Bristol and beyond

Small but perfectly formed

Before I return to regular posting, I would like to offer my readers one more selection of past posts, to celebrate this blog's tenth anniversary. This, time, I've chosen a handful of very small buildings. This is in part a reminder that, over the past decade, the English Buildings blog has taken pride in noticing very small structures that many people pass by without a thought. It's also, in a way, a tribute to the great architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner and the colleagues with whom he worked. A very long time ago I bought my first volume in his Buildings of England series: it was Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds, and I added it to my shelves shortly after it came out, in the 1970s. In fact, it was one of the volumes not actually written by Pevsner – the great man was getting old and realised that the only way to complete the series was to enlist some help. So the Gloucestershire volumes were written by local expert David Verey. Be that as it may, they followed Pevsner's lead in including many small buildings among the more obvious churches and big houses.* I was made aware of this when I looked up the entry on a place I knew to find that the most unassuming building of all – a privy – had been singled out for notice. I learned something that day, that even the most modest structure could be worth looking at. I have tried to keep that in mind ever since. So here are five of my posts on small buildings, easy to miss but very memorable...

A public lavatory in Bristol

A Turkish bath in London

A fountain in Warwickshire

A lock-up near Oxford

A churchyard seat in Herefordshire.

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* Now that revised editions of the Pevsner volumes are appearing, with more and larger pages allocated to each county, more and more of these small buildings are included, and a good thing too.

Bishopsgate Churchyard, London

Desirable alien (1)

The Ottoman architects of Turkey, famous the world over for vast domed mosques covered in polychrome tiles, were also masters of small buildings. Little pavilions and kiosks, intricately carved tombs, structures sheltering fountains – all, in years gone by, have been given the kind of ornate treatment that in Europe is more often reserved for a place of worship or for the most exclusive of shops.

It’s a wonderful shock, therefore, to come across this tiny late-19th century Turkish pavilion in a paved courtyard in the City. It began life as part of a Turkish bath with a design that wonderfully put the fashion of the time for tile and terracotta decoration to a use foreign to London but apt for the building’s purpose. Thanks to committed supporters, the structure has survived against all the odds, in the face of changing bathing tastes, the Blitz, and office developers. It now forms one of the most memorable settings for a restaurant in central London.

Almost completely hemmed in by the glass-and-steel modernism of the late-20th century, this Turkish pavilion is a brilliant and welcome blast from the past. Thanks to colourful tiles, ornate terracotta, and stained-glass windows, it more than holds its own in its rather bleak setting, and is clearly something of an oasis – it was full of City gents getting outside a morning coffee when I passed by.

There are more photographs of this wonderful little building in More London Peculiars by Peter Ashley, of Unmitigated England.