Stroud, Gloucestershire

 

Place and taste

I was recently reading Adam Nicolson’s Sissinghurst, about the beautiful castle in Kent restored and lived in by his grandparents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Adam Nicolson is the third generation of his family to live there and its garden, also the creation of Vita and Harold, is world-famous. In the book, I found this very apposite observation about places: ’It is an article of faith with me that a place consists of everything that has happened there; it is a reservoir of memories, and understanding those memories is not a trap but a liberation, a menu of possibilities’.

This is very much how I think about buildings and its truth was exemplified when I saw this ghost sign in Stroud. Actually, it was the Resident Wise Woman who spotted it first, and I expressed surprise that, having been to Stroud dozens (at least) of times, I’d not noticed it before. ‘Pritchard’s delicious home-made what?’ we wondered, fancying that we could make out a hint of the first letter of the missing bottom line – could that be part of an ’S’, and could the answer be ‘Sausages’?

It does indeed seem to be the case that this was the premises of Walter Pritchard, butcher, and his two sons, Arthur and Jack, and that the family opened their business here in 1928, the sons carrying on into the 1960s. The shop front, with its elegant turquoise and cream tiles (a tiny bit of it is visible on the right-hand edge of my picture because the window extends around this side wall of the building), could well have been made for them – butchers often favoured attractive ‘hygienic’ tiles that could be wiped down with ease, though this one does not feature the animal tiles that some butchers went for.

For me, the shop has a more recent memory – it was until a few years ago a second hand bookshop, which always had a large selection of books on film and architecture. Quite a few volumes on my shelves came from here. So if some older residents think of it as ‘the old butcher’s’ and remember its sausages (for foods too are at their best local and distinctive), I remember it as a source of books about architecture. No doubt for some it has yet other associations, accruing to form the reservoir of memories that Adam Nicolson mentions.

Hereford

Happy pigs

Walking along a street in Hereford, a city I’ve visited a number of times, I saw this tile panel, clearly one produced for a butcher’s shop, that I’d never previously noticed. How can I not have seen this before? I have walked along this street more than once, on at least one other occasion noting the features of other old shop fronts hereabouts. Could it possibly be that this tile panel was covered by some later decoration, and has been revealed relatively recently? Maybe. But whatever its recent history, it’s now visible, delightful, and an asset to the streetscape, even though the premises no longer belong to a butcher, having been made over to the business of selling boots and shoes.

I find the panel charming – and charm, I’d say, is a quality that is appropriate for retail architecture, the object being to charm customers so much that they go inside and buy things. So here, five happy-looking pigs chomp and root away by a stream, while a sixth seems to have decided to lie down in contentment. The foliage of the trees is not depicted realistically, but made up of a series of impressionistic shapes and splodges in various shades of green and brown, a style that looks more 20th century than Victorian. The chequered border and angular lettering point that way too – I wonder if the tiles were designed and made in the 1920s. I couldn’t find anything about them in my favourite tile reference book, Lynn Pearson’s Tile Gazetteer. So for now I’m left to speculate and admire.

Entering the shop, I found one more tile panel (below), showing another group of pigs just inside the door. This time they seem to be in a farmyard setting, and this, together with the fact that the pigs are depicted in more detail, has given the artist a little more scope to be realistic. The grey wall in which the tiles are now set has a surface slightly proud of the panels, and this may well conceal a tiled border. The adjacent display of wellington boots, perfect for the well dressed farmer or swineherd, made me smile. It’s a while since I’ve seen such good butcher’s tiles, and these are rivals to my local favourites, which adorn the shop of Jesse Smith and Co, butchers of Cirencester. There they have attracted me inside to buy a pork pie. Although I didn’t buy any shoes in this Hereford shop, I may well return – tiles are still, for me, a powerful attraction.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Clothes from the Butcher

This is a special sort of shop in Aldeburgh, a business that has been in the town since the 19th century with a fine shop front dating to the 1930s. It’s an old-fashioned Ladies and Gentlemen’s outfitters. Not a clothes shop, or a boutique, or a purveyor of leisure wear: an outfitters. The sort of place where you could buy a proper waxed jacket, or a tweed overcoat, or just a pair of braces. Traditional clothes that will last for years – and when they do start to wear out, you can mend them, or even send them to be mended. There’s much to be said for such places although it also has to be said that these days, they’re mainly the preserve not simply of the old, but of the rich.

But, to the architecture. I like this shop front because it exemplifies something that was once the latest trend in retailing: the deep lobby. The idea was that there would be a broad opening along which you can walk, but instead of reaching the front door immediately, you’d pass more display windows, showing yet more goods to tempt you. There might even be a central island display, fully glazed, in the middle of the lobby, around which you’d be forced to walk, seeing yet more tempting goods as you went. All of which meant that the further you went in, the more likely you were to push the door and enter the shop proper and spend money.

Marvellously, at O. and C. Butcher’s of Aldeburgh all this is still here, and it culminates in separate doors for Ladies and Gentlemen, so that the former can cut straight to the chase without getting tangled up in shirts and braces, while the gents can avoid thinking about ‘foundation garments’ and find what they want with ease. The lettering in stained glass above the doors is Art Deco and very characterful, both the slightly stretched capitals of ‘Shoes’ and the pleasant mixture of ramrod-straight uprights and generous curves on display in ‘Gentlemen’s Outfitting’. It really was almost enough to make me blow my savings on a tweed overcoat.

John Street, London

Bring on the apple sauce

The other day I went on an inspiring trip* aboard a Routemaster bus to look at lettering on buildings around the capital. This expedition was led by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, experts in letters both typographical and architectural. We were privileged that our guides shared a wealth of information, giving background stories about familiar bits of lettering as well as pointing out examples that were new even to me (and I’m the one you’ll bump into as I walk around looking ever upward, oblivious to fellow pedestrians, who are probably cursing as they try to dodge me).

This boar is an old friend but I’d never been able to find out much about him. The building he adorns seems to have been a butcher’s shop with offices above, which seems fitting, this being close to Smithfield Market, an area rich in architectural lettering of all kinds. The text next to the boar says ‘Rebuilt by Wm Harris 1897’ and the façade also has a ‘WH’ monogram. So presumably the otherwise mysterious Mr WH was a butcher – probably a pork butcher, since butchers often specialized in the Victorian period.

The lettering, as our guides pointed out, is awkwardly arranged – the strokes uneven in width, the forms crude, the ‘S’ and ‘7’ top-heavy. And the boar itself has an unfinished look, as if Mr Harris, eager to get his premises rebuilt after some disaster – a fire, perhaps – was impatient to get the plaque up, the scaffolding down, and the doors open. In spite of all this, the plaque has a charm that, like so many decorations on buildings in the capital, made it worth an upward glance, and even a crick in the neck.

*And I must offer sincere thanks to both the friends who invited me on this memorable journey.