Nantwich, Cheshire

Resurrection

Readers who would like to see some older timber-framed architecture, after two posts on half-timbered buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries, look no further.

Equally at the top of my list of priorities when visiting a town that’s new to me are historic buildings and local bookshops. Here in Nantwich then was nirvana: a bookshop in a historic building – the Nantwich Bookshop and Coffee Lounge. For the refreshments, I can forgive the fact that part of the lovely 17th-century facade is obscured by the tented gazebo out front – customers of the Coffee Lounge need to be accommodated and there were plenty on the day we were there. We could still revel in the dazzling patterns of the posts, beams, struts and braces of both the bookshop and the premises to the right. The ornate design of the timberwork is typical of the region, as are the front-facing gables that protrude over the street, the transition between the two surfaces made by a plaster cove. What’s more, there’s a delightful hand-made quality to all this, which, together with a hint of a little structural movement here and there, confirms that this is a building of the 16th or 17th century, not a Victorian imitation.

This is a jazzy building, a bit like a three-dimensional 17th-century equivalent of the paintings of Bridget Riley, and would have cost a lot of money to produce. The owner of the bookshop part when it was built was Thomas Churche, linen merchant, nephew to the still more prosperous William Churche, who built the portion to the right, and who was also the owner of the large Churche’s Mansion in Hospital Street in Nantwich. Both of the buildings in my photograph were almost certainly rebuilt after the great fire that destroyed much of the town in 1585. Investigations when the building was restored found that there had been some structural movement, probably soon after construction, and samples of the earth beneath the shop were taken. These revealed unconsolidated soil to a depth of 7 feet, and stretching back some 15 feet from the front of the shop. It’s suspected that the building was erected over the former castle moat.*

Another surprising discovery during the restoration was that the rear of the building is actually older than the front portion, and apparently by a different carpenter. Could this be because part of the structure escaped the fire? Or because the rebuild was done in two phases, perhaps as money became available?

While I was occupied in pondering these and other matters, the Resident Wise Woman got talking to a member of the shop staff. As a result I was permitted to climb the stairs into the attic (not normally open to the public) to inspect the substantial roof timbers of those impressive gables. On the way up, I passed through the middle floor (UK first floor, US second floor), where I saw Jacobean panelling on the walls and a beautiful piece of decorated plaster ceiling (see the photograph below).

Finding such interest and beauty on the inside as well as the outside of a building made my day, and I felt all the better because this had happened in a bookshop. I can say with the politician and writer Michael Foot that some of my happiest moments have been spent in bookshops.† This one was no exception. Thank you to the staff of the Nantwich Bookshop and Coffee Lounge for hospitality and coffee. And yes, of course I bought a book while I was there.

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* I’m indebted to a report by the architect Jim Edleston, a copy of which is available for consultation in the bookshop.

† Michael Foot (1913–2010), Labour politician, journalist, and author of books on Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, and Lord Byron, among many others.

Detail of plaster ceiling, Nantwich Bookshop

Stroud, Gloucestershire

R & R

The Cross in Stroud is a road junction at the top end of the High Street that many people must miss. A paved area at the uppermost point of the High Street cuts it off visually, whereas in years gone by traffic must have come up the now pedestrianised street and made its way on and up to Bisley one way or Chalford the other. Now the main landmark here is the old Coop building of 1931, a neat Art Deco design by William Leah with rather pleasantly angular lines, a central clock and a cross-motif in the balustrade that’s repeated in the glazing pattern of the upper parts of the shop windows. With its raised central portion it makes an attractive corner building.

It must have been a sizeable store, but the Coop is long gone and the building now houses several shops: a launderette, a café, a Chinese take-away…and a secondhand bookshop, R & R Books, which I usually visit when I’m in Stroud. I have posted before about the joys of bookshops, specifically Old Hall Books in Brackley and Richard Booth’s in Hay. R & R is another favourite, this time a shop stocking exclusively secondhand books, and one from which I always seem to come away with at least one purchase.

I have spent many enjoyable hours in secondhand bookshops. There are fewer of them around than there used to be, because so many secondhand booksellers now trade online, leaving the high streets to charity bookshops run by the likes of Oxfam. Online buying makes a lot of sense in some ways – you can search for what you want, and find it without leaving your house – and the internet gives you access to millions of books offered by a world of booksellers. In spite of this choice, I think the demise of high street secondhand bookshops is a shame, because there is a great deal to be said for browsing and buying real used books in a real shop.

There are various reasons for this. For book collectors, it helps to be able to see the exact condition of the copy on sale – there are many things you can see that even a thorough bookseller’s description (or even a photograph) can reveal. There is also the pleasure of dealing face to face with the bookseller: you can ask them questions, learn things, talk with people who often have the same interests as you. But more than all this, there is the benefit of serendipity, of accidental discoveries. In bricks and mortar bookshops I have discovered titles I didn’t know existed, shedding new light on subjects I’m interested in, or opening up entire subjects, such as psychogeography or the design of petrol pumps, or the history of plotland developments. I’d call such discoveries educational and life-enhancing.

R & R Books in Stroud is not a large bookshop, but it has an interesting stock that turns over, and a helpful owner. In it I’ve found over the years books I’d not come across before on such subjects as Art Nouveau, graphic design, and the architecture of Liverpool. I’ve also found quite a few old guidebooks (always interesting to me) and books I wouldn’t have bought without looking closely at them first, such as an early edition of J M Richards’s An Introduction to Modern Architecture, of which I already had a more recent copy – comparing the two editions and discovering how the author revised his text and added new buildings over the course of time was fascinating, to me anyway. R & R also sell various kinds of printed ephemera, and I’ve been unable to resist such delights as old London bus maps and a 1966 Sunday Times Magazine with a special feature on English contemporary poets.

Stroud had another excellent secondhand bookshop, Inprint, but it has recently closed. There’s still an Oxfam with a few books, plus books to buy at the café in the top picture, plus a new bookshop on the High Street. On Saturdays, Stroud’s celebrated printmaking anarcho-cyclist poet Dennis Gould sells a small selection of mostly used books and his own letterpress prints on an outside stall in the Shambles market off the High Street, and R & R have an indoor stall there too. Stroud is an excellent town for the book lover, and for me R & R Books is the place to start – and finish.

Garrick Street, London

Filigree

Here’s a detail from a shop in Garrick Street, next door to London’s famous Garrick Club and of the same date, the 1860s. I must have passed this hundreds of times before I paused to look at the architecture, mainly because I’m so interested in the contents of bookshops that their design sometimes passes me by more readily than that of most buildings.

In this case, the architecture is an arcaded frontage that’s very much of its period. There are classical pilasters with inset panels of dark stone. Between these pilasters are tall, round-headed arches  with dark marble shafts, producing an effect of restrained grandeur that’s very much in keeping with the large club next door (the architect was responsible for both club and shop). But what particularly caught my eye was the gold filigree decoration in the spandrels, the almost-triangular spaces made when you fit the rounded arch into the rectangular facade. It’s a delicate gold floral pattern and a smaller version also appears on the capitals.

These delicate decorative touches come from a time when the designer of a shop front expected it to last, not to be replaced with new fittings in a couple of years. One wonders if Frederick Marrable, the architect of this London block, would have expected it still to be here 150 years after it was built. Perhaps he and his contemporaries would have been surprised, but no doubt pleasantly.

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The architecture and decorative sculpture of the neighbouring Garrick Club are described and illustrated at the excellent Ornamental Passions blog.

Brackley, Northamptonshire

Brought to book

Here’s a warts-and-all photograph of one of my favourite buildings in Brackley, a Northamptonshire town that some of you will know as (I think) the market town in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. I’m attracted to this house for various reasons. First of all for the charming, if pulled-about, mid-18th century front. It’s all very restrained – the brick pilasters running up each edge of the facade are easy to miss; the pale bands beneath the windows are plain and simple; the off-centre doorway is modest. It’s not grand Georgian architecture, but the kind of satisfying facade that was put up by the dozen in the 18th century. And you notice I say ‘facade’. This is another example of the effect I noticed in Aylesbury a couple of posts ago: a Georgian brick front applied to an earlier house – in this case, a 17th-century building of rubble masonry.

There’s another reason I always stop here when I visit Brackley. This building is now a bookshop, and apparently a thriving one. This weekend it was also hosting a plant sale in the front garden, hence the unusually busy scene behind the railings. Inside it was calmer but there were customers browsing the mix of new and secondhand books, and buying too. As both new and used bookshops fold under the combined pressure of Amazon and ABE, perhaps more High Street stores should adopt the practice, still quite unusual in Britain, of selling both old and new books. Here at the Old Hall Bookshop, with its ample shelves of art, architecture, topography, and literature (and many more subjects: those are just the shelves that interest me), it certainly works for me.

Hay on Wye, Powys

Hay, good looking

This is the English Buildings blog, so I don’t as a rule record what I see on my visits (all too brief for the most part) to Scotland or Wales. But I live within striking distance of the Welsh border, and it occurs to me that now and then my readers might be interested in the occasional Welsh building, perhaps one so close to the border that it can virtually be seen from England.

Hay on Wye is a town I visit often, and it’s near enough to the border to be more or less on it. It’s famous as the town of secondhand books, and even in these digital times the place is full of bookshops. People come from all over the country to browse and buy here and, as more and more secondhand bookshops disappear from most High Streets, Hay seems to survive. It’s a stimulating place to browse, and you never know what you will find – it’s the opposite of a search engine, the ultimate in non-targeted, algorithm-free discovery.

The person who began it all was Richard Booth, who started his first bookshop in Hay in 1961 and attracted publicity not just with his large and diverse stock, but also by declaring the town an independent kingdom (with himself as king, naturally). Booth has sold books from several premises in the town since then, and a couple of dozen other booksellers also trade from shops in the town’s knot of narrow streets. This is Richard Booth’s shop in Lion Street, beautifully restored with maroon period paint. It’s an interesting design, structurally a bit like an enormous shed, but with a front that’s nearly all glass. There are lots of ornate details, such as the gilded lion at the top above a date stone that says 1886, and the very fancy capitals.


But what makes it even more special is the wonderful selection of tiles on the front. The sheep and cattle depicted on the tiles have led many to assume that this was originally a butcher’s premises, but this building doesn’t feel like a butcher’s somehow – I’m inclined to believe the sources that say it’s a former agricultural supplier’s. The quality of the space inside (high ceilings upstairs, spacious wooden floors) and the wide door that one could imagine wheeling sacks through on a truck fit with this. The interior has recently been refitted with custom-made shelves, ample seating, and a café – it’s a far cry now from a seedsman’s warehouse, and a good place for both physical and intellectual nourishment.