Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Public utility

My last post about Kidderminster for now shows a Victorian drinking fountain against the background of one of the town’s carpet buildings. That background structure was built as the offices for H. R. Willis’s Worcester Cross carpet factory in 1879. Birmingham man J. G. Bland was the architect and he chose a plain red brick that looks sober in comparison with some of the town’s polychrome brick structures, albeit given interest by a very large central window and some curvy Flemish gables; behind was the usual single-storey north-light shed for the carpet looms. Willis’s business did not flourish and the building was sold to another Kidderminster manufacturer and carpet production continued there until the beginning of the 1970s.

In contrast to the big red-brick offices is the small stone Gothic drinking fountain, which was given by John Brinton, one of the town’s most successful manufacturers and donor of Brinton Park in the town. In 1876, when the fountain was built, supplies of clean drinking water were still not always reliable and generally in private hands. Then, as now, people complained that water companies were more interested in profit than in the public good and in 1876, cholera epidemics were recent history and germ theory only recently established. People everywhere welcomed reliable sources of clean water. Architect J. T. Meredith gave the fountain enough height, with its tall, spire-like roof, to make it into a landmark, and a touch of colour comes from the red granite shafts that support its pointed arches. Quatrefoils, small ornate gables, and Gothic arches abound. A detail shows the bands of ball-flower ornament, a motif drawn straight from English 14th-century Gothic, together with one of a series of grotesques that cling to the eaves.

All this rich detail, together with the clock faces on four of the eight sides, make this into a delightful little building that was once truly useful too. Now we’re less in need of public clocks and drinking fountains (although many are dissatisfied with our current water companies’ management of their pipe networks, supply, and changing regime). But a structure that affords a bit of beauty in a Midlands town that’s not universally beautiful cannot be altogether bad.

Bath, Somerset

Water is best

I go to Bath quite often and almost always, when I’m there, I admire the Georgian architecture that has made the place famous, but also look out for buildings and details that are either not Georgian or otherwise not typical of the city. Recently, walking along Walcot Street, the Resident Wise Woman and I spotted this small marvel. It’s a drinking fountain that once supplied water for humans and, via the trough to the right, for animals too, appropriately enough since it once served the city’s cattle market. Water, of course, was the thing that made Bath famous before the Georgian period, when the healing spa brought the Romans here. “Water is best” as it says on the walls of the Pump Room,* extolling the life-giving liquid.

Water once came to Walcot Street not in a classical pump room or a Roman bath, but via this Victorian fountain. It’s a Victorian creation, erected in 1860 by one Major Charles Davis, who was appointed city architect and surveyor a couple of years later.† By the look of it he’d been studying the work of John Ruskin, whose books, especially The Stones of Venice, are illustrated with the author’s beautiful drawings showing just this kind of architectural detail. What Ruskin admired in the architecture of Venice (especially its Gothic architecture) was the combination of craftsmanship and visual beauty. He drew arches sometimes with patterns carved into the surface of the stone, as in the outer arch here; sometimes with a zigzag pattern in two colours, as in the drinking fountain’s lower arch; often with shafts (miniature columns) in different materials, also as here. In 1860, bright, shining, and new, the arch would have gleamed, catching the eye with this combination of varied geology and delicate carving. The sound of running water would have added to the appeal.

It’s a shame that the fountain has seen better days – the weeds in the trough seem well established (was it once used as a planter?) and, because the structure is on the side of the road where there are no shops, few people walk along this bit of pavement to notice. Looking it up online, I found an article about restoring the fountain, but I’m not sure the date of this. I hope some cleaning and conservation work is possible, even if the fountain can no longer be connected to a water supply. Though the trickle of water would be an added attraction too.

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* This motto is actually in ancient Greek, as it’s a quotation from the poet Pindar, put there, I believe, by temperance campaigners to encourage people to choose water over intoxicating liquors.

† Davis did a lot of work in the city, from the redevelopment of the Roman Baths to the building of the Empire Hotel. He would have needed to cultivate versatility to produce these diverse works, and the tiny project of designing the drinking fountain shows another string to his bow – Ruskinian Venetian design to add to his classical works in the Baths and the more generic Gothic and Norman that he needed for his church restorations.

Enstone, Oxfordshire

Passing wonders

This drinking fountain is on the roadside at Enstone – actually in Church Enstone, which stands slightly apart from what I take to be the ‘main’ village, although, as is clear from the name, it’s where the parish church is. The fountain was designed by G. E. Street, with carvings by Thomas Earp,* and was built as a memorial to Eliza Marshall, who died in 1856. When I first saw it, my eye caught by the band of acanthus carving, I thought of it as ‘a horse trough’, but it’s actually three troughs, at different levels, with lion-mask spouts taking the water from one to the next. So far, so ingenious, I thought – a clever bit of design, taking advantage of the slope in the ground, and providing a no doubt once well-used facility for passing traffic as it made its way through the village.

It struck me at the time that the lion masks were rather more badly worn than the rest of the structure, and I wondered if they were carved from a different stone – the lions, looked at close to, seemed less pinkish in colour the the other carved sections, although the differences in colour are probably due at least in part to the presence of moisture and the growths of lichen. Then, my memory prodded by Pevsner, I recalled the Enstone Marvels, a series of waterworks, cascades and grottoes, built in the 17th century at an another nearby hamlet, Neat Enstone, and visited by Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria. On the main road there’s a cottage, one part of which is built of chunky and deeply vermiculated masonry inset with niches, which may well be part of a grotto from the Marvels.§

Spectacular waterworks were, as they say, a thing in the 17th century. For example, Salomon de Caus, a French Huguenot engineer, published a book in 1615 called Les Raisons des forces mouvantes, which illustrated an early form of steam pump as well as various elaborate waterworks, fountains, grottoes, and the like. He and his brother, architect Isaac de Caus, worked in England and Isaac was an associate of Inigo Jones. The fact that such experts in the field spent time in England, and that the king was interested, goes some way to demonstrate the fashion for such works, mostly now long vanished. As for the Enstone Marvels, we know about them from Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677). This much I knew, but the further possible link between the Marvels and this Enstone drinking fountain is drawn by the author of the website Polyolbion, who has images of both the cottage and the lions on the drinking fountain.† These beasts indeed have a baroque look about them and might just possibly be a bit of inspired, historically important, bit of recycling.

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* A specialist in architectural sculpture and a regular collaborator with Street

§ The cottage is visible from the road, but not easily photographable without the kind of intrusion I was not prepared to make.

† The relevant page from the Polyolbion site is here.

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.

Clevedon, Somerset

Watering place

In spite of the two previous brewery posts, I have a liking for small structures. I’m also an admirer of the work of the Doulton ceramics company, especially the wares that they produced in their Lambeth factory on the south bank of the Thames and that are often used as facing on buildings. So I was pleased, visiting Clevedon to look at the pier, to come across this, surely one of the smallest of listed structures, a Doulton drinking fountain erected by a Mr Sheldon in 1895.

As well as their large and lucrative business in domestic pottery (everything from vases to beer jugs, ash trays to loving cups), Doultons made all kinds of goods connected with the supply of water – plain earthenware pipes, more decorative jugs, water filters, drinking fountains, and so on and on. This one is typical of their wares of the 1890s – some flowers and foliage hinting at Art Nouveau, a pleasant and rich palette of greens, blues, and browns, a profusion of architectural decorations, from the plain base to the fancy finial. Altogether a refreshing surprise.