Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire

Going wild in Bradford-on-Avon

I recently had a walk around Bradford-on-Avon, admiring the architecture, scaling the town’s sometimes precipitous slopes, and quenching my thirst with copious amounts of tea. I did of course admire much of what makes the town famous – churches, houses, mills, the lovely bridge with its tiny chapel – but found things to make me think that weren’t architectural: how well, for example, the place was handling social distancing and how people expressed their thanks when one gave way on a narrow pavement or moved aside a shade more than usual on a wide one. Nobody made this feel like a chore and everyone I came into distanced contact with was welcoming.

Another non-architectural thing I admired was flowers. Walking round to the bit of the town that contains both Holy Trinity church and the small Saxon chapel of St Lawrence, I found that wildflower planting was in evidence in places where I might expect lawns. One such is in Holy Trinity’s churchyard, so that one could look towards the chapel of St Lawrence across the colourful swathe of glowing ox-eye daisies shown in my photograph. I thought this miniature meadow looked really good, and raise my hat to those who made it possible.

There’s a lot to be said for wildflower verges and other patches of these flowers in towns. They can encourage bees – as well as other insects and invertebrates in need of a niche, they can be colourful additions to the local scene, local authorities like them because they don’t have to be cut every five minutes like lawns. Ecologically, it is best if they contain only native species – introduced species can be colourful and quick-growing, but are sometimes invasive and attract fewer beneficial species. Native plants attract a greater variety of insects; they may take a bit longer to establish, but they’re worth the effort. Bradford-on-Avon’s Holy Trinity church has made caring for the environment part of its mission. Part of its work as an eco-church is ‘managing the churchyard to optimise nature conservation and biodiversity’. There’s a lot to be said for that too.

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* The ox-eye daisy, native to this country and to Europe generally, is considered to be an invasive species in some countries where it has been introduced. It does dominate here, but in reality this patch of ground does host a number of wildflower species alongside it. Is it an ideal plant to include in a selection in this kind of context? It’s better, surely, than a manicured lawn in which nothing is allowed to flower.

Ripple, Worcestershire

Flowers and fields

I have posted pictures from Ripple on a couple of previous occasions, including one on which I shared an image of one of the church’s impressive set of misericords. These seats, which flip up to reveal lovely and often humorous carvings, are mostly found in cathedrals, monasteries, and large collegiate churches, but here, in a quiet Worcestershire village, there are sixteen of these carved seats, all 15th-century, twelve of which feature a sequence of images quite common in medieval art: the labours of the months.

From church portals to books of hours, these depictions of the appropriate works for the twelve calendar months are widespread – a medieval constant, one might say, portraying the key points and cycles of life in the countryside through the seasons. Except that they are not entirely constant, because the climate and agriculture in, say Italy is rather different from that in England, and even in England there may be local variations. So in March, for example, they might be ploughing in France, pruning the vines in Italy, and here in Ripple, they’re scaring birds from the crops, rather as the Resident Wise Woman has recently been doing as the seedlings went in.

Ripple’s misericord for May shows the figure of the Virgin Mary carrying bunches of flowers. So what’s she doing here while in Italy they’re harvesting hay and in France they’re hawking? Apparently, the carving is a commemoration of the custom of carrying an image of the Virgin bearing flowers into the fields on Rogation days, when Christians took particular time to pray to God for protection from calamities. Rogation days occurred in the run-up to Ascension Day,† and were a time of processions and the image of the Virgin was carried around the fields during the blessing of the crops.

Blessing the crops with the appropriate ceremony was clearly a vital part of the agricultural year and worth marking as one of the twelve important labours. This simple carving, placed out of the way on a folding seat, becomes, it seems to me, rather moving when one understands how much hope and faith it embodies, summing up as it does how vital this crop will be to the community. There’s also something rather lovely about the way it celebrates spring flowers, which are themselves, and like Mary herself, living symbols of growth, renewal, and hope.

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* They’re inevitably rural labours. The work of the town merchant or craftsman is less bound by the seasons than that of the farmer or grower.

† There is a ‘major’ Rogation Day on 25 April, and three ‘minor’ Rogation Days in May.

Little Washbourne, Gloucestershire

A short diversion

I have posted about this church before, but wanted to show you another photograph of it because as I drove past the end of the no-through-road where it’s sited today, I noticed that the blossom was already out. A short diversion brought me back to the lane and the churchyard, to see that there are not only trees with blossom but also daffodils in bloom up the grass path to the church.

No through road, lane, grass path – it all makes the tiny church at Little Washbourne sound remote. However, it’s only a couple of hundred yards from the road between Tewkesbury and Stow-on-the-Wold – hardly a trunk road, but not remote either. Yet when you turn off, this spectacle of quiet greenery and blossom awaits you. Part of the joy of English buildings is their settings, whether smack in the middle of a town, like the factory in my previous post, or up a country lane and a grass path.

There’s no grand architecture here – just a medieval parish church modified by the Georgians and left much as it was since then. But where it is, the flowers on the approach to it, the clouds of white blossom to its left, and the still whiter clouds in the sky, all make it worth stopping and looking. And when the main road is quiet, the noisiest thing here is the buzzing of bees for the nearby hives.

Poole, Dorset

Carter’s Cavalcade (3): Not just seed potatoes

The third (and final, for now) highlight from my visit to Poole is this panel, one of a pair, that originally came from the shop of W H Yeatman & Sons, corn and seed merchants. Yeatman’s, whose former corn mill I’d noticed when I was walking along Poole Quay earlier in the day, had a shop in the town’s High Street. These colourful tile panels decorated the shop from the late-1920s or early-1930s: clearly the owners wanted to remind people they sold more than produce for the farm or vegetable patch. The black background helps the vivid flowers stand out beautifully (there is probably Art Deco influence in this use of black), and the colours are contained within very narrow boundary lines. These were produced using tube-lining, a technique that involves applying wet clay from a syringe, rather in the way that someone icing a cake uses a piping bag. You can feel how the tube lines are raised above the rest of the surface if you run your finger across the tiles.

When Poole’s old town was redeveloped in the 1960s, these memorable panels were saved and mounted on the end of a building that is now an ice-cream parlour. Although sited at a road junction with plenty of pavement in front of them, they’re actually quite easy to miss, and I was grateful to have them pointed out to me by Jo, leader of the guided walk that brought them to my attention.* It’s fortunate that this bit of shop ornament, from a time when such decorations were expected to be in place for decades (unlike so many of today’s ephemeral plastic shop signs), were rescued. As well as serving a local business for years, they have now outlived their original raison d’être for even longer. Built to last: modern retailers please note.

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* Anyone wishing to take part in one of these excellent walks should follow Jo Amey on her Facebook page, The Tile Lady. The page has many pictures of beautiful tiles and she also posts information about the walks there.

Long Melford, Suffolk

In the shade

During the recent hot days I've seen quite a few cottages swathed in roses. These in Long Melford made me pause as I made my way towards the church. I was struck by the way that the house is painted almost the same colour as the flowers so that the profuse blooms stand out more in space than in hue. Except that when you look closely, the flowers display a variety of pink shades.

Shade cast by the roses drew my eye down to the doorways below. Here what struck me were the gates fitted to each entrance, like the bottom halves of stable doors. Please bear with my ignorance: are they dog gates, to keep animals in (or out) when the main door is opened for ventilation? Or are they intended to keep small children indoors? And why not just have stable doors? Perhaps my readers can throw some light on the subject.

Snowshill, Gloucestershire

Coloured counties (2)

In view of the colourful cheer my picture of Hailes brought to a number of my readers, I thought I'd do something I do only rarely: reprise a picture from an earlier post. I first posted this picture, which was taken by the Resident Wise Woman, back in 2009 and, looking at it again, it seems to exemplify the happy combination of colour and building that I was celebrating in my post of Hailes. Even more so than that picture, the scene here comes about purely as a result of a working landscape. The barn – stone walled by roofed in corrugated iron – is a basic working building if ever there was one. A knockabout building. And a knocked-about building. But with my admiration for corrugated iron, even with a coat of rust, I like it nonetheless. As for the flowers, they're lavender, a crop grown commercially in these parts that lights up summer hillsides with blue, and sends visitors out with their cameras.

What works, then, can be beautiful or admirable. You know that, probably, if you're a regular reader of my posts. But whether or not you share my liking for the rusty old iron, you can enjoy the drifts of blue that have grown up around it.

Hailes, Gloucestershire

Coloured counties

Travelling across Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire today, fields of yellow-flowered rape stood out in bands between green grass and trees, blue and deep grey skies. There wasn’t time, today, to stop and photograph such views, taken in beyond fences and dashing objects on the road. So here’s a picture from a couple of years ago, of a similar field in Gloucetsershire with the tiny 13th-century church of Hailes, probably originally the cappella ad portas of the once-great Hailes Abbey, a major medieval pilgrimage centre.

This image symbolises my belief, exemplified I hope by many of the posts on this blog, that a major part of the impact of a building has little to do with the architecture itself. Here at Hailes, the architecture is modest, although it has a simple Early English gothic perfection of its own. But it’s the setting that counts. Up a winding lane off the main road. Orchards beyond. Ruined Cistercian arches not far away. And in front a yellow field that would make the pulse of a Van Gogh race.

Cookham, Berkshire

There’s a building there, somewhere

I often look at old photographs – postcards, pictures in mid-20th century books like those volumes about the regions of Britain published by Batsford, Victorian images – and I’m frequently struck by the way in which so many buildings are covered in vegetation. Ivy, Virginia creeper, and other boskage winds its way up walls, clings to window frames, aims for high battlements. Wisteria blossoms are blurred as they move in the breeze. Tendrils tap on window panes.

Today, conservation conscious, we’re more likely to strip away creeper and discourage this kind of threat to masonry and woodwork. Trees keep their distance. ‘Wisteria rhymes with hysteria.’* But flowers against a wall, even trailing ivy, can be good to look at. As the leaves turn in autumnal England, here’s an example I photographed a couple of months ago in Cookham, the town immortalized in the work of the artist Stanley Spencer.

Spencer, famous for his paintings of people, was also an exemplary painter of plants, flowers, fields, even of wisteria (‘Wisteria at Englefield’). I think he might have liked this display, with its splashes of colour that almost completely hide the building that supports them, a memory of summer as the nights draw in.

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* ‘Wisteria (Rhymes with Hysteria)’: the title of an essay by John Russell, The New York Times, 1980

Ludlow, Shropshire

Local colour

On a somewhat unproductive day, I thought I'd go through my photographs of some of the places I've visited recently and was quickly reminded of Ludlow. The Feathers, a dazzling timber-framed house turned inn, is a building I've written about before and admired on many occasions. However often I go past, I always take a look at its carved timberwork, but what raised my spirits this time was the display of hanging baskets. I suppose if you'd asked me beforehand, I'd have said that the Feathers, in all its jazzy Jacobean glory, hardly needed baskets of flowers to add to its attractions. Isn't all that carved oak enough on its own? Well, at one level it is, but at another, a few splashes of colour do complement the monochrome patterns of the woodwork. The building's carvings (mustachioed faces, scrolls, leaves, miniature arches), patterned glazing bars, and lozenges of golden glass are set off wonderfully by this floral display.

Paddington Street, London

First and last

The background to this little building is outlined on a helpful board nearby. Paddington Street Gardens originated in the 18th century as a burial ground for the parish church of St Martylebone. The land was granted to the parish by Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, in 1730 and the burial ground was opened in 1733. There were few burials after 1814, when the St John’s Wood burial ground was opened, and subsequently most of the headstones were removed and the land turned into a park. But this mausoleum was left in place. It was built by the Hon Richard Fitzpatrick for his wife, who died in 1759, aged just 30. Later his daughter was buried there too.

So much for the history. But what made me notice this small building, aside from its fine lines and the large urn acting as an outsize finial and funerary symbol, is the way it works in its setting. The pale stone building acts as a focus in this enclave of plane trees, lawns. and flowers. And as if to confirm that, the gardeners have attached hanging baskets, so that plants and stones, soft and hard landscaping, come together. This winning combination is typical of graveyards, where the seasonal round of flower and leaf acts in counterpoint to the theme of last things, turning our thoughts from death to the renewal of life. In Paddington Street Gardens, the mausoleum and its vivid flowers ensure that this process is re-enacted year by year.