Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

 

Continuity or change?

The small riverside town of Upton-on-Severn has one of those traditional high streets that has evolved over the years to meet local needs, with apparently few incursions in the form of multiple retailers or big brands. You’ll find early-19th century buildings (sometimes with Venetian windows above), Victorian shop fronts, and a scattering of Edwardian or later gilded shop signs, preserved against the odds. Here’s one that’s small and quite easy to miss. It is above the door of one of the few ‘big names’ in Upton, a branch of Boot’s. It’s a pharmacy now and clearly was in 1881, when John Gibbs put up his plate in this very building.

Were pharmacists in the 1880s still stamping out pills by hand using little brass moulds and pouring our lotions and tinctures from large glass carboys? I’m not sure, but if they weren’t, that time could not have been long past. Pharmacists still have to be well qualified of course, but these days the medicines are usually manufactured elsewhere and packaged in blister packs. The gilded lettering of Mr Gibbs’s sign certainly harks back to the earlier era. It’s shiny but not flashy – simple, clear capitals that have none of the curls and elaborations of other Victorian signs. The effect must have been traditional and reassuring even in the 19th century.

And of course, it’s personal. When this sign was made, local people would have known the pharmacist and would have spoken of ‘Going to see Mr Gibbs,’ for some advice and a remedy. Today, the premises bear the name of the best known high street chemist. But it’s still not impossible that the people of this small town know the people who work here, and speak of them by name, and think of them differently from those who live in a big town and speak simply of ‘going to Boot’s’ to pick up their prescription. I don’t know this to be the case, but there’s the possibility of such a connection and continuity, reflected by the gilded lettering of this sign. If it’s there, it’s worth hanging on to.

Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire

Signs that shine

The Worcestershire town of Upton-on-Severn has quite a few old shop fronts, and a point has been made recently of preserving a number of these – and even revealing the signs of old businesses, long gone but still essential and picturesque bits of the place’s history. So although this former brach of the Worcester New Co-operative Society is a Co-op no more, its sign still shines above its frontage. These gilded letters on a black background are typical of the kind of thing shopkeepers were using in the late-19th and early-20th century to advertise their businesses, and the way the lettering has been managed to get everything into the available space is typical in its ingenuity too. The letterform is quite narrow (that was probably the standard style for this company) but extra economy of space has been achieved with the diagonal words, which are visually effective and give the sign a feeling of dynamism and verve. Even the abbreviation of Society to ‘Socy’, with its superscript Y and little dot, has been handled with some flair.

Beneath the sign the rest of the frontage is quite plain, with big windows and central lobby. Even this has been designed and made with care – look at the fluted pilaster on the left, and the little turned capitals atop the slender shafts. The main job of the shop front, though, is to show off the goods – whether the hams and cheeses of yore or the lampshades and vases of today – and to draw us in through that set-back central doorway. And whether we enter or pass by, both the goods and that glittering sign are bound to make an impression on the retina.

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There’s another post on a shop sign in this town here.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Great minds…

The other night I was giving a talk about the history of the high street in Britain, illustrated with pictures of shops and shop fronts down the ages. After the talk, which was in Gloucestershire close to the border with Worcestershire, a member of the audience asked me if I’d seen the recently revealed old sign above a shop in Upton on Severn, not far away. She liked it, and thought I would too. As it happened, just a few weeks earlier, I had seen it and admired it. Great minds think alike.

The shop is now Sweet Daisy, an “old-fashioned” confectionery shop, with rows of jars containing sweet things. But the proprietors, or the owners of the building if they are different, have done a fine thing, and left the rather good old sign of a long-gone firm, the London Meat Company, exposed, it having been covered up for years as other businesses had occupied the building. The bold gold capital letters of the old Meat Company are an asset to the street. The sign still looks good surrounded by the bright red of the shop front, even if they’re not perhaps as bright and shiny as they were in their heyday. Which was when? I’d imagine the early-20th century, although the letters could be Victorian. The strips of green tiles with stylized flowers on them look Art Nouveau,* so perhaps the shop front and sign were done around 1900. Whatever its age, thank you Sweet Daisy for leaving the sign visible. No doubt its helps draw in the curious and paradoxically encourages the purchase of barley sugar, sherbet pips, humbugs, rhubarb and custard, Scottish tablet, and so on and on…

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*Which I omitted to photograph in close-up. Next time I’m passing…

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Revisiting: Illuminating globe

There are people (you know who you are) who have been reading this blog since before April 2008, when I posted the first of several pieces about the Worcestershire town of Upton on Severn and focused on its two memorable garages, one an art deco surprise, the other in a converted chapel. Those with sharp eyes would have noticed that in my original picture of Shipp’s, the second garage, there was a rather old petrol pump, topped with one of those distinctive globes that petrol companies once used to advertise their wares. I think it was a Cleveland Discoll pump globe but for some reason I didn’t photograph it in close-up. I’m sorry I didn’t, because it has gone now. The garage is happily still there, though, and they’ve replaced the old globe with a shiny white and red Shell one. When I passed it the other day I didn’t make the same mistake and got the camera out right away.

The Shell oil company adopted their scallop shell symbol back in 1904, having tried a mussel previously. The earliest of the company’s pump-top globes were literally and simply globe-shaped – they introduced shell-shaped globes in 1929. They made various designs, with changes to the exact shape of the scallop and legends advertising ‘Shell Derv’, ’Super Shell’, and ‘Shell Diesoline’, as well as the plain and simple ‘Shell’ type. This example in Upton looks to be one of the kind introduced in the early 1950s. There’s more information about Shell globes, together with much more fascinating material about old garages, on the excellent Vintage Garage site, here. You can be sure of that.

Deddington, Oxfordshire

This is the creature that was never seen…

Looking rather soulfully down at potential customers is this three-dimensional sign on the Unicorn Inn in the Oxfordshire town of Deddington. I’m kicking myself for not having noticed it before, as it’s an appealing sign. But perhaps these days it’s not as affective an eye-catcher as it was – driving past, you are apt to be dodging other vehicles in the town’s busy market place, which is made narrow by parked cars. Walking along the pavement, the sign is easy to miss as you pass, being tucked on its ledge, its white body set against the pale background of the wall behind.

When you do see it, though, it’s arresting, the golden bits helping its white body to stand out against the white wall, and it’s one of those bits of folk art that’s worth admiring. And what a fine and distinctive creature to put on your inn – mythical, enigmatic, elusive (‘This is the creature there has never been,’ begins Rilke’s sonnet on the beast, in J B Leishman’s translation), and yet instantly identifiable all the same.

I’ve managed to miss the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of Folk Art in London, but intend to catch it at Compton Verney soon. I’m hoping that it includes some pub signs – both painted and three-dimensional – along with the marvellous ships’ figureheads, shop signs, felt pictures, and other delights I’ve seen illustrating reviews of the show. Traditional inn signs, it seems to me, offer a terrific opportunity to display works of art out of doors, and the nature of the genre dictates that they be clear, easy to read, and characterful. Even though I found it hard to spot, Deddington’s unicorn makes up in character what it lacks in other ways: it seems to fit the bill.

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If you like this sort of thing, I’ve noticed a few other three-dimensional inn signs on my travels. They include: the uniquely named Dying Gladiator at Brigg, Lincolnshire; the splendid, gold-maned White Lion at Upton on Severn, Worcestershire; the Old Sugar Loaf at Dunstable, Bedfordshire; and the Swan at Wells, Somerset (with musical bonus).

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Cat on a Doric roof

Writing about the Dying Gladiator in Brigg in a recent post has alerted me to three dimensional inn signs, a phenomenon I've noticed in this blog before. The White Lion at Upton is another inn with a three-dimensional sign, still more striking – although less remarkable in subject matter – than the Dying Gladiator. The White Lion's building goes back to 1510 and the inn now has a classical frontage on Upton's main street. It was the hostelry of choice for Prince Rupert and his followers towards the end of the English Civil War and, while the Royalists were enjoying the inn's hospitality (or sleeping it off) a small group of Parliamentarians occupied the local church, held out until they were reinforced, and sent the Royalists packing to Worcester, where they were defeated by Cromwell a week later, bringing the war to an end.

Among later guests at the White Lion was the novelist Henry Fielding, who has the eponymous hero of his novel Tom Jones put up at the inn. I don't know if the lion above the doorway had been installed by this point. Probably not, as it looks of a piece with the late Georgian or Regency-looking facade, so perhaps the creature has been there, looking down from the top of the inn's Doric porch, his gilded mane catching the sunlight, for just over 200 years.

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There is more about the White Lion here.

For more 3D inn signs, see my posts on the Swan Hotel in Wells and the White Hart at Hingham.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Pepper pot

Boston Stump, the Gherkin, the Shard: we like to give nicknames to buildings, especially towers, of unusual shape, and this selection suggests a tendency to try and bring them down a peg or two – but in an affectionate sort of way. There's something of the same effect about this example, sometimes known as the Pepper Pot. It's one of the major landmarks in Upton on Severn, and is an eyecatching sight as you enter the town from the Malvern side.

It started out as the tower of Upton's church and was a plain medieval sandstone structure topped with a spire and with buttresses at the western corners. In the 17th century the church was the scene of fighting when Royalists tried to stop Parliamentary troops crossing the nearby bridge over the Severn. In the 1750s the medieval church to the east of it was rebuilt in classical style and in 1769–70, when the spire became unsafe, the octagonal pepper-pot, copper-clad dome, and tiny openwork lantern on top were added, to make the tower look more in keeping with the rebuilt church. The architect was Anthony Keck, who had quite a large practice designing country houses in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and South Wales. He was a classicist and a follower of Adam, and his addition to the Upton tower has something of Adam's delicacy.

About a hundred years after Keck's pepper pot was added to the tower, it was decided to go in for a larger church at the other end of the town. This, a Gothic structure with a spire, became Upton's main church and in 1937 the old church was pulled down.* All except for its tower and ornamental pepper-pot top, which remains to house a heritage centre and to surprise passers-by.

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* Putting their cards on the table as usual, the BBC reported recently on their website that "the knave of the church was demolished in 1937".

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

A Ludlow in Worcestershire

The previous post about pillar boxes seemed to attract a lot of interest, so, although I’ve not managed to pass an Edward VIII post box recently, here’s a letter box with the monogram of his brother, George VI.

There have been wall boxes, post boxes set into the walls of Post Offices or into all kinds of other walls in the countryside, since Victorian times, and I don’t normally give them too much attention. But this one caught my eye because of the unusual enamel plate. Jonathan Glancey’s good little book Pillar Boxes (1989) tells me that this is what’s known as a Ludlow box, manufactured by James Ludlow of Birmingham, a company that supplied non-standard wall boxes from the late-19th century until the firm closed in 1965. Their boxes have a white enamel plate and no rain hood over the letter slot. The body of the box is not cast iron, like most post boxes, but is made of wood with a covering of sheet metal.

Perhaps the lighter body and the tendency for the enamel plates to come away from the front have made Ludlow boxes slightly less durable than their cast-iron counterparts. But it was good to find this one, still accepting mail and still catching the eye with its businesslike enamel panel.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

I’ve always liked Upton on Severn, an inland town with a marine feel to it, thanks to a riverside location that has brought trade and pleasure traffic to the place for centuries. The town is full of old inns, 19th- and early-20th-century shop fronts, and other points of interest, but what caught my attention on my most recent visit were two early garages.

The architectural history of the garage is hardly a tale of glory. Apart from the occasional Art Deco eyecatcher, it’s a story that began with converted farm buildings, makeshift huts, and former stables, and ended with corporate dreariness. Yet early survivors often rise above the total blandness and minimalist shells we’re used to when we fill up now.

Take Shipp’s Garage, up a side street in Upton. This building began life in the 1890s as a nonconformist chapel, but the garage proprietor found the building’s height and location conducive to conversion, A plaque on the wall says ‘Established 1926’, though I don’t know whether they’ve been in the old chapel that long. Of course, part of me thinks that converting a building like this is a travesty. Violence has been done to the front to knock through the big doorways, the one remaining window is a sorry version of its former self – and one could go on. But the rest of me likes what’s happened, for the building’s knockabout visual charm and for the fact that it wears its troubled history on its sleeve, for us all to see and read.

A few streets away, on the road out of Upton towards Malvern, is Pane’s Regal Garage, a place to make you swerve.


It has a big moderne frontage with the name Regal Garage spelled out in huge tall cut letters. But a building’s surroundings are often as important as the building itself, and what marks out this place is the remarkable collection of very large and very red trucks, breakdown wagons, and cranes parked on either side. This one, probably American and probably as old as the garage itself, caught the sun, and my eye.