Liverpool, Lime Street

Second among equals

The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas responded with an eye-catching round tower featuring a dome that seems to grow organically from the masonry below; both tower and dome are festooned with curvaceous frames around windows and pediment-like features that proclaim the design’s baroque heritage. The gables are fancy too, with more curves and finials – it’s a shame that neighbouring buildings mean that it’s hard to see much of this skyline against a background of sky.

Fireplace with beaten metalwork surround and panel depicting Viking ships.

Inside, the pub is very much a sibling of the Philharmonic, with much carved mahogany, polished metalwork, and a mix of stained and etched glass. Some of the metalwork is outstanding – the relief featuring Viking ships above the fireplace in my photograph is a good example.

Privacy screen with oval of stained glass. An original bell push is visible on the wall beyond. 

One feature of the layout is a number of wooden privacy screens with Art Nouveau stained glass panels and lamps mounted on metal uprights set into wooden columns. There are also telling memories of a kind of table service not seen in pubs much now (if at all): small bell pushes that enabled customers to call for service without getting up and going to the bar.

Copper-clad bar front, carved mahogany column and elaborate plaster ceiling

Dating from 1907, this pub is a few years later than the Philharmonic, but they clearly have much in common. One difference is the style of plasterwork in the ceilings. While the Philharmonic recalls the Jacobean era (early-17th century), that at the Vines looks to be inspired by designs from later in the same century. It’s no less impressive, and worth a stop to anyone seeking visual or alcoholic refreshment.†

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* The name comes from one Albert Vines, who ran an earlier pub on this site.

Manchester, Portland Street

One for Cottonpolis

Some of Manchester’s commercial buildings are so vast that they defeat the photographic efforts of a mere amateur with an iPhone. You really need skill and a camera with a good wide-angle lens to do justice to the 1850s monster on Portland Street that is now the Britannia Hotel. The whole thing is around 300 ft in length and the seven storeys reach about 100 ft in height. A structure with clearly palatial aspirations, it began life as a warehouse for the textile merchants S & J Watts, Manchester’s biggest wholesale drapers. It was a home trade warehouse, in other words a place where British clothing and haberdashery retailers would come to inspect and order stock for their shops. Inside were grand showrooms, where customers could examine the goods, plus floors for storage and offices for the administrative staff.

Architectural historians such as Clare Hartwell* have detected a similarity in the overall shape of the building to the Fondacho dei Turchi in Venice. That’s true enough, but let no casual user of AI be foxed into thinking that this hulk of a structure is ‘in the Venetian style’.† Apart from anything else, something as weighty as this would surely sink into the lagoon. As for the stylistic treatment, Manchester architects Travis and Mangnall threw the kitchen sink at it. Each floor is treated differently, and there is a mixture of Italian and English Renaissance detail, plus the rather baroque heavily rusticated entrance floor, where the deeply cut masonry and big voussoirs of the arches are combined with more delicate carved detail, some of which is visible if you look closely.¶ At least the detail is all classical, one muses…until one looks up to the skyline, where the four towers have wheel windows that could have come from a Romanesque cathedral.

The differences between the treatment of the floors, together with the fact that there seems to be a lot of variation in ceiling height, give the warehouse a satisfying vertical rhythm, but the overall effect from street level is the simple one of overwhelming size. It’s an enormous lump, for sure, but one that reminds us of the chutzpah of the Manchester cotton traders, of the scale of their activities, and of Manchester’s justified pride in its status as Cottonopolis.

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* Clare Hartwell, Manchester (Pevsner City Guides), 2001

† An AI-generated description saw while looking up various accounts of the warehouse online: caveat googlor.

¶ It’s worth clicking on the images to enlarge them. 

Manchester, London Road

 

When size matters

I have marked my recent visit to Manchester with a series of posts on three of the city’s small architectural gems – a cinema, a chop house and a library – structures that many people might miss in a city full of buildings that are on such a large scale that they command the view. For my next couple of posts, then, I turn to some seriously big Mancunian buildings.

Hardly has the visitor emerged from Manchester Piccadilly station than the parade of architectural juggernauts begins. In London Road, straight opposite the railway hub, is this Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century. It’s an enormous structure, and the part visible in my first photograph is just one facade of a building with four unequal sides surrounding a large courtyard. In 1906, when it was completed, Manchester was a prosperous city that wanted to give the emergency services a home that was architecturally magnificent and the design, by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham,* fits the bill. There’s the full Edwardian panoply of towers, turrets, domes, classical columns and grand entrances, all in a combination of red brick and glazed terracotta. Rows of windows are testimony not only to the various offices occupied by the emergency services and the coroner’s staff, but also to the many apartments provided. Workers such as firemen, on call night and day, often lived on site, in this case in homes that were better than most of those in the surrounding, rather poor, area. Whatever one feels about the design as a whole, the architects made a noble effort to compose the diverse elements – the large entrance arch, the rows of windows, the recessed section with its pairs of columns, the various towers – to create a convincing composition.

The decorative details, for those with the time to give them the attention they deserve, are likewise impressive. Among the best are above the largest entrance on London Road. Above the great central arch are two groups of allegorical figures. On the left are three figures representing fire: they bear torches and thunderbolts, and their hair is aflame. Opposite are three water-carriers, who offer the solution: at their feet are fishes and foliage grows prolifically above their heads, representing the life that can thrive when the danger of fire has been averted. Figures with similar iconography are set above the central window and within the arch, near the ‘FIRE STATION’ plaque.

This extraordinary building served the emergency services through much of the 20th century, most of it closing when the fire-fighters moved out in 1986. With the closure of the coroner’s court in 1998, the place was finally empty. In spite of a plan to convert it to a hotel, it was left abandoned and deteriorating until recent years and now a new scheme is underway for a mixed-use conversion. I believe work on this is still ongoing.

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* A short-lived local partnership of three architects who practised with various partners and in different groupings. Manchester, a large and growing metropolis, was able to sustain numerous architects – most of the Manchester buildings that I’m posting were designed by firms based in the city.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.

Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Local speciality

Stoke pots, Nottingham lace, Luton hats. In years gone by, many English towns became specialist centres of manufacturing. Whatever else they might produce, even big cities like Birmingham (famous for its small metal goods, from jewellery to boxes) or Sheffield (steel and cutlery), became widely known for particular industries. Witney in Oxfordshire looks at first glance like a typical small rural town with its Corn Exchange. But what made Witney well known all over the country was its woollen blankets. In the winter, Witney kept you warm at night. A short walk from the town centre the buildings of Early’s blanket mill still exist, and nearer still to the heart of the town is the Blanket Hall, built in 1720 as the headquarters of the Company of Witney Blanket Weavers. Inside was a room where the weavers came to have their products weighed and measured, to ensure that their work was up to standard; there was also a room for meetings and facilities for catering for blanket makers’ feasts.

The architecture of the Blanket Hall is early Georgian with a baroque flavour. This is not the full-blown baroque that we see at Vanbrugh buildings such as Blenheim Palace (not far away), but a small-town version with curved (segmental) window heads, pronounced but plain window surrounds, a pediment that is broken at the bottom to accommodate the clock, and a skyline punctuated with ball finials. The frontage is built of good ashlar but the side just visible in my photograph is of rougher stone, because most people won’t notice.

The architect is said to have been William Townsend (or Townesend) of Oxford. Townsend was a member of a family of master masons and builders who worked in Oxford in the late-17th and 18th centuries, working on numerous colleges and other buildings. They formed a locally important building dynasty comparable to the Smiths of Warwick, the Patys of Bristol and the Bastards of Blandford Forum. William Townsend was primarily a mason, and probably worked in tandem with an architect on his larger buildings, but here he may have taken sole responsibility. The baroque front that he created in Witney is in a style I’ve seen a number of times in small Oxfordshire towns – Chipping Norton, for example, has some examples. It makes a grand enough impression to stand out next to the rural-looking buildings on either side, but is not so ornate as to be showy. The blanket-makers, one feels, were happy to display substantial wealth, but not in a way that’s too grandiloquent or boastful. Fit for purpose, reassuring, does the job well: like the blankets, in fact.

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.

Clifton, Bristol

In the vanguard

I like to wander around towns and cities, finding interesting buildings, rather than relying too slavishly on guidebooks, but before our most recent visit to Clifton I did consult the excellent Pevsner city guide to Bristol, to check whether there was anything I should be looking out for. The guide sent me to the memorable 1960s church of All Saints and hinted that there was a late-Victorian baroque garage nearby. Even the book’s enthusiastic description did not quite prepare me for this modest but highly ornate building.

Catching sight of it from some distance, I could make out the combination of brick, bands of stone, shallow arches and fancy finials that told me that I was approaching something special in that distinctive, rather frantic baroque style that was popular from the end of the 19th century into the Edwardian period. Getting closer, and taking in the elaborate decoration above the central entrance, I could appreciate the full effect: scrolls, face masks, cornices, circular window, pediment with extra large mouldings, and foliage draping down and springing up everywhere. Mr E. Edwards (his name lettered in clear, plain capitals but with a hint of the raffish in the curved crosspiece of the ‘A’) must have been proud of his premises. His architects, Drake & Pizey,* did him proud,

Remarkably, this building is dated 1898: that’s about a decade on from the German petrol engines of engineers Daimler and Benz that enabled the earliest vehicles we’d recognise as motor cars, but only three or four years after the first cars were seen on British roads.† The firm of Edwards, who both sold and maintained motor vehicles, were pioneers. Their building was in two parts: showroom on the left, workshop on the right. There are photographs from little more than 20 years ago that show the workshop still in use (as an MoT test centre). The showroom section is still used to display cars. Few late-19th century automotive buildings have outlasted the Daimlers and de Dion Boutons, the Lanchesters and Austins, that were sold or serviced there in the 1890s and early-1900s.

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* A Bristol partnership who also designed a baroque bank in Bristol, which I must also seek out.

† The National Transport Museum now awards the honour of the first car in Britain to a vehicle produced in 1895, but stresses that there are many conflicting contenders. It also depends what you mean by a car. But the point is that cars were very few in these early years and Edwards were true pioneers.

Kemerton, Worcestershire

 

Distant prospects

One of the themes of this blog is the pleasure to be gained from unexpected architectural encounters – those views of buildings that one glimpses from the road while going from A to B – and so much the better if there’s the opportunity to stop and take a closer or longer look. There’s something especially rewarding about chancing upon something in one’s local patch, a notable building that’s only visible from a road or footpath that one doesn’t normally use. I often pass through the village of Kemerton, in Worcestershire, and even occasionally stop there for a coffee on a quiet morning, but the other day I made a detour, little more than driving around three sides of a rectangle of roads to return in the direction I’d come. It was then that I caught sight of the house in my photograph.

One field separates Kemerton Court from the rural road I was driving along. Even from a moving car I could make out a building that looked special, and it wasn’t long before I returned, walked up the same road, and had a longer look. I saw a Cotswold stone front of the early-18th century, apparently very well built, mostly of ashlar. The window surrounds are quite plain – the keystones are small and not especially showy – and the doorway has a triangular pediment with Doric or Tuscan pilasters running down from its ends. Plain it may be, but the articulation of the frontage is quite sophisticated – notice how the central bay and the pairs of outer bays are set slightly forward of the rest, to give some visual interest, while the round-topped window and the little circular window above it emphasise the central bay. The finials on the parapet (which resemble either egg cups or acorns according to how you see them) and the survival of the small panes in the windows are pleasing touches. There’s also an eye-catching contrast of curves, with the string course below the round window going one way and the curves in the parapet going the other. It’s this kind of contrast that shows the influence of the baroque style on whoever it was who designed this facade. The architect is not known – Smith of Warwick and Thomas White of Worcester are possible candidates.

This facade fronts an older house of the 16th century, and following the road round to the rear of the house reveals a less symmetrical structure. Looking from the road was all I was going to do, though, as Kemerton Court is a private house and not open to the public. I’m grateful, though, that its satisfying west front could be seen, at arm’s length as it were, just one green field away.

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.  

Bath, Somerset

Matters of taste

Kingsmead Square seemed to be the perfect spot for a socially distanced cup of coffee on a recent visit to Bath. Our seat was also a good place from which to admire the entrance front of Rosewell House, named for the person who had it built, one Thomas Rosewell. Rosewell’s architect was Nathaniel Ireson of Wincanton who developed part of this square in the 1730s – there’s a carved datestone inscribed ‘1735’ at the very top of the house’s facade. By this time, John Wood Senior had already set the style for Georgian Bath with developments such as the grand, palace-fronted Queen’s Square. But Wood’s style was less reliant on ornament and more on proportions than this house. Ireson’s mode was more akin to the lively baroque of the beginning of the 18th century – so there’s plenty of carving, more curves, more elaboration.

You can see this wherever you look. The windows all have fancy surrounds – the first-floor ones with carved busts in the keystones, the big central windows even more elaborate, one with a surround of curves and scrolls, one flanked by upright figures. There are lots of pilasters dividing up the frontage and book-ending it, those on the ground floor with banded rustication. The whole is topped by a deep cornice and segmental pediment that contains the carved datestone, which is concealed behind a tree branch in my photograph. Presumably the ground floor would originally also have had sash windows, but the spaces now accommodate shop windows.

I find all this detail fascinating. It’s even more elaborate than the beautiful stone facades in a smaller Georgian town like Stamford in Lincolnshire, another place where the provincial taste for baroque elements lingered longer than they did in more ‘progressive’ and ‘sophisticated’ cities like Bath. John Wood, in the vanguard of sophistication, did not care for this sort of thing, which he referred to as ‘ornaments without taste’. Well, Wood built some fine houses, and I have some respect for him as an architect, but I’ll happily look at this example of what he saw as bad taste all day. There is more than one way to design a classical town house, and Bath has room for several different approaches.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Put your hands together for Mr Matcham…

During the pandemic, with its various attendant prohibitions on gatherings and unnecessary voyages out, the Resident Wise Woman and I have enjoyed numerous streamed and recorded performances by the likes of the National Theatre as welcome substitutes for the real, live thing. At various times of our lives, the live theatre has been important, and these offerings have been very welcome. But there is nothing like the atmosphere of a live performance in a proper theatre, and once or twice recently I’ve caught myself remembering some of the notable nights out we’ve had in months and years gone by.

Something triggered a memory the other day of my very first visit to the theatre. I was a small boy, and I’d read somewhere about theatres, and seen, I think, an illustration of one in a book. Whatever the book was escapes me now, but the illustration was of a magical place, all gilded decoration, glittering lamps, red velvet, and baroque curlicues – though I would not then have known what a curlicue was, let alone what the term ‘baroque’ means. But I had this image of a theatre in my mind, and when I was told I was going to go to the theatre I hoped it would be somewhere like that. I’m not sure how old I was (eight? nine?), but I know I was (already, so young!) not unprepared for disappointment. It couldn’t, could it, be quite as ornate, as glittering, as wonderfully other and different, as the theatre in the book?

But it was. The interior of the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, was every bit as extraordinary, from the crystal lamp hanging in the centre of the ceiling to the red plush on the seats, from the golden putti on to the balcony fronts to the intricate decoration around the proscenium arch. Little did I know that I was in a building designed by the doyen of theatre architects, Frank Matcham. Matcham, who died in May 1920, had a hand, as builder or rebuilder, in some 150 theatres. It was what he did, mainly, and he did it very well. Not only was he brilliant at this kind of late-Victorian and Edwardian baroque fantasy decoration, but he also understood the theatre. He knew that the whole audience needed to be as near the stage as possible, and that seats with views interrupted by pillars were a pain. He was up with the latest in theatre technology, from electric lighting to crash bars.¶ He could work on a large scale or (as at Cheltenham) on a restricted site. He knew how to make a theatre adaptable – Cheltenham’s theatre, originally built as an opera house, has an orchestra pit that can be covered to fit in more stalls seating when (as is usually the case these days) the show needs no band.

As you can tell, I’m a fan of Frank Matcham. But back in the sometimes absurdly destructive years of the 20th century, many did not share my enthusiasm.* Matcham’s fancy decor (sometimes baroque, sometimes classical, sometimes Italian Renaissance) and traditional theatre layouts fell out of favour and many of his buildings were demolished. I’m glad that a number – the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, the Richmond Theatre, London’s vast Coliseum, Cheltenham’s little Everyman, and some 20 others – still survive and are now much loved.† Matcham’s theatres are, as they say in the business, dark now. But they’ll glitter again, and audiences will be doubly grateful for them, and they’ll resound with laughter and applause.

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¶ Crash bars: the bars on theatre exit doors that open when you push them; Cheltenham’s theatre was the first building to have them fitted.

* An excellent article in The Guardian cites a telling comparison made by architectural historian Andrew Saint. Matcham’s fate has sometimes been like that of Charles Dickens; the novelist was sometimes sneered at by academics (especially F. R. Leavis – but there have long been Dickens supporters in academe) for being popular or lacking in seriousness. Dickens’ reputation is safe these days; that of Matcham is too.

† Matcham’s other buildings include Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom and the magnificent County and Cross Arcades in Leeds.

Photograph: Copyright © 2020 Everyman Theatre Cheltenham 

Leeds

Gigantic Leeds (2)

My second gigantic and over-the-top building in Leeds is the Corn Exchange, another enormous structure by Cuthbert Brodrick and, like the Town Hall, a design that won a competition. Brodrick based it in the Halle au Blé in Paris, a domed circular building that had already inspired a major structure in London, the Coal Exchange by John Bunning, a masterpiece that John Betjeman tried unsuccessfully to save from demolition in the 20th century. Brodrick’s Leeds building, though, is elliptical with three semicircular protrusions that mark the entrances. While the Halle au Blé had a classical design with quite plain detailing, the Corn Exchange in Leeds is probably closer to baroque, with its gigantic size, its varying curves, and the monumental treatment of its masonry.

The exterior is of sandstone ashlar and the masonry is imposing, if not almost overwhelming in its finish. Most of the blocks are rusticated and carved to form diamonds pointing outwards; decoration includes swags and paterae; the clock is surrounded by garlands. The identifying inscription, by contrast, is in a dead plain sans serif letterform that seems to mean business.

And this was also, when it was originally completed in the 1863, a highly practical, businesslike building, housing a ring of offices for the corn factors around the perimeter and a large open market space accommodating stands for the factors in the centre. A balcony running around the walls half way up gives access to a further collection of offices, and above that is the vast dome, its structure largely visible from within and its great sweep dominated by two openings – a huge oval window that forms part of Brodrick’s design and an additional window like a vast curving slit, that is a later modification and adds another touch of eccentricity to this highly original building.

Since the Corn Exchange ceased to be used for trading in grain in the 1980s, it has undergone two restorations to attempt to adapt it for retail use. On the face of it, the result seems successful. The rings of offices convert easily to small shops without destroying the integrity of the building, and the open areas lend themselves well to café or restaurant use. However, the trading areas seemed very quiet when I visited and I do hope they weather the current difficult time for retailing in Britain. Brodrick’s building deserves to survive and deserves to be used.

Marylebone Road, London

Maestoso, etc

I often walk along Marylebone Road and I usually admire the Royal Academy of Music as I pass. The other day I did what I’ve always meant to do, and stopped to take a photograph. It’s a building of 1910 by Sir Ernest George, a good late-Victorian and Edwardian architect known for his country houses and his versatility (his practice designed all kinds of buildings from Golders Green Crematorium to mansion flats) but always rather in the shadow of his even more successful pupil, Edwin Lutyens.

I like the well-mannered baroque of his Royal Academy design. The materials, red brick and Portland stone, are thoroughly at home in London, the facade looks rather like a country house, with its side wings, but is also urban, somehow – perhaps it’s the sense of height conveyed by those vertical ranks of windows and the tall chimneys.

Towards the top it gets very fancy, with those round oeil de boeuf windows, the curved pediment, the reclining figures with musical instruments to hand, and the extraordinary window in the centre of the pediment, that can’t make up its mind whether it’s oval or rectangular. It’s majestic, but also very lively – in musical terms, maestoso, but with decidedly allegro passages. Altogether, it’s a building that enlivens my days when I pass, as the work of some of its alumni enlivens my evenings.

Burford, Oxfordshire

Conversion

I don’t recall coming across a Methodist chapel so ornately Classical as the one in Burford. The entrance front is in a local version of the Baroque style made fashionable by architects such as Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh (we’re not too far from Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace here). This is very much not the curvaceous Baroque of mainland Europe, but the British Baroque – a style that makes architecture theatrical with visual devices such as banded rustication (the horizontal bands in the masonry), an emphasis on size or height (the narrow windows help make the building seem higher than it is), big keystones over the windows, and doorways with Gibbs surrounds (the protruding square blocks are the key feature of this sort of door surrounded, popularised by James Gibbs, architect of St Martin in the Fields, London).

It’s an unusual chapel, and that’s because it was originally a private house. It was built for a lawyer called Jordan in 1720–30 and remained a house until 1849, when it was converted to a chapel by removing the interior floors to make a large hall and installing a gallery for extra seating. At this time the urns that decorated the parapet (another Baroque feature) were removed. It's interesting to find a house converted into a chapel: these days, one is more likely to find the opposite – a redundant chapel made into a house. Its rich combination of banded masonry, tall Corinthian pilasters, and all the Baroque features make the chapel’s facade a striking feature on Burford’s main street. Even though it is set back from the main building line, it stands out.

Kingly Street, London

Mr and Mrs Atlas

Here’s a brief post as I wrestle with a deadline.

There are whole books about looking up in London, and rightly so: you miss a lot if you don’t. A chance glance when hurrying along Kingly Street in search of congenial friends in a pub led me to stop briefly and take a photograph of these figures through the gloom of dusk. They remind me of those baroque atlases – common in central European cities like Prague – that seem to strain to hold up doorways in grand city houses. I’ve noticed them in London too, in particular in a very studied baroque revival facade in Mortimer Street.

Here the figures are on a more modest frontage, with lots of glazed tiles. It’s almost as if the architect threw in a bit of baroquery as visual relief and to stop the frontage looking like a kitchen. It’s a standard assemblage – swags (heavy), scrolls (curvaceous), date stone (bulgy). And the figures: male and female supporters straining at their job and somewhat squashed-looking, but with enough space to stick their elbows out and their knees up, as if to support the swags. A neat and confident bit of decoration from 1911, in defiance of the Cubism, Futurism, and abstraction that were bursting out everywhere in the visual arts. Tradition still had its place.

Derby

Insurance agent's baroque?

Here's a building arrestingly adapted to its site, the baroque structure that forms the continuously curving corner of Wardwick and the Strand in the centre of Derby. I know it as the Refuge Assurance Building, and that company certainly occupied it for a long while, although I don't know whether it was originally built for them. Its grand style, the high baroque of the late-19th century, is rather well adapted to follow this tight corner. The cornices, string courses, balustrades, and window ledges all go with the flow, taking the eye around the curve, while the windows – one lot plain and rectangular, the other lot more fancy, with semicircular tops, carved keystones, and little balustratdes along the bottom – form a steady rhythm punctuated by various upright pilasters. All these classical details give the place a kind of grandeur, which is augmented by the striking skyline, with its French pavilion roof crested with ornamental ironwork. The narrow profile of the building at the corner also adds to the effect of the height, making the building look taller than it is.

This is how the 1880s did urban grandeur and when they went for, they were cooking with gas, to use a figure of speech that might have been made for the Victorian era. It's roughly the style that has been dubbed 'banker's baroque' and the insurance-men of the late-19th century had it taped too. There are examples all over Britain's major cities, especially in London, but few are graced with such a dramatic shape. Here's to Victorian confidence!

Mortimer Street, London

Sculptural practice

I know the area north of Oxford Street quite well, especially the bit around Portland Place, home to the RIBA and its marvellous architectural library, which I use from time to time. But I don't recall walking along this part of Mortimer Street before, or seeing number 82, a striking facade that made my jaw drop. This frontage of the very late 19th century features an artful collection of stone pediments and tall windows, with the main features picked out in stone against a background of red brick. What took my breath away, of course, were the two figures that support the upper pediment. They're cousins of the hundreds of straining figures – usually male, and usually known as Atlantes – that support lintels and arches on countless buildings in Europe. Part of the repertoire of baroque architecture, they're less common in England than in Italy or Central Europe. But here they are, doing sterling work in the middle of London. 

Figures like these are generally male. Female supporting figures more usually take the form of caryatids, which stand upright and are bereft of arms – their heads do the holding up. Here, though, we have one seated male and one similarly seated female, and a fetching pair they make. Their bodies, drapery and faces are well carved and I particularly like the way they are placed, sitting on the curving lower pediment and holding up the one above. Back home, looking the building up, I wasn't surprised to find that it was designed by Beresford Pite, a notable architect with a strong London practice, who loved to include carvings on his buildings. Long-standing readers of this blog may remember him from a post of another London building, also richly carved, that I did a long while back. On today's facade, the sculptures were done by Thomas Tyrell who I think taught at Lambeth School of Art.

This building was originally a consulting room for an anaesthetist and coincidentally, the other building by Pite that I posted had a medical connection too. As so often when I notice architectural sculpture in London, I find that Chris Partridge and his excellent Ornamental Passions blog has got there first. Chris Partridge speculates that the figures represent waking – the upward-looking male – and sleeping – the female who pulls the hood or veil over her head. Such subjects would certainly be appropriate for the occupant of the building. Whatever their intended subjects, though, I'm grateful to have been alerted to their presence.

Oxford

Back again

More than five and a half years ago (sometimes I find it hard to believe I have been blogging for so long) I wrote a post about this building in Oxford, and accompanied my thoughts with a rather lacklustre photograph, the best I could muster at the time. Aware that my photograph did not do the building justice, every time I've been in central Oxford since then I've had a look to see if the facade could be viewed with sunlight on its stone and without cars parked in front. As you can see, I have almost managed it – just the rear end of one car prevented me from getting the whole facade in the frame, and even with this intrusion, the result seemed closer to the mark.

So here it is: Vanbrugh House, a building of the early-18th century by an unknown designer that has more than a hint of the eponymous architect (or his brilliant assistant Hawksmoor) about it: those very plain window surrounds, with just the keystones emphasized on the upper floors and aprons in the middle floor; the exaggerated cornice and canopy; the pair of giant pilasters rising all the way up the building; the narrow space between the pilasters; the very plain doorway. The pilasters are especially odd: they seem to have been parked in front of the rest of the frontage, filling the gaps between the evenly spaced windows like an abandoned piece of stage scenery. The decoration towards the tops of the pilasters, beneath the protruding canopy, is also rather like scenery – a couple of those three-banded triglyphs to provide the idea of an entablature, but not the thing itself.

Like all scenery, it needs good lights. On a dark day, it can look brooding and oppressive. But with some sunshine it comes to life – although there's no getting away from the sheer weight of all that stone. Whoever designed it, he deserves Abel Evans's epitaph for Vanbrugh himself: 'Lie heavy on him, Earth! For he Laid many heavy loads on thee!'

Notting Hill Gate, London

G'day!

The Coronet, Notting Hill Gate, was once my local cinema. I must have passed it hundreds of times and have seen a few movies in it too, but it's a long while since I've actually looked at the building. Then, one day recently, I walked by as the morning sun was throwing its baroque plasterwork into delightful relief and I stopped and looked more closely. In truth, its design is a theatrical hybrid – a bit of Italian Renaissance (the arches in low relief), a lot of baroque (the swags, and much other detail), some non-specific classicism, some leaves that wouldn't be out of place on an Art Nouveau building.

It's theatrical to be sure, and the building was indeed designed originally as a theatre, in 1898. As early as 1916 is was converted to a cinema and a ready market for movies in West London has kept it going. I'd wondered whether it was by the architect Frank Matcham, who did so many highly ornate theatres that have kept me entertained over years, from London's vast Coliseum to Cheltenham's small but perfectly formed Everyman. It's not by Matcham, but by a designer who drank from the Matcham spring: W G R Sprague, himself a prolific architect of theatres in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Born in Australia and the son of an actress, Sprague seemed destined for the theatre. He worked for Matcham and for another theatre architect, Walter Emden, before teaming up with Bertie Crewe and designing theatres off his own bat.

The facades of the Coronet show off well what Sprague liked to do – to create what he referred to as 'the free classical form'. From the Aldwych to the Gielgud, Wyndham's to the Ambassadors, Londoners can sample his work, keeping their eyes diverted before the lights go down. The Coronet, lit up by the morning sun, is a shining example of his style.