Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

No madding crowd

Yes, this is something you don’t often see on this blog: a really famous building. It’s Shakespeare’s birthplace, the house in Stratford that in normal times attracts crowds inside and out. But as we were emerging out of lockdown last month, Stratford was still quiet and I took the opportunity to take a photograph of the building without anyone standing in front of it. It’s not known for sure how long this house has stood here, but we do know that John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was living here by 1552, when he was fined for leaving a midden heap (dumping trash, you might say) in the street outside. Not an auspicious entry into the historical record, but Shakespeare senior rose to prominence in Stratford-upon-Avon. A dealer in wool and hides and a maker of gloves, he was an alderman and spent a period as the town’s High Bailiff.

William Shakespeare inherited the house in 1601, by which time he was a successful playwright in London with his own house in his home town. So he leased the house to tenants. By the early-19th century, there were no surviving direct descendants of the dramatist, and the house fell into disrepair and was partly refaced in brick. When it came on the market in 1849, P. T. Barnum announced that he wanted to buy it, take it apart, and rebuild it in America. This was the spur that the British admirers of Shakespeare needed to buy the house themselves and preserve it. They raised the money, and repaired and refaced the building so that it looked much more like its 16th-century self.

At the same time, the second half of the 19th century saw a revaluation of Shakespeare as a writer. New editions of his works came out, a Shakespeare festival was started in Stratford, and a theatre was built to put on the plays. Shakespeare turned into a kind of national symbol (or at least into a symbol of England’s outstanding achievements in the arts), and Stratford attracted visitors from all over the world. Insofar as the street was quiet the other day, I welcomed the fact that the crowds of Shakespearian pilgrims were not visiting Stratford. But the bustle of the town in normal times, with its mixture of shoppers, theatre-goers, students, culture tourists, and even the odd literary scholar, cannot be too far from the diverse crowd that attended the plays in London’s Globe theatre in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Let’s hope they can return soon.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Wise foolery

There’s something satisfying about the fact that the Stratford-upon-Avon branch of W. H. Smith, newsagents, stationers and booksellers, should be housed in a timber-framed building that looks very much at home in this town of famous timber-framed structures. But this shop isn’t one of the celebrated ancient buildings of Stratford (Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Harvard House, Hall’s Croft, and the rest): it’s only about one hundred years old. So what’s the story?

In the early-20th century, W. H. Smith had its own Estates Department, led by the architect Frank C. Bayliss, which designed and developed new shops, refurbished old ones, and was responsible for such things as lighting, heating, and decoration.* By the early-1920s, when the Stratford shop was built, they’d developed a house style, with shopfronts in light oak, with many small panes of glass, classic Roman lettering (designed by Eric Gill) for the signage, and the frequent use of colourful tiling. The red ‘newsboy’ hanging sign (the work of Septimus Scott) was ubiquitous and the half-timbered look was often employed for the upper floors of the building. The 1920s were a busy time for Bayliss, so he often commissioned local architects to work on specific branches. The firm of Osborn, Pemberton and White was responsible for this one and they followed the house style.§

Smith’s weren’t new to Stratford when they built this shop. In fact they had occupied the property next door, a building once home to Shakespeare’s daughter Judith, before they moved to these larger premises. The architects added a couple of appropriate touches that have survived recent modifications to the frontage.† A panel above the shop sign contains a quotation from Shakespeare’s early play Titus Andronicus: ‘Come and take choice of all my library and so beguile thy sorrow’ – spot on for Stratford, of course, but also used by the company on their Kingsway branch in London. William Henry Smith, the man who built up the business in the 19th century using the profits he made from station bookstalls, was on a mission to sell good literature to the masses; his company produced pioneering cheap editions of literary classics and liked literary quotations – the branch in my home town, Cheltenham, used to have a line of Wordsworth on the shop front. The other unusual touch is provided by the carved heads on the consoles (the brackets at either end of the shop sign). One, the head of a jester (below), feels just right for the town of Shakespeare, whose plays often include a jester or ‘fool’. Shakespeare’s fools generally prove wiser than the kings, queens, and aristocrats that they serve. In this age of anonymous, plastic-fronted retailing, W. H. Smith’s are wise to have preserved shops such as this.

* I’m indebted for my information on the history of W. H. Smith’s shops to Kathryn A. Morrison’s excellent book, English Shops and Shopping (Yale University Press, 2003).

§ The best surviving example of this house style is the branch at Newtown, Powys, technically outside the scope of this English Buildings blog, but it’s so outstanding that one of these days I’ll have to post it anyway.

† The sign uses Smith’s current letterform, and I think there would originally have been small panes of glass lower down the window too.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

For all time

As Shakespeare is being widely celebrated at the moment, here's a brief Shakespearean interlude. It's a terracotta panel from the Old Bank in Stratford-upon-Avon, a building of 1883 designed by Martin and Harris. The facade is festooned with scenes from the work of Stratford's most famous son. All the sculpture on the bank was produced by Samuel Barfield of Leicester.

The panel in my photograph (click on it to enlarge it) shows scenes from four of the plays, from left to right: As You Like It (with people of the Forest of Arden on the left, presumably); Two Gentlemen of Verona; A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bottom with the ass's head); and Twelfth Night (Andrew Aguecheek and Viola, dressed as a man, nearly coming to blows). Culture as the common currency of Victorian England. Lovely.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Keeping up appearances

On a recent visit to Stratford I was struck by this substantial town house. The street front is built in a Gothic style, but we’re not in the realm of cathedral Gothic here – this is the fancy, rather feminine style popular in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and often dubbed Gothick. Just the kind of facade that a prosperous townsperson would like to build in order to show they are up-to-date, fashionable, and sophisticated. And a very far cry from what then, even more than now, was the prevailing architectural style in the town – the timber-framed vernacular.

But for all their sophistication, this fashionable householder apparently did not have funds enough for a full rebuild. This is how the house looks when we step back a little and take in the side:


It's as timber-framed and old-world as the next one in Church Street, Stratford. Clearly, no one was fooling anyone with this partial makeover. The side wall of the building is highly visible from the street, and would have been more so when there was no vegetation to hide the join. With its curvaceous ogee-framed windows, battlements, and columned doorway abutting on to a Tudor or late-Medieval structure, it’s a bit of a joke, it’s true. But jokes aren’t all bad.

Clifford Chambers, Warwickshire

Place in the sun

Clifford Manor is at one end of the main street of a village nor far from Stratford-upon-Avon. A timber-framed house of the 15th or 16th century on the site was remodelled in 1903–9, but this building was badly damaged in a fire in 1918. Edwin Lutyens was called in to repair the house, and he and Gertrude Jekyll are also said to be responsible for the gardens.

I don’t know how much of the house as it stands today is Lutyens’ work, but this façade is certainly something he could have designed, taking the familiar English country-house look and giving it individuality with features such as the oeils de boeuf and small triangular pediment.

This house is not open to the public, so I felt privileged to get a glimpse of it. Lutyens designed and modified a lot of country houses, but so many of them are tucked away down long drives or hidden by trees. It’s good that this one, its bricks glowing in the late-afternoon sun, forms such a visual asset to its quiet village of timber-framed and brick houses.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Another time, another place

It may look like a rusty old shipping container, but it’s actually the Courtyard Theatre, the temporary home of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and the building that the company occupies while the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre across the road is being rebuilt. When I first saw it, I didn’t think it was going to be my sort of building. Although I rather like rusty old corrugated iron barns, this ugly duckling seemed at first sight a bit too industrial for Stratford’s swan-haunted riverside, too harsh for its cottage neighbours.

But the Courtyard Theatre has grown on me. It’s not just like I admire the warm tones of its rusty ridges as they glow in the sun; not only that I appreciate the rightness of a temporary metal building on the site of the RSC’s former ‘experimental’ space, The Other Place. I’ve also discovered the qualities of the interior, a compact and friendly theatrical arena that seems to inspire those who perform in it. A few weeks ago at the Courtyard I enjoyed hugely the combined RSC/Baxter Theatre Centre production of The Tempest. The other night I was entertained by As You Like It.

The entire audience is close to the stage, and the design of the interior gives plenty of opportunities for the actors to enter and exit between the seats, bringing players and spectators still closer together. And the whole space is warm and, for such a modern, box-like building, curiously responsive, housing equally happily As You Like It’s doom-laden, almost oppressive early scenes, and its cheerful, life-enhancing conclusion.

In the interval of The Tempest, various members of the audience were speculating about what would happen to this temporary building when the main theatre comes back into use towards the end of next year. I got the impression that most of them – including some local people who had to live with its industrial-looking exterior – rather hoped it would stay.