Hull, East Yorkshire

 

Names and textures, 2

Now for a sign that contrasts with the one in my previous post and makes a good excuse to look at one of my favourite street names. Yes, The Land of Green Ginger is the name of a street, a narrow one off Silver Street in the centre of Hull. There are various theories about the origin of this curious name. Some say that it is a corruption of ‘Lindegroen jonger’, referencing a junior member of the Dutch Lindegreen family, who lived in Hull in the early-19th century. Others suggest it derives from ‘Landgrave Granger’, because the Landgrave family nearby. I am always suspicious of derivations that are said to be ‘corruptions’ of ‘difficult’ words and prefer the simpler explanation that, in this great shipping and trading city (a cosmopolitan place where ‘unusual’ names must have been common), valuable spices like ginger were sold nearby.

The sign itself is an elegant one that uses a serif letterform which fills the name plate so that there’s very little free space around the words. Such is the clarity of the letters, though, that the sign doesn’t look crowded and is perfectly legible. The size of the sign has been well specified to sit comfortably on its strip of masonry. The dark background of the name plate and the thickness of the material mean it stands proud slightly as is easy to spot.

But what an extraordinary wall it’s set on. This building was designed in 1907 by Dunn and Watson for the National Provincial Bank. Built in 1907, its Portland stone walls are finished with an effect called banded rustication – the masonry is arranged in bands that have deep grooves between them, giving a striking stripey look in full sun. But this rustication goes further than most. Many of the bands are pulvinated – in other words they have a convex curved profile. The gaps between the bands are very deep and there are concave mouldings within each band; the ends of the bands are carefully chamfered or curved. A lot of trouble has been taken with this masonry, including the way the bands turn to embrace the keystone above the window. Another striking feature is the Celtic knot design on the square block above the keystone. Once more in Hull, name and texture, surprising for different reasons, sit well together.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Still busy

The beehive has been a powerful symbol for centuries. For some it has represented ‘the winged republic’, where society runs in an equitable way, with each individual playing their role to general benefit of the whole. For others, it has stood for industry and productivity. Perhaps the latter train of thought was behind the adoption of the beehive as the symbol of Lloyd’s Bank in 1822. It was the bank’s sole symbol until they took over Barnett ’s Bank in 1884, when the company also began to use Barnett’s emblem: the black horse. Both symbols were used by the bank until the 1930s, when the hive was phased out and the black horse remained.

But the occasional Lloyd’s beehive survives, like this one on a hanging sign in Bury St Edmunds. Since sign and bracket alike have clearly been carefully designed and made with some skill, it’s understandable that no one wanted to throw it away. The sign has a dome shape at the top to accommodate the hive, which is itself cut out from the background and coloured the same gold as the lettering. The bracket is shaped to follow the contours of the hive, adorned with curlicues and finials, and braced with a diagonal strut; it’s fancy, but not distracting because the clear lettering and symbol make the sign very easy to read: I’d say the combination works very well. No doubt that fact that the building it’s attached to is still branch of Lloyd’s means it’s still effective too, alerting anyone who doesn’t know to the bank’s location as they approach along the pavement. It was, I’d say, a good investment.

Sherborne, Dorset

Surprised in Sherborne, 2

Sherborne’s Cheap Street is a very attractive jumble of architectural styles – from late-medieval timber framed structures to stone buildings from virtually every later date: a hotch-potch, mostly with recent shop fronts, but much of it given unity by the glowing stone. Even in this good company, the bow-fronted building above is outstanding. Living near Cheltenham, I’m used to stucco-covered Regency buildings decked out with classical cornices, columns and iron balconies, but even so this one made me pause. It’s small, with just a single window on the upper floor of its curvaceous facade, but what a window – the full Venetian, with a pair of rectangular sections bookending a round-topped central portion, the whole surrounded by elegant mouldings and highlights picked out in white. A neat cornice and parapet, balustraded in the centre, complete this upper floor, which rests on four stone Ionic columns that frame the modern shop window. The iron balcony is the finishing Regency touch, vital for the safety of those inside who want to open the big window, which extends down to the floor.

As with the shop front in my previous post, I wondered what this building was used for when it was first put up in the early part of the 19th century. The upper room looked to me like the spacious drawing room of a middle-class house, the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place in Brighton. But there was no clue to what was originally where the modern shop window is now. The answer turns out to be that the building belonged to the Sherborne Savings Bank, who erected it in 1818. 

This was the formative period for savings banks in England. These banks were set up to provide banking facilities for poorer people – those who were not normally the customers of the established banks, whose accounts did not normally bear interest at this time. Savings banks welcomed small investors, including those who could save only intermittently, as their incomes were unreliable and varied according to the seasons or the availability of work.* Although savings banks did not help the very poor, who found it impossible to save any money at all, they were attractive to those such as artisans, small farmers, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, among whom were many who had a little money to save and who liked the idea of self-help. Savings banks were not perfect: in an era before elaborate state regulation of financial institutions, some folded as the result of fraud or incompetence. But for many they played a useful role.

Whoever designed the Sherborne bank’s building did their best with what was clearly a confined site. Ideally, the sweep of the bow front should stick out over the pavement area, so that it can make an impression whichever way you approach it. But the building to the right already sticks out, so this wouldn’t have worked without invading too much pavement space. So here it sits, standing proud of one neighbour and slightly in the shadow of the other, making its impression nonetheless.

The delicate architecture of this frontage is not what I normally associate with banks. The banks I’ve admired on this blog in the past have been rather chunky buildings, with the kind of solid-looking masonry that suggests strength and security. They seem to tell you that your money will be safe here. This building is very different. It’s impressive, but in a gentler, more domestic way. Its columns and the overhang they make possible offer shelter from the rain and seem inviting. ‘Come in,’ they say, ‘and you’ll receive a warm welcome.’ The effect seems wholly appropriate for a savings bank set up for those not previously used to dealing with the estanlishged banks or money markets. It still works its charm, on one passer-by, at least.

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* Small investors could also entrust their money to Friendly Societies, but these had regulations – often requiring members to deposit money regularly, that did not suit those with irregular incomes. Savings banks did not have such rules. 

Worcester

Sun and the city
In Worcester the other day, I paused briefly as the afternoon sun went down, moved out of collision range of passing Christmas shoppers, and spent a few moments admiring the impressive array of buildings on the city’s main street. It’s a row of varied structures including a house, a couple of banks, a church, and a hotel, and positioned as it is in the centre of the city it’s surprisingly easy to walk past, dodge other pedestrians most of whom are heading resolutely for the shops, and not give any of it a second glance.

But, as regular readers will know, it’s one of the points of this blog to linger over architecture that’s most often unregarded or taken for granted. So what have we got here? First, in the foreground, my photograph shows half of an early-18th century brick building that I take to have been built as a house. This shows the decorative grace that Georgian classicism can achieve – acanthus keystones above the windows, swags below, neat quoins and cornice, and a finely detailed Ionic doorway. Next to it is a former bank, designed in the Edwardian baroque style by Charles Heathcote of Manchester in 1906. Although smaller than its neighbours, it manages to be very grand, its Portland stone frontage oozing telling details like those columns on the upper floor, the circular window above the doorway, and the iron balcony on the side wall, as if to enable the manager to look down on the hoi polloi below and calculate their credit ratings by eye before they even reach the front door.

Beyond that building is the other bank, dating to 1861–2. Its detailing is a little more restrained than that of its smaller neighbour, more Renaissance palace than baroque, as Pevsner observes. It was built for the Worcester City and County Bank as their headquarters, and this local business fittingly chose a local architect, E. W. Elmslie, who made such a mark on Malvern.

Next in line is St Nicholas Church, now, like the first bank, given over to eating and drinking. The architect of this building of the 1730s is not known but Pevsner tells us that the landmark tower is taken from a design by James Gibbs, one he did but rejected for the church of St Mary Le Strand in London. Its recessed stages culminate in an octagonal cupola with a delicate circular columned lantern at the top. At ground level this striking tower is set off by tall Doric pilasters and a pediment and the whole thing is a grand climax to this part of the street. Its stone catches the sun beautifully too, as it did on the cold winter’s afternoon when I took the photograph.

Visible beyond the church is part of a brick building, also warmed by the sun and partly striped with pale Doulton terracotta. This is a long block, originally housing the Hop Market and Commercial Hotel, built in two stages between 1899 and 1907. The visible end is the later part of the structure and has a striking open lantern topped with another small dome on the street corner, a colourful counterpart to the tower of St Nicholas.

Each of these buildings provides much to take in for anyone with the time to stand and stare. But even the casual passer-by can appreciate how well they work together: a coming together of periods, building materials, and styles that both enlivens a city street and gives it a sense of grandeur. It’s one of those bits of a provincial city not at all where time has stood still but where something of the quality attainable by local architects and builders has been preserved. We should be grateful for that.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

For all time

As Shakespeare is being widely celebrated at the moment, here's a brief Shakespearean interlude. It's a terracotta panel from the Old Bank in Stratford-upon-Avon, a building of 1883 designed by Martin and Harris. The facade is festooned with scenes from the work of Stratford's most famous son. All the sculpture on the bank was produced by Samuel Barfield of Leicester.

The panel in my photograph (click on it to enlarge it) shows scenes from four of the plays, from left to right: As You Like It (with people of the Forest of Arden on the left, presumably); Two Gentlemen of Verona; A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bottom with the ass's head); and Twelfth Night (Andrew Aguecheek and Viola, dressed as a man, nearly coming to blows). Culture as the common currency of Victorian England. Lovely.

Wells, Somerset

 
Slightly foxed

At the weekend I was teaching a course about architectural ornament and the participants were amused and, I think, charmed by a number of variations on the classical orders that I showed them. I wanted to demonstrate that the orders weren’t necessarily regarded by masons, carvers, and builders as a set of hard-and-fast rules. They could be starting points on which the craftsman played variations. A particular hit was a Corinthian capital with a bird fluttering among its acanthus leaves in Birmingham. It reminded me that there are capitals featuring animal heads on a building in the High Street at Wells. They occur on the Bath stone facade of a bank of about 1880. But what kind of capitals are they? And what are the animals?

The official listing text for the building describes the capitals as “quasi-Ionic”; the text doesn’t mention the animals at all, not concerning itself with such trivialities. The Ionic element is the spirals, although there are also some acanthus leaves lurking at the back, so it might just as well be “quasi-Corinthian” I suppose. The beast is an oddity: the Resident Wise Woman suggested an attempted fox, observing that the ears seem to be turning into a leaves. A mythical beast? Or just a poorly carved one? No matter. It’s a bit of fun however you look at it.

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

People’s bank

British banking expanded in the Victorian period, and it wasn’t just a matter of high finance. In the 18th and early-19th centuries there was a dearth of places where people on low incomes could save on a modest scale, putting away a small amount of money for hard times and unforeseen needs. Local savings banks were one answer, and such banks spread widely after the success of one founded by the Rev Henry Duncan in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, in 1810. It’s said that such a bank was started in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 1816. Thirty years later it was large and well enough established to move into these premises in Crown Street.

Lewis Cottingham, a Suffolk-born architect who established his office in London and became well known as a Gothic-revival specialist, was the designer of the bank. This commission came at the end of Cottingham’s life – he had developed a successful career as a repairer of churches and cathedrals (and was the restorer of the Norman gate tower next door to this site), and a builder of houses large and small. For the savings bank he chose neither straight Gothic, nor the classical style so often used for banks, but a red-brick ‘Tudor-Gothic’ style with stone mullioned windows, prominent gables, and tall, ornate chimneys. The brickwork has diaper patterns, which the Victorians sometimes used on their more decorative buildings, from humble cottages to William Butterfield’s vast Keble College, Oxford.

The result is impressive, making good use of the corner site, but not grandiose. There’s a domestic feel to the building, and the look of the date, picked out in dark bricks, is more like something you’d see in homespun by a builder than on an architect-designed bank.  So much so indeed that I took it at first glance to be a group of almshouses, in which the large door led to a courtyard. But a bank it was, and it served the people of Bury in this way until 1892. I’m told the building is now divided into apartments, and must also serve its residents well with light, attractive, and central accommodation.

Launceston, Cornwall

Glances and gazes

I sometimes get odd looks from passers-by when I am standing looking at some building that probably seems at best unremarkable to them. Several times, walking around the centre of Launceston contemplating shop fronts, banks, pubs, backs of houses, and similar sights, I was aware of quizzical looks. I wasn’t long in the town (the chief architectural object of my visit to Cornwall was to see some country churches), but as well as walking around I seized the opportunity to pause and sit in the Square and see how much had changed since the John Piper illustration and photograph I posted some years ago.

One object of my gaze hadn’t changed much at all: this building, done in Victorian Gothic and dominating one corner of the Square. Details such as the rows of pointed arches and the occasional quatrefoils reminded me a little of the sort of architecture that Osbert Lancaster poked gentle fun at in his exemplary cartoon histories of architecture: his ‘Municipal Gothic’ just about fitted the bill.

This isn’t a municipal building but a bank, and the 1870s or 1880s Gothic, the work of the somewhat Gothically named Launceston architect Otho Bathurst Peter, seems to fit the bill well. Both the banded, two-colour stone of the arches (showing the influence of Ruskin’s studies of Venetian building no doubt) and the multi-coloured stone of the walls are satisfying. I like this masonry, the restrained ornament (those quatrefoils above the door and the ground-floor windows) and the simple, plain-speaking way the building turns the corner.

I spent a while taking all this in, puzzling away at the colourful decoration above the middle row of windows. It’s tiled, I think, although if so the tiles are laid very close, so that the joins are hard to see. As I looked, and waited for the traffic to pass so that I could take a relatively uncluttered photograph, a passing woman caught my eye. ‘Yes, it’s rather good, isn’t it?’ she said, with an approving nod. Which is true, and shows me that not all these passing glances are quizzical.

Gloucester

A new light

A change in the light, a chance upward glance, and we can see familiar buildings anew. I’ve walked past this branch of Lloyd’s Bank in the middle of Gloucester dozens of times, and often registered its 1890s gables, Flemish Renaissance details, and modest signs. It took a particularly strong dose of winter sunshine to make me see its familiar face more clearly: to mark the differences between the pediments above the windows (segmental in the projecting side bays, triangular in the central recessed section); the ornate pinnacles and oeil de boeuf at the top of the central gable; the horizontal bands giving a touch of extra richness in that gable; the variations in the window sizes.

The architect was a local man, Frederick William Waller, son of Frederick Sandham Waller, also an architect. Both father and son worked widely in Gloucestershire and round about and must have been successful men of the city. They were both architects to the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester Cathedral as well as prolific designers of new buildings and restorers of churches. This bank shows Waller Junior articulating in his building some of the prosperity and confidence of his home city – port, mercantile hub, manufacturing centre, and county town.

When the sun lit up this facade the other day, making the red bricks as red as they can be in all their colourful glory, its illumination made me look a little more closely than I’d done before at this confident frontage. It helped me to realise that the dressings of this very red brick exterior were not stone, but terracotta, lending the whole upper part of the building a warmth that contrasts with the paler granite of the arched ground floor, just visible at the bottom of my photograph. Perhaps I was seeing this frontage for the first time as the architect hoped people would see it, standing out in all its redness against a clear deep blue sky.

Manchester

Throwing the kitchen sink at it

A recurring theme in posts on this blog has been the way architects and builders deal with corners. Here’s one of the most striking corners I know, the turret or overgrown oriel that takes the eye around the junction of Chancery Lane and Brown Street in Manchester. The building was designed as the offices of a bank, and, from the rusticated ground floor to the rows of dormer windows in the roof and the iron crown that tops off the structure, it’s an eye-catcher in a city of rich showy 19th-century buildings.

The architect was George Truefitt, whose buildings included the unusual circular St George’s Tufnell Park Road in London, and other bold churches such as St Mary, Davyhulme, Manchester, which has an octagonal tower, and St John Bronley, which has a big apse and a number of quatrefoil-shaped windows. Whereas these churches are unambiguously Gothic, this Manchester office building of 1868 is in a style one can only call eclectic – a mixture of classical rustication, Gothic shafts, round-headed arches, iron balconies and stone parapets. Some of the carved stonework – repeated flowers and leaves, for example – looks forward to the terracotta details on many buildings of a couple of decades later. The finishing touch, that wrought-iron crown on top of the corner turret, is a charming one-off. This kind of blend of showiness and solidity, confidence and delicacy, is typical of the Victorians. It may not be ‘proper’, but one way to make a mark on the busy, architecturally eventful streets of Manchester is, in a popular phrase of today, to throw the kitchen sink at the building. I’m rather glad that Truefitt did so.

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Turning again

In 1853, when in France Baron Haussmann was becoming Prefect of the Seine and beginning to plan his transformation of Paris, countless smaller transformation were underway in towns and cities all over the place, not a few of them to do with providing more spacious and up to date premises for businesses and offices. This bank in Aylesbury is a case in point. Long established as the Bucks & Oxon Union Bank it got a smart classical building in 1853 with rusticated ground floor with arches window recesses and bigger, pediment-topped windows upstairs.

And that's all very impressive, but what made me pause was the way the architect treated the corner, especially as I've been thinking about corners after posting the unusual house in Bishop's Stortford the other day. Whereas the Bishop's Stortford building turns the corner with a tight curve of brickwork, this bank takes the junction at an angle, and with extraordinary banded rustication – masonry laid with exaggerated horizontal joints – all the way up the wall to the cornice. Those upper bands of stone seem to break the conventions that the rest of the building adheres to, not least of which is that you rusticate the lower floor and leave the upper levels plain.

There are plenty of examples of rustication on upper floors – especially running up pilasters or filling the space above a central portico. But this narrow strip above the doorway does seem rather in your face, perhaps because there's nothing on the wall except the banded masonry – no windows, no columns or pilasters, just these lines of stone, ruled out like a ledger, on which various inscriptions have been cut: a sort of vertical timeline that mercifully leaves rather little space for the sign of the current proprietors. A corner that is ruled off, as it were.

Strand, London

Fish facing

My interest in the work of the Doulton ceramics company, as featured in the previous post, alerted me to this building long before I actually managed to find it. It's easy to miss, because this part of London, where the Strand and Fleet Street meet, is full of rival architectural attractions, from the Law Courts and the church of St Clement Danes to the premises of Twinings, purveyors of fine teas. This richly decorated building began life as the Palsgrove Hotel, and its entrance lobby is a dazzling array of Doulton tiles decorated by John H McLennan. McLennan worked for Doulton for some 33 years, coming to their Lambeth factory at the age of 17 in 1877, while continuing his studies at the Lambeth School of Art. A mere year later he won a silver medal at an exhibition for a portrait of Handel on a ceramic plaque, and he continued to win prizes, as well as completing decorative schemes for prestigious Doulton clients such as the King of Siam and the Czar of Russia.

His tiles for this hotel lobby form a riot of foliage, animal heads, figures, and ornate architectural details. A relief panel depicts fish disporting themselves amid sinuous waves and this theme is continued on the end walls, where flying fish with big wings and twisting tails stand out from niches. Above the fish, on a keystone, is the letter P for Palsgrove Hotel, in the fanciest Victorian script. I'm not sure of the significance of the fish – maybe the hotel had a fish restaurant – but the creature takes its place among a decorative ensemble that is at once exotic and typically Victorian in its richness of detail.

If all these beasts and fish, flowers and leaves, capitals and keystones,  were outstanding in a hotel, they seem even more remarkable in a bank, which is what this building became in 1895, when Twinings, who had diversified into finance and were running a bank from their neighbouring premises, took it over. Nowadays, it's a branch of Lloyds and offers customers a visual feast as they queue to use the cashpoint.

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There's more about this building at Caroline's Miscellany, here.

My main source for information on John H McLennan is Desmond Eyles and Louise Irvine, The Doulton Lambeth Wares (Richard Dennis, 2002)

Northampton

Letter set (4)

To complete my short series about letters on buildings, here's an example of a fourth kind of lettering, the sort known generally and unflatteringly as the grotesque. These letters are distinguished by their total lack of serifs, the little end strokes that adorn Egyptian, Clarendon, classical and "English" letters† and in the world of print and type this class of letter is known simply as "sans serif".

At first glance you could almost believe that some gigantic stamping device has been at work to create this example beneath the pediment of the former Northamptonshire Union Bank in Northampton, but this is stone not concrete and it must have taken a lot of chiselling to incise the these large grotesque capitals. Their unadorned, businesslike quality contrasts with the more delicate carving of the composite capitals below them and the phoenix, with its flames and logs, above. In this context (classical architecture, classical mythology) one might have expected more classical or "English" letterforms, like the ones on Roman inscriptions perhaps, but these plainer ones certainly get the message across. Alan Bartram, whose short book, Street Name Lettering in the British Isles (1978)§, has been a useful guide for me, describes the grotesque letter as "in reality, an Egyptian without serifs", going on to remark that it's an adaptable form that can be used at a wide range of different weights.

These Northampton examples are nicely proportioned letters, although the P is rather high-waisted, making its bowl somewhat small and confined. On a modern inscription the letter would probably have a much fuller bowl. But this bank was built in 1841 and in those days that was often how they made, to adapt Shakespeare's phrase, their great Ps.

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† Readers who would like to see examples of these other classes of lettering can see my other posts on Egyptians in Stroud, Clarendons in Devizes, and "English" letters in Leicester.

§ The companion volumes, Fascia Lettering in the British Isles and Tombstone Lettering in the British Isles are also both worth seeking out via ABE or used book stores.

Brighton, Sussex

Building society

I wonder if I would have noticed these carvings if I'd not been alerted to their presence by Nicholas Antram and Richard Morrice's Pevsner Architectural Guide to Brighton and Hove. Possibly not, as they adorn a 1930s neo-Georgian building and my eyes would probably have been distracted by Regency onion domes and other fancies. So I'm grateful to Antram and Morrice for pointing me in the direction of the former Citizens' Permanent Building Society.

Building Societies. If you are inclined to think of them in the way we think of banks, financial institutions offering a range of financial "products" from loans to insurance, think again and think back. Building was originally much closer to the heart of what building societies did – holding deposits from some of their members and lending other members money to build houses.

So when he designed the Citizens' Permanent Building Society J L Denman got Joseph Cribb to carve a series of relief panels depicting the building trades and set these panels around the three large windows on the ground floor. Capped and overalled tradesmen mix mortar, saw wood, attach roof tiles, and build walls, and Denman himself appears in one panel, unfurling a plan and discussing progress with another man (a foreman or clerk of works?).

 Joseph Cribb began as apprentice and assistant to Eric Gill, remaining at Ditchling to work independently when Gill left Sussex for Wales in 1924. His work is in numerous churches and I'd not expected to find his carvings in this context. They rise to the challenge of squeezing their subjects into the spaces and curves around the windows and pick out details, from roofing battens to pulleys, in a satisfying and realistic way. Their concentrated view of life on site also reminds us of what building societies were about. The building, however, is now occupied by a bank.

Leicester

Built to last

Just along Granby Street from the Turkey Café described in the previous post is this large Victorian bank. It’s such a show stopper of a building that I couldn’t photograph it all (there are more pictures of it here). The Victorians liked to build big, imposing banks, and employed all sorts of styles for them from solid classical, through ornate Italian Renaissance revival, to the Gothic employed here. Now empty, formerly a branch of the Midland Bank and HSBC, this 1870s building was originally the head office of the Leicestershire Banking Company. Its designer was Joseph Goddard, who, like Wakerley of the Turkey Café, was a prominent Leicester architect. In fact several generations of the Goddard family have practiced architecture in Leicester. Goddard originally intended to design the bank in the classical style, but his clients wanted something different from the classical National Provincial Bank up the street, so he went for this red-brick Gothic, with trimmings of stone and terracotta.

The part of the building shown in my photograph is the banking hall. Its dominating features are the tall Gothic windows – I left a passing pedestrian in the picture so that you can see just how tall they are. I especially like the way Goddard used pale Portland stone to contrast with the brick – the stripy arches are an effective touch, as is the mix of stone and terracotta at cornice level above them. Slender shafts flanking the windows, decorative terracotta panels, and little bands and rosettes of carved stone provide plenty to entertain the passer-by. It’s a building full of Victorian confidence, soaring above the modern shops that surround it on this street in the centre of Leicester and speaking of the city’s prosperity when the hosiery, textile, and engineering industries were at their height – a time when bankers and their architects built to last.

Purton, Gloucestershire

Strangers on the shore

The British have been building boats for millennia, and sailing them, and wearing them out. When boats are no longer sea-worthy, they end up on the shore, getting recycled in interesting ways. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes lived in a hut made of an upturned boat, like the fishermen’s huts of Lindisfarne. Masts become maypoles. Figureheads are made into garden ornaments. Countless wood-framed houses are said to be built of ‘old ship’s timbers’. As the salmon-fishers at the end of Andrew Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House knew (who ‘like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes’) there are many things you can do with a boat as well as sailing it.

Near Purton, on the eastern bank of the River Severn (there’s a Purton over on the western bank, too, just to confuse us all) old boats have been used in a remarkable way. The Severn, with its great tidal range, challenging currents, and acres of mudflats, is a huge changing ecosystem. It deposits silt here and washes away banks there. In some places the banks need reinforcing, and here, it is old boats that have been used over the years to bring some stability to the shore.

At Purton, more than just the river bank was at stake. The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, built to cut out some of the more difficult and winding stretches of the river on the way up to Gloucester, runs here parallel to the Severn and very close to its bank. In 1909, when the canal bank was threatened, a small fleet of old lighters was beached at Purton to reinforce the land and protect the inland waterway. As the years went by, more and more redundant vessels were beached here. Purton is now Britain’s largest ships’ graveyard.

Full or half-full of silt and tussocky vegetation, some 81 vessels reinforce the bank here. Timbers stick up from the ground; sometimes entire hulls remain, sometimes odd posts and tangles of ironwork. There are concrete boats too, and chunks of metal superstructure, and bits of old gearing.


They make a poignant collection ranging from Island Maid, built in Plymouth in 1863 and beached some time before May 1945, to the unpoetically named FCB 75, built in concrete by the Wates Building Group at Barrow in Furness in 1941 and beached in 1965. They were probably all as tough and utilitarian as FCB, but they had a job to do and they did it. And now they have another job, they do that too.

Western Avenue, London

Perivalediction (3)

As a final footnote to my Art Deco encounters on London’s Western Avenue, here’s a detail of the building just across the adjacent road junction from the Hoover Factory. It’s a bank and row of shops, clad in this white and green tile and probably put up around the same time as the factory. No doubt the original shops were used by the Hoover workers as well as by the residents of the many new houses built in this area at around this time.

Here we have the vocabulary of Art Deco, the green and white colour scheme, the white cladding, the little bursts of ornament – plus some eccentric extras like the unusual window frames, which are a far cry from the sleek metal-framed windows of the Hoover Factory. It’s all used to much more modest ends, a small tribute to the monster factory nearby showing how this kind of decoration can work on a smaller scale. It’s easy to miss in the shadow of its neighbour, but satisfying to find.

Leominster, Herefordshire

The building formerly known as… (1)

Every so often I find myself in a strange town admiring a bank. Not, I try and convince myself, in a nostalgic spirit of longing (‘Those were the days when banks were banks, when bankers lent money they really had to people who could actually afford to repay it’). After all, I’m far from certain that the image of solidity so often created by Victorian and Edwardian bank buildings necessarily reflected the financial security of the institutions inside. We sometimes forget that things changed rapidly in the 19th century too.

Here’s Lloyds, with its doorway as solid and classical as they come, on Corn Square in Leominster. But it wasn’t always Lloyds, as becomes clear when we crane our necks on entering. It was the Worcester City and County Banking Company until 1889, when Lloyds took them over. But they weren’t over-eager to bury the history, having the old name carved in deep block letters above the door in a rather odd position, but clear for all to see.


I’m not sure when this was done, but the doorway with its columns punctuated by bold stone blocks (rusticated columns, in archispeak) is the kind of thing that appeared on grand buildings in the classical style during the decades on either side of 1900 – so soon after the takeover, perhaps. There’s quite a lot to admire here – I especially like the way the word ‘BANK’ fits into the spaces in the frieze above the door, and the way the blocks around the arch match those in the columns. All balance and order, then: a bank for its times, and, let’s hope, for our own.

New Street, Birmingham

ORDER, ORDER (2)
In spite of blitzkrieg, modernism, decay, and demolition, there are still plenty of Classical buildings in England. And so architecture buffs, who know their metopes from their triglyphs, get used to recognising the Classical orders. But how often do we really look at their details, the curving spiral volutes of Ionic capitals, the curly acanthus leaves of the Corinthian?

Of course, capitals are usually high up on a building. You need binoculars and toned neck muscles to look at them closely. One of the joys of visiting the great cities of the ancient world – Istanbul is supreme in this respect – is the amount of Classical rubble lying around on the ground. In places like that you can look at all kinds of architectural sculpture close-up, without craning your neck.

Now and then in England, though, the accidents of building design bring you face to face with this kind of detail.This Corinthian capital is in the New Street branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in the centre of Birmingham, which occupies the former Midland Bank, a building of the late-1860s designed by Edward Holmes. The style is a grand, confident Classicism. It’s just the kind of thing for a High Victorian bank but the generous spaces also make it a good setting for a large bookshop.

The stairs afford interesting glimpses of some of the Classical details, and the invention and craftsmanship that went into their creation. The picture shows the capital atop one of the giant Corinthian pilasters inside the shop. Face to face with this capital, we see the Corinthian order, or an eccentric Victorian adaptation of it, afresh. Crisp acanthus leaves curve inwards and outwards, spirals thrust up and forward like springs, and the whole thing supports, not an entablature or lintel, but another piece of decoration, an even bigger piece of foliage. The most striking touch of all, though, is the centrepiece – a bird opening its wings amongst the scrolls and leaves. All praise to the Victorians for their whimsy, and to Waterstone’s for their conveniently sited staircase that gives us this close-up view.

Corn Street, Bristol

Less famous than the cathedral (see previous post), but even more ornate and just as amazing in its way is the former West of England and South West District Bank, now Lloyd's TSB, in Bristol's Corn Street. The picture shows a small section of the upper floor and cornice of this building, built in the 1850s and modelled on St Mark’s Library, Venice. The Italianate proportions (using the plain Doric order on the ground floor, the more elaborate Ionic order above) are impressive. But what really sets this building apart is the carving with which it is smothered. Using pale Portland stone to stand out from the Bath stone of the main structure, sculptor John Evan Thomas let himself go, with the arms and symbols of the towns and cities where the bank had its branches and up in the entablature, a host of putti busy working away as bankers. How unlike the bankers of today these innocent figures seem.