Stanway, Gloucestershire

In I go? 

In spite of the fact that it has a handful of houses and a charming but over-restored church, the Cotswold village of Stanway is one of the richest sources of architectural enjoyment for miles around. Glorious Stanway House, J M Barrie’s wooden cricket pavilion, my favourite war memorial, and a length of churchyard wall of more than usual antiquarian interest are just a few of the highlights.* Here’s another, and one of the best: the gatehouse to Stanway House.

This 17th-century stunner, probably dating to the 1630s, is built in the rich ashlar, golden verging on orange, of the rest of the village. It displays that blend of old and new styles that appears so often in the early-17th century – Tudorish bay windows, ornate shaped gables, and a more Stuart-looking Classical door surround; the door opening itself has another Tudorish feature, the flattened four-centred arch, and above it are Tudor-looking roses in the frieze.

The finials to the gables are scallop shells, which also appear elsewhere on the building – on the wall above the twin columns that flank the doorway, for example. These shells are the badge of the Tracy family, who were leasing the big house from Tewkesbury Abbey at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and bought it when the abbey closed.

This gatehouse has enough of the Classical about it to have been attributed to the architect Inigo Jones in the past. However these days historians, aware of the very severe and correct Classicism of Jones’s designs for the Banqueting House in Whitehall and the Queen’s House in Greenwich, are apt to reject this attribution.† A more likely designer, says Pevsner, is Timothy Strong, who worked on the Canterbury Quad at St John’s College, Oxford. Whoever did the design, the gatehouse beautifully enhances the corner where it stands, its stone glowing in the winter sun.

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* I am fortunate to live only a few miles from Stanway. This, as well as the sheer interest of the place, accounts for its appearance on this blog five or six times. No apology, I think, is necessary.

† Fifty years ago, there was a tendency to attribute every other 17th-century building to Jones. Now scholars are much more circumspect.

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.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The iceman's cousin

This is a brief pendant to the previous post about a terrace in Bath and its keystones carved in the form of icemen. A correspondent pointed out that the exuberant carved decoration on the Bath terrace might well be an expression of impatience with the austere classicism of much Georgian architecture, an exercise in lightening up and putting on the frills. I think that rings true. Here is another bit of ornament in a non-classical, but equally unexpected, context.

On a recent Cotswold walk a friend and I crossed a field on a downhill stretch towards a familiar road and missed the proper footpath by a couple of hundred yards, arriving roughly where we wanted to be but by a different, unofficial route. As we did so, we passed a tiny stone building of unknown purpose. The only remarkable thing about it was this rather fine date stone, complete with a mask that is surely, if I'm right in seeing icicles in the beard, a distant modern cousin of the Bath icemen. Whoever he is, he was a pleasant surprise.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Green thoughts in a green shade

The other night I and a small group of neighbours went to visit a local water mill that has been beautifully restored. While I was walking around the outside as the evening light faded, I noticed this shed, and especially its roof, which is covered with corrugated iron – regular readers will know this is one of my favourite materials. Whether by accident or design, the corrugated covering of this roof has become home to a green carpet of moss, grass, and other plants. An informal green roof is the result.

Green roofs are quite fashionable these days. Their construction usually involves several layers of different materials to protect the roof structure from vapour, water, and roots, as well as a substrate in which to grow the plants. This one, as far as I can see, is just a sheet of corrugated metal with plants growing on it – hence my use of the word ‘informal’. It’s not going to last for ever, but this roof with its covering of greenery is a happy addition to this workshop down a secluded lane surrounded and shaded by trees.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The near pavilions

It is a winter’s afternoon just before the recent snow and the sun is about to drop down behind the nearby hill. It’s quiet, but not silent: somewhere not far away there’s the sound of a quad bike ticking over and beyond the trees some guns are at their work – a shot cracks through the cold air every minute or two. Parkland – old trees, iron railings, grass cropped by sheep – stretches behind me towards the golden-stone Stanway House next to its church, barn, and cluster of cottages.

But I have my back to all that, and I’m focussing on this unusual building, the wooden cricket pavilion built for the author J M Barrie, who regularly stayed at Stanway House in the 1920s. It (and a nearby tennis pavilion) was the work of a local builder, John Oakey, who provided walls of larch poles and a roof of thatch. Neither of these materials is typical of the Cotswolds and coming on this odd structure in this limestone country pulls one up short. But in a surprising Cotswold touch, the whole thing rests on staddle stones, those mushroom-shaped objects originally meant to support granaries, lifting them off the ground to deter vermin. These days staddle stones are more often seen lining people’s drives or keeping cars off grass verges, so it’s good to have this reminder of their original purpose.

During the summers Barrie spent at Stanway, many literary and artistic friends came to stay too, and cricket teams may have included such luminaries as H G Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Australian composer Percy Grainger also came to stay and one wonders whether, in between expeditions collecting folk songs, Grainger presided over some kind of amateur ashes contest. It’s a beautiful setting for an innings, even for an innings defeat…

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Jack and Percy

Yes, those of you who saw my previous post about the notices will probably have guessed that it was Jack in the Green who arrived yesterday, May Day, to mark the season with Morris dancing and other celebrations. There’s a photograph of Jack below, walking through Winchombe on his way to morning coffee. He appeared together with a group who make it their business around these parts to mark the stages of the year, an enterprise I admire greatly. This weekend of celebrations had an additional and unexpected pleasure, which provided a surprising link with another English building. During the afternoon of 1 May, Gwilym Davies gave a fascinating talk about some of the area’s traditional songs. The talk centred on the colourful figure of the Australian composer Percy Grainger, who was famous not only for writing his own music and for arranging (or ‘dishing up’, as he put it) the music of others in new, fresh forms, but also for travelling around collecting folk songs, which he might then ‘dish up’ in their turn. Grainger both wrote these songs down and recorded them on his wax-cylinder phonograph, still new technology in the early 1900s. Some of these songs would be quite lost today if Grainger (or colleagues such as Ralph Vaughan Williams) had not captured them on paper or wax.

In 1907, Grainger came to Gloucestershire and stayed at Stanway House, then the home of Lady Elcho, who threw interesting and rather arty house parties where one might come across the likes of J M Barrie or John Singer Sargent. Grainger travelled a few miles down the road to Winchcombe, where he visited the town’s workhouse and recorded several of the inmates singing their favourite songs. It was fascinating to hear some of Grainger’s recordings, crackly and indistinct but moving nonetheless, and to imagine him and his friends at Stanway, this golden house of the 16th and 17th centuries with its Cotswold stone gables and giant five-sided bay window. At Stanway there is also a terrific gatehouse of the 1630s, visible to the right of the photograph. And a medieval barn. And a cricket pavilion built for J M Barrie. And a water garden with the world's tallest gravity-fed fountain. I like to think of Percy Grainger performing one of his favourite tricks, hurling a tennis ball into the air over a house, and running round the back to catch it. But the tall gables of Stanway House would probably have defeated him.

Jack in the Green, Winchcombe

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Remember them

Here are last year's snows on my favourite war memorial, not far from where I live. The 1920 bronze statue of St George and the Dragon is by Alexander Fisher, the column was designed by Sir Philip Stott, architect-squire of the nearby village of Stanton, and the lettering on the memorial is by Eric Gill. The memorial is wonderfully sited at a junction as the road begins to rise up the hill, past Stanway's few stone and thatched cottages, and on towards Stow on the Wold. Its sculpture, arresting in form and beautiful in detail, does its job well: makes us pause, and look, and remember. It's a work of real quality, and that is, after all, what those who died in war deserve.
Thanks to Zoë, who took the evocative photograph while I scraped the white stuff off the car.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Stanway is a magical corner of the Cotswolds. A stone manor house, mostly of the 16th and 17th centuries stands hard by an ornate gatehouse, a medieval tithe barn, a parish church, and a small group of cottages. Nearby is a thatched cricket pavilion, built for the author Sir James Barrie, who was a frequent visitor to the big house. The parish church was restored, heavily, twice, once in the 1790s and once in the 1890s, so a lot of the original medieval church has been swept away.

Some of the sweepings found their way into this churchyard wall, a charming bit of recycling. What can be seen here are lots of fragments of Norman stonework, various bits of moulding, some carved foliage of the 13th century, and a chunk of a figure from the early-14th century. Oh, and a stone coffin, performing the role of a kind of shelf.

One can imagine the zealous restorer of the 1890s – actually the then vicar, the Rev Bullock-Webster, feeling slightly sheepish about having run around the building like a bullock in a china shop, and getting his builder to reuse some of the bits he’d thrown out by putting them in the churchyard wall. If only more of the most enthusiastic Victorian church restorers had done the same.