Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Warm and cool, rough and smooth

There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the bricks have been used to build a country house of delightful proportions, so much the better – even if, as is the case at beautiful Wallsworth Hall, those proportions have been somewhat skewed by the addition of an off-centre turret and a protruding bay (in harder, later brick) on the left-hand side. But houses grow and their owners have changing ideas about what they want, and I’m happy to accept these changes as interesting bits of history, revealing developing needs and new tastes. They don’t, for me, wholly destroy the beauty of the mid-18th century original, in which old brickwork is complemented by sash windows, stone dressings, and a rather pleasing row of three circular windows to the central attic.

More recent changes have had a less obvious effect on the exterior of the house. It has been for some decades the home of Nature in Art, the first museum and art gallery dedicated to art inspired by nature. It celebrates such art (both fine and applied) through a growing permanent collection, a programme of special exhibitions covering everything from botanical illustration to wildlife photography, an artists in residence scheme, and a range of courses.

Architecturally, what particularly caught my eye, as I approached the house, was the doorway. Here too, the sun played its role, bringing out the details of the bold pediment, with its chunky dentils creating a pattern of light and shade. It’s this detail, and the extraordinary columns that are striking. Just as the sloping sides of the pediment are broken by chunks of carved stone, so the columns are raised to a greater level of decorative splendour by three cubic stone blocks, again chunkily carved, which punctuate their Roman Doric smoothness.

What these bits of carving do is take us from the rational, 18th-century mode of classical symmetry to a the world of caves and grottoes. Look at one of the square sections of the blocked column closely and you see a cluster of rock-like lumps and facets, many of which have the chisel marks clearly visible to emphasize their roughness, interspersed with what look like icicles or stalactites. It’s the sort of thing that would be at home in a grotto in the garden of a great house like Stourhead, and translates us from the balmy sunshine to the shivering sound of the aria sung by the Cold Genius in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. What a place to end up on a warm winter’s morning: delightfully different, but still contained within the classical proportions of the house as a whole.

Croome, Worcestershire

A glance into the past

Early on in the history of this blog, I did a couple of posts about Croome Court, the 18th-century house of the earls of Coventry. What especially interested me was the number and variety of buildings in Croome’s landscape garden and the surrounding countryside, from the classical ‘Temple Greenhouse’ by Robert Adam to a circular panorama tower. Croome is a place I’ve been meaning to revisit for a while now, and I planned to do a post about the house and its 18th-century architecture but, as usual, something unexpected caught my eye. So, much as I enjoyed looking at the Georgian architecture of the great house, designed by Capability Brown and with interiors partly by Robert Adam, here at the heart of this 18th-century building is, of all things, a bit of timber-framed wall.

The 6th Earl built Croome Court as we know it, an elegant Palladian house with corner towers and a central classical portico, in the 1750s. But the central part was actually a rebuilding of the family’s earlier 17th-century brick-built house – the architect, Brown, rebuilt it using the old foundations, facing it in stone, laying out new rooms inside, and adding the corner towers and portico. The 17th-century house, however, had an even earlier, timber-framed house at its core, and it’s a fragment of this that I noticed as I walked around the building’s basement. One of the National Trust’s helpful guides, seeing me looking at this, pointed out details on the floor that showed the lines of early, long-demolished walls among the floor tiles.

And so Croome Court, so classically perfect, turned out to be a bit of an architectural jigsaw, as so many buildings do when you look carefully. I don’t know if it was a member of the Coventry family or one of the house’s later owners* or the National Trust who now run and maintain the building who left this small section of timber-framing exposed. But I was pleased that they’d done so, because it made me think of the house in a different way, one more true to its complex history.

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* The ownership history of the house has been varied since the 1940s. Sold off by the family after World War II, it became successively home to a school, to the UK headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, to a property developer who planned to turn it into a hotel, and to another developer who lived in it for a while. The Croome Heritage Trust then took over the house in tandem with the National Trust, ensuring its survival.

Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire

For vigour

What’s this, in the park of the 18th-century house of Lydiard Tregoze, near Swindon? Not a sheep wash. Certainly not something for cleaning mud off the wheels of carts. It is, I’m reliably informed by the adjacent interpretation board, a plunge pool for humans, and it dates to about 1820, when Sir George Richard St John was Lord of the Manor. Although by this time the technology for piped water certainly existed, most country houses did not have such a convenience. What did the upper classes need piped water for, when they had a large staff of servants to bring the stuff to where it was needed? So water for washing and bathing was brought to your room by hand, and most country-house owners were happy with this arrangement.

Some houses, however, had plunge pools, either out in the open like this, or undercover in an outbuilding. Plunge pools, as the name suggests, were not for wallowing. The idea was to plunge in and out quickly and the reason for doing this was not primarily for washing, but because a dunking in cold water was deemed to be good for your health. Some went to Bath or other health resorts, some, increasingly, went to the coast to bathe in salt water, but many held that immersion in fresh water – here supplied from the nearby lake – was just as good. Madness, rickets, leprosy and asthma were among the disorders said in the Regency period to be helped by a course of plunge-pool treatments. Maybe some bathers thought that a daily dash down to the plunge pool and back would bring them increased vigour, in the same way as a cold morning bath at boarding school was supposed to do.

So it was perhaps a case of going down the steps as quickly as you could manage, ducking in a few times, and then dashing back up the steps – even faster, and shivering no doubt – and rushing indoors to be dried. Invigorating? I hope so.

Kemerton, Worcestershire

 

Distant prospects

One of the themes of this blog is the pleasure to be gained from unexpected architectural encounters – those views of buildings that one glimpses from the road while going from A to B – and so much the better if there’s the opportunity to stop and take a closer or longer look. There’s something especially rewarding about chancing upon something in one’s local patch, a notable building that’s only visible from a road or footpath that one doesn’t normally use. I often pass through the village of Kemerton, in Worcestershire, and even occasionally stop there for a coffee on a quiet morning, but the other day I made a detour, little more than driving around three sides of a rectangle of roads to return in the direction I’d come. It was then that I caught sight of the house in my photograph.

One field separates Kemerton Court from the rural road I was driving along. Even from a moving car I could make out a building that looked special, and it wasn’t long before I returned, walked up the same road, and had a longer look. I saw a Cotswold stone front of the early-18th century, apparently very well built, mostly of ashlar. The window surrounds are quite plain – the keystones are small and not especially showy – and the doorway has a triangular pediment with Doric or Tuscan pilasters running down from its ends. Plain it may be, but the articulation of the frontage is quite sophisticated – notice how the central bay and the pairs of outer bays are set slightly forward of the rest, to give some visual interest, while the round-topped window and the little circular window above it emphasise the central bay. The finials on the parapet (which resemble either egg cups or acorns according to how you see them) and the survival of the small panes in the windows are pleasing touches. There’s also an eye-catching contrast of curves, with the string course below the round window going one way and the curves in the parapet going the other. It’s this kind of contrast that shows the influence of the baroque style on whoever it was who designed this facade. The architect is not known – Smith of Warwick and Thomas White of Worcester are possible candidates.

This facade fronts an older house of the 16th century, and following the road round to the rear of the house reveals a less symmetrical structure. Looking from the road was all I was going to do, though, as Kemerton Court is a private house and not open to the public. I’m grateful, though, that its satisfying west front could be seen, at arm’s length as it were, just one green field away.

Moreton Corbet, Shropshire

 

Gorgeous and stately

Looking at this end-on view of the ruin of Moreton Corbet Castle’s south range, you’d not think it was a castle at all, in the strict medieval sense . The same would be true of a view across the fields taking in what is left of the long south front of which my photograph above shows one corner. What is here are clearly the remains of an Elizabethan country house, and one of some grandeur. It was built by Robert Corbet at the end of the 16th century, who was extending the work done by his father, Sir Andrew, who had begun to transform the structure of his family’s ancestral medieval castle.

Sir Andrew turned his castle into a more fashionable residence by building new rooms against the old curtain wall. Ruins of these are still seen on the other half of the site, to the left of the building in my photograph. Sir Andrew died in 1578, and Robert was more radical, adding this new south range to create what Camden called a ‘gorgeous and stately house’. Its curvy gables, classical pilasters and large, rectangular mullioned windows will be familiar to anyone who’s seen more famous houses of this period – Blickling in Norfolk, for example has similar gables and windows; so does Montacute in Somerset.

So this is high-status building, and the amount of effort and expense involved in its construction is confirmed by the details, especially the pilasters and attached columns, together with the friezes they support (photograph below). These feature a variety of roundels, bits of strapwork, and carved animals of various kinds, some from the standard repertoire of the time (decorative flourishes influenced, like the house’s gables, by contemporary Flemish architecture), but also the heraldic beasts of the Corbet family.

Why is this marvel of late-Tudor architecture now a ruin? During the English Civcil Wars there was much fighting around the house (which was then occupied by Sir Vincent Corbet, who was on the royalist side). As a result, the house was badly damaged, and although the family continued to live in it, they abandoned it in the 18th century. There were plans to build a new house on the site but these came to nothing and the building was left to decay. It is a magnificent, if tantalising, ruin.

Burwell, Lincolnshire

One image, two lives

Although I have a literature degree, I no longer read as much fiction as I once did. There is too much else to read: books about Victorian architects, journals by 18th-century travellers, topography, psychogeography… But there is no accounting for it. Sometimes the Sirens sing, and the lure of the novel is too much to resist. They sang for me, those Sirens, some time in 2001, when I picked up in a bookshop a copy of what seemed to be a novel, read the first couple of pages, and found myself confronted by four photographs of pairs of eyes staring at me from page 3, surrounded by text describing the Antwerp Nocturama, home to night-waking jerboas, racoons, opossums, lemurs, and owls, whose large eyes and inquiring gaze remind the narrator of ‘certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking’. This was the novel Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and I had been introduced to the world of Jacques Austerlitz, a man in search of his identity, not in some hippy ‘I need to find myself’ sense, but in the real sense that he does not know his place of birth, his parentage, even, when he was a boy, his real and extraordinary name.

Austerlitz, it emerges, was sent as a small child on a train to England and thence to Wales, one of the many Jewish children rescued from the holocaust by the Kindertransporten, and adopted by parents who wanted to erase any vestiges of his early life, his former identity. As an adult he sets out on journeys, in part to fuel his work as an architectural historian, in part to seek his own history. As he describes these journeys, Sebald scatters images (both the verbal images that pervade his mesmeric prose and the haunting, slightly fuzzy photographs with which the book is sprinkled) of themes, ideas, and objects that at first seem random, later seem to make patterns, and later still chime with events in Austerlitz’s background or his lost early life. And so Austerlitz’s adult interest in railway stations, fortifications, empty houses, luggage, things that fly, stars, builds in significance and throws light on his identity. The result is that his dour upbringing in Wales (his adoptive parents are Calvinists and seem unable either to show emotion or to stimulate him very much at all) is contrasted with a background of culture and wordliness in prewar Central Europe. This odd combination accounts for Austerlitz’s curious character, a mix of the analytical and the driven, of an austere daily life balanced by a taste for grandiose architecture. 

The photographs that punctuate the book (photographs of butterflies and nocturnal animals, railway stations and fortifications, a rucksack and a mosaic) are particularly fascinating. After Sebald died I heard the writer A. S. Byatt reminiscing about her friend ‘Max’ Sebald on the radio. She had asked him about the photographs, which seem to have a fluid, shifting relationship with the text that surrounds them. ‘Those photographs, Max, in your books,’ she said (I quote from memory). ‘Do they show what you say they show?’ To which Sebald replied, helpfully, ‘Sometimes they do, Antonia, sometimes they don’t.’ And so we have pictures that are said, or implied, to be of Austerlitz that may be of the young Sebald himself, but also photographs of real buildings (ones in Prague and Terezin in the Czech Republic, for example) that are exactly the buildings that the book says, or implies, they are, and I know they are because I have been to Prague and Terezin and seen them.

One photograph of an English building brought me up with a jolt. On page 147 of the novel, Austerlitz describes a house he calls Iver Grove, which he sees as a young architectural historian in a period of his life when he visits many of the English country houses that were abandoned, threatened, often ultimately demolished. At Iver Grove he finds a hall, ‘ornamented with baroque stucco work’ in which ‘hundreds of sacks of potatoes leaned against each other.’ This bizarre sight is reproduced in a photograph of such a room, the floor covered with sacks: a country house used an as agricultural store. As soon as I saw this image I recognised it, because it appears in another book I’ve come across, one of the countless non-fiction works that I read and that give me so little time for fiction: John Harris’s No Voice From the Hall: Early Memories of a Country House Snooper (1998), in which the architectural historian John Harris describes his own early life, visiting abandoned and soon to be demolished country houses in England in the 1950s. The house in the photograph is Burwell Hall on the Lincolnshire Wolds (not far from where I was born), and when Harris visited it in 1957 it was full of heaps of grain, sacks of potatoes, even a flock of sheep.

I want to record this parallel not because I’m the only person to have noticed it (others have spotted it too), but because I did notice it for myself and wanted to share the surprise I felt when I came across this picture in its new setting. And also because it is typical of the surprises that await a reader of Austerlitz. The fact that Sebald acquired this image from Harris’s book (presumably he asked permission, although the book contains no photographic acknowledgements*) doesn’t spoil the book for me. It’s still no less Harris’s image for this creative repurposing: the image now has another life too.

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* As printed in Austerlitz, the photograph is framed by a black rule, just as it is in No Voice from the Hall. None of the other pictures in Austerlitz has such a frame. I suppose the frame acts as a silent acknowledgement, if one might use such an oxymoronic term, of the image’s source. 

Photograph from John Harris, No Voice From the Hall: Early Memories of a Country House Snooper (1998) and W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

Country house consumption

My next review in this spring's selection is a collection of essays about the country house, with a particular emphasis on owners as consumers. It makes for fascinating reading.

Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds) The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption
Published by Historical England

This is an impressive collection of essays about country houses and the ways their inhabitants furnished them and bought the other things they needed and wanted. When I saw the book in Historic England’s catalogue it immediately caught my eye – as someone who has written about both architecture and the history of retailing it seemed ideal for me.* And I was gripped. It’s a large book, full of new research, and a short review like this can only skim its surface. I mention here just a selection of the essays, the ones that especially engaged me – but there is something in every essay (including the handful on overseas houses) to fascinate people who want to find out more about the lives of the owners of these great buildings.

One key question posed by the book is: Where did the owners of country houses buy their furnishings and consumer goods? Jane Whittle looks at one family – the Le Stranges of Hunstanton – and shows how their household accounts reveal sources in Norwich and Kings Lynn in addition to London, as well as revealing when the family began to acquire such fashionable goods as clocks, window curtains, and upholstered furniture. A piece by Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery studies two notable houses – Stoneleigh Abbey and Arbury Hall – and finds that one shouldn’t assume that luxuries come from London and everyday supplies from local sources. Some luxuries were bought locally, and the purchasers also exploited family links with other areas or bought things from towns, such as Bath, which they visited for pleasure.

Some of the most interesting essays cover the relationship between the country house and the cultures of Asia. Emile de Bruijn’s piece on the development of chinoiserie (associated variously with high-mindedness or whimsy, wise government or foolish princes, the feminine identity or effeminacy; Kate Smith’s piece on objects from India, showing the varied and accumulating meanings that these items acquired; Patricia F Ferguson’s study of the use of ‘Japan China’ among elite consumers are all absorbing examples.

Another group of essays explores the lives lived in country houses and in specific rooms. Susan Jenkins reveals the library at Kenwood as a room for entertainment as well as a space for books. Rosie MacArthur describes the changing uses of rooms at Kelmarsh Hall as the family moved in before the building was completed.

A final section includes studies of the ways country houses have been presented, including the evolving visitor experience at Stowe (Anna McEvoy) and the distinctive mix of magnificence and luxury, conspicuous consumption and art, wealth and power at Mentmore (Nicola Pickering). The last essay of all, by Karen Fielder, is particularly haunting. It concerns the traces of the lost country house of Coleshill, a place I’ve written about more than once on this blog. It shows how the presence of the house is still powerful in its absence, a moving reminder of the enduring fascination and power of country houses and the families that lived and entertained in them.

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* Potential readers should note that this is a scholarly book with a price-tag in line with the limited market that this sort of work commands.

† My two most recent posts on Coleshill are about: surviving gate piers (noting my indebtedness to Karen Fielder’s essay) and cottages built on the estate.

Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire

A great arch for a great house

As is well known, England is rich in country houses, but was once richer still. Hundreds of country houses have succumbed to the mallet and swinging ball of the demolition contractor, for reasons ranging from economics to fashion. The vanished country houses often leave traces behind, though, and amongst the most noticeable are lodges and gatehouses, built to mark and guard the entrances to country estates and often kept because they make good houses. A favourite of mine is the domed lodge at Stoke Edith in Herefordshire. Here’s another, the grand Palladian lodge near the B3089 at Fonthill Bishop in Wiltshire.

Fonthill is a name to make architectural historians pause. The place was the home of the most grandiose and bizarre Gothic revival house ever, Fonthill Abbey, built in the early-19th century by super-rich dilettante and author William Beckford. It is long gone (although a fragment remains, which I hope to see one day). But before Fonthill Abbey there was Fonthill Spendens, a vast Palladian house built for Beckford’s father between 1755 and 1770; its park was entered through this lodge.

The round arch, pediment, and blocks of heavily rusticated masonry are emphatically Palladian in style, so much so that some say the building is the work of the original English Palladian architect, Inigo Jones. If so, that would make it a 17th-century building, but it’s more likely to date from the time when Splendens was built. If so, it’s a powerful reminder of the kind of architecture of Splendens, a house that was pulled down in 1807, when William Beckford, a dedicated follower of Gothic fashion, was building his new house. If Fonthill Splendens was as solid as this great archway, it probably did not come down without a struggle.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Palace of art

When I first came across Compton Verney the place had an air of melancholy mystery. The great 18th-century house can be glimpsed through trees from a road the joins the Fosse Way, the old Roman route that runs northeast from Cirencester to Leicester and on to Lincoln. Rows of sash windows and gigantic corner stones made the place look imposing in the manner of a house by Sir John Vanbrugh, but in the 1970s it all looked rather down at heel. What was this place, and who lived there?

The building that I could make out through the trees had been begun on the site of an older house in the early years of the 18th century for the 12th Lord Willoughby de Broke. The designer isn’t known, but the strongest candidates (apart from Vanbrugh) are William and Francis Smith of Warwick, successful Midlands master builders who often also acted as architects. What is known is that in the 1760 the 14th Lord Willoughby de Broke had the place remodelled by Robert Adam. It was Adam who was responsible for turning what had been a courtyard house into the striking U-shaped building that still exists.

In the 1970s, when I first saw the place, no one lived there. Requisitioned by the army during World War II, Compton Verney had stood empty ever since, and could easily have been one of the hundreds of country houses that were demolished in the years after the war. But the building’s absentee owner held onto it, and it was finally bought and turned into an art gallery with funds from the Peter Moores Foundation. The architectural firm Stanton Williams were commissioned to convert the interior and build an extension – modern in idiom but discreet and complementary to the original building – on the site of former service buildings.

After almost 50 years of neglect, Compton Verney has found a fitting role. The building houses a permanent collection that specializes in a number of interesting areas of art history (highlights: Chinese bronzes, British folk art) and puts on temporary exhibitions that keep one going back. No doubt one day the place will have me blogging again, too. The conservation work, which embraces the Capability Brown landscape in which the house sits, is now turning to the ice house in the grounds. I wonder if they will find a way of showing visitors the impressive sunken brick-domed interior. Anyone for CCTV?

Go here for more about Compton Verney and its history.

Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire

I remember when I first stumbled across this place. Passing a knot of stone outbuildings and rounding a sharp bend, there was a high brick wall pierced with mullioned windows. As we continued a little further and pulled up by the side of the lane, this beautiful front was revealed across a lawn. We had found Canons Ashby.

All those years ago, the house looked neglected and sad. Walls were bowing. I think I remember weeds sprouting from the fabric here and there. We poked around a bit and a local woman appeared from a nearby cottage. We learned that Canons Ashby was the ancestral home of the Drydens (the poet’s family), who had lived here since the 17th century, but who now lived in Africa. As the sun warmed the Northamptonshire stone and and brought out colours ranging from raspberry to apricot in the brickwork, the place looked magical. Inside, we were told, nothing much had changed for 250 years. And all this history looked as if it would soon turn into another ruin, another lost country house.

That it did not do so was mostly due to Gervase Jackson-Stops, architectural advisor to the National Trust and a great scholar of and friend of country houses. Jackson-Stops not only fought to save the place, but also pioneered an arrangement under which government money was used to endow a house given to the National Trust – the first time the Trust had accepted a building with this source of endowment.

The place has blossomed since it was taken under the National Trust’s wing in 1981. The dry rot is gone, the structure has been strengthened, and conservators working for the Trust discovered enchanting 16th-century murals under layers of paint, to add to delights ranging from elaborate plaster ceilings to the vast kitchen, which, until 1938 contained the only tap (cold, of course) in the house. The library even houses a signed copy of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson, one of the fathers of the English novel. Apparently he wrote the book at Canons Ashby: another literary link. It’s heartening to know that the fragile beauty of this place has been saved.

Coughton Court, Warwickshire

Whenever I drive to or from Birmingham Airport, I see this building, set back from the A435. When its west-facing façade is warmed by the late-afternoon sun, it is the highlight of my journey.

Driving past, one gets the impression of an orange stone building set at the end of an avenue of trees in parkland – a perfect building and a unified composition in a very English landscape. Stop and look more closely, though, and the building is more complicated. Even the stunning 16th-century gatehouse at the centre can’t be all of a piece. At the ground-floor level the turrets are square, but they metamorphose into octagons between the ground and first floors, suggesting that the gatehouse was built in two goes.

The wings on either side are rendered, not stone – but whoever did the rendering got the colour right, so that it blends well with the masonry of the gatehouse. These wings are later. Their windows look 18th-century, and a painting of the early-18th century shows the large windows all in place, although the delightful little quatrefoil windows upstairs hadn’t been added at that point, so they must be later still.

Like so many English country houses, then, Coughton is a hotchpotch of periods, but a hotchpotch in which the ingredients blend together to produce something magical. Maybe the harmony has something to do with the fact that the same family has lived here for nearly six centuries. The Throckmortons of Coughton have always been Catholics, although their loyalty to the faith has landed them in trouble more than once. Their house was sacked by Parliamentarian troops during the English Civil War and the place was vandalized again by a Protestant mob in 1688. But united the family stood, and their house perhaps reflects this unity of faith and vision, over a period of almost 600 years.