Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Fancy work

I’m always on the look-out for interesting shop fronts, not least because everyone else seems to ignore them. This lettering is found on the lovely late-19th century frontage of a jeweller’s on Tewkesbury High Street. Pevsner (excellent on the timber-framed buildings and much else on this street) does not include it. But it caught my eye for the signs alone, and I was still more impressed when I realised that this front retains the grooves to take its old wooden shutters, which are still put up at night to cover the windows.

With an eye on history and style, the shop, now Buttwell and Jones, has kept the old ‘Buttwell & Sons’ signage. The gilded lettering on its green glass background (more beautiful if anything for being worn) has satisfying, full-looped letters with lots of character. Plenty of variation between the width of the strokes, neat loops on the w and o, and a distinctive small s at the end all contribute to the effect. Only the ampersand seems a bit squashed and mean.

Up above, against a gold background glinting like an engine-turned cigarette case, are the ornate capital letters of the word ‘JEWELLER’. These letters are a feast of knobbly serifs, curving strokes, and dots. You’d not want too much of this, but, placed where it is, it gives just the right impression of fancy work that the original proprietor no doubt wanted to convey, back at the turn of the 20th century. How pleasing that the sign, and the business it advertises, is still there.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Stick-ons: 3

I’ve been away for just over a week, hence the recent posts of pictures from my archives. Now I’m back, he’s a third stick-on sign, this time from the town where I live, to symbolize my return to the land where cups of tea are a way of life. These signs are on a window that until a while ago fronted a small grocery shop. The building is now used residentially, but the tea signs remain and add some colour to the rather sober window frame. They advertise two brands of tea that have been part of British life for over a century.

The Typhoo brand began in 1905 and was successful partly as a result of astute marketing – even in the 1900s the company produced teapots with the Typhoo name emblazoned across them and included collectable picture cards in packets of tea. In the early days the company also claimed their tea was health-giving, and the curious name derives from the Chinese for “doctor”.

Brooke Bond is even older. The company was founded by Arthur Brooke in 1869 and launched its famous P G Tips brand of tea in the 1930s. Brooke Bond tea was very successful from the 1950s onwards, when packets contained collectors’ cards that were probably even more popular than those given away with Typhoo tea earlier in the century. Brooke Bond tea is not widely sold in Britain now but the brand is still widely available in India and Pakistan.

I’m pleased these colourful signs are still adorning this former shop window. Whereas the Brooke Bond one sits quite neatly in its rectangle, the Typhoo sign has been cut up to fit – but in spite of the interrupting glazing bars its bold letters shout the message loud and clear.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Beguiling tiling

I’ve posted before about the wonderful shop fronts built by the W H Smith chain in the 1920s and 1930s, most of which have now vanished. My recent post about a tiled shop front in London reminded me that I meant to return to this subject, to look at a favourite example of W H Smith tiling, still in situ in Malvern.

Smith’s shop front in the hillside town centre of Great Malvern is recessed slightly from the building line, leaving two narrow strips, like exterior window reveals, at right-angles to the street. The two wonderful tiled panels in my photographs are set at the top of these strips, and so are rather easy to ignore. How typical of the painstaking design of the time that such trouble should be taken with these easily overlooked spaces.

And what amazing images their ceramic artist produced. The car rattling along in the ‘Road maps’ panel conjures up all the optimism of the open road in the 1920s. There’s little hint of where the scene might be set (it could just as well be France as Worcestershire), but the sun is out and the road, we feel, is empty ahead. The driver has read his road map and he’s opened the throttle.


On the other side of the shop front. the bridge, gatehouse, and castle keep that advertise ‘Post cards’ are rendered in an extraordinary palette of purples, browns, and blues. The great tower seems hugely out of scale and oddly positioned in relation to the bridge. But who cares? This expressionist architecture lit by the stars (and the moon, which is presumably somewhere over the artist’s right shoulder) is simply stunning, the buildings reminiscent of the fantasy townscapes of F L Griggs, but with colour poured in, for good measure.

How fortunate that these two images have survived, while the rest of the frontage has been adapted and painted over. Their light is from another age, but still it shines.

Northampton

Old principles, modern building

From its 19th-century roots in the Rochdale, the co-operative movement grew rapidly in the Victorian and Edwardian periods to become a force to be reckoned with on Britain’s High Streets. There were co-ops everywhere, and they were prized for their combination of quality and fair pricing, and also for their values – from ownership by the members and democratic member control to the support of education and community. These values, enshrined in a list known as the Rochdale Principles, still shape the co-operative movement today.

By the 1930s, although the really big expansion was over, co-ops big and small were still being built. The principal architects who worked for the co-operative movement, William A. Johnson of Manchester and Leonard G Ekins of London, were both enthusiastic modernists. The work of Ekins, for example, developed from an Art Deco not unlike the style of 1920s and 1930s factory architecture to a more hard-edged steel and glass modernism.

This co-operative store in Northampton shares several features with Ekins’ earlier work – the white walls with touches of green, the tall windows, the dark green plinth at the bottom and the stepped-back effect at the top. If it’s not actually by Ekins, it is probably the work of an architect who had studied his buildings. Whoever designed it, the building has proved durable. It’s now an arcade full of small independent shops, while the tiles of the street frontage still bear the name of the original owner, picked out in capitals.

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Here's another example of Art Deco tiling on a co-op, this time in Tamworth, which I blogged about a while ago.

Witney, Oxfordshire

Iron appeal

BBC1’s series Turn Back Time: The High Street has now begun, and, as I wrote the book to go with series, there will be a few posts on shops this month, in the spirit of spreading information about this neglected aspect of architecture – and in the cause of unashamed pluggery.

The Victorian High Street could be a dangerous place, where bakers laboured in dingy back rooms, using flour adulterated with alum, and where grocers happily sold cheese coloured with copper sulphate. They did all this with a grand flourish of showmanship, and this love of show was sometimes reflected in extravagant shop fronts. Ironmongers liked to set off their vast and bewildering stock (everything from nails and screws to grates and stoves) with a good-looking frontage. There are still a few of these around, including two magnificent Victorian shop fronts in Witney. Originally made for ironmongers, these fronts are made, appropriately enough, of cast iron.


They’re a matching pair, at opposite ends of the town, and made around 1870–1880 by some unsung foundry. At the top of each frontage are intricate diamond shapes linked together and enclosing rosettes. Up each shaft winds twining foliage. Delicate scrolls twirl across the corners of the glazing. This feast of decoration must have amazed the Victorian shoppers of Witney, and must have drawn people towards Leigh’s at one end of the town, by the green, and Thomas Clark and Son at the other end, in the High Street. Neither of the shops is now an ironmonger’s, but these stunning iron frontages still house businesses – a bakery and an estate agent – that contribute to a vibrant and busy High Street.

Norwich

Colour and light

Here’s a rare survival. Victorian shop windows could be a riot of colour and lettering, and examples like Smith’s umbrella shop in London, subject of an earlier post, hold the attention of anyone interested in the history of lettering or retailing. This Norwich shop is different. Instead of the lettering, what remains to catch our eye here is some of the old stained glass. Victorian shop designers were aware that there was a ‘dead’ area of the window at the top. Goods displayed too high would not be noticed, so how did one use this upper area of the window? One solution was to divide it off with a horizontal glazing bar (called a transom) and glaze the upper section (known as the transom light) with stained glass. So it could glitter with colour, and catch the eye in a different way.

The Victorians used stained glass a lot – not just in churches, where we’re used to seeing it, but also in domestic front doors, in schools, and in shop windows, where it must have glowed beautifully at night. Much of this glass has vanished as features have been replaced and facades made over. What remains might not be the best of the Victorian glazier’s art (that usually was reserved for churches) it’s good to see this example still pleasing the eye. Pleasing it rather more, perhaps, than the rather routine display of stickers and notices in the main part of the window.

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Apologies to readers who saw a discarded version of an older post, which was here, briefly, in error. Those wishing to read this post, about a house in Stratford, can find it here.

New Oxford Street, London

Umbrella men

This is one of my favourite London shop fronts, and I expect a lot of my readers are familiar with it too. So, instead of the main double-fronted New Oxford Street façade, here’s a photograph of the part around the corner in West Central Street, which, like its bigger conjoined sibling, is largely from about 1870 (although the business was established 40 years earlier) and packed full of Victorian exuberance. Gone is the restraint of the Georgian and Regency periods, when shops often had rather discreet bow windows and shoppers had to peer through small panes of glass at the goods within. Instead there’s Victorian display in all its hyperactive glory. The Gothic iron cresting above the fascia, the use of mirror glass, the division of the glazing into large sections, the brightly polished metalwork just below the window, and, most of all, the lettering – it is all very much and very richly of its time.

Most of the signage consists of lettering painted on to the back of glass panels. This is done in a choice of letterforms that will delight anyone with an interest in 19th-century graphic art – I especially like the capital J with its branching top and all the ornate gold capitals in the upper part of the window (the transom light in shop-parlance).

The stock that’s being advertised also harks back to another world. Not just umbrellas, but sticks and whips are offered, and, on the New Oxford Street front, Malacca canes and tropical sunshades evoke the imperial past. Dagger canes and swordsticks are mentioned too – you’ll not be able to get those today – all lovingly lettered as only the Victorians knew how.

Swordsticks or not, there’s something satisfying about the fact that, after 170 years in business, the umbrella men are still plying their trade here, with ranks of brollies at the ready for a London downpour. And if your fabric’s torn or a spoke gets bent, the Victorian signage advertises repairs too: ‘Umbrellas recovered, renovated & repaired. Sticks repolished.’ Bring your parasol…

Wells, Somerset

Wells Cathedral was begun towards the end of the 12th century and its builders, as was usual in the Middle Ages, began at the east end with the choir and then worked their way westwards. By the 1220s they had got to the west front, one of the most striking fronts of any cathedral, consisting of a vast stone screen of niches, in which were set hundreds of statues of saints, bishops, Biblical figures, and others.

In most English churches the medieval sculptures were destroyed during the period of puritanical iconoclasm in the 17th century. But for some reason many of those at Wells were spared, and more than 300 remain, although in almost 800 years the elements have eroded some of them badly. What is more this screen of sculptures, which covers the entire western wall of the cathedral, also extends around on either side to cover part of the north and south walls. The whole makes up England’s greatest collection of statuary from the early Gothic phase of the 13th century.

Most visitors, deterred by eye strain, vertigo, or impatience to get inside the cathedral, don’t spend very long looking at each statue, especially those around the sides. So here are a pair of knights that stand high up on the north side. One has his head covered in a kind of proto-balaclava helmet of mail. His neighbour wears on his head a great helm with eye slits and breathing holes.

Their heads fit neatly into their intricate trefoil-headed niches, which are beautifully carved even though unregarded except by those with enthusiasm for such things, preferably backed up with binoculars or a telephoto lens. A bird's-eye view would be best, though birds are clearly apt to look at a Gothic niche in terms of its suitability for a nesting site.Thanks to Zoë Brooks, her sharp eyes, and her zoom lens, for the pictures.

Crown Passage, London

The web site of the most famous London hatters tells us that if we jump into a London cab and ask for the premises of Lock, the driver will point his vehicle towards St James’s Street and deposit us at the door of number 6, home of the best hatter in the world. The St James’s Street frontage is reassuringly Regency, just the kind of shop window we’d expect for a traditional business like this, the sort of place where you can still buy a top hat or a bowler. They don’t call it a bowler here, though. At Lock, it’s a Coke hat, after William Coke of Holkham, Norfolk, landowner and farmer, for whom the Locks made the first such headgear in 1850. But not all Coke-wearers or Fedora-fanciers know that this important emporium has a back entrance, in the appropriately named Crown Passage, which you can find off King Street.

The facade in Crown Passage is even older than the main one. Many of the little shop fronts in this side street are Georgian, and Lock’s looks late-18th century. The small wooden bay window on its serpentine brackets is a reminder of the period when shopkeepers were starting to be a bit more assertive in their architectural display, pushing their windows out towards the street to attract passers-by. But they were only allowed to invade the pavement-space by so much – there were strict regulations about how far they could protrude. In a narrow street like this – it’s little more than an alley, really – your windows were only meant to stick out 5 inches or less.

So this shop front, like its Georgian neighbours, is quite modest. Glazing bars divide the panes, and we’re a world away from the big plate-glass windows of today. There’s only room in there for a few hats, tastefully displayed. But that’s all they need. After all, the name ‘Lock’ above the window tells us all we need to know.