Sudbury, Suffolk

Corn Exchange, book exchange

This is one of those jaw-dropping buildings that constantly stop me in my tracks as I walk around English towns. A corn exchange was a major centre for a country town and an important adjunct to a market. Corn exchanges are often imposing buildings, symbols both of civic pride and rural productivity. They have carvings of reapers or goddess like Flora on them, big doorways so that you can get in and out with ease and sacks, and are designed to be both landmarks and useful.

This one was built in the 1840s and makes its mark with a giant order, a tall door and windows, and the requisite corn-related decoration: sheaves of corn at the top of each column and a group of resting harvesters in the centre of the parapet. No doubt for quite a bit of the last century it was still a much-used building and a local hub – read Adrian Bell’s classic book Corduroy (and the sequels Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree*) for accounts of English farming in the interwar period, in Suffolk especially, to get the idea of how important this business was. But by the 1960s, this building was ‘just’ a landmark, and no longer used for its original purpose. It was saved from demolition thanks to a local campaign and is now the town’s library.† A nice example of creative reuse.

- - - - -

* These gentle, reflective books about country life have been reprinted and can also be found in wonderful early Penguin editions. Maybe Bell made country life a bit gentler and more idyllic than it really was (though it’s not always easy for the young farmer whose life they chronicle) but there is much to like in them, I find, and much to learn. If I’m perhaps a little indulgent towards the generally rosy picture of country life they paint, maybe it’s because they describe life on the land in a period when my own father was a farm worker, somewhat to the north of Bell’s territory, on the Lincolnshire Wolds.

† Now libraries themselves are under threat. But I hope Sudbury can sustain one, and sustain this outstanding building.

Sudbury, Suffolk

Craftwork

Look up. People are always telling me to do it. I am always telling people to do it. Look up above the tree line, at church towers, above the doors of houses, above shop windows. You often see something unexpected and rewarding. So when a splash of colour caught my eye above the modern shops of North Street in Sudbury I looked up and saw this: a bit of 1870s Arts and Crafts design that can still take your breath away about 140 years after it was built.

I’ve called it Arts and Crafts because it demonstrates so many crafts in such a small space: colourful floral mosaic, incised plasterwork, stained glass, ornate metalwork (those floral finials that tops the little hipped roofs of the oriels), and the use of neat openwork ridge tiles. All of this is set within a strong design, with the Tudoresque timber framing, the pair of tall, narrow oriels (topped and tailed with hipped roofs and plastered undersides), and the russet roof. It’s an impressive piece of work and in a different league from the upper fronts of so many shops, where you find a bit of brick wall and a couple of sash windows if you’re lucky. I don’t know who commissioned this facade or what business was first housed beneath these mosaic flowers and Tudorish windows, but it’s good to see such care being lavished on so small a frontage back in 1876.

Although the Arts and Crafts movement is often said to have got into full swing in the 1880s, William Morris’s firm was in full swing by the 1860s, and Morris and his colleagues founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. Morris’s work, the interest in design fostered by the embryonic Victoria and Albert Museum, and, above all, the kind of ‘Free Tudor’ architecture of Norman Shaw (as in is famous 1860s house, Cragside), set the tone. So, if we’re surprised by the restrained richness of this facade, we should’t be surprised at the date, the curvaceous numerals of which are incorporated into the mosaic. This kind of design was in the air.