Chichester, Sussex

 

Don’t look up!

I’m always telling people to look up in towns – look at old facades above shopfronts, look at windows, look at old signs, look at roof lines, and so on. But what I should really say is ‘Look everywhere.’ In other words, one is liable to make a mistake if one becomes too preoccupied with looking in a single direction alone. I was reminded of this when walking along South Street in Chichester and admiring the White Horse, once a pub, now a Prezzo. Of course, I’d noticed that the brick frontage of the upper storeys looked Georgian (the building turns out to be much earlier, having been refronted in the 18th century). As I was taking this in, the Resident Wise Woman prompted me: ‘Have you noticed the glass?’. I had not, because I was looking up. From yet another era come the late-19th or early-20th century windows, with coloured glass used to delineate white horses.

This use of glass to decorate or advertise the name of licensed premises was quite common in the late-Victorian period and just after.* Coloured glass was also used to advertise the drinks available – sometimes you can find ‘Beers’ or ‘Wines and Spirits’ picked out in coloured glass lettering. Here it’s just white horses, in various depictions – here, on the move (trotting perhaps) in the fanlight; elsewhere at full gallop, or stationary. There are also white horses with flared legs, to indicate they’re shire or ‘heavy’ horses; there are even horses’ heads in some of the windows. They’re all in a white, almost opaque glass, but are mostly surrounded by patterns and scrolls in a mix of colours including amber, dark red and deep blue: the windows must lookl very appealing when the interior is lit up at night.

So when you’re walking along an urban street, by all means look up, but also look sideways, straight ahead, and down. And try not to do this while on the move – it can lead to pedestrian collisions, and worse! And if you start colliding, people might think you’ve had one or more too many at the White Horse…

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* Pub architects also specified elaborate engraved glass. For an example of this, see a post I did a few years ago, here.

Leominster, Herefordshire

 

Incidental pleasures, 1: Fan mail

Are you are a fan of fanlights? I’m sorry, but the pun seems to want to be made.* I have always admired the semi-circular fanlights of the Georgian period, noticing the satisfying, cobweb-like layout of their glazing bars, dividing the little window in a way that justifies the name. And also reflecting how the entrance hall of a house can be its darkest area, and that a generous fanlight can help bring in some welcome natural light. So I’ve done posts about fanlights more than once before.

Scrolling through my pictures looking for something else, I came across this small gem. Not semicircular at. all, and not fan-like either, but more interesting than the simple rectangular windows that were often inserted above Victorian doors. The cue for the shape comes from the door’s canopy, with its shallow segmental curve, giving the fanlight a curved top too. And the pattern of the glazing nods towards this curve with four straight glazing bars radiating outwards, forming shapes that look as if they have been inspired by the tracery in Gothic stained-glass windows. So the shapes are all ogees and cusps, making a contrast with the simple, straight-sided panes of glass in the door below.

It’s modest, but visually satisfying. I have my doubts about how much light it lets into the interior, especially with the canopy producing shade as well as shelter. But if your front door faces directly on to the street, it’s pleasant to offer the street a bit of visual uplift, something to warm the heart of the observant passer-by.

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* If it seemed so to me at least, perhaps it’s because I’m a bit of a paranomaniac at heart.

Pershore, Worcestershire

Good honest building

Pershore – a town dominated by the abbey in the Middle Ages, by trades such as wool-dealing and glove-making on either side of the dissolution, and by market gardening after that – must have been both prosperous and fashionable in the Georgian period. Some of the 18th-century houses in the town centre are outstanding. Back then, even if you were clattering through the streets as the London coach gathered speed (Pershore was the first stopping place out of Worcester) you very probably noticed the array of solid brick walls and smart sash windows. The sharp-eyed traveller might even haver made out finer details such as the showy fanlights and carved keystones.

My photograph shows one of my favourites, right in the centre of the town. Number 3 Bridge Street is a whopper: seven bays wide and all the windows bar one of the same size – no one was bothering here about making the windows on the first floor larger, to signal the comfortable main rooms that would have been on this floor, the Italian piano nobile. Plain ‘six over six’ sashes were good enough for the owner of this house. But when it came to the doorway they allowed themselves a bit of ‘look at me’ swagger: a broad door topped by a huge fanlight with glazing bars patterned in interlocking circles and circles within circles, a design that leaves the beholder wide-eyed with amazement. This was a window both highly practical (it made for a light hallway inside) and decorative. In addition, I was interested to note, just visible through the glazing on the upper floor, evidence of inner windows with ogee-arched lights, suggesting a form of double glazing that looks very well made. In fact the whole house – big but unpretentious – looks well made, what I’d describe, borrowing an old phrase, as ‘good honest building’.

Wells, Somerset

More light

In Wells, turning my back, for a moment, on the magnificent west front of the Cathedral, and remembering Jonathan Meades’s characterization of another cathedral close (the one at Salisbury) as a complete three-dimensional history of architecture, I focused on the more modest houses on Wells’s Cathedral Green.

My eyes came to rest on this, one of a varied row on the Green’s south side. The first thing to catch my attention was the doorway, with its beautiful late-18th century fanlight and door surround with open pediment and Doric uprights. The fanlight, it is said, was brought from Dublin and the surround was put together from various fragments, including some bits that began life in a convent. All this high-class bricolage points to the fact that, for all its sash windows and fancy entrance, this is actually a 17th-century house that was altered in the 18th and 20th centuries.

The proportions – with low ground floor and the whole building sitting lower down the the green in front of it – are another hint to the building’s age: not for this house the standard narrow sash windows, three panes wide and four deep, that are usual in the Georgian houses of cities such as Bath. Here we have glorious big windows with 20 panes each on the ground floor and 16 panes on the floor above. Their size is no doubt testimony to earlier 17th-century openings – and to the fact that this is a north-facing house with an interior that needs plenty of light. Perhaps these generous windows help to make the house as pleasant inside as, set off with the elegant railings, gate, and iron overthrow, it is from without.