Walford, Herefordshire

Not so primitive, 2

Spotted on the same day as the chapel in my previous post, this building is in Walford, between Brampton Bryan and Leintwardine in far northwest Herefordshire. It’s another Primitive Methodist chapel and, like the one in Weobley, it’s a brick building with a pitched roof and stone dressings around the windows and doors. And yet it looks very different from the Weobley chapel because it’s in the Gothic style – all the openings are pointed and those at the front have some extra elaboration in the form of carved terminations to the hood moulds over the windows and doorway. There’s also a charming quatrefoil-shaped opening in the gable, the frame of which contains the inscription, ‘Primitive Methodist Chapel 1866’.

The wing to the right was built as a schoolroom. Its glazing bars have a simpler pattern than those at the front of the chapel, but are still probably original. Both roofs are enhanced by curvaceous bargeboards of a kind I associate more with large suburban villas than Primitive Methodist Chapels, but why should the devil have all the good carpentry?

As can be seen from the signage, the chapel, the building is not longer used for worship, housing instead a gallery where drawings are exhibited. Chapels can make good gallery spaces, and this seems a dream use for such a building that is no longer required for its original purpose. Someone said that the latest art galleries, designed by starry architects and filled with works that are designed to shock or awe, are the cathedrals of our time. But I appreciate this chapel-gallery too.*

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* See the gallery’s website for information about The Drawing Gallery and its exhibitions.

Somerset House, London

Taking pains

Quite often I find myself in or near Somerset House in the centre of London – partly because work sometimes takes me to the Strand, partly because I’m a regular visitor to the Courtauld Gallery, both for its stellar permanent collection and for its often excellent temporary exhibitions. You get into the gallery through a door inside the vast building’s entrance archway, but I often take a minute to walk around the vast courtyard while I’m there, marvelling at the building’s size, proportions, and plethora of architectural sculpture. It’s easy to take for granted Somerset House’s 18th-century classicism and vast size now, but back in the 18th century this was an innovative building: London’s first office block and a formidable feat of organisation in bringing together several diverse bodies of scholarship and government – the Royal Academy, the Navy Board, the Stamp Office, for example, and accommodating them within what looks like a classical palace. This year, however, the Courtauld Gallery (which occupies just a small part of the complex) is closed for redevelopment* and I’ve not been in the Strand entrance – my most recent encounter with Somerset House happened to be at the back, when I was walking along the Thames embankment.

As you move along the pavement on this river side, it’s hard to take in the facade because it’s enormous – some 800 feet long. It’s also part of a major engineering project. The architect, William Chambers, had to cope with the fact that there is a 40-foot drop between the Strand frontage and the river shore. So he had to construct the embankment to allow for this and support the southern part of the building. From the pavement, you see a succession of massive stone walls, much of the masonry heavily rusticated, some of it vermiculated, and punctuated with arches, niches, and occasional pieces of carving on keystones.

What struck me as I took all this in was not just the sheer scale, but also the meticulous craftsmanship. A close-up of an arch and a neighbouring bit of wall, above, might demonstrate what I mean. For a start, the sheer effort in cutting by hand all that vermiculation on the stone blocks. Admirers of the brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Centre sing the praises of the concrete, in which many of the surfaces have been bush-hammered to give it a textured finish. True enough, this takes care and skill, and the effect is admirable. But look at this detail of Somerset House – square yard upon square yard of hand-cut vermiculation: it represents skill and effort in abundance. So does the moulding of the arch and the precise cutting of its blocks. But look still more closely (clicking on the image should help) and one can see that the surfaces of these apparently flat pieces of stone have been expertly and finely tooled so that their surfaces are actually made up of a series of precise parallel lines, the work of who knows how many skilled man-hours. A similar affect is even visible on the bevelled edges of the vermiculated blocks.

I’ve recently been reading Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling, and looking back at one of his previous books, The Craftsman, which focuses on the kinds of skills involved in this kind of work and highlights the importance of doing things well.† There’s lasting value, and also pleasure, in taking pains to get it right. It’s easy enough for admirers of Somerset House to praise the architect who brought it into being: Chambers certainly deserves admiration for his design. But spare a thought – spare more than one thought – for the masons and carpenters and sculptors and plasterers who brought it into being. In these days when developers are content to put up a host of poorly designed, ill-finished and no doubt ephemeral blocks along the banks of the Thames in order to make a fast buck, it’s worth lingering here and reflecting on the effort this building took and the way it has lasted.¶

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* A small selection of master works from the permanent collection is currently on display in the National Gallery and remains there until April 2020; some are also on loan to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Reopening is not expected until some time in 2020.

† Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling, Allen Lane, 2018; The Craftsman, Allen Lane, 2008

¶ The photograph is slightly high resolution than usual, because I hope that will help readers to see the surface of the flat stones clearly. I have also increased the contrast a bit, to bring out this effect. Clicking on the image, as usual, will enlarge it.

Tate Britain, London

Looking down again

Among my recent posts, one of my personal favourites (and if web statistics are anything to go by, one of my readers’ favourites too) is one I did in August about the mosaic floors in the National Gallery, created by the Russian-born artist Boris Anrep, starting in the 1920s.* Anrep adorned one other London gallery, the Tate (now Tate Britain), and these mosaics are just as fascinating, though not quite so easy to see.

The Tate was damaged in a Zeppelin raid in World War I, and after the hostilities ended needed a new floor in one of the octagonal corner galleries. Boris Anrep, who was yet to do his bigger floors in the National Gallery but had established himself as a mosaic-maker of some flair, offered to make a mosaic floor for the room. Better still, from the gallery’s point of view, he was prepared to work for nothing if no funds could be found.

This suited Charles Aitken, the gallery’s keeper, although as it turned out he was able to secure some money for Anrep’s materials, and Anrep settled on illustrating eight of William Blake’s proverbs, this being a room, at that time, where some of the gallery’s considerable Blake holdings were displayed. The proverbs are of course very Blakean: ‘Exuberance is beauty’, reads one; ‘If the Fool would persist in his Folly, he would become wise’ is another.

There’s quite a lot of tension in these mosaics. In ‘The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion,’ the lion has a bottom-up pose, a spiky mane, and prominent claws: a well-fed and powerful feline. The fox by contrast in long and rangy, with matchstick legs: providing for yourself can be a hard business. ‘Expect poison from standing water’ has a different kind of tension: the female figure seems about to drink, but the restraining hand of God hovers above – will she heed it? 

These striking mosaics are easy to find. Blake’s works have been moved elsewhere and the octagonal room is now given over the the Tate’s print sales area. The gallery have tactfully positioned the display units so that they do not cover the main parts of the mosaic, but the floor cannot have its full effect, and it’s hard to photograph some of the panels without also including bits of the gallery’s tasteful grey display units in the frame.† However, the mosaics are well worth searching out, and one can understand the excitement that attended their unveiling in 1923. The general praise for Anrep must have helped him secure the National Gallery commissions a few years later and the Tate had a colourful new work of art, full of exuberance and beauty.


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* This earlier post also has more information about Anrep, which I have not repeated here.

† There is also a certain amount of reflection from the lighting, which I have tried to minimise but which can still be seen in the photographs.

Perry Green, Hertfordshire

Red Cube

There were plenty of telephones in Hoglands, the Hertfordshire house of the sculptor Henry Moore. They were symbolic, perhaps, of Moore's central position in the art world for much of the 20th century and testimony to the fact that everyone from Kenneth Clark to Helmut Schmidt wanted to keep in touch with him. If the house phones were busy, Moore could pop out of the front door, cross the road, and use the public telephone box on the village green.

The K6 box was decommissioned in 2009 and in 2012 became the art gallery Red Cube* (regular readers may remember another post box gallery in Settle, Yorkshire). The gallery is a joint project of  Much Hadham Parish Council and the Henry Moore Foundation, which is based at Hoglands and opens the house, Moore's studios, and the surrounding grounds to visitors. Red Cube was opened earlier this year. It makes an agreeable stop on the short walk from Hoglands to the Hoops Inn, another building owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

I think Henry Moore would have approved of all this. The gallery is a way of offering a small exhibition space to visitors, staff of the Foundation, clients from the Drawing Room (part of St Elizabeth's Centre, a national centre of expertise for epilepsy) and others. It helps to preserve a small landmark on the village green. And it enables people to engage with Moore's art in an active way – hats off to those who come and draw.

* The gallery's name wittily alludes to the name of London's famous White Cube gallery (Red Cube is also the title of a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi)

For more about the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, go here.

For more about Red Cube, go here.

Settle, North Yorkshire

Photograph courtesy of The Gallery on the Green

The Gallery on the Green

Red telephone boxes are not as thick on the ground as they once were. There were two classic designs, both the creations of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, architect of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and Battersea Power Station. The first, the K2, appeared in 1929. Its Soane-inspired domed roof and red paintwork were instantly recognisable, but the boxes were heavy and costly, so a competition was run for a more economical design to commemorate George V’s Silver Jubilee in1935, and Scott produced the K6, which is smaller and lighter but still red and domed. Tens of thousands were made, but many were replaced from the 1960s on with more modern designs. Now the rise and rise of the mobile phone means that many more are simply disappearing.

In response to those who mourn the demise of the red box, BT has launched a scheme called Adopt a Kiosk. Local communities can buy a box for a token sum, find a new use for it, and take responsibility for its maintenance. The kiosk, minus its payphone, remains in situ, as a visual amenity, for future generations. Settle Town Council bought this K6 kiosk earlier this year and it has now begun its new role as a visual amenity in more than one sense of the word – as well as remaining an attractive piece of street furniture it is now also the Gallery on the Green, probably the smallest art gallery in the world. Its curators invite postcard-sized submissions and plan to select some for exhibition in the gallery as well as scanning some so that they can be displayed on the gallery website for the benefit of those who can’t actually visit Settle.

This is a lovely idea, one that recycles what would have been a redundant kiosk and will provide a changing visual display that can stimulate, delight, and charm. It needs its committed support in the shape of the local volunteers who run the gallery. And it deserves the support of the rest of us. And perhaps imitation too. How long before there are more phone kiosk galleries, or before people find other creative uses for these beloved red boxes – uses that can delight, provoke, or inspire us all?

For more about the Gallery, go here.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire

Palace of art

When I first came across Compton Verney the place had an air of melancholy mystery. The great 18th-century house can be glimpsed through trees from a road the joins the Fosse Way, the old Roman route that runs northeast from Cirencester to Leicester and on to Lincoln. Rows of sash windows and gigantic corner stones made the place look imposing in the manner of a house by Sir John Vanbrugh, but in the 1970s it all looked rather down at heel. What was this place, and who lived there?

The building that I could make out through the trees had been begun on the site of an older house in the early years of the 18th century for the 12th Lord Willoughby de Broke. The designer isn’t known, but the strongest candidates (apart from Vanbrugh) are William and Francis Smith of Warwick, successful Midlands master builders who often also acted as architects. What is known is that in the 1760 the 14th Lord Willoughby de Broke had the place remodelled by Robert Adam. It was Adam who was responsible for turning what had been a courtyard house into the striking U-shaped building that still exists.

In the 1970s, when I first saw the place, no one lived there. Requisitioned by the army during World War II, Compton Verney had stood empty ever since, and could easily have been one of the hundreds of country houses that were demolished in the years after the war. But the building’s absentee owner held onto it, and it was finally bought and turned into an art gallery with funds from the Peter Moores Foundation. The architectural firm Stanton Williams were commissioned to convert the interior and build an extension – modern in idiom but discreet and complementary to the original building – on the site of former service buildings.

After almost 50 years of neglect, Compton Verney has found a fitting role. The building houses a permanent collection that specializes in a number of interesting areas of art history (highlights: Chinese bronzes, British folk art) and puts on temporary exhibitions that keep one going back. No doubt one day the place will have me blogging again, too. The conservation work, which embraces the Capability Brown landscape in which the house sits, is now turning to the ice house in the grounds. I wonder if they will find a way of showing visitors the impressive sunken brick-domed interior. Anyone for CCTV?

Go here for more about Compton Verney and its history.