylor says a lot about stone, and a lot about the Georgian houses and other buildings in Stamford built of this material. One thing he noticed was the number of variations on the carved keystones above windows: the town really is an exhibition of the art of the keystone carver. Looking through my own photographs, one example struck me in particular: Stamford’s Town Hall, a building of the 1770s.

At first glance, this building, with its rows of sash windows, its rusticated ground floor, its low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, could be a grand Georgian town house. But the coat of arms at the top gives it away. The architect isn’t known fort certain but it may have been Henry Tatam, a local cabinet-maker who also designed buildings. The window surrounds (detail at the top of this post) don’t protrude very much, although the lasts-afternoon sun that shone when I took my photograph does its best to catch the surface variations on the facade. The sun also catches the decoration around the upper windows – the pattern of rosettes and linear forms that give these windows their elegant character. This pattern is taken up in both the keystones and the cornice, giving the decorative scheme its character – a sense of unity or repetitiveness, as you wish. The walls themselves, with their very tightly jointed stonework of the kind common in Stamford, set all this off well.

Clifton-Taylor mentions this building in his film, and shows many others, often just as interesting. His programmes are good old-fashioned TV† – no gimmicks, just a man talking about what he likes for half an hour in an informative way – and well worth watching. 

Alec Clifton-Taylor, Six English Towns: Stamford

- - -

*There were a further two series, so he covered 18 towns in all, and he brought out books to accompany each series too.

†Very much of their time, these programmes show a middle-class, rather schoolmasterly Englishman unglamorously talking to camera – and showing off the buildings he discusses with relevant, informative footage. The sort of thing that’s sneered at too often as paternalistic, like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (another formative series for me). One shouldn’t let prejudice get in the way of their genuine insights.

Hingham, Norfolk

Hunting the hart

Spotting my recent posts on unusual inn signs, and anticipating that I’d soon be moving on to post a three-dimensional sign, Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England sent me this picture of the White Hart at Hingham. Hingham is known for its fine collection of Georgian houses, built apparently when local gentry moved in to reduce their reliance on the area’s inadequate roads during the winter, giving them elegant town houses and Hingham itself the nickname ‘Little London’. The White Hart sign is a real winner, a visual asset where a conventional hanging sign, or maybe a row of wooden letters attached to the wall, would have been expected. I like the way that Peter’s photograph catches the beast as if it is just becoming aware of the pursuing hunter – a hunter equipped of course with a weapon no more deadly than a Leica.

When not wielding his Leica, incidentally, Peter Ashley has had his paintbrushes out. The result is a rather lovely capriccio depicting a selection of the most notable buildings in the town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. It’s an artful image, containing lovely examples of architecture from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, plus a number of picturesque inclusions, from a railway train (steam-hauled, naturally) to street furniture. Prints of the image have been made and some of the proceeds from their sale will go to the Stamford Civic Society. You can find out more about the prints here and there’s a short film about them here.

Peter Ashley, Unmitigated Stamford