King’s Lynn, Norfolk

 

Maritime Lynn, 2

As well as the Pilot Office for people managing the shipping in the harbour and its approaches, the other prominent architectural feature of King’s Lynn’s maritime life was the Customs House. This stately classical building is one of the most famous coastal structures in East Anglia. It is well sited right on the northern bank of the inlet called Purfleet Quay. It’s a tall building and its neat wooden turret with cupola attracts attention to it.

Anyone who knows the town centres of England will recognise this building’s architectural ancestry. Its form, with arched lower story, upper floor with large windows, and roof turret, is similar to that of many of the structures that combine the functions of town hall and market that make the centrepiece of many English towns. Its style is proudly Wren-like, like a smaller version of the magnificent town hall at Abingdon. The semi-circular arches, pilasters, hipped roof with dormers, and roof turret are just the kind of thing one sees on late-17th century buildings – both town halls and country houses like Ashdown. This one is not by Wren, but was designed by a local man called Henry Bell, who had clearly absorbed the essence of this style and brought it to his home town when Lynn was still a prominent port. Anyone inclined to think of Lynn as a backwater should think again: the port was a very busy one at this time. Indeed Bell himself was a merchant whose goods went in and out of Lynn harbour; like many architects in the Stuart period, he was an amateur, and picked his commissions carefully. He’d been to Cambridge, and had gone on a grand tour that included time in Holland, where the buildings clearly made an impression on him.

This building was commissioned by Sir John Turner, a local MP, who also served as the town’s mayor and made his money from his business as a wine merchant. This trade was one of the mainstays of Lynn’s harbour, and Turner would have been as aware as anyone of the usefulness of a building in which the local merchants could do business. Hence the structure’s resemblance to a market house. When opened in 1685, the lower floor of the structure (then with open arches) was used as the merchants’ exchange; the upper floor was let to the Collector of Customs; in 1717 the whole building was sold to the Crown and was already known as the Customs House. It remained in the care of HM Customs and Excise until 1989 and when I lasted visited it was used by the local council and housed the Tourist Information Centre. And maybe that’s not totally inappropriate. King’s Lynn no longer gets its main income form its port; tourism is more important to the town today and the Customs House is a perfect architectural signpost and information point for visitors.

Painswick, Gloucestershire

 

Varieties of architectural experience

How could a delightful building like this ever be controversial? It seems unlikely that this pretty structure, part vernacular building, part classical belfry and entrance, could excite disagreement in an apparently peaceful Cotswold village like Painswick, but the church of Our Lady and St Thérèse came in for criticism on two separate occasions. The original church, a very plain stone building with rectangular windows, partly visible on the lefthand side of my photograph, was converted from a slaughterhouse for use as a Catholic church in 1934. It’s said that the building was a decaying mess before its conversion and one would have thought the locals grateful to the Catholics for taking it in hand. There seems to have been, however, quite a bit of anti-Catholic feeling in the area in the 1930s. The vendor, a local butcher, was not at first keen to sell to a Catholic buyer and an account of the history of the building says that ‘Catholics at that time were virtually non-existent in the village and all were regarded with great suspicion’. In the end though the church’s founder, Alice Howard, got her way and the building was converted discreetly into a church.

In 1941, the church was damaged by a bomb. When rebuilding took place in 1954–56, architect Eric Hill (of Ellery Anderson, Roiser and Falconer) built the beautiful Classical entrance, with its circular window and cupola supported by eight rather dainty columns.* There was no trouble getting planning permission for this, but the Parish Council criticised the County Planning Committee for agreeing to the building, on the grounds that a structure in the classical style was ‘out of keeping’ with Painswick’s mostly traditional Cotswold architecture. Defenders of the church pointed out that two scheduled buildings in the town were in the classical style; they might have added that there were several others that had some classical features and that the building was in a Cotswold limestone that was and is very much in harmony with the rest of the village.

These controversies died down – as, one hopes, did the anti-Catholic sentiments that surrounded them – and I should think the little church looks as good now as it ever has, a visual as well as a religious asset to an unregarded back street in one of the most beautiful of Cotswold villages.

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* For information about this church, I am indebted to Brian Torode and Richard Barton (eds), Ursula Usher, The Story of the Catholic Church in Painswick, 1990, accessed here. However the second surname in this architectural partnership is Roiser, not Rosier as Usher’s history gives it.

Eyton on Severn, Shropshire

Rooms with a view

Rounding a bend in a lane in Shropshire, I caught a sudden glance of a small pointed roof and stopped to find this little tower, apparently stranded on its own next to a tall garden wall. It is stranded because it is the last remaining fragment of Eyton Hall, the home of Shropshire grandee Sir Francis Newport, who rebuilt his house in the 1590s and early 1600s. The tower was one of a pair, standing at either end of a bowling green, and its artful plan (based on two conjoined octagons), diaper-patterned masonry, and ogee-capped roof are typical of the more ornate style of English architecture at the end of the Elizabethan period.

The building was what was known as a banqueting house. The tradition was for those enjoying a grand meal to take the last course – fruit, comfits, dessert wine – in a garden pavilion or tower, where they could enjoy a view across the garden. It was perhaps the closest they got to al fresco eating, an architectural concession to the English climate akin to Elizabethan long galleries, which enabled Tudor and Jacobean ladies to enjoy a walk without going outside to face the elements. Some of the grandest of country houses, such as Longleat, had banqueting houses in the form of towers on the roof, but  pavilions like this one at Eyton did the job just as well, while also maintaining a closer connection with the garden.

It's possible to enjoy this little tower not merely as I did, as a passer-by, but more intimately. It is in the care of the Vivat Trust, who let it out as a holiday home. The details, together with more historical information about the building and its history, are here.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Pepper pot

Boston Stump, the Gherkin, the Shard: we like to give nicknames to buildings, especially towers, of unusual shape, and this selection suggests a tendency to try and bring them down a peg or two – but in an affectionate sort of way. There's something of the same effect about this example, sometimes known as the Pepper Pot. It's one of the major landmarks in Upton on Severn, and is an eyecatching sight as you enter the town from the Malvern side.

It started out as the tower of Upton's church and was a plain medieval sandstone structure topped with a spire and with buttresses at the western corners. In the 17th century the church was the scene of fighting when Royalists tried to stop Parliamentary troops crossing the nearby bridge over the Severn. In the 1750s the medieval church to the east of it was rebuilt in classical style and in 1769–70, when the spire became unsafe, the octagonal pepper-pot, copper-clad dome, and tiny openwork lantern on top were added, to make the tower look more in keeping with the rebuilt church. The architect was Anthony Keck, who had quite a large practice designing country houses in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and South Wales. He was a classicist and a follower of Adam, and his addition to the Upton tower has something of Adam's delicacy.

About a hundred years after Keck's pepper pot was added to the tower, it was decided to go in for a larger church at the other end of the town. This, a Gothic structure with a spire, became Upton's main church and in 1937 the old church was pulled down.* All except for its tower and ornamental pepper-pot top, which remains to house a heritage centre and to surprise passers-by.

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* Putting their cards on the table as usual, the BBC reported recently on their website that "the knave of the church was demolished in 1937".

Lydney, Gloucestershire

A glimpse of gables

After a short walk around the restored docks at Lydney when I watched mist lift from the River Severn, I walked back towards the industrial estate under a virtually cloudless sky. Glancing up a potholed road past silent factories (whitewashed brick, shuttered concrete, blanked-out windows, lots of chain-link fencing and barbed wire) I caught sight of an old gable. I followed the chain-link fence until I left it behind and, beyond a field, a view opened up of a gabled sandstone house of the 17th century.

This is Naas House, built for the Jones family (William Jones was founder of the Haberdashers' Company in London) probably in the early-17th century. It's a big house – this is just one end – and the mullioned windows, string courses, and parapeted gables are very much of the period, as are the false windows in the gables. The central turret, though, with its lead-covered cupola, is a sophisticated touch. From here the owners could walk out on to a viewing platform and look towards the River Severn (to the right) or towards Lydney and the Forest of Dean (to the left).

The Jones family upgraded the interior in the early 18th century, installing panelling in a number of rooms, but in 1771 Mary Jones, daughter of the owners, was murdered on her way home from a dinner at the rectory at Lydney. Soon after this the family moved to another house near Newnham on Severn. Although the family kept Naas House (a Rev Edward Jones lived there in 1839) it was no longer their main residence and this was probably why there were few further alterations and the house keeps its Jacobean character in its quiet backwater.

Brackley, Northamptonshire

Marking time

I have a fondness for the old town halls of the 17th and 18th centuries. They form visual climaxes to so many high streets and market places and they combine civic pride and usefulness in a way that seems just right. The typical layout is an open, arched ground floor where you can have a market, a big upper room for meetings, and a cupola on top, often with a clock.

The clock is important. Back when the Town Hall at Brackley was built (by the Duke of Bridgewater, in 1706) not many people had watches or clocks of their own. So they relied on the church clock or a town hall timepiece like this one to tell the hours. The church wasn’t always visible from the main street, so to give a town a clock, right in the centre where everyone gathered to meet, buy, sell, and gossip, was a real gift to a town.

Such a gift needed to be visible and town hall builders started adding these cupolas, perfect little bits of carpenter’s Classicism, to show them off. The cupola at Brackley is one of my favourites. Everything about this ornate little structure – the fancy weathervane, the neat dome on its eight Classical arches, the cube containing the clock with its white corner brackets – shows that the builders took special care and gave the job the time it deserved.