London, Marylebone Lane

 

The pub on the corner

Corner sites are favourites for any business that relies on walk-in trade – shops of course, but also pubs. I passed this glowing example on a recent walk from New Bond Street to a meandering, roughly northwestward drift along Marylebone Lane. Every so often the narrow lane opens out at a crossroads or junction and here, at the corner with Bentinck Street was an ideal inn site, with an attractive looking pub catching the afternoon sunlight in pole position.

It’s the Coach Makers Arms, named in honour of a trade once prevalent hereabouts in Marylebone and, as opposed to the only vaguely Jacobean revival architecture of the shop in my previous post, it represents something from the same period (in this case 1901), in a free but more obviously Jacobean style. The early 17th century influence makes itself felt in the proportions of the windows (but not the sashes on some of them); the curving pediment at the top of the Bentinck Street frontage, with the little architectural flourish that pops up at the very top; the entrance canopy with the chubby baluster columns that help to support it; and the flourish of ornament in low relief on the corner of the building above the ground-floor window.

The use of red brick with stone dressings is typical of many buildings in this part of London, so the pub very much looks at home. There was evidence as we passed that there were still plenty of people drinking there at around 4 p.m., sometimes a quiet time after the lunchers have departed and before the after-work early doors trade begins. In this time of challenges for pubs, in terms both of architecture and hospitality, it seems as if this one is getting something right.

Ipswich, Suffolk

Turning a corner – once more

Regular readers will have noticed my liking for buildings that deal stylishly with an acute angle, giving builders the excuse for a tight, neat curve or even a tower. One such reader* has sent me a photograph of this kind of building in Ipswich (a place I don’t know at all well) and as he guessed, it’s very much up my street (or up my acutely converging thoroughfares). It was built in c. 1903 as the premises of H. Sneezum & Co to designs by a local architect, Harvey Winkworth. My correspondent tells me that the original design (of which there’s a drawing in the Suffolk County Record Office) had the building coming to a sharp point, but that this was modified, with the curved wall and pointed roof that we see now.

Pedimented sash windows and fairly orthodox early-20th century shop fronts form a facade that’s made just that bit special by the corner feature with its pointed roof. It stands out, that roof, and I should think Mr Sneezum must have liked the way his roof line stood out from the architectural and retail crowd. Perhaps other locals did too. “I’ll meet you outside Sneezum’s” or “Turn right at Sneezum’s” – I can imagine people saying things like that as they got used to this turret-like feature, standing guard at its corner and becoming something of a landmark. I too am pleased to make its acquaintance.

*Thanks to Bob Kindred for altering me to this building and supplying the picture.

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Postscript In my post above I avoided saying anything about what Sneezum's sold in their large shop. I'd seen online references to them operating as pawnbrokers, also to a shop (but it was unclear if it was this shop) selling clothing. A reader (see comments section) has come across another online reference, which includes an early photograph and says that someone bought a tennis racket, hockey stick, binoculars, and a camera there. A modern business called Sneezums operates as a jeweller and photographic retailer in Bury St Edmunds.

Hertford

Angles and curves

This former seed warehouse, resplendent with glowing brick and gilded lettering, was built in the mid-19th century for seed merchants Alfred McMullen's and partly rebuilt in 1944 after bomb damage. Tucked away not far from the town’s Mill Bridge, it’s now I think used variously as offices and a store for Hertford Museum. Hertford Town Council also offers this part of the structure – the Mill Bridge Rooms – as a community facility for hire.

There's some lovely brickwork here – mainly yellow brick with some details including a diaper pattern and segmental arches above the windows in red brick. The way the brickwork curves to turn the corner* is striking, especially the way the curves contrast with the varied sharp angles and straight lines of the rest of the structure. This was the feature that caught my eye as I passed – that, along with the way in which the gold lettering shines in the sun.

It's not all brick, though. Typically of central Hertford, which exhibits a variety of brick, stone, stucco, weatherboarded, and timber-framed buildings, there are several different materials on display here – hammered sandstone around the doorway, slates on the roof and cladding the hoist chamber that sticks out above the doors to the right, even a bit of pebbledashing along the eaves course. It's a rich mixture that works, and is a tribute both to the flair of Victorian builders and the efforts of those who have conserved and maintained the building more recently.

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* Regular readers will know that I have a particular liking for buildings that turn tight angles with curved walls, as exemplified here and here.

Manchester

Throwing the kitchen sink at it

A recurring theme in posts on this blog has been the way architects and builders deal with corners. Here’s one of the most striking corners I know, the turret or overgrown oriel that takes the eye around the junction of Chancery Lane and Brown Street in Manchester. The building was designed as the offices of a bank, and, from the rusticated ground floor to the rows of dormer windows in the roof and the iron crown that tops off the structure, it’s an eye-catcher in a city of rich showy 19th-century buildings.

The architect was George Truefitt, whose buildings included the unusual circular St George’s Tufnell Park Road in London, and other bold churches such as St Mary, Davyhulme, Manchester, which has an octagonal tower, and St John Bronley, which has a big apse and a number of quatrefoil-shaped windows. Whereas these churches are unambiguously Gothic, this Manchester office building of 1868 is in a style one can only call eclectic – a mixture of classical rustication, Gothic shafts, round-headed arches, iron balconies and stone parapets. Some of the carved stonework – repeated flowers and leaves, for example – looks forward to the terracotta details on many buildings of a couple of decades later. The finishing touch, that wrought-iron crown on top of the corner turret, is a charming one-off. This kind of blend of showiness and solidity, confidence and delicacy, is typical of the Victorians. It may not be ‘proper’, but one way to make a mark on the busy, architecturally eventful streets of Manchester is, in a popular phrase of today, to throw the kitchen sink at the building. I’m rather glad that Truefitt did so.

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

Round we go  

Sometimes the way a building turns a corner can be the best thing about it. I remember in a past post describing a particularly noticeable corner tower on a building in London – a 1930s version of many such markings of the junction between one street and another. This house in Bishop's Stortford is almost the opposite, small where the other building was grand and statement-making. Presumably there was a triangular site, where two roads, Basbow Lane and King Street, met at an acute angle. The builder (probably in the early-19th century) made full use of the plot, creating a triangular building with this beautiful curve at the junction. The bricklayer obliged with some careful brickwork.

Even if the house is only about six feet wide at the apex, it does the two things it should – makes full use of the available land and turns the corner gracefully. Steps, bricks, and trees make an interesting bit of urban scenery too, rendering a small building dramatic and turning a change of level into an architectural surprise. Modest? Yes. Unregarded? Probably. But sometimes, in townscape as in life, it's the small things that matter.