Weald and Downland Museum, Sussex

Drying not dying

A building like this has a very special effect on me. It’s large, but in a way it’s insubstantial because there are no walls: just oak posts and a roof of tiles. It provides a lot of shelter from the rain – but for what, or whom? The answer takes us back to 1733, when it was built in Petersfield, Hampshire. It’s a shelter for stacking newly moulded bricks, so that the clay could dry and harden before the bricks were taken to the kiln for firing. Bricks in this raw state are known in the trade as ‘green bricks’, although their colour at that stage would be the hue of the clay of which they’re made. And the story of this building’s use takes us back to the 18th century, not just because of the date of this particular example, but also because by the 19th century, hand-made bricks were starting to die out, to be replaced by mechanically made bricks, which could be produced in vast numbers and at speed.

This brick-drying shed at the Weald and Downland Museum was reconstructed on this site in 1988. Hand-made bricks did not completely die out in the 19th century. The one in Petersfield carried on until World War II, there still being demand for good quality hand-made bricks in contexts where the locality or building requires something with the look and texture of traditional local brickwork. Petersfield itself has many Georgian and later buildings that it would be sacrilege to repair or add to using hard-edged, standard-issue mass-produced bricks from somewhere outside the region; so the demand continues. But some traditional brickworks could not compete with the cheap prices of the big producers, while others closed during the war because the blackout demanded their open-topped kilns, burning through the night, showed no light. That was the case with the one at Petersfield.

About 80 feet long, the drying shelter is big enough for the brick-maker to set up his bench at one end, so he could shape the bricks, one by one, before an assistant (often a family member in the old days) could stack them nearby. Today, the museum uses the bulk of the space for an exhibition about brickwork, surely a good use for this modest but large-scale structure that stands among the other working buildings, from the carpenter’s ’shop to the pug mill, on the site at West Dean, which for my money is one of the best collections of vernacular buildings anywhere.

Weald and Downland Museum, Sussex

Wooden buildings for woodworkers

The UK is fortunate to have several open-air museums that preserve old buildings, usually structures that have been dismantled and re-erected on the museum site, that would otherwise have been demolished. Some of these museums have large collections of dozens of buildings, gradually amassed and preserved over decades, and one of the best, in my opinion, is the Weald and Downland Living Museum, a few miles from Chichester in West Sussex, which preserves many buildings form Southeast England – mainly Sussex, Kent, and Surrey. They do an excellent job, and should be supported and visited now they are open again after the various lockdowns and restrictions that we’ve been living through.

Following on from my previous post about a plumber’s workshop, here are two more small working buildings from the Weald and Downland. The larger of the two is a joiner’s workshop originally from Witley, Surrey and the smaller structure is a carpenter’s ’shop, from Windlesham in the same county. Both have the generous glazing typical of such working buildings and they’re both made mainly of wood and built more for practicality than looks.

The carpenter’s ’shop belonged to a Mr Dale, who like many in his time traded as both a carpenter and an undertaker. It was reconstructed on the museum site in 1980, but I don’t know how old it is – the museum’s website doesn’t give a date, so perhaps its age is unknown. It’s very simple, with a wood-framed structure covered with boards and tarred to protect it from the weather. Mostly the carpenter’s materials and finished work came in and out of the door although there’s a small opening above the central window, through which he could insert and remove his ladders.

Inside, the tools left in the ‘shop when it was finally vacated are preserved. Saws and large drill bits hang from the roof beams; chisels, bradawls, and other smaller tools stand in racks; planes wait on the bench. There are pots and bottles of liquid, perhaps preservative oils. When it was still a workspace, there might have been a pot of glue on the go too. You could move in here and start working with wood, with only a few additions if you were able to work with traditional hand tools alone.

It’s very atmospheric and reminds me how accurate some of the 20th-century depictions are of such carpenters’ ’shops. I’m thinking particularly of the one by Edward Bawden in the King Penguin book Life in an English Village, which I blogged about here, mentioning my father’s boyhood memories of another carpenter’s workshop in rural Lincolnshire. Even the humble buildings need celebrating, something I try to do on this blog, and something open-air museums like the Weald and Downland do brilliantly.

Weald and Downland Museum, Sussex

 

Call in the plumbers

These days when something goes wrong with a tap, or there’s a leaky pipe, or a ballcock, we call in the plumber. Plumbing is one of those trades that has been with us since ancient times and form the Romans to the early-20th century, water was carried in lead pipes. So plumbers were skilled in the working of lead – they could make lead pipes, mend them, install them. And they also got involved in trades in which lead was used – in glazing, for example, when panes of glass were set within strips of lead, as in the ‘leaded lights’ we still talk about when discussing windows in some churches or old houses. That’s what ‘plumber’ means (coming from the Latin plumbum, lead), a person who works with lead.

So here’s the plumber’s workshop at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. It’s a wooden building with large windows to provide plenty of natural light, and fitted with generous work benches. It was probably built in the late 1880s and was originally sited in Newick, East Sussex. It belonged to the long-established firm of W. R. Fuller, who were plumbers and decorators, another two trades often combined, and came to the Weald and Downland Museum after it was dismantled in 1985. It’s just the kind of building that’s at home in an open-air museum, and like some of the best working buildings that end up preserved, it came with a large selection of tools – for cutting lead, measuring it, and for forming and bending pipe. The museum has a large collection of artefacts used in various building-related trades. Many of these are in storage, but it’s good that some of them can be displayed, to give visitors an idea of how tradesmen worked.

And we need such an idea, because plumbing changed radically in the 20th century. When scientists realised that lead pipes could be harmful to human health, there was a changeover to pipes made of other materials, from copper to plastic. The trade changed, and workshops like this became a thing of the past. There must have been thousands of such workshops; now leadworking is a specialist craft, restricted to areas like the decorative leadwork sometimes seen on rainwater goods, and the repair of windows that have leadwork, so plumders’ workshops of this kind must be rare as hen’s teeth. Thanks to the Weald and Downland Museum, one at least has been preserved to throw light on a bit of a much-changed building trade.

Singleton, West Sussex

In the Weald

This post continues my short series on timber-framed buildings with another type that is associated with a specific  English region. This is the Wealden hall house, a form that is most common in the Weald region, which covers part of Kent and neighbouring East Sussex. A Wealden house is a timber-framed building with a central, double-height hall heated by a central hearth, the smoke from which would originally have escaped through a hole in the roof. On either side of the central hall are two-storey sections, with their upper floors overhanging slightly, so that the central, hall section of the house is recessed. There would be service rooms on the lower floor of one of these side sections, with private rooms called solars on the upper floors.

My picture shows the beautiful Wealden house known as Bayleaf, originally built at Chiddingstone in Kent and relocated to the excellent Weald and Downland Museum. The house dates mainly from the early-15th century with alterations from the 16th century. With its large rectangular panels of wattle and daub, with curving cross-braces, it is very attractive, although some Wealden houses have a still more striking type of framework made up of many closely positioned vertical timbers. The name Bayleaf may derive from Bailey, the surname of the first occupant in the 15th century. Harry Bailey and later tenants and lessees of the house were farmers and Bayleaf seems to have been associated with a landholding of about 100 acres of probably mixed farmland (cattle farming dominated in this part of Kent, but a holding of this size most likely included some arable as well). This would make it home to people who in modern terms we might think of as members of the rural middle classes.

Wealden houses were not only found in the Weald. There are also some examples in Surrey, Essex, and even further afield. But Kent and eastern Sussex are their heartland and they form one of the most distinctive and attractive regional types of timber-framed buildings.

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The website of the the Weald and Downland Museum, which I must visit again soon, has more information about Bayleaf.

The photograph above is by Keith Edkins, and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Singleton, West Sussex

Timber and tin

Chris Partridge, of the excellent Ornamental Passions blog, has sent me some photographs of a building recently erected at the Weald and Downland Museum, seven miles north of Chichester, and has given me permission to share them with my readers. Many of you will know that the Weald and Downland is an open-air museum that specializes in preserving buildings by re-erecting them on their site, so that visitors can enjoy them and learn about their history. Most of their buildings come from southeastern England and many are timber-framed structures, including houses from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

Their latest addition is a very different kind of timber-framed building, a corrugated-iron church from the Hampshire parish of Wonston, near Winchcester, which was first built in 1909 and last used in 1996. Buildings like this were bought as “flat packs” by parishes who needed an inexpensive church, often as temporary building before they could raise the funds for a more elaborate building. Many, like this one, lasted far longer than their original users might have imagined.

Resplendent in its new green paint, the church of St Margaret, Wonston is now looking as good as it must have done when new in 1909. Its design is quite simple – there is no spire as there was on some corrugated-iron churches, and the windows are rectangular – although their individual lights do have a pointed upper section. But at one end, the building does look more ecclesiastical, with a corrugated iron bellcote and a small quatrefoil window.

Churches like this were designed to be quick and easy to put up, whether by parishioners in England or builders in the far corners of the British empire, where prefabricated corrugated iron churches were often sent. Once the team from the Weald and Downland Museum had constructed the base, the timber frame took two people a week to erect. No doubt the original builders put the church up at a similar speed, impressing the parishioners as much as the newly restored building impresses visitors to the museum.

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I’ve posted about “tin churches” before. There’s an example from Gloucestershire here and another from Worcestershire here.