Framlingham, Suffolk

 

First post

I’d been to Framlingham before, but was not switched on enough to look properly at the post boxes. What a sadly missed opportunity! 

Now, I know that for many people even a slight preoccupation with post boxes is thought to be the preserve of the anorak.* And yet I’d argue (hoping not to get too dull about it) that these small items of street furniture both look good in our towns and villages and provide some insight into social history.

So, in Framlingham the other week, I paused to appreciate one of two such boxes in a very rare early design – octagonal boxes with vertical slits, probably dating to about 1856. This is really early in the history of the post box. When the standard penny post for letters was introduced in 1840, there were no post boxes at all. To post a letter you had to take it to a ‘Receiving Office’ or wait for a man ringing a bell to walk down your street and give your letter to him.

In 1852, the first free-standing post boxes were installed on Jersey; these proved successful and the following year the first of (eventually) thousands of boxes began to be seen on streets on the British mainland. They were all made of cast iron and took a column-like form,† with a vertical slit for the letters. There was no standard design,¶ but this example in Framlingham is one of the earliest still in use. It exhibits many of the features common to later boxes – the initials or cipher of the monarch, a display panel for collection times, a locking door, and so on. It was made by Andrew Handyside, ironfounder of Derby, and probably dates to 1856 or 1857 – Handyside began to produce boxes with horizonal slits in 1857. Horizontal letter slots became the norm, and by 1866 the first national standard box was introduced.

If all this is much too like anorak-speak for you, you’ve probably stopped reading by now. But if you’re still with me you’ll appreciate that such rare early boxes illuminate a bit of postal history and enhance the handful of streets and lanes where they still exist.

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* Informal British English. Anorak: person who has an obsessive interest in something generally thought to be ‘dull and unsociable’ (thanks to Chambers Dictionary for the last phrase).

† Some resembled columns very closely, like the fluted one in Malvern, subject of an earlier post.

¶ To begin with, there was no uniform colour either. Red became the standard hue in 1884.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

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* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.

Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire

 

Industrial Gothic

Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) is best known today as the author of a book with the lengthy title of An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, first published in 1817 and reissued many times. This work was the first to use the names Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular for the different phases of English architecture between 1066 and the beginning of the Tudor era, names that are still often used today.* Rickman stumbled into his deep interest in medieval architecture after two disastrous events in his life, the failure of his business and the death of his first wife. He took to taking long walks in the English countryside and became fascinated by the many medieval churches he saw on his travels. His studies and drawings of these buildings led to his book and to his career as a designer of buildings – houses, at least one town hall and numerous parish churches.

I visited Hampton Lucy to see St Peter’s church, built to designs by Rickman and his architectural partner Henry Hutchinson in 1822–26§ for Rev. John Lucy, a member of the family who owned the nearby country house, Charlecote Park. I found a church that’s surprisingly large for a small village and built in glowing Cotswold stone. The style is what Rickman called Decorated, the idiom of the first half of the 15th century, characterised by rich carved ornamentation and elaborate, curvaceous window tracery. The south elevation in my photographs shows the tracery of the aisle windows with its two different patterns, using a range of curvy shapes. The pinnacles and parapets above create a skyline that’s typical of Decorated carving.

The stonemasons of the 14th century, and their successors in the 19th century, handled stone beautifully. But Hampton Lucy has a trick up its sleeve. That window tracery is not stone at all – it is actually made of cast iron. Thomas Rickman, a stickler for reproducing medieval details, did not mind using ‘modern’ materials to achieve this. He developed a fruitful working relationship with at least one ironmaster,¶ which allowed him to use high quality ironwork in several of his churches. This use of one material to look like another is the kind of architectural ‘dishonesty’ that many Victorian architects and writers rejected – if it looks like stone, they’d have said, it should be stone. However, Rickman died before this kind of purism became not just fashionable but morally axiomatic. And the results here at Hampton Lucy are impressive. I’m sure most people who see the church assume that this tracery is stone, like most other window tracery, in spite of the fact that the paint is slightly paler in colour than the true masonry. Personally, I respect the craft of the stonemason,† and when one looks closely at hand-carved work, there are always minute variations between apparently ‘identical’ windows that give pleasure to those with eyes to see it. I do find, however, that 19th-century handwork is often much more mechanical in appearance than medieval carving and in this case I’m happy to find the cast-iron tracery of Hampton Lucy not only acceptable but also ingenious.

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* I own a battered copy of Rickman’s book and admire its many engravings of medieval architecture; the book is well worth looking out for. Rickman’s four styles and their names, though not perfect for the shifting modes and evolving patterns of medieval building, are still useful.

§ The chancel was built later, after a request for a still more elaborate setting for the church’s high altar in the 1850s. Its design is by Scott.

¶ John Cragg of Liverpool, who worked with Rickman on several churches, including St George’s, Everton, which I hope to see on my next visit to Liverpool.

† Much of the stonemason’s art and craft is visible in this church, not least in the parapets and in other windows made the conventional way.

Detail showing aisle windows, Hampton Lucy

Halifax, West Yorkshire

Looking up in Halifax

Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale in the late-Victorian period. I was particularly struck by a number of streets such as Southgate and Market Street. The clue is in the latter name – this is a block that contains the town’s covered Borough Market. From the streets (especially the two streets I’ve named) the architecture is very imposing, punctuated as it is with turrets, big semicircular windows, tiny windows topped with pediments, variations on the classical orders, and arches with rusticated stone blocks. There’s more than a touch of French Renaissance about all this, but it’s pumped-up French Renaissance, and Nikolaus Pevsner, in the first edition of his Buildings of England volume on West Yorkshire, was rather snooty about it: ‘in an undisciplined French Renaissance style,’ he noted.

And yet Pevsner was a greater invoker of the Zeitgeist. He often praised architecture than reflected the moods and manners of its time and this building surely reflects the confidence and flamboyance of the era in which it was built. When you get inside the market, though, the place lacks the size and theatricality of, say, the great arcades in Leeds. Everything is on a smaller scale, but there’s still an impressive iron and glass roof, with a dome in the middle, which does a good job of getting light into the market, bounded as it is on all four sides by the French Renaissance shops. Those who look up see clear glass (5850 square metres of it), fan-shaped windows with iron tracery, the octagonal dome itself, and a small forest of iron columns holding everything up. This is where the discipline is in this building – the discipline of good engineering that makes everything fit together in a neat and well balanced way and where the Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty) are very much in evidence. The local architects, Leeming and Leeming, did a good job in the 1890s, and their building has stood the test of time: it still seems well used.*

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* There’s more on the history of the market here.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

The great and the goods

Huddersfield station (see my previous post) had imposing buildings for passengers, but a lot of its traffic carried goods. As a result, its goods yard acquired two warehouses, the first, a plain stone building, conventionally built with load-bearing stone walls, and the one in my picture, an enormous structure held up by internal cast-iron columns with an outer ‘skin’ of red and blue bricks.

This monster storage facility was built in 1885, cost £100,000,* and came with its own built-in wagon hoist. The part of the building that protrudes from the facade at the far end, supported by large cast-iron Doric columns, contained this hoist. The mechanism used hydraulic power to raise railway wagons to an upper floor for loading and unloading. Once at the upper level, the wagons could be moved around on internal tracks using electric power, thanks to overhead wires like those supplying modern electric trains. There were also internal hoists and capstans for moving the unloaded goods around, and separating it on to the different floors, each of which was allocated to a particular commodity – textiles, grain, potatoes, miscellaneous goods.

The building has an interesting past but a challenging future. Recent years have seen a roof replacement, and works such as window and door replacements to conservation standards, and work on the interiors with the aim of making them fit for office accommodation and other uses. Marrying such diverse requirements as UK Net Zero targets, thermal efficiency and conservation standards is part of the challenge. But at least the building is being cared for and plans are being made for its future life.

 
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* There are different ways of calculating the value of historical sums of money, but the Bank of England’s inflation calculator puts the value of goods and services costing £100,000 in 1885 at £10,764,769.09 in 2024.

Leigh Brockamin, Worcestershire

 

Marking the way

Milestones go back as far as the Romans. The invaders who did so much for us erected a marker stone every 1000 double paces, or 1618 yards, the standard Roman mile, along their principle roads both to delineate distances between towns and to promote the name of the emperor who paid for them – milestones had political as well as navigational importance. However, there was a much later heyday of the milestone in the 18th century, when turnpike trusts were set up to build and improve roads as long-distance coach travel became more widespread. Turnpike trusts began in 1706 and lasted until the late-1880s (by which time signposts similar to those we use today were becoming more common) and during this period thousands of milestones were erected on Britain’s roads.

‘Milestone’ is the name used for any roadside distance marker in the form of the short, vertical stone or post and not all are made of stone. The one in my photograph, which I happened to see when visiting the medieval barn in my previous post, is by the side of a quiet rural road in Worcestershire and shows distances to Worcester and Bromyard. Helpful pointing hands (manicules) indicate the direction of these two places. The form of this iron milestone is quite a common one – it’s triangular, with a sloping top so that the name of the location can easily be read by a passing rider or coachman looking down on it. I rather like the fact that it provides this additional piece of information. I had no idea that I was in a place called Leigh Brockamin – I’d seen it marked on a map as simply ‘Leigh’.

Reading that unfamiliar name, I was reminded of being lost years ago and pulling up by a remote rural post box. Getting out of the car, I read the name of the box’s location on the label that showed the collection times. Once I knew where I was, I could orient myself, and confirm that I was heading in roughly the right direction. Post boxes no longer show this useful information. Many milestones used to do so. Now they are disappearing. The Milestone Society* estimate that around 9000 may be left in the UK. They’re worth preserving, and worth more than a passing glance.

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* They aim to identify, record, research, conserve and interpret for public benefit the milestones and other waymarkers of the British Isles’. See their website, here.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

 

Dashing for the post

I always make a point of looking at old post boxes. The post (‘snail mail’) has always been a major part of my life. Before email (and its precursor, the fax) I was always always popping round the corner to the local post box, or dashing to the post office to get some urgent missive or piece of text dispatched. So it was not unusual that I paused by this wall box close to the big house at Rousham. A Victorian box, I thought. Nothing unusual about that – there are quite a few of these wall boxes, well over one hundred years old and bearing the ‘VR’ monogram of Queen Victoria, still in use, often in remote locations. But then I looked a little closer and saw that this one was a slightly different design from those I’ve seen before. It’s quite tall in relation to its width and instead of the Queen’s monogram being right at the top, it’s further down, beneath the inscription ‘Post Office’ (at the very top, just about visible) and ‘Letter box’ (just below the slot). In addition, the words ‘Cleared at’ appear below the monogram, acting as a heading to the label below, which gives the times at which the box is emptied. A further touch: the box is topped with a triangular pediment – most wall boxes are simple rectangles.

All this is so much fine detail, which is not interesting to everyone (are you still reading?). But it reminds us that many different designs of post boxes were produced and that preserving such valuable and useful bits of street furniture isn’t simply a matter of counting (‘We have n-hundred Victorian boxes, does it matter if we lose one?’); it’s about checking the details, and making sure we don’t unknowingly let go of something unusual or unique. Looking at images of similar ones online, this one may be a National Standard No 2 Small Wallbox* design, which goes back to about 1859.

Hanging on to this kind of thing is also about respecting the histories of the people and firms that made them. Cast into the metal at the bottom of this box is a manufacturer’s name. Alas I can’t make it out, because it’s encrusted with layers of paint, but the final word is ‘Birmingham’, so that’s where the makers were based. Names associated with this kind of box include the Eagle Foundry and Smith & Hawkes, both of Birmingham. Next time I go to Rousham, I must look again at the name on this box, armed with these names, and see if one of them fits.

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* The very name suggests that it’s one of numerous different designs of large and small wallboxes in use alongside a further variety of free-standing pillar boxes.

Edmondthorpe, Leicestershire

Mouthwatering

This blog is, of course, supposed to be an account of my encounters with buildings, but I’ll include something else occasionally if it seems to me buildings-related or has an architectural quality to it – gate piers, pillar boxes, milestones and the like have all featured here. Hence this village pump, which caught my eye for its obelisk-like form, its puzzling inscription, and its impressive dragon spout. The pump is made of iron – cast iron for the casing and spout, wrought for the handle, I believe.

Whose idea could it have been to erect such an eyecatcher for the village water supply? Presumably the bearer of the initials W.A.P. who, according to an online source, was William Ann Pochin (1844–1901), Lord of the Manor of Bourne Abbots, although he lived in Edmondthorpe Hall. He is said to have restored a number of houses in the village. The houses remain, although the hall burned down in 1943. As to the striking design of the spout, the Pochin coat of arms is the sign near the school just behind the pump, and I couldn’t see anything resembling a dragon in it. However, makers of pumps and those who channel natural springs do sometimes make spouts in the form of such beasts – I’ve seen dragon- or serpent-heads before with water rather than fire spurting out of them. The people of the village were no doubt pleased to have a reliable water supply. This passer-by was delighted to come across such a visual amenity.

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* This structure is a listed ‘building’ and the listing text confirms the material. Foolishly, I did’t strike it when I was there, to see what sound it made. It’s often worth tapping or hitting structures as the dull sound of wood is very different from the knock or ring of metal. Beware, though – if you hit too hard you can come off badly in the endeavour!

Bishops Castle, Shropshire

Shop prop

This photograph was taken through a shop window in the small town of Bishops Castle in Shropshire. It’s a detail that opens up a whole aspect of shop design that most people don’t notice: how to hold up the building’s structure when almost the whole of the ground floor is glazed. Back in the Georgian period and before, shop windows were relatively small, and this wasn’t such a big problem. In the Regency period, windows got larger, and shops with rows of Classical columns became fashionable, creating a facade that looked a bit like an ancient Greek temple (there’s a detail of such a row of columns on a shop in Oxford here).

By the mid-Victorian period, however, shopkeepers were going for still larger windows, so that the shop front became made up of little but glass and glazing bars. And so it became the thing to prop up the front of the building with columns on the inside, just far enough from the glass to allow the window display to overlap them and make them disappear. Since the columns weren’t meant to be noticed, they are often quite plain, and these days end up being painted white, so that they blend quietly into any window display.

It’s the top of one these internal columns that is the subject of my photograph. But as you can see, the people who made this example weren’t content with a plain column. On the contrary, it’s very ornate, with a spiral band running up the body of the column and a decorative capital at the top. The capital isn’t from the standard range of Classical design (it’s not Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian) but is made up of a combination of standard motifs – scrolls, stylised leaves, a fleur de lys – combined together to created a design that a Victorian builder might simply have labelled ‘fancy’. ‘We could do a plain column, sir, but for a stylish shop like yours, I’d recommend the fancy.’ And with the client’s approval, the builder would order up a set of fancy columns from an iron foundry and the shopkeeper would be proud to have the latest thing in elegant shopfitting.

Such columns were not uncommon. I have seen similar, but not identical ones in the Kirkgate Market in Leeds, propping up the roofs of cast-iron stalls. Kirkgate Market was put up in 1901–1904, and I’d not be surprised if this column was of a similar date. It was still propping up the shop a couple of years ago, when I passed by and took my picture through the window, much to the surprise of the other pedestrians on the street, who, no doubt, had not seen this bit of architect’s or ironworker’s fancy.

Worcester

The room now standing on Platform 2

The Resident Wise Woman tells me that in her youth, taking the train home to the Cotswolds from Oxford, she would hear the guard on Oxford station announce her train: ‘Calling at Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton-in-Marsh, Evesham (Capital of the Vale), Worcester Shrub Hill, and Worcester Foregate Street’.* And so it was that the litany of stations on the ‘Cotswold Line’ traced the train’s journey across the hills, down to the Vale of Evesham and on towards the River Severn at Worcester. And being a hill person, the Resident Wise Woman knew that, as she stepped up from the windy platform on to the chugging diesel multiple unit, she’d soon be on her home turf.

Worcester Shrub Hill, back then, was just a name to her and to me too. So we didn’t know that this station, perched high among factories on the edge of the city centre, housed a rare and unexpected bit of Victorian luxury. In the 19th century, it was not unusual for railway stations to have a ladies’ waiting room where female travellers could sit in comfort and safety before their train arrived. And the lucky ladies who travelled from Worcester Shrub Hill station could wait in the magnificent setting of this room on platform 2. Built in c.1864, the ladies’ waiting room is clad on the outside in glorious majolica tiles made by Maw & Company of Broseley (originally the firm was based in Worcester). The rich red columns and arches surrounding them are part of the room’s cast-iron facade, made by the Vulcan Iron Works of Worcester. The overall effect – especially since the waiting room was restored about ten years ago – is one of polychromatic magnificence outside, clean pale walls inside.

No one knows the full story of this structure. No comparable waiting room, with iron walls and tiled facade, has survived. It seems to have been a one-off, and an informative notice on the station speculates that it may have been built for exhibition purposes, to show what could be done with the most up-to-date Victorian materials. The mid-19th century, after all, was a golden age of ironworking, with foundries supplying all kinds of building materials, from enormous columns and beams for giant train sheds to delicate shop fronts. And tiles were becoming increasingly popular for facades – soon, there would be tiled shops, tiled pubs, even office blocks with ceramic cladding. Maw’s were pioneers of using these brightly coloured tiles for architectural use.

The stylistic inspiration is a typically Victorian hotch-potch. Some of the ornament looks Islamic, some Classical, some medieval. But the decoration does hang together visually, while also giving travellers – and potential clients – a sense of what can be achieved with these materials. For waiting passengers, the room is more than fit fo purpose, and must raise, at the very least, an appreciative smile.

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* Evesham, by the way, is pronounced by local people as something like ‘EEV-uh-shum’, with three syllables, and this is what I hear in my mind’s ear when I remember this story.

Lincoln

Men’s room

Looking back over the photographs I took on my visit to Lincoln a few months ago, I found a couple more I wanted to share with you. One small group pays homage to a building type I’ve noticed before: the Victorian cast-iron lavatory or urinal. This one is in the Museum of Lincolnshire Life and is a rather more ornate version of a similar one I found some years ago in a park in Bath. This Lincolnshire example was originally installed at Woodhall Junction station, which closed in 1970. It was made at the Elmbank Foundry in Glasgow, the premises of James Allan Senior and Son. The great Scottish city was a major source of iron goods, and in the architectural sphere one comes across everything from barns to pissoirs made in Glasgow and exported in pieces down south.

Such pieces of fine Scottish ironwork are often highly ornate, as we can see here. Every sort of floral ornament that was popular in the the 19th and early-20th centuries, from acanthus to sunflower, was used, and buildings often exhibited more than one, as in my example. There’s also a rich array of abstract patterns – the wavy lines are especially striking (click on the image above to reveal more detail). Impressive too is the way in which the walls are pierced around the ornament near the top. The pattern made by the piercing can be seen clearly in my imperfect photograph below, which shows that even the tops of the screens between the stalls are ornamented. Victorian men were well provided for: it is a shame that less regard was given to the needs of women.

Lincoln

First post

Just inside the entrance to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln is this post box. It was made in 1856 at the Handyside foundry in Derby and installed the following year at Gosberton Bank near Spalding. In 1969 is was moved to the museum, as an example of a very early type of post box – from the time before there was an accepted standard design. A number of the early post box designs were octagonal like this one and like the Penfold, of which a number survive. The Lincoln example, ten years earlier than the Penfold, is rarer still and almost as striking.

With its vertical slot and octagonal shape, it looks quite unlike modern cylindrical boxes and as the red finish wash’t standardised until later, it might originally have been a different colour too. But many features – the royal monogram, the panel showing collection times, and the words ‘Post Office’ are all similar to those on the boxes we use today.

I don’t often feature here items from museums, but there are so few opportunities to see these early boxes on the street that I didn’t want to let this one slip by. And there’s a twist. Although it’s in a museum, this post box is still in use, and visitors are encouraged to post their letters in it – this is Lincolnshire’s oldest working post box. As the first post box appeared on the British mainland in 1853,* it is also one of the oldest in the country. Mr Handyside did the Post Office proud.

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*The Channel Islands got them the year before.

Louth, Lincolnshire

Egyptians

While still on Lincolnshire themes, it struck me that when in Louth I really should take a photograph of at least one of the cast-iron street signs that are a feature of the town. These modest items of street furniture make a huge difference to the character of a place. So many towns have modern street signs, made of thin metal (or even plastic) – no doubt cheap to produce and easy to clean and maintain, but totally lacking in character and without much in the way of visual flair.

Louth is one of the places that have preserved a high proportion of their Victorian signs. They score highly for clarity – the bold, clear, lettering sees to that. They are distinctive, because, although other towns have this style of sign, none are quite like the ones in Louth. They are clearly very durable. They do need looking after – repainting every so often, particularly. But it’s a price worth paying in my opinion.

The lettering, by the way, is in the style old-fashioned sign writers and those who care about the design of these things mostly know as Egyptian. That has nothing to do with ancient Egypt, but everything to do with the design of the letters, which are distinguished by the way the serifs have no curves (or very minimal curves) – they are basically short, straight-line embellishments to the ends of the main strokes.* These particular Egyptians are squarish in proportion, and have some variation between the width of the strokes, but not extreme variation. They work really well painted in black against the white background, within the slender black frame line of the whole sign. The other lovely touch is the incurving corners – another bit of distinctiveness. Hats off to Louth for preserving these exemplary signs.

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* If this was a font for printing, I’d be describing the letters as having ‘slab serifs’. But I take ’slab serif’ to be a term from printing and typography. These signs, on the other hand, come from the world of the sign writer and sign-maker, so I use the term traditionally used in that world: Egyptians.

Pancras Road, London

Iron classic

This small structure is a drinking fountain, just opposite St Pancras Old Church Gardens, where I visited the mausoleum of Sir John Soane many moons ago. It’s the sort of street furniture that’s easy to miss and it’s hardly big enough to be a building. But it’s certainly architectural: a quintet of slender classical columns set on a drum and supporting a shallow dome topped with a putto (a cherub if you like) holding an urn.

This little bit of classical elegance was donated to the church in 1877 by William Thornton, Church Warden. It was one of the many bits of Victorian architecture made of cast iron, this time by Andrew Handyside of Derby, a company who produced everything you could make from iron, from railway components to ornamental vases.

Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, Athens

The design, incidentally, is based on one of the go-to structures for architects who wanted to base their buildings on the ruins of Athens: the 4th-century BC Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.* It’s by no means an exact copy – Lysicrates’ monument has a square base, and is filled in behind the columns. But the proportions, the encircling group of columns and the shallow dome are all there in both structures. It’s close enough for classicists to nod, or to shake their heads depending on how purist they are. Athenian classicism in cast iron: a very Victorian mix of ancient and modern, and of art and industry.

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*Choragic, from choregos, one who paid for and trained the dance-chorus in ancient Greek drama; Lysicrates was a patron of musical performances.

Erith, London

After the stink

Among our greatest heroes should be Joseph Bazalgette and the other Victorian engineers and builders who created London’s network of underground sewers. The scandal of Victorian London’s inadequate open sewers (poor disposal, contaminated drinking water, cholera, typhoid, and appalling smells) was finally confronted in 1858, the year of the ‘Great Stink’, when the odour from the Thames was so great it penetrated the nostrils of the powers that sit in the Houses of Parliament.

Joseph Bazalgette’s enormous and far-sighted engineering project put an end to this. Miles of pipes and brick-vaulted tunnels stretch beneath the capital, removing the effluent to a vast reservoir (49 Olympic swimming pools’ worth, in language appropriate to August 2016), which was then emptied into the Thames at high tide, to be flushed out to sea. Most of those pipes and tunnels are still use today.

The pumping work was done at steam-powered pumping stations, one of which was the Crossness Pumping Station on the Erith Marshes in the Borough of Bexley. This South-East London engineering marvel was opened in 1865 and was used until 1956, when a new sewage-treatment works was installed. But the building has survived, thanks to its extraordinary architecture, grant-aid from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the hard work of volunteers and restorers. The original pumping engines are there too (they have 52-ton flywheels and may be the largest remaining ones of their type in the world).*

It’s the architecture that gets me going, of course. The white Gault brick exterior is impressive, but the inside, a riot of multi-coloured ironwork, is what’s special. This is the sort of iron extravaganza that raises the same sort of cloud of journalistic clichés as the great London railway termini: it’s a cathedral of cloaca, a palace of poo, a temple of…

Enough of that. It’s an irrepressibly Victorian building, its walls and windows drawing on the Romanesque revival (semi-circular arches, artfully arranged in groups), on Gothic (foliate ornament, pointed motifs in the balcony railings), and on the sheer power of engineering. In other words it represents that coming-together of ancient and modern that the Victorians liked so much – as in the railway stations again. But there’s something else. They built this stuff to last. We’re still the beneficiaries of their thoroughness, of their glorious over-engineering, every time we flush a lavatory in Lambeth or load the dishwasher in Dagenham. Think of that, as you admire the iron curlicues, which have lasted too, thanks to the engineers’ skill and the restorers’ art.

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* Visiting times are limited at the moment. They’re on the web here, where there is also much more information about the building, its engines, and its restoration.

Photograph  I nearly always use my own photographs on this blog, but this time the image above is copyright © Christine Matthews and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.

Bristol

 A gentlemen’s to relish

My route to Bath the other day took me around the edge of Bristol. Emboldened by my recent post of an ornate lavatory in Worcester, I decided to seek out an even more interesting example: the late-19th-century gents in the corner of Mina Road Park, in the northern part of Bristol.

The building was made, probably in the 1880s, at the Sun Foundry in Glasgow, a business founded by George Smith in the late 1850s. The Sun Foundry became prolific producers of architectural ironwork, together with such items as drinking fountains and bandstands. They described themselves as ‘Art Metal Workers, Iron Founders and Sanitary Engineers’, so they were clearly well suited to the manufacture of structures like this iron pissoir. They certainly lavished as much attention on its details as they did on projects like ornamental fountains and cast-iron Corinthian columns.

Lovely pierced panels covered with floral ornament line the upper parts of the walls, combining ventilation with decoration. The sprays of flowers, scrollwork motif, and small round finials are similar in design to the terracotta panels on many contemporary buildings. The openwork theme continues in the dome. This is a delicate and intricate network of flowers, leaves, and arabesques.

This tiny gents, practical and elegant, is an asset in the corner of the park, and it was good to see that it has been carefully maintained and painted. It’s not so good inside – the graffiti vandals have been at work – but the view up into the openwork dome, with the resulting view of the sky and breath of fresh air, is uplifting. As in Worcester, this amenity proves that a visit to the lavatory can be interesting, architecturally. It’s a pity the burghers of Bristol did not supply something similar for the ladies.