Shrewton, Wiltshire

Earthy

Looking through my pictures the other day for something else, I found this picture that I took years ago and probably meant to blog. It’s the gate lodge to an adjacent manor house and stands proud and white near a road junction (near where the village lock-up is also to be found), a very effective architectural signpost, as it were, to the gate to the larger dwelling. It’s built of cob, a material consisting of earth, water, sand, and straw. Cob is associated most closely with Devon, Cornwall, and Norfolk, although it’s also found in Wiltshire (and in Buckinghamshire, where it’s known as wychert). The walls are likely to be quite thick (about 2 ft) and offer good heat insulation, but need a well maintained overhanging roof to keep them dry. This one has a hipped roof of thatch to do the job.

The Gothic windows suggest a late-18th century date, which is what is suggested in the official listing description of this building. The house looks substantial, and also has a modern extension, part of which is just visible in my photograph, so would provide accommodation for someone who worked for the owners of the manor house, together with their family. I’ve written blog posts about several lodges before,* including a number with thatched roofs, because these are often striking, ornamental buildings. I was glad to find this one again among my pictures, and looking at it has made me resolve to return to Shrewton one day – according to the revised Pevsner volume for Wiltshire, there’s a cob crinkle-crankle wall somewhere nearby, which I missed. When you visit a place once, there’s nearly always something else to see when you retiurn.

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* For more, click the word ‘lodge’ in the list of topics in the right-hand column.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Landmark base

I’ve passed this building a number of times when driving into or through Devizes in Wiltshire – one can’t fail to notice it, but it’s one of those buildings that is easy to pass by because you’re on the way to somewhere else. Coming out of the town the other week, I resolved to find a place to stop, have a closer look, and take a photograph. I knew little about it except that it was a former army barracks and that it was built in the late-19th century.

Its original role dates back to a series of reforms of the British army undertaken in the 1860s and 70s by the Liberal Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone and his Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell. The reforms involved abolishing the practice of buying commissions in the army, changing the way the War Office worked, and setting up reserve forces based in Britain. The barracks in Devizes were home to one of these forces, and was named after the illustrious cavalry commander John Le Marchant. For a long period the building was home to the Wiltshire Regiment, although during World War II it was used as a prisoner of war camp.

The castle-like architecture clearly signals the barracks’ military function – the part in my photograph is clearly built to resemble a castle keep, although longer blocks running to the left and behind this ‘keep’ are less military looking. The long blocks are the barracks themselves – the accommodation for the soldiers. The keep building contained a guard room, detention cells, and storage areas and armouries. The keep is a highly symbolic part of the complex. It is gratifying that it has survived the closure of the barracks and the eventual conversion of the site to housing – a structure that both embodies the past and reminds people today of the old phrase about an Englishman’s home being his castle.

Devizes, Wiltshire

When is a castle not a castle?

...When it’s a toll house.

This small building was erected some time in the mid-19th century, probably the 1840s, to collect tolls on a turnpike road form Devizes to Chippenham. The building is all of a piece, with stone walls, windows with dripstones, and a parapet with battlements that remind one of a castle. But there are three distinct sections. The largest part, to the left in the photograph, would have provided residential rooms for the toll-collector, whose accommodation also took up much of the middle, octagonal, section. However the octagonal shape of this part was also useful for work, because the windows in the canted walls have good views of approaching traffic on either side – the building is actually at a fork in the road the forms the meeting place of the modern A361 (to Trowbridge) and A342 (to Chippenham). Toll houses of this period were often octagonal and the resulting angles of view were often cited as the reason for this unusual shape. Another reason could be the very distinctiveness – an octagonal building stands out on the road.

The third, right-hand, section of the house is a porch, the door of which is now blocked because an entrance on the end is more convenient these days. Another doorway in the side has been blocked too, and the space decorated with a trompe l’oeil image of a half-open door – you’d not want to step out of it these days, into the path of a passing bus. The porch afforded some shelter for the toll-collector on rainy or cold days. In the road, there would have been a gate and, when the toll-collector saw traffic approaching, he could lurk here in the dry until whatever it was – coach, carriage, cart, horse rider, pedestrian – was at the gate. He could then come out, collect the traveller’s money, and open the gate. Nowadays this is a busy stretch of road – getting a picture of the building without any cars, lorries or buses in front of it entailed some patience. Although it has been altered and now seems rather marooned between the two main roads, this castellated building still offers a glimpse of a past way of life.

Devizes, Wiltshire

 

Now showing…

Entranced on previous visits to Devizes by such buildings as the delightful stone-fronted Parnella House and the massive Victorian red-brick brewery, I’d overlooked the cinema, which stands between these two landmarks. When I did look at it, I found it pleasant but rather enigmatic. There are Art Deco things about it – notably the very plain pilasters or piers, which run right up to the parapet, where the central ones pierce the skyline. But the facade also has the look of an earlier era – the swags and the various curved dripstones feel to me Edwardian. Likewise the rather demure torch-bearing statues that stand on brackets above the cinema’s name: they’re a far cry from the celluloid lasciviousness of some Art Deco cinema decoration, while also avoiding the stylization or symbolism common in other 1930s cinemas, although the faux-flaming torches do feel to me a bit more akin to Art Deco.

The Devizes cinema, in its first incarnation, was an early one, opening, according to the excellent Cinema Treasures site, in 1912 as the Electric Palace. The same website also tell us that the cinema was enlarged in the late-1920s – could this be the date of this white, rather chaste facade? The latest edition of the Pevsner Wiltshire volume actually gives the date of the building as 1932 and the architects as Satchwell and Roberts of Birmingham. So what I think we have here is something very much of the Art Deco period but in a style that fits the more restrained setting of a country town better than the sometimes brash, sometimes stylish full-blown Art Deco efforts of the architects who worked for the Odeon or Gaumont chains. The current owners, according to press reports earlier this year, are said to be intending to upgrade the building. One hopes that they produce plans that are both viable and respectful of the frontage and setting, so that this modest but elegant cinema can serve the town once more.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Boot’s Corner

One result of spending some time thinking and writing about the history of shops is that one becomes aware of the way different multiple stores liked to design their shop fronts – the light oak window frames of W. H. Smith, the muted, modernised neo-classicism of Marks and Spencer, and so on. Among the best of the bunch were a number of Boot’s branches in town centres, which were often placed on corner sites and sometimes adorned with statues of famous historical figures with a local connection. When I looked up at the corner of St John’s Street and Wine Street in Devizes, it wasn’t long before I guessed I was looking at a former branch of Boot’s.

In the 19th century, Boot’s began to diversify their range beyond the company’s core pharmaceutical products, taking in everything from cosmetics to photographic processing. As a result, they needed larger stores, often with room for an upper sales floor. They also chose corner positions to take advantage of higher footfall and shop windows facing in two different directions. The Devizes branch was one such corner shop, with the added feature of a round tower to emphasize the building and turn it into something of a landmark.

Then there were the portrait busts in roundels on the upper walls. Some of the more spectacular Boot’s stores (for example, in Newcastle, Derby, and Bury St Edmunds), boasted full-length statues. The Devizes branch, in a smaller town, made do with busts, but they’re still impressive. The busts form part of a decorative scheme involving very fancy window surrounds, running even to putti beneath the top-floor windows, and pilasters that extend up the full height of the building. The busts, set in garlands, are at the tops of the pilasters. The two busts in my photograph portray Hubert de Burgh and Edward I. Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent in the early 13th century, fought alongside Richard I during the third crusade, encouraged King John to add his seal to Magna Carta and became chief Justiciar of England. However, his enemies brought about his removal from office and he found himself imprisoned – in Devizes Castle, which is how his portrait came to be displayed on the walls of the Boot’s store in the town. The reason for Edward I’s presence here may be that the town sent two representatives to this king’s 1295 parliament, the so-called Model Parliament, because it set the precedent of boroughs sending two representatives to Westminster; for some historians, this makes the Model Parliament the first such representative assembly in England’s history.

One gets the impression, looking at the decoration on this building’s facade, that it was built to last and that Boot’s intended to occupy the store for an extended period of time. Although they no longer do, the facade remains as a reminder of the times when retailers put real effort into the design and construction of their shops, making the country’s numerous ‘Boot’s Corners’ a pleasure to look at.

Stourhead, Wiltshire

The great indoors, 2

The other day I did a Google image search of ’Stourhead’ and eight of the first ten pictures it produced featured the Pantheon, the garden’s great domed and porticoed temple. For many, the Pantheon is the climax of the garden, a visual focus whether viewed from near or far; seen across the lake from the end of the garden nearest the house, it is a goal for anyone about to walk around Stourhead’s glorious landscape.

‘Pantheon’ means a temple dedicated to all the gods, not just one deity as was the norm in the classical world. The Stourhead version is modelled loosely on the much larger Pantheon in Rome, one of the best preserved of all Roman buildings. The Roman Pantheon has a large dome and a portico with eight massive Corinthian columns. Stourhead’s version is smaller and its portico has six columns and unlikle the Roman prototype does not stretch right across the front of the building. This leaves room for a large niche at either end of the facade, containing a statue of a deity, Bacchus, god of wine, on one side, Venus, goddess of love, on the other. To be more precise, the love goddess appears in the form known as Venus Callipygos, Venus of the beautiful buttocks. Apart from her physical appeal, Venus is probably here because she was the mother of Virgil’s hero Aeneas – when laying out the garden, Henry Hoare made several allusions to Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, although the scholarship in this case was in part an excuse for the male gaze to linger over an image female beauty.

For many, the point of the Pantheon is what it looks like from the outside and how it enhances its garden context. But of course the building also has an interior and a use – the family held supper parties there and used it as the setting for picnics. These forays away from the dining room in the house took place in a stunning interior. Beneath the coffered ceiling of the dome are panels of classical scenes in relief, but the walls of the circular building are dominated by a series of seven large niches containing statues of deities. The most famous is a Hercules by Michael Rysbrack but for a change I show his statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. The others are: Livia Augusta, a Roman empress (she was Virgil’s patron and her statue at Stourhead is an ancient one, acquired by Hoare from another collector); the ancient Greek hero Meleager; Flora, goddess of fertility, flowers, and gardens; Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess (also worshipped by the Romans); and St Susanna (a saint connected to the city of Rome). Livia is an ancient Roman statue, acquired by Hoare from another collector. They seem a miscellaneous collection, but several have garden or country connections, a couple are heroes like Aeneas, and Livia has a close link to Virgil; they also, in different ways, reflect Hoare’s interest in collecting and in commissioning art. Like so much at Stourhead, they also embody Hoare’s liking for a mix of scholarship and the pleasures of beauty, nature, food, and wine. I’ll drink to that.

Stourhead, Wiltshire

 

The great indoors

I’ve visited several gardens this summer. Lest anyone think this represents time off from historic architecture, my recent posts about Painswick and Warwick will be proof of the opposite – gardening, from Renaissance Italy to Victorian England, is also a chance to build more not less and gazebos, summerhouses, temples and sheds abound. So garden visiting is not all about the great outdoors; the great indoors has its role to play too. In England, garden buildings might be ornamental but are also practical – they provide shelter from the wind and rain; in warmer climes (how quaint that phrase seems now), they also provide welcome shade and cool.

One kind of structure that afforded a retreat from hot weather in Italian Renaissance gardens was the grotto. A subterranean, cave-like grotto, with water trickling through, is just the thing on a baking hot day. When Henry Hoare, cultured banker and owner of Stourhead, laid out his famous landscape garden, he was particularly pleased with his grotto, and was not above taking a dip in its pool: ‘A souse in that delicious bath and grot, filld with fresh magic’ pleased him greatly. He called it an ‘Asiatick luxury, and too much for mortals, or at least for subjects’ – after a session in the grotto, Henry Hoare felt like a king.

Stourhead’s grotto is also an example of the way in which visiting a landscape garden can be a journey of discovery and surprise. We enter a dark passage, lined by rough-hewn stones – the atmosphere is of something dark and mysterious. But on our journey through we encounter, as well as the expected cool flowing water, two classical figures. One is the River God, who is probably meant to represent Tiber, the god of Rome’s river – ancient Rome being a key inspiration for the gardens at Stourhead. The god points us on our journey. The other figure is the nymph whose grotto this is. She reclines in a lighter space, lit by a skylight from above. This figure, recumbent by her pool, is probably meant to evoke the nymph and grotto in the Aeneid, where the Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage fall in love. An inscription from Virgil’s epic is from this part of the poem; translated, it reads: ‘within, fresh water and seats in the living rock, the home of the nymphs’. Another inscription, in the floor in front of the pool, imagines the words of the nymph: ‘Ah spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave And drink in silence or in silence lave’. This is not Virgil but a translation by Alexander Pope of a 15th-century poem. The lines remind us that this magical space, in which the statue and the cascading water are caught in light from above, was also seen as eminently practical. Drink, or bathe, or sit and take your ease…then continue on your journey…

Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire

For vigour

What’s this, in the park of the 18th-century house of Lydiard Tregoze, near Swindon? Not a sheep wash. Certainly not something for cleaning mud off the wheels of carts. It is, I’m reliably informed by the adjacent interpretation board, a plunge pool for humans, and it dates to about 1820, when Sir George Richard St John was Lord of the Manor. Although by this time the technology for piped water certainly existed, most country houses did not have such a convenience. What did the upper classes need piped water for, when they had a large staff of servants to bring the stuff to where it was needed? So water for washing and bathing was brought to your room by hand, and most country-house owners were happy with this arrangement.

Some houses, however, had plunge pools, either out in the open like this, or undercover in an outbuilding. Plunge pools, as the name suggests, were not for wallowing. The idea was to plunge in and out quickly and the reason for doing this was not primarily for washing, but because a dunking in cold water was deemed to be good for your health. Some went to Bath or other health resorts, some, increasingly, went to the coast to bathe in salt water, but many held that immersion in fresh water – here supplied from the nearby lake – was just as good. Madness, rickets, leprosy and asthma were among the disorders said in the Regency period to be helped by a course of plunge-pool treatments. Maybe some bathers thought that a daily dash down to the plunge pool and back would bring them increased vigour, in the same way as a cold morning bath at boarding school was supposed to do.

So it was perhaps a case of going down the steps as quickly as you could manage, ducking in a few times, and then dashing back up the steps – even faster, and shivering no doubt – and rushing indoors to be dried. Invigorating? I hope so.

Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire

Going wild in Bradford-on-Avon

I recently had a walk around Bradford-on-Avon, admiring the architecture, scaling the town’s sometimes precipitous slopes, and quenching my thirst with copious amounts of tea. I did of course admire much of what makes the town famous – churches, houses, mills, the lovely bridge with its tiny chapel – but found things to make me think that weren’t architectural: how well, for example, the place was handling social distancing and how people expressed their thanks when one gave way on a narrow pavement or moved aside a shade more than usual on a wide one. Nobody made this feel like a chore and everyone I came into distanced contact with was welcoming.

Another non-architectural thing I admired was flowers. Walking round to the bit of the town that contains both Holy Trinity church and the small Saxon chapel of St Lawrence, I found that wildflower planting was in evidence in places where I might expect lawns. One such is in Holy Trinity’s churchyard, so that one could look towards the chapel of St Lawrence across the colourful swathe of glowing ox-eye daisies shown in my photograph. I thought this miniature meadow looked really good, and raise my hat to those who made it possible.

There’s a lot to be said for wildflower verges and other patches of these flowers in towns. They can encourage bees – as well as other insects and invertebrates in need of a niche, they can be colourful additions to the local scene, local authorities like them because they don’t have to be cut every five minutes like lawns. Ecologically, it is best if they contain only native species – introduced species can be colourful and quick-growing, but are sometimes invasive and attract fewer beneficial species. Native plants attract a greater variety of insects; they may take a bit longer to establish, but they’re worth the effort. Bradford-on-Avon’s Holy Trinity church has made caring for the environment part of its mission. Part of its work as an eco-church is ‘managing the churchyard to optimise nature conservation and biodiversity’. There’s a lot to be said for that too.

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* The ox-eye daisy, native to this country and to Europe generally, is considered to be an invasive species in some countries where it has been introduced. It does dominate here, but in reality this patch of ground does host a number of wildflower species alongside it. Is it an ideal plant to include in a selection in this kind of context? It’s better, surely, than a manicured lawn in which nothing is allowed to flower.

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Staggering architecture

This is a building that startled me in two distinct ways when I was looking at the wonderful 18th-century clothiers’ houses in Trowbridge the other week. Jammed into a corner between two of these classical almost-palaces, this building is constructed of the same creamy limestone and is also in a classical style. But look at the detail! At the top, a triangular pediment with a cornice that sticks right out from the main wall, producing deep shadows and emphasising the very large dentil blocks that punctuate its lower edges. The bottom of the triangle is interrupted in the middle to make room for swathes of carved ornament that hangs deep down on either side of a window and extends upwards into the triangular space made by the pediment. In the middle there’s a blind oval with four exaggerated stones – one at the top in the position of an arch’s keystone, the others matching it on the bottom and sides, like the cardinal points on a compass. Lower down this end wall run pilasters with deeply cut blocks of stone, each pilaster topped with more carved ornament.

So what was this highly ornate building that caught my attention and made me rush across the street so that I could examine it more closely? At first I took it to be an especially showy example of a clothier’s house, the residence of someone who had more of a taste for the baroque that the apparently more classically minded neighbours on either side. It was, of course, something quite different and much later: the imposing offices of Ushers Brewery, built in 1913 to designs by local architect W. W. Snailum in a style sometimes called brewer’s baroque. Thomas Usher had established their brewery in the centre of Trowbridge in 1824 and by 1913 the firm must have been doing well. By the mid-20th century, they had expanded hugely but were no longer so profitable and were eventually taken over, like so many provincial brewing firms, by a larger company, Watney Mann. When the baroque office building was put up in 1913, Usher’s must have been growing and optimistic of further success: the architecture seems to reflect that.

I began this post by saying that this building startled me in two ways. What was the second surprise? It was more sudden, and less pleasant. When I crossed the road to look at this extraordinary architectural confection more closely, keeping my eyes on the stonework and not on the ground beneath my feet, I tripped on a metal bar meant to stand upright to define a parking space but actually hinged down, parallel to the ground, and fell flat on my face, my smartphone and my dignity slipping from me instantly. The Resident Wise Woman, crossing the road more slowly than I, was soon behind me, and a passer-by was also offering help. I was, thankfully, able to climb to my feet unaided, and although I was bruised on my knees and chin (the main points of impact), I sustained no lasting damage. It has, though, made me warier of looking up without watching where I put my feet, not wishing to repeat what happened when I went to look at this doubly staggering building.

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

 

Palatial

The other day I found myself in Trowbridge, strolling around the town centre looking at the rich mixture of industrial and domestic buildings that contribute so much to the visual character of this town. The industry was cloth-production, and I’ve already posted an example of its architecture – the Handle House for drying teasels, with its remarkable pierced brick walls. Here’s an outstanding domestic building, one of the palatial clothier’s houses built in the 18th century. I like this one in Fore Street, built for Nathaniel Houlton in the early-18th century, for its baroque features. What I mean by this is the quirks of design that take it beyond the highly satisfying but straightforward classical ‘box with sash windows’ that gets its effect mainly from its pleasing proportions. I’m thinking of the banded pilasters, the heavy string course and cornice, and above all the handling of the central part of the frontage. This breaks away from the standard window sizes with narrow, round-arched windows on either side of the doorway and central window. The whole central bay steps forward from the flanking bays, and then the central section of this bay is emphasised with columns (Tuscan on the ground floor, Corinthian above), above which the cornice and strong course break forward still more than the rest of the bay. Much effort has been put into all these design details, and they’re set off to advantage in glorious ashlar limestone masonry. The facade is one of many quiet triumphs in this town.

On my recent visit to Trowbridge I did not have with me the new edition of the Pevsner volume for Wiltshire, which is published this week. I see it covers this house and many more, pointing out details that will no doubt send me back to the town, looking again and finding buildings I’ve missed before. I plan to review the book some time during the next few weeks, but I’m already finding it both useful and absorbing.

Endnote My apologies to the 40 readers who saw this post when it was headed Trowbridge, Worcestershire. Trowbridge, of course, has never been in Worcestershire and for it to be so would entail a boundary change that is unimaginable, even in the context of the mess that has been made of county boundaries in the past. Call it a slip of the finger, or a brain in neutral.  

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

House of holes

A while back I wrote a blog post about Herefordshire barns with walls of pierced brickwork to provide ventilation. Imagine my pleasure, then, when on a recent visit to Trowbridge in Wiltshire I came across this, a structure that looks like a patriarch among pierced brick buildings, a house of holes. It is a legacy of Trowbridge’s cloth manufacturing industry, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the town was known as ‘the Manchester of the West’. The pierced brick structure, squeezed into a space near a former woollen mill – it’s actually built on a bridge over the River Biss – is called the Handle House and its use requires a little explanation.

One of the finishing processes in the manufacture of woollen cloth is known as ‘raising a nap’. The nap is the furry finish that makes many cloths soft and pleasant to the touch. A traditional way to raise a nap was to stroke the fabric with the seed heads of the teasel plant, which bear dozens of naturally barbed or hooked spikes. The spikes catch in the fibre and pull it up, producing the nap. A number of teasel heads were mounted on a wooden handle and dragged across the cloth – at first by hand, later using a machine. The process was generally done when the cloth was wet, because its fibres are less prone to damage then. But the teasels would get soggy and soft when they became damp, and so were less effective. So they have to be dried. One way to do this was to suspend them in a building like this, when the cross-draught would dry them, restoring their strength.†

That’s where the Handle House came in. It was probably built in the 1840s and is very impressive indeed. There must have been quite a few buildings like this, but this is only one of a very few left (some sources say there is only one other in the country). The pierced walls must have made them very difficult to use for anything else once they were no longer required for their original purpose; additionally, the way they’re built hardly makes them the most robust structures in the world, so some examples probably fell quickly into dilapidation. This one is hanging on, and being very unusual is listed at grade II*, a testimony to the ingenuity of the woollen business that has long since left the town.

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† I once blogged a heated building for teasel-drying here.

Salisbury, Wiltshire

 

Doomsday, 2

The painting of the Last Judgement in the church of St Thomas, Salisbury, is the largest of medieval ‘doom’ paintings and one of the clearest. It is, one could say, the rich cousin of the faded doom at Oddington that featured in my previous post. Details of costume suggest that it dates to the last quarter of the 15th century. Like nearly every English medieval church wall painting it was covered with whitewash some time after the Reformation, rediscovered (when traces of colour were noticed during cleaning) in the Victorian period, and restored. It doesn’t seem to be known for sure how much of the rich detail in the painting survives from the 15th century and how much was added by the Victorian restorers, but the overall effect is impressive – indeed, overwhelming – and when a visit is possible, I’ll be able to see has changed since the most recent restoration a couple of years ago and whether the process of conservation has yielded any more information about what the Victorian restorers did or didn’t add.

Meanwhile, even in my photographs, it’s a feast for the eyes. Christ sits at the centre, on a rainbow, with his feet resting on another rainbow. Beside him stand angels holding the instruments of the Passion (cross, crown of thorns, pillar, spear, sponge), and nearby are the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Beneath the lower rainbow stand the 12 apostles. To the left, angels blow their trumpets to waken the dead, who climb from their tombs, some naked, some in shrouds, one with a hat on, another with a bishop’s mitre. Angels guide these righteous souls towards Heaven, the architecture of which awaiting in the background. To the right, devils chain up a group of souls and drag them towards Hell. Hell, as is common in such paintings, has the fearsome mouth of a monster, in which flames are licking the souls who have already been pushed inside.

Even if some of the detail may be attributable to 19th century restorers, this doom painting takes one back to the 15th century with a jolt. It’s a colourful scene (medieval churches were colourful of course), it teems with figures, it’s at home with symbolism, both the symbols of the Passion and the symbolic headgear of some of the participants – mitres and royal crowns are visible among both Heaven-bound and Hell-destined souls. This painting lacks the faded atmosphere of Oddington, but repays lengthy scrutiny in its details – where both God and the devil reside.

St Thomas, Salisbury, Heaven

St Thomas, Salisbury, Hell

Swindon, Wiltshire

Mighty delicate

If you think of Swindon as a railway town, which, as the location of the GWR locomotive works it certainly became in the 19th century, you’d expect it to have at least one water tower. It still has more than one, and this is my favourite. It’s on the edge of the railway works site, and is extra tall so that it could provide water at high pressure, for fire-fighting. It was built in 1870 using components of cast iron and the strength of the ironwork and its bracing is enough to create a tall structure bearing what must have been a prodigious weight of water in the tanks on top.

The delicacy of this structure, which reminds me of the appearance of the iron frameworks around gas holders, tricks the eye somewhat. There are four stages to the tower, marked by a succession of cast-iron girders, and each is far bigger than a single storey of a conventional house – it’s roughly 75 feet tall all told I think and the tanks are about 2 metres high. By 1870, Victorian engineers were very good at building iron framework structures. After all, they’d had lots of experience, constructing bridges and making load-bearing frames for factories. It might have been easy for them, but, seeing a frame exposed like this – and beautifully preserved too – still impresses me, mightily.

Swindon, Wiltshire

Whatever next?

Whatever can that be? This was my first thought on encountering The Platform, now a venue for music and educational work concerned with the arts, in Swindon’s Farringdon Street. The spires made me think of a church, but the part to the left, with its small windows over several storeys, did not seem to fit with that, unless this was a very well appointed Victorian chapel, with additional hall and meeting rooms. Surely not?

The building is on the edge of the railway village, built by the Great Western Railway from 1840 onwards to house staff at the locomotive works that stands nearby. Many of the workers, who arrived in Swindon from all over the country, were single men, and Brunel saw the need for accommodation suited to them – somewhere to lodge for people who did not need or could not afford a whole house. So he built this, a ‘model’ lodging house, designed to house about 100 men and to provide kitchens, a bakery, and day rooms (the individual mens’ rooms were small, with space for a bed, drawers and a chair, so residents needed somewhere to relax when they weren’t working). Construction began in 1847, but immediately stopped because of a recession, to be resumed again in 1853–55 to a revised design.

The result was certainly impressive, but the hostel wasn’t popular with those who lived there, who mostly preferred to find traditional lodgings with local families. Locals took to calling the place ‘the Barracks’ and apparently the residents found it institutional. One can’t blame them. Buildings made up of scores of similar rooms usually do have that feeling to them. In the early 1860s, the company converted it to small flats, to house an influx of Welsh ironworkers who were hired when they built new rolling mills, but even these men and their families were soon accommodated in proper houses added to the railway village. After a while the building became a Wesleyan Chapel, then in the late-20th century a museum of the GWR, then, after 2000, was given over to its present use. Now, presumably, it languishes in lockdown, and one hopes the current users will be able to return soon and bring life to this lively piece of architecture.

 

Avebury, Wiltshire

Dream topping 

Was I dreaming? The west churchyard wall at Avebury seemed to have a roof of very neatly finished thatch. It seemed an unlikely covering for a wall made of sarsen stones, among the toughest kind around. The result seemed worthy at least of a photograph and some later research. 

Looking it up when I reached home, I discovered that this exceptional wall is listed at Grade II. The listing text describes the structure as built of ‘Squared sarsen approximately 1.6 m high, with topping of cob and thatched coping.’ So there we have it. The top of the wall, oddly is made of cob, a mix made with mud and vulnerable to damage if exposed to the rain. Wiltshire has many cob walls that have thatched coping, and this is one with a difference. 

The thatch also helps shelter a rather well cut monument to Francis Knowles, a biologist (and an FRS) and Professor of Anatomy at King’s College, London. Knowles bought the manor from Francis Keiller in 1955 and lovingly restored it.* It’s good that his memorial is nearby, protected by the thatched coping of the churchyard wall.  

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* The house is now owned by the National Trust, who did further conservation work around ten years ago. 

Avebury, Wiltshire

Humans and other animals

Another of the incidental joys of Avebury, ignored by many visitors, or at least taken in with a rapid glance, is this dovecote. It is not the first dovecote I’ve posted in the long history of this blog, which is in part here to celebrate buildings that are out of the ordinary run of domestic, religious, or industrial architecture (although there’s plenty of all that here too). I particularly like many dovecotes because they are round – a shape that’s visually pleasing but also well suited to an internal design in which a central post carries a ladder that can be rotated so that one can reach any one of the hundreds of nest boxes inside.

Like the museum in my previous post and the stones in Avebury’s great prehistoric circle, this building is made of sarsen stone, with a couple of details in brick. This helps this out of the ordinary structure belong in its grassy spot among a collection of buildings, including the wooden barn that houses one of Avebury’s two museum spaces and the stone stables now occupied by the other museum. Stables, barns, dovecotes: this corner of Avebury would once have been home to a variety of creatures. Now the human animal – behaving in an admirably civilized manner when we were there – is the most usual living thing, its English variety frequently in search of coffee or tea.

Ramsbury, Wiltshire

Pattern language

People who follow me on Instagram (where I am @philipbuildings ) may have noticed a while back that I posted one of those old black and yellow AA signs on a brick wall in Ramsbury. It occurred to me then that I should post a brick building from this Wiltshire town, and the blog seems the place for it because most of my readers look at the blog on a bigger screen than those of the mobile devices most often used with Instagram. Blowing up the picture by clicking on it will reveal the bricks more clearly.

Brickwork makes up a rich architectural language of patterns and this house is no exception. Many will recognise straight away the pattern of alternate stretchers and headers (the long sides and short ends of the brick) that makes up Flemish bond. That’s not unusual – Flemish bond is often seen on old brick buildings in England, though it’s not that common in Flanders, as Alec Clifton-Taylor and others have pointed out.* What’s different here is the use of darker bricks for those facing header-outwards. These are probably red bricks with ‘vitrified headers’, in other words headers that have been given a dark glaze at one end, either because those ends were facing a very hot part of the kiln, or the brick-maker added salt during the firing process, or a particular type of wood was used for firing.

This is an effect quite often seen in South Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, where according to Clifton-Taylor the presence of lime in the clay fosters the darkening process. These grey vitrified bricks were fashionable from the 18th century, and sometimes you see a house with a front wall in grey bricks with the more common red bricks reserved for the sides and back. More frequent still are walls where the two colours alternate, as here, to give a variegated effect that I find delightful. It’s sometimes said that creating these patterns was a way of using up bricks that had partly darkened, and that may sometimes have been the case. But I’m more convinced that people made these choices because of their visual effect, which adds colour and interest to many a building in this part of Central Southern England. Long live vitrification!

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* See Alec Clifton-Taylor, The Pattern of English Building (Faber & Faber) for a feast of information on English traditional building and building materials.

Marlborough, Wiltshire

Town texture: columns and tile-hanging

Marlborough is one of the English towns (Blandford Forum and Warwick are others) whose history was changed by a great fire. Marlborough’s major fire occurred in 1653 and there were further fires in the late-17th century. Substantial rebuilding in the late-17th and early-18th centuries has left the centre of the town with its own distinctive appearance – the High Street displays a unified townscape of red tiled roofs, gables facing the street, tile-hung walls, bay windows, and arcaded ground floors.* It’s not all like this – there are also a few white and black-and-white facades – but there’s enough of it to set a dominant and satisfying style.

The most unusual and outstanding aspect of this is the arcading. There are a few English towns that have substantial runs of arcading in main streets, and they vary quite a lot in design. At Totnes, the upper storeys of the buildings overhang the walks beneath, so that the columns are flush with the upper part of the facades. At Tunbridge Wells, the famous ‘Pantiles’ have arcades that protrude forwards from the building line, so that they cover the pavements at ground level and house balconies above. And in the case of Chester’s ‘Rows’, the arcades are upstairs, on the first floor. Marlborough’s arcades break forward slightly from overhanging upper storeys, so that they cover only part of the pavement. They are topped not with balconies, as at Tunbridge Wells, but with narrow pitched roofs. These are covered with tiles that match in colour the clay tiles with which the walls above are hung, giving a pleasantly ruddy colour to the facades. Many, but not all, the tiles have a ‘fish-scale’ pattern, so they also have an attractive texture.

The building in my picture probably dates mainly from the post-fire period of the late-17th to 18th centuries. Its 18th-century bay windows have replacement sashes, but some of these retain 18th-century-style small panes. The wooden columns along the ground floor are original and a local builder’s or carpenter’s version of Doric. A number of buildings like this, plus one or two timber-framed ones like the neighbour to the right, combine to give the street its character,

Very broad, long, and curving slightly, this is one of the country’s notable streets, a wonderful setting for the market, for shopping, or for an evening stroll. It’s not always easy to see it as a whole, because it’s so long, and it’s often full of market stalls or parked cars. An aerial view gives one a clearer idea; a closer view reveals its colourful effect and distinctive texture.

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*Tile-hanging is a speciality in the southeast, in Sussex and Kent especially. But you also find tile-hung walls in other places, such as parts of Buckinghamshire, and in Wiltshire in Marlborough and some of the nearby villages.

Image of whole street, above © Country Life

Salisbury, Wiltshire

On high

When in Salisbury I always look up at the sign of the White Hart Hotel, a particularly lovely three-dimensional inn sign that stands out against the sky. The building it crowns is a large inn of about 1820 with an enormous Doric portico, but there has actually been an inn here since at least 1635. The use of the white hart as a badge goes back further still – it was the device of King Richard II and that fact accounts for the crown around the creature’s neck.

On this sign the crown and chain look as they have been made of metal and attached to the figure of the hart. The fact that the antlers are a different colour makes them stand out too, as if the sculptor had used a real pair of antlers. although this is no doubt the effect of a paint job.*

From ground level, everything is less distinct than in my photograph, which was taken with a zoom lens at full extension. Most passers-by are therefore unaware of the details of the sign. More often than not in my experience, the creature appears in silhouette, in which form he is still an effective marker, enabling one to single out the building from some distance away and forming a bold effect for an imposing building.

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*I'm not sure of the material used for the hart itself. The rough surface looks stone-like, but this may be the effect of a coat or two of masonry paint, plus grime. Could it be Coade stone?