Melbourne, Derbyshire

Tracing history

The High Street renews itself all the time. Old shops get makeovers, new businesses come along, and with each change a fresh signboard goes up. Sometimes, though, it’s just the sign that’s changed, or a coat of paint that’s added. And if that’s the case, part of the old shop front stays to tell us something about the history of the building. I like the way fragments of old decoration, bits of moulding, a pane of glass high up in a window, can drop quiet hints about a shop’s previous occupants. Tiles, among the most durable of decorations, sometimes linger in this way, and here are a couple of neighbouring examples in Melbourne, Derbyshire.

I don’t know exactly when these shop fronts were tiled, but I’d guess in the Edwardian period – the designs seem to bear that influence of Art Nouveau that I often saw in the tiled surrounds of Edwardian fireplaces when I lived in London. Back in the early-20th century, firms such as Minton and Doulton were producing millions of tiles that brought a bit of colour – and a sense of hygiene – to the High Street. Butchers, dairies, grocers, and fishmongers were among their most enthusiastic customers. They liked the bright, easy-care surfaces, which were often continued inside the shop.

On many early shops there was often a blurring of the boundary between inside and outside. Butchers, for example, would hang meat on rails in front of the window, and both butchers and fishmongers had opening shop windows, enabling customers to see the goods or talk to the proprietor without even stepping inside. The right-hand shop in the picture has an opening sash window, and probably once sold meat or fish.

Few High Streets have complete surviving Edwardian shops like the ones lovingly reconstructed in the BBC’s Turn Back Time series. But in many towns there are fragments like these strips of tiling, which afford colourful glimpses of the history of the High Street.

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For readers interested in Melbourne, there's a post about its wonderful Norman church, here.
For more on tiled shop fronts, see a post about a street in Cheltenham, here.

Arthur's Stone, Dorstone, Herefordshire

Above the east Herefordshire village of Dorstone the lane rises, flattens, bends, and rises again. You know, when you’ve visited a few Stone Age burial chambers, that your goal is likely to be at the top of the last rise, on a ridge, with views for miles. And so, after another short rise, here is Arthur’s Stone, and beyond it views of the Herefordshire hills and the Welsh hills too.

This late-Stone-Age monument is a burial mound without the mound – in other words, it consists of the stones that line and cover the burial chamber and entrance, the earth mound that covered them having eroded away. The large capstone is about 20 feet in length and lifting it must have taken all the manpower and technology that the builders of 3400-2400 BC could muster.

Burial sites like this were among the grands projets of prehistoric England, and the people who built them weren’t going to hide their light under a bushel. Such a mound, the result of long labour, was a conspicuous memorial to those buried there, as well as being a major landmark. You don’t have to believe in ley lines to appreciate that hill-top barrows provided a good way of orienting yourself, as well as being powerful symbols of community and place.

The symbolism could get a bit mixed up in later centuries though. I don’t know when this place became known as Arthur’s Stone, but associations with King Arthur are not uncommon with hill-top monuments, especially in the south and west. It’s not hard to see why the Arthurian associations could multiply hereabouts – the king demonstrated his royal rank by pulling a sword from a stone, and he and his knights might be sleeping in such a burial mound, waiting for the time when they will return to supply England’s need. More prosaically, the mound was said to mark the site of one of the king’s battles. All evidence that Arthur’s Stone – technologically, scenically, mythically – is a place with the power to make us wonder.