Western Avenue, London

Perivalediction (1)

When I visit London my route in and out of the capital city takes me past the former Hoover Factory in Perivale, and seeing its long pale façade on the way out, I know that I’ll soon be beyond the urban sprawl and on to the M40. For thousands of others every day, this great flash of white and green represents their farewell to London, and no doubt when the factory, designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, opened in 1933 it was designed to make just such an impression.

The Hoover Factory was one of many built on the western fringes of London in the Art Deco style. From the road, we see the office section, but behind stretched a huge manufacturing building – eventually extended to about a quarter of a million square feet – where some 1,600 people assembled the vacuum cleaners that were already synonymous with the company’s name.

For Hoover, manufacturers of the latest cleaning devices, this factory was a perfect symbol. Its white walls suggested cleanliness and hygiene; its flashes of coloured decoration implied that the company's products were stylishly designed; its big windows created light, airy spaces inside, showing that modern workers could work in modern comfort.


Gliding past along Western Avenue, one takes all this in, but stop and look at the details and it gets even better: the great cinematic sweep of the window above the entrance; the artful arrangement of diagonal glazing bars in the doors (mirrored incidentally in the patterns of the iron railings around the site); jazzy light fittings; white sculpted variations in the wall surface; amazing recessed quadrant windows in the stair towers.


For a while, buildings like this were unappreciated. They were seen as ephemeral cinema-style architecture, their flashy decoration out of kilter with the puritanical tenets of modernism. And so, one by one, as manufacturing moved away from London, they were demolished. Hoover shifted their manufacturing away from London in the 1980s, and their building looked likely to suffer a similar fate.

But by this time, more people came to see the virtues of buildings like the Hoover. The decorative flair, and sometimes excess, of postmodern architecture helped many see them in a new light. Architects and public alike realised that cinema-style building was not all bad (I once heard a well known postmodernist modestly refer to some of his own work as ‘B-Movie architecture’). So the Hoover Factory was saved, although it’s now the called Hoover Building, because nothing is manufactured here and it is occupied by offices and a supermarket. For which I for one am grateful, as I drive westwards, dodging speed cameras and dashing objects, and saying my farewell to London.

Former City Electricity Works, Worcester

From majestic cooling towers to backstreet substations, England’s electricity industry has produced many different kinds of buildings, mostly ignored by architectural historians and passers-by, sometimes condemned as eyesores. This one is far from an eyesore. It’s the former City Electricity Works outside Worcester, sitting back from the road southwest of the city across a meadow by the River Teme. Apart from temporary structures, this delightful building, now converted to apartments, was the first hydroelectric station built by the authorities of an English city. Worcester’s city engineer, S. G. Purchas, did the designs, fitting three big turbines across the river. The red and yellow brick, arched windows, and water-meadow setting ensure that this fine building of the 1890s looked good then and now, generating admiration as well as 400 kilowatts.

Palace Hotel, Manchester

MANCHESTER VIGNETTE (2)
This depiction of a building on a building is a far cry from my previous Manchester vignette. We’re now well and truly in the Victorian era with a combination of tough, very red bricks and dark red terracotta courtesy of the ubiquitous Doulton’s. So what’s the castle all about? Well, this building, now the Palace Hotel, was originally the offices of Refuge Assurance. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in the early 1890s, in the heyday of terracotta and brick (and indeed of Doulton’s). Waterhouse’s son, Paul, did the adjacent extension. You can’t get a much better symbol of safety and refuge than the double towers of a medieval castle gatehouse. So that’s what we have on this corner – the full castle Monty, with cross-shaped arrow slits, battlements, and overhanging gallery with holes (machicolations, in castle-parlance), to allow the imagined retainers to pour boiling oil on attackers below. One hopes the insurance business was rather more laid back, but we get the idea. High security, Victorian style.

Weobley, Herefordshire

With one city, no big towns, a small, mainly rural population, and a dearth of motorways and heavy industry, Herefordshire is one of the quietest of all English counties, little known to outsiders. Yet it has a beautiful rural landscape – of rolling hills, sheep fields, cider apple orchards, views towards the uplands of Wales. As in much of rural England, buildings add to and enhance this character. Herefordshire has some good building stone – the pinkish sandstone that Hereford Cathedral is built of, for example, and limestones in a range of colours from yellow to chocolate. But in many areas the dominant local building style is “black and white” – a timber frame infilled with wattle and daub.

There are whole villages of black and white houses in Herefordshire, and one of the finest is Weobley, between Hereford and Kington. The photograph shows the Red Lion, bits of which date back to the 14th century. This part of the building has a timber-framed upper floor on top of a sandstone ground floor. The upper floor has a big overhang, a feature called a jetty which gives a little more floor space upstairs. More importantly, a jetty was a sign of status – to the medieval mind it said, ‘I can afford the extra wood and the skilled carpenter that this feature demands.’ The arch-shaped timber braces either side of the window on the end wall are high-status features too. The plaster red lion is a much later addition, but affords a touch of charm and colour. Here’s to it.

Coughton Court, Warwickshire

Whenever I drive to or from Birmingham Airport, I see this building, set back from the A435. When its west-facing façade is warmed by the late-afternoon sun, it is the highlight of my journey.

Driving past, one gets the impression of an orange stone building set at the end of an avenue of trees in parkland – a perfect building and a unified composition in a very English landscape. Stop and look more closely, though, and the building is more complicated. Even the stunning 16th-century gatehouse at the centre can’t be all of a piece. At the ground-floor level the turrets are square, but they metamorphose into octagons between the ground and first floors, suggesting that the gatehouse was built in two goes.

The wings on either side are rendered, not stone – but whoever did the rendering got the colour right, so that it blends well with the masonry of the gatehouse. These wings are later. Their windows look 18th-century, and a painting of the early-18th century shows the large windows all in place, although the delightful little quatrefoil windows upstairs hadn’t been added at that point, so they must be later still.

Like so many English country houses, then, Coughton is a hotchpotch of periods, but a hotchpotch in which the ingredients blend together to produce something magical. Maybe the harmony has something to do with the fact that the same family has lived here for nearly six centuries. The Throckmortons of Coughton have always been Catholics, although their loyalty to the faith has landed them in trouble more than once. Their house was sacked by Parliamentarian troops during the English Civil War and the place was vandalized again by a Protestant mob in 1688. But united the family stood, and their house perhaps reflects this unity of faith and vision, over a period of almost 600 years.

Broadway Tower, Worcestershire

Broadway Tower is on top of a hill on the borders of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on a site that had long been used for lighting beacons. The hill is almost 1000 feet above sea level, so any fire lit there, or any light glimmering from a building, can be seen for miles. The story goes that the wife of George William, 6th Earl of Coventry, wanted a beacon she could see from her house in Worcester, and her husband decided on this site and chose James Wyatt as the architect.

Wyatt was known for his work in the Gothic style, but was a versatile designer – for this building of 1797–1800 turned his hand to a kind of Romanesque revival, with round-headed windows and castle-like turrets. The tower can certainly be seen for miles around, and people who like to make lists of such things argue about the dozen or more counties you are supposed to be able to see on a clear day from the top of the tower. There were of course even more before the local government reorganization of the 1970s.

People talk about buildings like Broadway Tower as ‘follies’. But, all these apparently eccentric towers, sham castles, grottoes, and so on were originally built for a purpose and when we know the purpose the buildings seem less bizarre. Broadway Tower was built to be seen, to be admired, and to admire the view from. Not so outrageous, really.

Bishop's Cleeve, Gloucestershire

This tiny structure – almost too small to be a building – is in a courtyard car park in the centre of Bishop’s Cleeve, a village that has expanded since the 1970s to become a dormitory settlement for Cheltenham. It’s surprising amongst the shops and houses to find an industrial building, for this is a wheelwright’s furnace, where iron rims were heated before being attached to wooden cart wheels and dunked in a trough of water so that they shrunk to fit. But every place of any size once had its wheelwright, a craftsman who had to be skilled in both wood- and metalwork, and who would mend buckets or do joinery when no wheels were needed.

Curiously, this furnace is dated to around 1910, which seems rather late for iron wheel rims. John Boyd Dunlop patented his pneumatic rubber tyre in 1888 and it caught on quickly. But old wooden-wheeled carts were used for decades afterwards, even though the iron rim and its furnace were already old technology in 1910. How fortunate that this relic of industrial technology has been preserved – appropriately bound with iron bars, presumably by the wheelwright himself.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

This surprise is in the Barnard’s Green area of Malvern, standing proudly at a road junction from where you take your choice of Malvern’s attractions – the lovely Victorian railway station, the town centre, the stately and all-commanding hills. The little building is not the thing one expects in this elegant English town, a place in so many ways redolent of the age of Queen Victoria or of Edward Elgar. Malvern is all wells, Victorian hotels, and opulent villas behind conifers and laurel bushes.

But not quite all. Meet the modernist war memorial bus shelter and clock tower of Barnard’s Green. I don’t know much about this building. It has a British Legion plaque on it and is in a 1930s modernist style that recalls seaside pavilions. There’s a neat clock, some masonry fins, an overhanging flat roof typical of the style, and seats inside, occupied the day I was there by a group of gentlemen somewhat the worse for drink who shuffled into the shadows when I got my camera out.
Best of all are the war memorial poppies that adorn the end panels around the outside of the little building. Buildings in this idiom aren’t normally allowed floral ornament, but this is different, of course. The poppies give us all the message we need.

Chiselhampton, Oxfordshire

One of the purposes of this blog is to record accidental architectural discoveries and to preserve those moments of surprise when I come across unexpected or unusual buildings. Recently I was taking the coach from London to Oxford when we hit a diversion. Because an accident was blocking the M40, the coach approached Oxford along a different road, taking us through the village of Chiselhampton. As we did so, I looked up from my newspaper to see this building through a gap in the hedge. Next time I was doing the same journey in the car, I reran the diversion so that I could have a better look.

There’s a date inscription telling us the church was built in 1762, but that’s all that’s known. It must be the work of a local builder and carpenter, interpreting the language of Classical architecture in their own way. What they came up with, a plain façade rising to an ornate, town-hall-style, clock turret, is not the kind of thing you normally find on a sophisticated town church, where convention demanded a proper pediment and bell tower in the style of St Martin in the Fields. But how much better this provincial version works for a small country church, lifting your heart as you enter and take your place in box pew or gallery (all the original furnishings are still there, by the way). Or as you pass, hassled and late, on your way towards the more pretentious turrets and spires of Oxford.

All Saints, Margaret Street, London

This nativity image is from All Saints, Margaret Street, one of the masterpieces of the architect William Butterfield. The church is a typical Butterfield building in polychrome brick, and is full of the sort of beautiful fittings and decorations that provided an appropriate setting for the kind of worship favoured by the Victorian Tractarian movement. The building was finished in 1859, but in the 1870s Butterfield returned to design scenes and figures to be painted on tiles in the North aisle. The stars shine down on a very Victorian tiled stable. The Gothic revival came early to Bethlehem and Our Lord, of course, merits only the best when it comes to quatrefoils, columns, and canopies. Season’s Greetings.

Shop front, Worcester

In 1881 people could be bothered with things like this. A small shop in a side street in Worcester is topped with this grandiose collection of panels, scrolls, pediment, date stone, and curvaceous lamp bracket. And in the pediment is a relief of a basket of flowers, picked out in colour. So this was a florist’s, then, in 1881, and the proprietor wanted his colourful wares to be presented to the public in a veritable temple of Flora.

I include this building not because it’s an amazing piece of design or a show-stopping example of architecture or a breathtaking bit of townscape. It’s none of these things. But it is an example of the small pleasures that can be had by looking up in the least likely of places, of the modest gifts that history gives the eye.

Shops are rather good for this. Their ground floors alter restlessly with new tenants and changes in fashion. Upstairs, things evolve more slowly, or not at all. Bits of former houses, faded painted lettering, fragments of ornament, or old window frames betraying a building with a longer life than you’d guess from looking at the shop window – these are the kinds of historical trove an upward glance can yield. So look up, and be amazed.

Melbourne, Derbyshire

Regular readers of this blog will remember the post a couple of weeks back about the parish church at Elkstone, Gloucestershire, an attractive small church in the Norman style of the 12th century. Here’s another Norman church, but on an altogether larger scale. This is a church planned like a cathedral. There’s a grand west front with twin towers and a large entrance portal. Inside, the nave is lined by round piers and semi-circular arches, high above which are yet more arches – and all on a scale you’d normally expect in a church in a much more important town or city. The imposing effect of the architecture is enhanced with plenty of carving too – zigzags around the arches, together with a plainer moulding that gives the design a more restrained look than Elkstone. The tops of the piers have capitals with crosses, scrolls, and other designs. Elsewhere there are some interesting animal carvings, all from the 12th century.

Why did this place have such an imposing church? Apparently the place was an outpost of the bishops of Carlisle, who used to come down to south Derbyshire when the going got tough in their northern bishopric on the border with Scotland. And so visitors to Melbourne get a pleasant surprise. The church is tucked away down a side street and most people don’t find it unless they’ve come to see Melbourne Hall, the local big house, which is nearby. Those who do stumble on it discover one of the gems of English building.

Aynhoe Park, Northamptonshire

Aynhoe Park is a striking country house in Northamptonshire, constructed in golden stone for several generations of the Cartwright family, who lived here from 1615 until the mid-1950s. This picture shows just one wing of the building. The house evolved over the decades between the 17th and early-19th centuries, and includes work by two great architects, the baroque master Thomas Archer and the Regency genius John Soane. Capability Brown landscaped the grounds.

In a way though, this illustrious pedigree doesn’t matter very much. What matters most about this house is its location. It’s a country house in the middle of a village, one that stands on its head the convention of the upper classes isolating themselves in large parks and sweeping away their tenants’ cottages when they spoil the view. So when you approach Aynho from Banbury, the road bends dramatically to the left – and there’s the house, one the best surprises English architecture has to offer.

Actually, the cottages of the village don’t spoil the view either. Aynho is one of Northamptonshire’s most beautiful places. Naturally, the houses are all built of local limestone. Naturally, lots of them have espaliered apricot bushes growing up the walls. A delicious place, if ever there was one.

Langham Court Hotel, Langham Street, London

The word ‘eye-catcher’ was coined for this place. When I caught a glimpse of it from a side-street I had to have a closer look. What I found was a hotel – but it hasn’t always been that. This dazzler was built in 1901 as a nurses’ home. The glazed-brick façade is no doubt meant to look hygienic – its shiny surface would have easily shed the build-up of city grime in the smoky period when it was built. The style is a kind of neo-Norman – the semi-circular arch above the doorway is a kind of homage to doorways like the one at Elkstone in the previous entry, as the jagged decoration around the arch and the spiral-twist shafts on either side of the door make clear. But no genuine Norman building was ever like this. The bold black-and-white design of the frontage takes the medieval love of pattern-making to new extremes – some of the treatment almost recalled the bold graphics of the Secessionist movement in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Arthur E. Thompson, the building’s architect, might have found this comparison strange. He’d no doubt have found it odd too that his nurses’ home had become a fashionable hotel. At least guests must find it easy to locate when they come back after a long night out.

Former Hat Factory, Hollen Street, London

Back in the early 1980s, I used regularly to take the short train ride from New Cross Gate to London Bridge. On this brief inner-city commute my train passed all kinds of factories churning out products from foods to light engineering goods. Paper bags, biscuits, malt vinegar, and flags were all being made near that busy railway line. Most of these industries have since vanished from the area and many former inner-London factories are now given over to apartments or shops.

Walking across central London the other day with the Carreras building (see previous blog entry) still in my mind, it occurred to me how many of these inner-London industries there used to be. I passed some of their former buildings in Soho, including this old hat factory in Hollen Street. A fairly ordinary building of the 1880s is enlivened with this lovely lettering. It’s as if the maker of the letter forms put in just that bit of extra effort into the design, just as the hatters inside wanted us to know that they would take similar pains with a homburg or a trilby. It’s good to see such care lavished on a relatively modest building in an obscure side street.

Greater London House, London

For decades, London took its wonderful Art Deco factories of the 1920s and 1930s for granted. Then from the 1950s to the 1970s they became the victims of makeover merchants and snooty design gurus who despised them as the cinematic fripperies of a past age, irrelevantly ornamented with details from an age still older: what had the ancient Egyptians, for goodness sake, done for us? And so the sunbursts and bright flashes of colour – and sometimes the entire buildings that bore them – began to disappear.

From the 1980s onwards, though, people started to realise that the world was a duller place for the loss of these exuberant buildings. Changing fashions and the rise of postmodernism with its penchant for outré ornament helped. So did the realization that the 20th century had contributed more to design than hair-shirt glass-and-steel modernism. So, of course, did amenity groups like the Twentieth Century Society. As a result there have been some dazzling successes of preservation and restoration.
By the approaching millennium, the old Carreras cigarette factory in Mornington Crescent had been shorn of many of its decorative details. The front of the 1926 building, designed by M.E. and O.H. Collins, had been the epitome of Carreras’ Black Cat cigarette brand, with cat-head roundels repeated across the façade and two eight-foot high seated cats, inspired by the Egyptian feline goddess Bastet, guarding the entrance. Triumphantly, the cats were brought back for the millennium, and the whole frontage – cat heads with wiry whiskers, stylish Art Deco lettering, colourful Egyptian capitals – was restored. This corner of North London is all the better for it.

Bee shelter, Hartpury, Gloucestershire

Almost too small to be a building, this structure is simply too special to ignore. It is a shelter containing 33 niches or boles to accommodate straw bee skeps, the traditional English forerunners of bee hives. There is nothing else like it in the world.

The shelter was originally made in the Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth by a stone mason, Paul Tuffley, some time between 1824 and 1852. Its carved scrollwork decoration shows that Tuffley was an accomplished carver and from the beginning the structure must have looked impressive. By the 1960s, though, it was unused – the bee skep had long been replaced by the wooden hive and the shelter looked likely to be demolished. But it was rescued and resited at Hartpury Agricultural College – only to be moved once more to Hartpury churchyard in 2002, when it was thoroughly restored. It’s still there, showing how well housed some of Gloucestershire’s bees once were.

St Laurence, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire

While we’re on the subject of Anglo-Saxon buildings, here’s one more Saxon church, the remarkably well preserved St Laurence, Bradford-on-Avon. Its date is uncertain. Documentary sources refer to a church in Bradford as early as the 8th century, but St Laurence’s looks more like a 10th or 11th-century building, and the best guess is that it was built in 1001 to house the relics of Edward the Martyr, who had been killed at Corfe, Dorset, in 978. Edward’s remains were originally kept at Shaftesbury Abbey, but scholars think they were moved to Bradford in 1001, possibly because this was a site less vulnerable to Viking raids, possibly to remind those who venerated the Northumbrian martyr Oswald (whose shrine was also in the region, at Gloucester) or the Mercian Saint Kenelm (whose remains were at Winchcombe) that there was also a Wessex martyr who was worthy of veneration.

This little building was no longer a church in the 18th century. It became a workshop, and then was converted for use as a schoolroom and cottage. But it was ‘rediscovered’ by a Victorian clergyman and restored, and has survived its first millennium in very well. Its tall, narrow proportions, tiny windows, and narrow, round-headed doorways are all typical of Anglo-Saxon buildings. So is the way the walls are decorated with narrow strips of stone, called pilaster strips, forming a series of arch-shaped panels.


The interior is small, plain, and rather magical. High up on one wall are two carved stone angels, beautiful pieces of relief carving that may have originally formed part of a crucifixion scene, a fitting climax to a remarkable building. You can read more about its archaeology, history, and architecture here.

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

This building began life as Oozells Street School, one of the board schools designed by J H Chamberlain, architect of Birmingham’s School of Art (see previous blog entry). These outstanding buildings were built as the result of a drive on the part of Birmingham’s politicians (especially the Liberals under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, no relation to the architect) to make Birmingham better. The fruits of this work included a library, the Council House, the Art School, and 30 board schools. This one is a quality Gothic building in brick with stone ornament, evidence of what its architect had learned from Ruskin and of his employers’ commitment to providing decent school buildings for their children.

In 1997 the school was converted for use as an art gallery. The architects of the conversion, Levitt Bernstein, added new floors and incorporated glass extensions to accommodate the stairs and lifts. They weren’t afraid to be modern, juxtaposing their glass-and-steel stair towers with Chamberlain’s brick walls and Gothic openings. The contrast works. The see-through stair tower gives you close-up glimpses of the fine Victorian detailing while the stair itself adds all kinds of new lines and curves in counterpoint to those of the original structure. It’s a happy marriage of the two styles, and a testimony to the ability of English buildings to combine old and new in dramatic and interesting ways.

School of Art, Birmingham

Schools, colleges, universities – they’re all buildings that ask for the best in design, but so often money, timing, expediency, or politics dictate that they don’t get what they deserve. J H Chamberlain, a Leicester-born architect who worked in Birmingham in the second half of the 19th century, wasn’t having any of that. As architect of Birmingham’s board schools he produced buildings that were a cut above the usual. And for the city’s School of Art he pulled out all the stops.

The School of Art is a very Victorian blend of brick, terracotta, stone, and tile. It’s very Gothic, too, with lots of pointed arches, little niches, and bits of moulding and carving. Elements like the repeated narrow windows and the band of tiles and moulded panels running around the building hold it all together. It must have inspired the first students when the doors opened in 1885. Even if modern students don’t quite respond in the same way to its Ruskinian Gothic, they still benefit from its light interiors, can still admire its glowing orange brickwork, and can still reflect that it was worth all the care that Chamberlain and his builders took.