Artillery Row, London

Call the nymphs and the fauns from the woods

Terracotta panels stretch across English buildings of the late-19th century like a riotous procession of ornament slowly drowning in sunset. The sunset of the gods. And sometimes it is gods, or creatures who live with the gods of classical mythology, alongside the more usual architectural decorations, the strapwork, foliage, and sunflowers that also appear with profusion in this kind of ornament. A lot of this sort of stuff is here, running along the walls of Westminster Palace Gardens in London’s Victoria, to delight the eye and puzzle the mind.

My details show a representative sample: naked nymphs and/or goddesses, including a reclining one with a sickle (perhaps a corn or harvest goddess like Ceres), small childlike figures with hirsute legs (fauns?), one attempting to grab at a passing bird. More birds, some of which merge into the scrolls and strap work that weave in and out of the background. It was towards the end of the day when I last passed, and the roseate burnt clay panels were glowing.  

So that afternoon the panels were beautifully effective, as they have been on such afternoons since 1899, when the block was completed to designs by C J Chirney Pawley. The finishing touch is the ceramic lettering above the entrance, just visible here, using a very clear letterform but with the odd concession to the style of the period, such as the little flourish on the A. The decoration is a winning mix, then, of urban and rural. I’m glad that nymphs and fauns sport a few yards from the bustle and traffic of Victoria Street.

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There are more images on Victorian Web, here.

Victoria Street, London

On reflection

Among the rampant office blocks and stores of Victoria Street stands the Albert, a pub of 1862 built in solid yellow brick with dressings in red brick, trimmings in stucco, and a big, decisive cornice. It belonged, apparently, to the Artillery Brewery, which was just across the road and built in a similar style. In the late sun of an autumn afternoon, its brickwork glows.

The pub exterior has its fair share of the kind of decorative elaboration the Victorian pubs and their owners went in for, and the aspect of this that particularly caught my eye was the engraved glass. It's said to be original and is a cut above a lot of pub glass, which bears arabesques and curlicues of a fairly standard and formulaic nature. At the Albert we have trails of foliage, flowers, fruit, and some wonderful birds. I particularly liked the one above, though I'm not sure what species it is or whether the image is at all ornithologically accurate. My main efforts on the sunny afternoon when I passed were in trying to photograph it without including too many reflections. It's difficult, on a bright day, but I offer my efforts anyway, because I think the glass is good, if the photography is not.

And in a way, the reflections are part of the point. A pub is a social building, that wants both to include you in its image, but also to stop you looking in, to give the drinkers inside some seclusion from the street. What's more, the reflections also include some of the pub's other decorative touches. There's a mirror image of some of the ornate ironwork in my photograph below and you can see the iron "Albert" sign, shadows of iron scrolls, the reflection of the building across the road, and glimpses of some interior lights. It might be a confusing picture, but even in the sun and even with all these reflections, the decoration of the glass still shines.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Carpet people

For around 200 years between the 1770s and the 1970s, carpet-weaving was a major industry in Kidderminster, a trade stimulated by the construction of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, which, completed in 1771, provided a vital transport artery. The business was initially based around hand-looms, and the Kidderminster weavers were at first reluctant to adopt power looms. After the 1850s, though, power-loom-weaving was introduced, and manufacturers built a number of large mills in the town to accommodate the new equipment. Since the industry declined in the late-20th century, Kidderminster has been redeveloped – there seem to have been major upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new ring road, which, I have to say, has made parts of the town centre very unfriendly to pedestrians. A number of the carpet mills survive, though, and most impressive they are, even when glimpsed behind 1970s shops when one is trying to dodge dashing objects making their way around the town centre.

These factories are not on the vast scale of the multi-storey mills and warehouses of northern England, Titus Salt’s Saltaire, for example. But they’re impressively long, with fronts of dazzling polychrome brickwork in which the varied colours of window surrounds, cornices, string courses, and similar details makes a pattern of masonry, not quite as intricate as a carpet, but nearly so.

This is the front of the mill built for the Victoria Carpet Company in 1869. The architect was T D Baker, a local man, and he seems to have been very confident in his handling of the blue brick and white Stourbridge brick, with which he contrived arched window openings, banded pilasters, and cornices. The overall form is classical, with a centre bay topped by a triangular pediment. But the decoration is a very Victorian hybrid – the mixture of dentils and zig-zag courses in the pediment conjures up an unlikely mixture of classical and Romanesque. The overall impression is one of solidity, but the wayward ornamentation hints that the people inside are up to making something decorative.


These buildings are a tribute to the industrialists of 19th-century Kidderminster, who must have liked the idea that they could build structures that were decorative and solid and durable. It was partly about putting up an impressive front – the weaving sheds around the back would have been much plainer and were no doubt tough, noisy environments in which to work. But the monumental factory facades suggest a pride in good work and must have been effective advertising, as decorative and hard-wearing in their way as the carpets made inside.