Puddletown, Dorset

Here comes the Sun, or, Odd things in churches (14)

People who look carefully at old buildings will know all about the Sun Fire Office. It was an insurance company, founded in 1710, and it’s still going in a different form. It’s familiar to devotees of old houses because the company’s clients used to fix a metal plaque bearing the company name and symbol (the Sun in splendour, naturally) to the fronts of their houses. Then when the Sun sent out their fire-fighters, they would know you’d paid for the service and would attack the blaze with whatever equipment they had.

One aid to fire-fighting was provided by fire buckets filled with water or sand. One often sees bright red metal ones hanging on the platforms of stations on preserved railway lines. But back in the days when the Sun Fire Office first started, canvas buckets were also in use. I’d never seen these in a church before, but at Puddletown several remain, hanging from hooks under the west gallery. There are many more hooks than buckets, so perhaps originally there were more. More would be a good idea, as they’re not very large and a couple would not go very far when extinguishing a fire of any size larger than a smouldering pipe left in an absent-minded church warden’s pocket. These fire buckets now go on an informal list I keep in my head of fire-fighting equipment I’ve spotted in churches – fire hooks for removing burning thatch and the occasional rare hand-pumped fire engine are also included. All a far cry from today’s enormous fire engines with their turntables and ladders, but as welcome in extremis as their diesel-powered descendants can be today.

Albert Embankment, London

Before I leave my exploration of friezes, decorations, and reliefs, features that seem to have been preoccupying me on my recent walks around London, here’s one more example. The headquarters building of the London Fire Brigade on Albert Embankment was built in 1937 to designs by architects of the London County Council. It’s a rather monolithic building, characteristic of the strong, silent phase of English building in the 1930s, and not everyone likes it. But it has a saving grace – a dazzling set of relief sculptures by Gilbert Bayes.

This one, part way up the Embankment façade, is a dramatic scene featuring firefighters, but not as we know them. These firefighters have fishy tails. Yes, they’re merfiremen, the perfect mythological creatures for a Fire Brigade HQ by the River Thames. Other reliefs depict galleys (the riverside theme again), and Phoebus with the rays of the risen sun. It’s not just the gilding that makes me think of the interwar period as something of a golden age of architectural. sculpture in London.

Thanks to Zoe, who blogs with such flair about her adventures in the Czech Republic here, for telling me to look at this building.