English Buildings

A small glory Yesterday some inner imp in me made me decide to visit Kidderminster. It’s a sad place, hardly designed to improve one’s mood,...

Small mercy ‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ my mother would say, keeping her spirits up in the face of what was sometimes a hard li...

Not so primitive, 2 Spotted on the same day as the chapel in my previous post, this building is in Walford, between Brampton Bryan and Leint...

Not so primitive, 1 Following on from my previous post, here is another building in Weobley that I missed on my first visit. It’s the Metho...

Memories The small church of St Mary, Sudeley is unusual in that it is both a parish church and the chapel of nearby Sudeley Castle. It’s a...

Meeting place When I was told that one name for this building in Ilminster was the Old Meeting, my first thought was that it was rather show...

Chapel in a garden Bridport’s Unitarian chapel was built in the 1790s after a group split from an existing independent congregation in 1742...

For filling up A recent visit to Buckingham, en route for a destination further east, saw us taking a stroll along Well Street, a way I’d n...

In motion and at rest, 2: Delivering the good news The idea of the Christian minister travelling around and preaching wherever he went is as...

Putting up a front In the same street as my two previous posts is this building, one that has caught my eye before as I’ve driven past. It’s...

More uses for face masks One of my favourite passages in Andrew Ziminski’s excellent book The Stone Mason: A History of Building Britain , i...

The good fight Although they don’t always make a big thing of it, allusions to military architecture fit rather well with the martial m...

Christopher Wakeling, Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant nonconformity Published by Historic England The next of my short seri...

Hurrah for Filocalus! After the small tiled extravaganza of a butcher’s shop in my previous post I didn’t expect to find any more memora...

Conversion I don’t recall coming across a Methodist chapel so ornately Classical as the one in Burford. The entrance front is in a loca...

Wesley’s room In response to my previous post about the chapel in Devizes, a reader asked me what were the essential requirements of a n...

Chapel style Somewhere in the back of my mind there’s the image of a stereotypical nonconformist chapel – the classic design with a symme...

The art of seeing My recent post about the wonderful mosaic floors in the National Gallery prompted a couple of people to say to me th...

Classical conventicle Most British people, even if not chapel goers or architecture buffs, are aware of the thousands of nonconformist ch...

Local hero I visited Altarnun primarily to see the parish church (which is late-medieval, beautiful, and packed with interest, including ...