Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

 

Occasional haunts, 2

I often stroll around Cheltenham, admiring its Regency architecture (terraces, crescents and squares of stone or stucco-clad houses especially). This heritage reflects a heyday in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when people flocked to the town to visit its several spas and take the waters in the hope of curing a variety of ills. However, the town remained prosperous in the Victorian period, when health tourism was supplemented by education (Cheltenham became home to several public schools) and by its popularity as a place to which to retire (it was a favourite of army officers, colonial administrators and their families). The public schools were not for everyone, and many local-authority schools were built in the late-19th century.

One of these, now converted to apartments, was All Saints’ School, built in hard, mass-produced brick with Dutch gables and big windows, in the style of many a London board school. The architecture is enlivened by architectural terracotta – i.e. clay cast to produce decorative or other designs, a material that was becoming very popular when the school was built in 1890–91. By this time, terracotta faces, sunflowers and foliage were appearing all over fashionable houses. On the school, this material was used to produce signs denoting the separate entrances for boys and girls (photograph below), and for highlights such as capitals atop the brick pilasters that ran up the building, enlivening the expanses of brickwork (above).

My favourite piece of terracotta decoration on this building combines acanthus leaves and scrolls with human faces and vases of flowers. Ornaments like this could be bought from stock from manufacturers in certain towns where bricks were produced – Ruabon, Tamworth and Loughborough, for example. Elaborate bespoke ornaments could be ordered individually, but examples like this, where the architect and builders would have been working to a tight budget, would probably have been selected from a manufacturer’s catalogue, just like those used on many streets of middle-class housing. Perfect for a lesson in the interest of looking up, even at a familiar building.

Sherborne, Dorset

The full nine yards

The interesting variations on Classical capitals in my previous post jogged my memory of something I’d seen last summer in Sherborne, Dorset. It’s a corner building, dating from some time at the end of the 19th century, designed as either s short row of shops or as a single shop. I’m inclined to suspect the latter: one large shop, owned by someone with a penchant for elaborate decoration. It was originally a single-storey structure, but within that limited scope its builder threw the decorative kitchen sink at it. A series of plate-glass windows are framed by pairs of attached shafts, each supporting floral capitals and, above that, a richly moulded entablature with some carving above the capitals. Higher up still are rectangular terminations that would probably have acted as finials before the upper floor was added. The lintels above the windows are carved too.

The capitals are a mass of flowers and fruit – so much of it that the vegetation spills into the middle, completely filling any space between the pair to link the area above the twin columns with leaves and blooms. Most shop owners did not run to anything this lavish carved in stone. Late Victorian shop fronts are more often made of wood, or occasionally cast iron, and these less costly materials can look highly decorative and eye-catching. Whoever built this wanted something a cut – or two – above the average. Later owners preferred a more more modern front on the more prominent end facade of the building, but the long range that faces on to the side street is still there, reminding us of what the Victorians could do when they tried. The full nine yards, as they say – and a little more still.

Note See the Comments section for interesting extra information about this building, which began as a draper's shop before developing into a department store. Thank you to my readers and commenters.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Regency inventions

I must have walked along the Promenade, Cheltenham’s grandest shopping street, hundreds if not thousands of times. On many of these occasions I’ve given an admiring nod to a sequence of houses at the southern end of the street, near the Queen’s Hotel, where there is a short stretch of very large houses, set back from the street, now mostly accommodating hotels and restaurants. Several of these buildings are currently partly invisible behind the extensive tents that have been erected to enable people to dine in the fresh air, a popular feature, especially in times of pandemic, although it does get in the way of appreciating the architecture. A small price to pay, many would argue, for the survival of businesses and the enjoyment of a decent meal.

However, the architectural admirer can always look up, as I did the other week, to be reminded of the unusual capitals on these otherwise conventional houses. One of the buildings features a row of attached classical columns topped with capitals like nothing in any of the Greek or Roman orders and nothing that I’ve seen in the work of John Forbes, the probable architect. Each one has a row of – what – fronds? feathers? topped by an abacus with a simple pellet moulding. The form of the fronds may owe something to the pergamene order, an unusual antique design found at Pergamon in Turkey. However, the description in Pevsner suggests that the design is a variation on the Prince of Wales feathers. The latter are sometimes drawn in the lengthy form of these architectural feathers, especially in the badge of Edward the Black Prince, which is said to be the medieval origin of today’s device, familiar to most British people from its reproduction on the old two pence coin. That seems fitting at least for a Regency or late-Georgian building.

My second photograph shows another capital on a neighbouring house, topping a pilaster in a position on its building similar to the one described above. This too is unusual, though I suppose it is a version of the Composite Order, the Roman design that combines the spiral scrolls of the Ionic with the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian. But here the Corinthian details have been modified, with the acanthus leaves stylized into a single leaf at each lower corner, and the space in the centre of the capital occupied by a large anthemion or palmette form. Whatever we call it, it’s another example of the capacity for invention and variation in classical architecture, a cherishable bit of character above the tents and menus and diners, most of whom, no doubt, have no idea of such niceties….

Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Ancient and modern

St Mary’s, Deerhurst, was one of the first historic churches I ever visited. I was sent there by a school teacher, who wanted me to see a Saxon building, and to go there I had to persuade my parents to take me in the car a few miles along the A38 Gloucester to Tewkesbury road, and up the lane leading towards the River Severn. We enjoyed seeking out details of almost unbelievable antiquity – Saxon carvings inside and out, the font, with its spiral decoration – and marvelling when the guidebook told us that the latter had been at one time removed from the church, lost, and found again doing outdoor duty as a planter, trough, or some such.*

I’ve been back many times since, and taken in the building’s later architecture too. I’m fascinated, for example, by the capitals of the nave arcades. They seem to date from the early-13th century, when the church’s aisles began to take their current form. They are all different. One is like capitals I’ve seen before in churches of the Early English Gothic style: this is a variation on the stylised foliage that the Victorians called ‘stiff leaf’ (Pevsner calls it ‘windswept stiff-leaf’, with the addition of small heads peeping out from the vegetation. I always find these heads charming, whether they come in large numbers, as at Much Marcle, or are thin on the ground, as they are here.

Another capital has just stylised foliage, which is given a bit more space and takes a striking form. The date must be similar, but the shapes of the leaves, with their strong lines and elegant curves, seems akin to the Art Nouveau of around 1890–1900. I’m not suggesting for one moment that some late-Victorian decorator saw this capital and based a whole artistic movement on it. Both medieval carvers and Art Nouveau designers looked at nature appreciatively and derived patterns from it. No wonder they sometimes ended up with something slightly similar; the medieval masons were no doubt also influenced by some of the foliage in earlier Romanesque ornament. Wherever the inspiration comes from, the effect made me catch my breath.

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* I’ve heard similar tales in several other churches, to the extent that I’m wondering if this is the ecclesiological equivalent of an urban myth.

Radstock, Somerset

Ups and downs

When I looked up Radstock in the Pevsner volume Somerset: North and Bristol, I had to smile. It seems that my perception of the town has changed, and that this alteration reflects exactly a change in the way the great architectural guides have seen the place. When I first saw Radstock, passing through with my father some time in the late 1960s, it seemed dark, dusty, and, frankly, ugly. It was a small mining town and, although there was some interest to be gleaned from passing trains and trucks and clanking machinery, it didn’t seem as if the place need detain us. The other day, the sun was shining, the buildings in the town centre were clean, and the architecture revealed interesting details; the pit had long gone, of course.

Pevsner, writing in 1958, found Radstock ‘really desperately ugly...without dignity in any building’. But his successor Andrew Foyle, in the revised volume of 2011, commented ‘...yet Radstock is among the best survivors in England of a small Victorian colliery town’. Tastes have changed, of course, and architectural historians are now open to a wider variety of subjects than they were in 1958 – thanks, it has to be said, in part to the work of Pevsner himself.

What struck me the other day was an array of buildings in clean, pale stone (white lias, I believe), festooned with interesting details. Most of these structures were part of a redevelopment by the Waldegrave family in the late-19th century, and they range from public buildings like the Victoria Hall to shops and a hotel. The peculiar capital in my photograph is a detail from one of the buildings. It must be an adaptation of a Classical order, perhaps the composite, but instead of a pair of downward-curving spiral volutes, there is a kind of scroll, in which one spiral goes upwards, the other down. For further adornment, there’s a rosette in the middle of each scroll. In spite of the worn stone, it’s still a charming detail, one small confirmation that there was plenty of room for inventiveness in this small, long unregarded, Somerset town.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Theme and variations

Passing through the area of Cheltenham known as ‘the Suffolks’ the other day, my eye was caught by these capitals. They’re part of one of the town’s most beautiful terraces, which runs along one side of Suffolk Square, itself part of a development on land once owned by the Earl of Suffolk and built in 1832–48. The original architect was local man Edward Jenkins, who probably did the overall design before he left Cheltenham* and was replaced by the more famous J B Papworth.

Jenkins included a grand portico-like arrangement of columns and pediments at either end of the row, and the columns are topped by these Corinthian capitals.† I was struck when I looked up how the architect used two variations on the Corinthian design here. There are four round three-quarter columns like the left-hand one in the photograph above, almost free-standing, with a full complement of flutes and the usual Corinthian capital, which has two layers of leaves topped by small scrolls. These are framed by two outer columns, this time square, fluteless, and bearing an abbreviated or truncated version of the capital. This is what you see in the right-hand capital in the photograph, a capital with  leaves only at the corners and a strip of egg and dart moulding that fills the space between them. This different design allows the architect to put two columns very close together without the straight repetition of capital design that one sometimes sees.

These adapted capitals are a reminder that designers and builders were always coming up with variations on the five ‘classic’ orders. In the past I’ve noted the Borromini order (a sort of upside-down Ionic) in Blandford, a Pergamene order in Clifton, a bird stretching its wings among Corinthian foliage in Birmingham, and the wonderfully eccentric and original ammonite order in Lewes§. Classicism in England is often most interesting when not a straitjacket but a jumping-off point for design, a place for elegant variations within a standard framework of features and proportions. And how well it works.

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* For more on the circumstances under which Jenkins left his drawing board, see my earlier post on the church he and Papworth designed, which is very near these houses.

† Their acanthus leaves and small scrolls make them Corinthian; larger scrolls (like those on Ionic capitals) above the leaves would make them Composite.

§ And even a Gothic order, taking us outside the sphere of Classicism

Wells, Somerset

 
Slightly foxed

At the weekend I was teaching a course about architectural ornament and the participants were amused and, I think, charmed by a number of variations on the classical orders that I showed them. I wanted to demonstrate that the orders weren’t necessarily regarded by masons, carvers, and builders as a set of hard-and-fast rules. They could be starting points on which the craftsman played variations. A particular hit was a Corinthian capital with a bird fluttering among its acanthus leaves in Birmingham. It reminded me that there are capitals featuring animal heads on a building in the High Street at Wells. They occur on the Bath stone facade of a bank of about 1880. But what kind of capitals are they? And what are the animals?

The official listing text for the building describes the capitals as “quasi-Ionic”; the text doesn’t mention the animals at all, not concerning itself with such trivialities. The Ionic element is the spirals, although there are also some acanthus leaves lurking at the back, so it might just as well be “quasi-Corinthian” I suppose. The beast is an oddity: the Resident Wise Woman suggested an attempted fox, observing that the ears seem to be turning into a leaves. A mythical beast? Or just a poorly carved one? No matter. It’s a bit of fun however you look at it.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Colour and capitals

I was looking out for another example of the use of colour in architecture, when I came across this in one of Cheltenham’s Regency squares. The use of a pale colour (blue, grey, buff, even orange) has always struck me as effective in this kind of architecture, especially when combined with details in low relief picked out in white. The effect, especially with blue or grey walls, is reminiscent of cameo jewellery or Wedgwood pottery.

This house is a lovely example of that effect, but as I looked more closely I was even more impressed by the classical details, particularly the Ionic pilasters. The Ionic, say the textbooks and manuals of ornament, is the order with the spiral volutes in the capital. True enough, but what wonderfully spiralling volutes these are, with their rings and rings of not-quite-parallel mouldings turning towards their centres. And that’s just the start. This Ionic pilaster has much more in the way of ornament, and it's easier to make this out if you click on the picture to enlarge it. At the top, just above the volutes is the part called the abacus, here consisting of a narrow ornamental band. Looked at closely, it reveals itself to be a band of egg-and-dart ornament – yes, it’s made up of alternating ovoid and pointed shapes. Between the two spirals (the bit called the echinus) is another row of slightly larger egg-and-dart, with a narrow band of interlace just above it. And then beneath the spirals is the band known as the necking, which is adorned with a central palmette (a motif based on fan-like palm leaves), flanked by flower-like ornaments. Just beneath these, before the flute pilaster proper begins, is yet another moulded narrow band.

The ancient Greeks, and those in later centuries who copied or adapted their designs, played countless variations on these motifs. These examples are based on the capitals on the Erechtheion (below), the glorious, asymmetrical temple on the Acropolis at Athens. This is perhaps appropriate in Cheltenham, because the town’s famous caryatids – which I’ve noticed in previous posts – also derive ultimately from this temple. It’s good to see the influence working wonders once more.

Ionic capital, the Erechtheion, Athens
Photograph by Eusebius (Guillaume Piolle), used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Bloxham, Oxfordshire

Together again

Some time ago I posted a curious capital from the church at Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire in which, instead of the usual plain mouldings or carvings of foliage there were figures with linked arms. I hinted in that post that there were other churches in this part of England with similar capitals – and in fact I remembered that many years ago I'd been in the grand church in Bloxham in Oxfordshire, where I remembered something along the same lines.

I finally returned to Bloxham to check my memories, and this is what I found. This 14th-century capital is more ornately carved than the one at Ludgershall, but shows a similar design, with linked arms, However, the male figure also has a shield bearing a cross and the female wears a floral head-dress, is surrounded by leaves, and is being assailed by a beast of some kind. The column, with its cluster of attached shafts is highly elaborate too, and there is a further touch of ornament around the top of the capital – a band of moulding decorated with bellflowers (a favourite 14th-century motif) and tiny heads.

So is the male figure, with his crossed shield and the staff weapon just visible in his right hand St George? And is the odd beast by the lady's head some provincial carver's idea of the dragon that the saint has come to slay? I don't know. As is so often the case, medieval church carving has left me pondering, but visually nourished.

Victoria, London

Capital!

When it comes to architecture, Victoria is not the most illustrious of the great London railway termini. It lacks the great iron and glass conservatory-like sweep of Paddington, the very resolved design of King’s Cross, or the restored glamour of St Pancras. It’s also structurally slightly confusing, partly because of its history of serving two railways – the South Eastern and Chatham and the London, Brighton and South Coast. It’s still a station of two halves, with the old South Eastern and Chatham platforms on the left as you stand on the concourse looking towards the tracks, the London, Brighton and South Coast platforms on the right.

There are still some little noticed but still notable details at Victoria, though. My picture shows one from the London, Brighton and South Coast side of the station, a cast-iron Ionic capital from 1898, when the LB & SC rebuilt their side of the station in red-brick Renaissance revival style. The roof is held up by impossibly tall Ionic columns, each terminating in a capital like this one beneath the arches that support the metal and glass roof.

This is a Victorian interpretation of a Greek capital: the curvaceous spiral volutes and egg-and-dart moulding are variations on what would be found on a Classical temple or Renaissance palace, the swags below them are a more fanciful addition, though probably copied from some Renaissance source. The capital and its cousins are hardly visible from down on the station concourse, but as I dashed up the escalator towards Victoria Place on my way to the Passport Office this morning, I found myself quite close to the roof and face to face with this capital. Trying to ignore the mystified glances of passing commuters, I aimed my mobile phone to record a bit more unregarded architecture for your delectation.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Glorious Bastards

In 1731 a fire swept through Blandford Forum in Dorset and destroyed most of the town. The task of rebuilding was given to two memorably-named brothers, William and John Bastard, who combined the roles of architect, surveyor, carver, and designer of plasterwork. The Bastards created one of the most beautiful town centres in England, with a Market Place lined with finely detailed houses, a grand Town Hall, and a large church at one end. The streets leading off the Market Place were also rebuilt.

This building at the end of the Market Place opposite the church shows the quality of the Bastards’ work, which is carefully detailed in a rather playful classical style with hints of the baroque. The walls are brick, laid mostly in courses made up of headers, and there are lots of details picked out in white. The architects took a great deal of care over these details – look at the upper row of windows, with their curving aprons below and their protruding ‘ears’ above; the meticulous details around the windows on the middle-floor (originally the main floor of the building); the central pediment, its baseline ‘broken’ to accommodate the round-headed window. And the pilasters that seem to support the pediment are special too. At first glance they have Ionic capitals with spiral volute decoration, but when you look more closely you see that the volutes are actually the 'wrong' way round. These are capitals taken from a design by the Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini, which the Bastards would have seen engraved in the book Studio d’architettura civile di Roma by Domenico de’Rossi, a publication that did much to publicize the designs and details of Rome’s baroque architects in the early-18th century. The close-up below is from a nearby building, where the spirals are still very crisp and clear.

So what was this lovingly detailed building? Not, as one might think from the central carriage entrance, a coaching inn, although there is such an inn, with an almost identical frontage, just along the street. In fact it was originally three houses. John Bastard liked the left-hand one so much that he lived in it himself. He was indeed both a clever and a lucky – fellow.

'Borromini' capital, Red Lion, Blandford Forum

Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire

All together now

Although sometimes I can’t resist writing about great architecture like that of Lincoln Cathedral, this blog usually focuses on more ordinary buildings. So, much as I enjoy ornate ecclesiastical spaces, grand country house vistas, and great art on the walls, I’m often to be found squinting hopefully up back streets and poking about in small parish churches. It’s my view that such unregarded places and spaces often have something for all of us to enjoy, and I like sharing my enjoyment.

This capital, which is just about the first thing you see when you open the door of St Mary’s, Ludgershall, seemed to sum up such ideas of sharing and togetherness. The church dates mostly from the 14th and 15th centuries, and in a 14th-century church in a remote village, you’d normally expect simple octagonal pillars (as we have here) with fairly plain moulded capitals. But on this capital and two others (one a close cousin to this but without the linking arms, another showing just heads) a local mason has gone for something more adventurous.

We’re not looking at the work of a master carver here but that’s not the point. It was enough that whoever carved this capital (and perhaps some similar ones across the border in Oxfordshire, which I hope to find soon) could make people smile. And perhaps suggest some symbolism too. What does it say? The church (or the people) united? Auld lang syne? Anachronistically, I just think of it as All together now.

New Street, Birmingham

ORDER, ORDER (2)
In spite of blitzkrieg, modernism, decay, and demolition, there are still plenty of Classical buildings in England. And so architecture buffs, who know their metopes from their triglyphs, get used to recognising the Classical orders. But how often do we really look at their details, the curving spiral volutes of Ionic capitals, the curly acanthus leaves of the Corinthian?

Of course, capitals are usually high up on a building. You need binoculars and toned neck muscles to look at them closely. One of the joys of visiting the great cities of the ancient world – Istanbul is supreme in this respect – is the amount of Classical rubble lying around on the ground. In places like that you can look at all kinds of architectural sculpture close-up, without craning your neck.

Now and then in England, though, the accidents of building design bring you face to face with this kind of detail.This Corinthian capital is in the New Street branch of Waterstone’s bookshop in the centre of Birmingham, which occupies the former Midland Bank, a building of the late-1860s designed by Edward Holmes. The style is a grand, confident Classicism. It’s just the kind of thing for a High Victorian bank but the generous spaces also make it a good setting for a large bookshop.

The stairs afford interesting glimpses of some of the Classical details, and the invention and craftsmanship that went into their creation. The picture shows the capital atop one of the giant Corinthian pilasters inside the shop. Face to face with this capital, we see the Corinthian order, or an eccentric Victorian adaptation of it, afresh. Crisp acanthus leaves curve inwards and outwards, spirals thrust up and forward like springs, and the whole thing supports, not an entablature or lintel, but another piece of decoration, an even bigger piece of foliage. The most striking touch of all, though, is the centrepiece – a bird opening its wings amongst the scrolls and leaves. All praise to the Victorians for their whimsy, and to Waterstone’s for their conveniently sited staircase that gives us this close-up view.