Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Health resort

To Malvern (again) for coffee, book browsing, exercise, and architectural appreciation. Malvern is one of my favourite nearby places, and not just for its magnificent hilly scenery. It keeps on giving me food for thought architecturally, with everything from medieval tiles to a rare Bini dome. It is, as they say in the trade, ‘well bookshopped’, boasting shops selling new books, a good vendor of second hand books, and a couple of charity bookshops. And its hilly terrain means getting around gives me good exercise.

It was ever thus, or has at least been thus for a long time. Malvern is, famously, a spa town. The health-giving qualities of the water at Malvern Wells were discovered in the 16th century, but the place really began to grow in the period around 1810, in part at least as a result of the great success of the spa at Cheltenham. Various wells were exploited, hotels were built – and more. Those who came to take the waters needed other things to do to. Cheltenham offered circulating libraries, a harp and pianoforte warehouse, assembly rooms, and so on. So in Malvern, next to the pump room and baths, the grand Royal Library was built.

The library is on a corner site, and turns the corner with some style. This corner is actually a junction at which two side roads meet the main Worcester Road towards the summit of the town centre’s hill. The setting gives the end of the library great prominence, and the architect, John Deykes, exploited this to the full with a full height semi-circular bow in the classical style of 1818, when he drew up his plans. The main ground floor, actually raised slightly above the ground because the land falls away so sharply, is particularly splendid. Tall, 9-over-9 sash windows are separated by Ionic columns that support a balcony above with a balustrade of pump uprights. Above this, the upper-floor windows are set back, but echo the semi-circular shape. It’s a striking composition, and must have impressed visitors as they slogged their way up the hill.

The library building was part of the same structure as the assembly rooms, so inside it was not all about the books. As well as a reading room and an extensive lending library there was also a music library, a billiards room, and a room for card playing. The building also contained a bazaar where, according to an information board down the street, ‘anything from a Bible to a firescreen could be purchased’. All this, together with increasing numbers of shops, gave the spa visitors plenty to do, and served the town well through the Regency and Victorian heyday of the spa. When I visit today, walking, browsing, and imbibing, not to mention admiring the architecture, I feel I’m following in those 19th-century footsteps.

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.