Clifton, Bristol

In the vanguard

I like to wander around towns and cities, finding interesting buildings, rather than relying too slavishly on guidebooks, but before our most recent visit to Clifton I did consult the excellent Pevsner city guide to Bristol, to check whether there was anything I should be looking out for. The guide sent me to the memorable 1960s church of All Saints and hinted that there was a late-Victorian baroque garage nearby. Even the book’s enthusiastic description did not quite prepare me for this modest but highly ornate building.

Catching sight of it from some distance, I could make out the combination of brick, bands of stone, shallow arches and fancy finials that told me that I was approaching something special in that distinctive, rather frantic baroque style that was popular from the end of the 19th century into the Edwardian period. Getting closer, and taking in the elaborate decoration above the central entrance, I could appreciate the full effect: scrolls, face masks, cornices, circular window, pediment with extra large mouldings, and foliage draping down and springing up everywhere. Mr E. Edwards (his name lettered in clear, plain capitals but with a hint of the raffish in the curved crosspiece of the ‘A’) must have been proud of his premises. His architects, Drake & Pizey,* did him proud,

Remarkably, this building is dated 1898: that’s about a decade on from the German petrol engines of engineers Daimler and Benz that enabled the earliest vehicles we’d recognise as motor cars, but only three or four years after the first cars were seen on British roads.† The firm of Edwards, who both sold and maintained motor vehicles, were pioneers. Their building was in two parts: showroom on the left, workshop on the right. There are photographs from little more than 20 years ago that show the workshop still in use (as an MoT test centre). The showroom section is still used to display cars. Few late-19th century automotive buildings have outlasted the Daimlers and de Dion Boutons, the Lanchesters and Austins, that were sold or serviced there in the 1890s and early-1900s.

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* A Bristol partnership who also designed a baroque bank in Bristol, which I must also seek out.

† The National Transport Museum now awards the honour of the first car in Britain to a vehicle produced in 1895, but stresses that there are many conflicting contenders. It also depends what you mean by a car. But the point is that cars were very few in these early years and Edwards were true pioneers.

Withypool, Somerset

 

Pump heaven

I’m not quite sure why I like old petrol pumps and garages. As far as the pumps are concerned it’s partly, I think, nostalgia and partly design – the lovely advertising globes on the tops of the pumps and the lines of the pumps themselves, which altered from one decade to the next as fashions changed. I think these Beckmeter pumps in the village of Withypool are probably from the 1960s. The shape, all straight lines, and the frames of chrome around the dials certainly look as if they’re from that decade, and online sources suggest I’m right. These pumps would be at home in front of a flat-roofed building with a large area of plate glass on the front. By the 1970s, similar-shaped pumps were still fashionable, but they increasingly had digital displays – the ones in which the digits were set on cylinders that rotated, bringing the next number gradually to the front. The star system for rating petrol (the pump in the foreground has two stars) came in during 1967, so that fits too, although the panel at the top where the stars are located was probably something that the garage owner or petrol company could change with ease. The shell-shaped globes, of course, are throwbacks to an earlier era. Shell globes in a similar design go back to 1929; the details of the design evolved, and the Shell globes were fitted to all kinds of different pumps.

Beckmeter pumps were ubiquitous back in the sixties and seventies. The company was founded as a general engineering concern in the Victorian era, and they gradually came to specialise in water meters and vales. When cars became increasingly common, in the interwar period, Beck’s adapted their water meter designs for use with petrol and soon manufacturing petrol pumps was a major part of their business. Of course these pumps lasted for years, and it was possible in, say, the 1980s, to find 30- or 40-year old pumps dispensing fuel. Hence their survival at filling stations like this one, long closed, in a remote Exmoor village.

I find the sight of them still lined up at a stone-built filling station, its woodwork painted to match the red of the Shell colours, very satisfying. Even more satisfying is that there’s an even older (1940s or 1950s) Avery-Hardoll pump (photo below) just across the road. Again, this one, now missing its globe, appears typical of its time – the tapering shape of the pump body and the script-style lettering of the Avery-Hardoll name look the part and the period.

Now there’s as much of a demand for coffee as for petrol, the forecourt with the Beckmeter pumps at Withypool has been taken over by a table, and refreshment is available from the building next door. So there’s a good reason for cyclists and walkers to stop here as well as motorists, and a good reason, I’d argue, for all of them to admire these examples of historical engineering and design.

Buckingham

For filling up

A recent visit to Buckingham, en route for a destination further east, saw us taking a stroll along Well Street, a way I’d never gone before. It wasn’t long before we passed this building, which I immediately wanted to photograph, although this was not easy because the street is not very wide. It’s a facade that’s wearing at least part of its history with pride. The building has most recently housed a restaurant, although this business seems now to have closed. The preservation of a pair of petrol pumps shows how the restaurant took its name and branding from the previous use – it was a garage and the restaurant was called The Garage. They even changed the globes atop the pumps to a pair bearing the letter G, specially made for the change of use, no doubt.

But the garage business cannot have been here much before the beginning of the 20th century; more likely it dated to some time after 1900. What was it before? The design of the front, with its symmetrically arranged windows and plain but decent brickwork, suggested to me a nonconformist chapel and that’s what it originally was. It looks early-19th century and a little research reveals that the structure was first a Presbyterian Meeting House. Although the frontage is Regency, the building behind it actually dates to 1726, with numerous further alterations in the 19th and 20th centuries. At some point after it ceased to be a chapel, it housed a school, before the wide doorway was fitted, no doubt part of the conversion to a garage. I’ve seen a chapel converted to a garage before (there’s one, for example, at Upton-on-Severn), but not one quite as elegant as this – the central doorway, though large, far from ruins the visual effect. Even the changes to the ground-floor windows do not completely destroy the symmetry.

In recent years many garages have closed, especially small town ones where a street-side site can make filling up with petrol an activity that holds up traffic. Country filling stations have been closing too as the profit margins are so narrow and the trade is now so dominated by the supermarket chains. So a few years ago this one closed and the restaurant arrived. Now it appears that the building is on the market again and conversion to residential use is one the cards. I hope its new owners will not erase the layers of its history that are still on show.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

 

Not quite doomed

We know it’s all fleeting now, don’t we? In these times of pandemic and climate change we know that things we’ve taken for granted are no longer the certainties we thought. To mourn the demise of long-distance air travel or petrol cars might seem trivial when human life itself is so fragile or when swathes of houses and alas their occupants succumb to floods and mudslides in Germany or wildfires in Australia or North America. But briefly, and because I came across it the other day, here’s a building that seems to be symbolic of the loss of a kind of ‘motoring’ that’s already long gone. It’s a garage on one of the roads into Much Wenlock, a structure of wood and corrugated iron that cannot have cost much to build but must have serviced cars and small commercial vehicles for decades.

The main body of the building is a large workshop, with glazed sides to admit plenty of light – at the front it has a bright blue door to the right, behind the furthest petrol pump, big enough to admit a car or largish van. This side of the door is a lean-to containing a small shop full of old cans, oily rags and Ferodo fan belts, and next to the shop, also under the lean-to roof, is a trio of petrol pumps. These represent three generations of pump: an early slender-topped pump,* a later tall one with an analogue, clock-face style dial probably dating to the 1940s or 50s, and in the centre one (of the 1970s perhaps) with a mechanical digital display in which slowly turning numerals register the amount of petrol and the cost. None of these have their globes to show the brand of fuel on sale, and all have flaking paint but look restorable.

From the well painted but slowly vanishing lettered sign to the humblest rusting file inside, this garage is a bit of motoring history, testimony to thousands of fill-ups, oil changes, and repairs. Clearly, as the paint flakes and the corrugated iron on the roof acquires another layer of rich iron oxide patina,† its decline continues as it becomes another vanished thing people once took for granted. And yet. The day after I took this photograph I passed by again to discover that someone had come along and wrapped those three pumps in a protective tarpaulin. To what end? To help preserve them in situ ahead of a restoration job? Or in preparation for a move to a place where they’d be cared for? I don’t know. But perhaps it’s a lesson not to assume too much. Not quite everything that seems to be going is necessarily rotting away. Let’s cling on to that.§

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* I’m not sure of the exact dates of these pumps; I’ve seen ones similar to this early one dated to the 1920s.

† Iron oxide patina. Yes, that’s rust to most of us.

§ The best book on the architecture of motor vehicles is Kathryn A Morrison and John Minnis, Carscapes, (Yale UP, 2012); for a brief treatment of the small out-of-town garage see also Llyn E Morris, The Country Garage (Shire, 1985)

Ryall, Worcestershire

Curvy 

Somewhere in rural Worcestershire, on a road I use quite often when there are no restrictions on travel, these pleasant curves pop up near the roadside. They’re one of the rural landmarks that tell me roughly where I am, how near I might be to one town or another, and they take their place in the ranks of field barns, outlying farms, lone pines, lonelier pubs, and telephone boxes on corners as my personal markers. I suppose I first noticed these buildings because they’re pale in colour, standing out from but harmonising with the surrounding landscape, as they harmonise with the cow parsley blooms in this view, taken when I finally stopped to take a better look.

They confirmed my liking for corrugated-iron buildings with curved roofs – the barns, railway sheds, Nissen huts, and other structures I’ve noticed here from time to time. And they confirm too that corrugated iron can look good in colours other than the usual green or the railway liveries now seen mostly at preserved or ‘heritage’ stations. I think they probably show the material’s adaptability too. I don’t know how these sheds began life – I’d not be surprised if they were built for agricultural use, given where they are. But they now seem to be used as some sort of automotive body-repair shop. They can’t be a bad fit for this use: they are spacious and provide plenty of headroom for vehicles much larger than the chunky classic Land-Rover in the foreground. The shelter and space are no doubt useful for paint jobs too. A good honest working building: so often, that’s just what’s needed.

Page Street, London

Fit for service

In the years before World War I, few people could afford to run a car. Most car owners were rich, and many were rich enough to employ their own chauffeur, who’d usually double as mechanic – which was important, since motor vehicles were nowhere near as reliable as they are today. If you didn’t have a chauffeur, it was as well to have at least basic maintenance skills, but, in larger towns especially, there was enough demand for the first garages to start in business. Many mechanics worked in a large shed – maybe a wooden or corrugated iron structure – with enough space to work on a car and to store tools. But some garage owners went for something bigger.


One such firm was Charles Jarrott & Letts, who built their garage in London’s Page Street in 1913. Amazingly, the building is still there and traces of the owners’ names are still visible on the front. I didn’t know what it was when I first saw it, but the open door provoked my interest and I did wonder if it was a place where cars were once repaired. It seemed to have what was needed – plenty of space inside without columns getting in the way, so that you could drive cars in and turn them around; good headroom to accommodate larger vehicles and to allow air to circulate and fumes to find their way out; decent lighting (although this was provided by modern strip lights when I passed by).


Browsing through the excellent English Heritage book Carscapes,* I found a little more out about the building and its owners. Charles Jarrott was one of Britain’s first racing drivers, and one of the most successful of the period. Sir William Letts was chairman of Crossley Motors of Manchester, a company that had begun by making engines and industrial machinery, branching into car manufacturing in 1903. They had showrooms in the heart of London, in Great Marlborough Street. The Page Street premises were where vehicles were repaired and serviced.


Like many a garage, it’s not a beautiful building. A substantial cornice and pediment are the main architectural ornament. The rest of the visual interest would have come from the signage – the owners’ names above the double doors and in the pediment above, the single word ‘GARAGE’ in large, widely spaced capitals. Just a little more than the basics, then, but enough to ensure that the building paid its way long after Crossley Motors ceased to be an independent company in the 1940s. Above all, this not quite basic building shows how even such a structure can embody interesting history, reminding us that the early development of the motor car involved a variety of personalities – not just a prominent industrialist and a successful racing driver, but also the many anonymous mechanics who got the cars on the road and kept them there.


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* Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minns, Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England, Yale University Press, 2012

Markham Moor, Nottinghamshire

Filling up, filling in

The frustrations of lockdown: lack of contact with friends and family; lack of secondhand bookshops in which to browse; inability to go and look at interesting buildings. Antidotes to the above: keep in touch with people by telephone, email, social media (the latter in moderation); rereading books I like, browsing my own shelves for inspiration; doing blog posts about buildings I have seen in the past but not got around to writing about, researching places to visit in the future when travel and social contact are possible once more. Here’s one of the latter.

Before the motorway age really got going, those planning a car journey over a long distance thought in terms of major roads. And there was no road more major, no more obvious symbol of moving around by road, than the Great North Road, the artery running from London northwards to Doncaster, York, Darlington, and on to Scotland, a route so important that when the roads were numbered it became the A1. When the route was joined by the first extended north-south motorway, the M1 that runs slightly to the west of the A1, the Great North Road did not fall into disuse. It was still much-used and still is in normal times. And as traffic increased in the 1950s and 1960s, it acquired numerous garages and filling stations, the ubiquitous accompanists of the lorry and car.

Most of these buildings are unremarkable architecturally, but there was one that was rather special. This was the filling station at Markham Moor, Nottinghamshire, between Newark and Doncaster. The distinguishing thing about it is the roof, made of a thin shell of reinforced concrete in a hyperbolic parabaloid shape. The architect was Sam Scorer* (he designed a church with a similar shaped roof in Lincoln), and he worked with the engineer Kalman Hajnal-Kónyi. I love the sweeping shape of the roof, but I don’t like what happened to it later, when someone built a restaurant underneath it, in place of the forecourt where the pumps originally were. The arrival of the Little Chef, however, may have saved the roof from demolition, and it is said that the restaurant building does not compromise the roof’s structure and could be removed without harming the shell. An earlier photograph gives an idea what the building was like in its heyday.

Why such an extravagant roof for such a modest building? First, it’s a landmark. That means that it’s easily visible from passing vehicles. Drivers can see it coming, and have time to stop and pull in. If they pass regularly they recognise it, and maybe will make a point of filling up there – so the roof is an advert, in a way. Second, fashion. When it was built (1959–60), architects and engineers were enthusiastically exploring the new kinds of structures they could build with concrete. Shell roofs like this had a hint of the future about them – even more so a couple of years later when those flying to New York might see Eliel Saarinen’s remarkable TWA Terminal building, with its roofs like aeroplane wings. Third, economics. Steel was rationed, and this kind of roof used much less of the material than a roof with steel posts and beams.†

What will happen to this building after coronavirus? The Little Chef restaurant business closed a few years ago. As far I know, the site is empty now, and fuel is supplied from a more modern facility nearby. The roof structure is listed, so its demolition is unlikely. However, it also needs to be looked after and used somehow. I for one hope a role can be found for it – if only for the selfish reason that I’d like my spirits to be lifted by it as I make my way, one of these days, along the sometimes relentless Great North Road.§

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* Hugh Segar ‘Sam’ Scorer (1923–2003) lived and worked in Lincoln, where he designed numerous buildings including the church of St John the Baptist, Ermine. He liked fast cars, especially Jaguars.

† I am indebted to an article by Karolina Szynalska, ‘The Markham Moor Papilio: A Picturesque Commentary’, Open Arts Journal, Issue 2, Winter 2013–2014, here.

§ Thanks to two readers, who have told me that the building now houses a branch of Starbucks.

The recent photograph below is by Richard Croft and used under this Creative Commons licence. The early photograph above is reproduced in Karolina Szynalska’s article; apologies if I have infringed anyone’s copyright – I will credit or remove the image if the copyright owner wishes.

Woodville, Debyshire

For sore eyes

I’d always fancied visiting Swadlincote – just because of the name, I admit. And because of the bizarre entry on the place in Henry Thorold’s 1972 Shell Guide to Derbyshire. This piece is mostly an extended quotation from René Cutforth’s book Order to View, which describes the ugliness of the place, which, he says, is in a district made up of ‘a loose assemblage of gigantic holes in the ground, some of them half a mile across, where clay was dug’ for various potteries. Cutforth opines, ‘It was so ugly it made you laugh.’ Woodville, which adjoins Swadlincote, is tarred with the same brush. Surely, I thought, it can’t be quite as bad as he says – not now at any rate.*

In truth, when I passed through the other day the weather was so gloomy I couldn’t possibly comment. It wasn’t the day for stopping and looking around, so I pressed on. But I did see one sight that made me resolve to return: the 1930s Clock Garage, which sits at a roundabout on the A511 at Woodville. What I could see through the gloom impressed me.† As the weather was too poor to take a decent photograph, I share one from the public domain, to give you an idea of the Art Deco glory of this building. The white walls, flat roof line, curving corner towers, glass bricks, and sans serif lettering are just the thing one thinks of when someone utters the phrase ‘Art Deco garage’. This is a structure almost up there with long-lamented 1930s landmarks such as Golly’s Garage, a lovely design with flat roof and strip windows once in London’s Cromwell Road, and Collier Filling Station, Sheldon, Birmingham (1936, by Harry Wheedon, circular, with a tall mast).§ The Clock Garage is just as much of its time as these, and one half expects to see someone standing outside dusting an Alvis Speed 20...or at least a Jowett 8. Clearly, the building’s paintwork and rendering could do with some attention, but it’s good that this place is still there and still serving a useful purpose not to dissimilar from what it was built for, when the motor car was for most a luxury and the idea of travelling on the open road, even in the industrial area that so amused Mr Cutforth, still held a measure of glamour.

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* Cutforth’s book was published in 1962, but is a volume of reminiscences. Cutforth (b. 1909) was born in Woodville, so the description must refer to a time a few decades before the 1960s.

† What I didn’t see was that there seems to be a bottle kiln behind this building. Its top is just visible behind the left-hand part of the garage in the photograph.

§ For more about such joys, it is work seeking out Julian Holder and Steven Parissien (eds.) The Architecture of British Transport in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2004) and Alastair Forsyth, Buildings for the Age (HMSO, 1982).

Photograph by Anthony Parkes, shared under this Creative Commons licence.

Withington, Gloucestershire

One pump or two?

Pump Cottage: what image does it conjure up in the mind’s eye? A small house next to the village pump, perhaps, to which the locals used to come for their water supply – as my mother did in rural Lincolnshire in the mid-1950s, when I was just old enough to toddle along to the pump with her. In Withington, Gloucestershire, it’s a rather different story. The pump next to Pump Cottage here is a petrol pump, now rusted, but hanging on just enough to be recognisable. As regular readers will know, when I see an old petrol pump, I can rarely resist stopping and looking and taking a photograph of it. Sometimes I’m attracted by a beautiful piece of design; sometimes I’m just interested in how times have changed, and how the roadside pump ironically became a rarity as the roads got busier.§

At Withington, what stopped me in my tracks was simply admiration of a bit of what John Piper called ‘pleasing decay’. I’m pleased that Jonathan Meades is also attracted by this sort of thing, by the sight, as he put it once, of an old petrol pump, ‘pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit’. Each time I passed, I meant to stop, but – it’s so often the way – because the village is on a regular route of mine I put off pulling in and getting the camera out. The other day, realising that the thing was rusting away and soon might not be there at all, I stopped at last, in spite of the Resident Wise Woman’s doubts about the contrasty light.*

And that was almost that. Except that I wondered about the history of this pump and did a little research. Apparently Mr E J Cripps, the proprietor of Withington’s garage, had to close his business 60 years ago because of ‘a rate reassessment’.† There’s a photograph of him at the Getty Images site, standing proudly by not one but two pumps. Both pumps were still there about 12 years ago, when another photograph, to be found on Geograph, shows one still with its ‘BP’ logo.¶ So today I post my picture of the single survivor, crisp and well cooked now, as a reminder of the time the garage closed – at around about the same time as your infant author was toddling to the water pump with his mother.

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§ Many small rural garages closed, from the 1950s onwards, often as a result of competition from larger businesses in towns and on main roads.

* But I like contrasty lighting.

† For my non-British readers, this means an increase in local taxation.

¶ Those who want to see the pump handle mechanism more clearly should look at this Geograph image, which was taken in different lighting conditions. The ‘BP’ shield is just about visible beneath the rust in my own picture, but only at high resolution.

Hook Norton, Oxfordshire

Back and forth

I’ve been to the delightful village of Hook Norton in Oxfordshire quite a few times, although the fact that I drive there means that I don’t usually take immediate advantage of the place’s best product: the beer proceed by the excellent Hook Norton Brewery. I’ve visited the brewery though and taken beer away with me to enjoy. And I’ve been to the church, the Baptist chapel, and one of the pubs, as well as just just stopping and staring or passing though. It was on one such passing, in a friend’s car on a cloudy day and en route to refreshment elsewhere, that I first saw this sight: an interesting piece of motoring history to add to my virtual collection of old petrol pumps. I had to go back when the sun was shining, and have done so twice since, on neither occasion getting quite the photograph I wanted, although the one above comes close.

On the day I took the photograph, the workshop door was open, so I peered inside and was greeted by the owner, who told me that the globe once belonged to a garage tucked not far behind this building. After it closed, the man I was talking to swapped the globe for a decent bottle of whisky and mounted it on his wall, where it remains near the old pump as an ornament to the street and a reminder of a bit of village history. The red colour on the shell-shaped Dieso-Shell globe has almost gone now, but its very fading quickly alerted me to the fact it was an original and not one of the many reproductions that are about, good as these are. How heartening that there are people around to save these scarce traces of the past.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Revisiting: Illuminating globe

There are people (you know who you are) who have been reading this blog since before April 2008, when I posted the first of several pieces about the Worcestershire town of Upton on Severn and focused on its two memorable garages, one an art deco surprise, the other in a converted chapel. Those with sharp eyes would have noticed that in my original picture of Shipp’s, the second garage, there was a rather old petrol pump, topped with one of those distinctive globes that petrol companies once used to advertise their wares. I think it was a Cleveland Discoll pump globe but for some reason I didn’t photograph it in close-up. I’m sorry I didn’t, because it has gone now. The garage is happily still there, though, and they’ve replaced the old globe with a shiny white and red Shell one. When I passed it the other day I didn’t make the same mistake and got the camera out right away.

The Shell oil company adopted their scallop shell symbol back in 1904, having tried a mussel previously. The earliest of the company’s pump-top globes were literally and simply globe-shaped – they introduced shell-shaped globes in 1929. They made various designs, with changes to the exact shape of the scallop and legends advertising ‘Shell Derv’, ’Super Shell’, and ‘Shell Diesoline’, as well as the plain and simple ‘Shell’ type. This example in Upton looks to be one of the kind introduced in the early 1950s. There’s more information about Shell globes, together with much more fascinating material about old garages, on the excellent Vintage Garage site, here. You can be sure of that.

Ford, Gloucestershire

The last pump*

I have faint distant memories of the hamlet of Ford, tucked in a fold of the Cotswolds by the River Windrush, from my youth. I remember it as a rather bleak place, with stone cottages that seemed to be hunkered down against the wind, a transport company called Bowles (buses and coaches I think), and an inviting pub, the Plough. Those were the days when people with cottages in the Cotswolds mostly had their work and their lives among the hills – farm workers, artisans, those offering local services. The outsiders who had cottages were mostly bohemians and people who lived up lanes with fires in a bucket† – a far cry from the retirees and celebrities one trips over today.

Back in the 1960s, many of these locals didn’t run a car. They walked to work across a yard, or cycled, and took the bus to Stow or Winchcombe or Cheltenham to do their shopping. If they did have four wheels, there might still be the odd roadside pump at which to fill up, like this one, surviving thanks to the care of the proprietors of the pub at Ford. My distant memory linked it to the bus company, but here it is by the Plough, together with an old ‘Ring for service’ sign, to suggest that this is where’s it has always been.

The wedge-shaped top and the lines of the pump’s body are straight out of the Art Deco school of design. How good a pump like this would look outside an Art Deco garage. But it looks good here too, against a stone wall and framed by flowers. The top to the pump brings back memories: of Shell pumps topped with shells, Esso’s oval “globe”, National’s diamond, BP’s shield – a whole form of advertising design that’s gone now, save from the world of museums and private collectors with space to spare. It’s nice to see this one still in its original home, even though the only thing that’s pumped hereabouts now is beer.

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*For now, at least
†Phrase copyright Philip Larkin, “Toads”

On the arterial road...

…pumpery revisited

One of my readers reminded me, after the previous post about corrugated-iron garages and roadside petrol pumps, that such structures were widely disliked and criticised when they appeared back in the 1930s and 1940s, much as we might appreciate them now. He is of course quite right. These makeshift structures are a good example of the way attitudes and fashions and the ways in which we see things change, sometimes radically, over time.

In the 1930s there were frequent protests about the unchecked rise of shacks, garages, and other unplanned buildings. These structures were often seen as unpleasant to look at, badly built, and part of the inexorable ribbon development that threatened to swamp the countryside around Britain’s towns and cities, joining settlements together so that no countryside would remain at all. Quite a few people wrote about this, attacking plotlands, garages, and ribbon development as part of the same problem. Take Sheila Kaye-Smith, for example, writing in the 1937 collection Britain and the Beast, edited by Clough Williams-Ellis. Here she compares modern buildings with the much-loved traditional buildings of Kent:

Compare [Kent’s traditional buildings] with the modern villa set up stiffly like a match-box on end, with the bungalow coloured a pink that can be seen nowhere else save in boiled crustaceans, with the garage of corrugated iron, the catsellated shop-front, and then address yourself to time, in your hopes no longer the preserver but the destroyer.

J B Priestley also had a go at such things in his book English Journey and the CPRE even suggested that motorists should boycott garages made of corrugated iron or sporting “garish, multi-coloured petrol pumps”. A whole world of sorry roadside development was captured in an illustration in another book by Clough-Williams-Ellis, The Adventure of Building, which I reproduce above: as well as corrugated iron, ubiquitous overhead wires and intrusive advertising posters are also part of the view.

Even back then, the objections were inspired by all kinds of motivations. For many, it was a genuine anxiety about the countryside and about the way our settlements were being planned – or not planned, but just thrown up, willy nilly along the highways. For others, it was snobbery about low-status building materials, discontent with structures that could be erected by unskilled labour, or a dislike of untidiness.

As far as corrugated-iron garages went, they got their way in the end – most have long vanished. Ribbon development, too, has been controlled by the planning system, as have, by and large, big advertising hoardings. And now, encouraged by writers like Jonathan Meades and Iain Sinclair, we are more likely to find something to admire or interest us in old garages, plotlands, and sheds. it might be the ingenious bricolage practised by their amateur builders; it might be the layers of history the represent. It might be – and this is where I come in – their contribution to, and absorption in, the character and life of specific places: a plotland bungalow softened by cow parsley or surrounded by shingle, a corrugated-iron roof turned over to nature, a barn rusting in the summer sun. Such things encourage us to look, and think, unearth stories about the past, and reassess what is still there in the present.

Rhydd, Worcestershire

Pumpery

By the side of a road a few miles outside elegant, hilly Malvern, in the flat country between the villages of Guarlford and Rhydd, is this small corrugated-iron building, now partly surrounded by grass, weeds, and elderberries. Driving past many times, I took it to be a farm outbuilding, but then I noticed the way it faces right on to the road and the presence of a very old petrol pump at one corner. There’s an enamel warning sign about the dangers of petroleum spirit too, its red lettering still clear against a white background, now partly obscured by the elder. I assume, then, that this was once a small garage, supplying fuel to cars on the way to and from Malvern and also to vehicles associated with the neighbouring farm.* Like so many early garages and pumps, it is right by the roadside (the tarmac is just out of shot), so that the motorist had just to stop and refuel. Since Malvern is the home of the Morgan Motor Company, I have mental images of early three-wheelers and 4/4s pulling up…

In 1927, as car ownership increased in Britain, the Roadside Petrol Pumps Act was passed, giving local councils the power to licence petrol pumps. To start with, these pumps were hand-cranked, but by 1930, electric pumps were being installed on roadsides. World War II brought petrol rationing and the demise of many rural garages, but once the post-war period of austerity was over, there was a steady increase in car ownership again and many new purpose-built garages and filling stations were built. More and more, these were substantial buildings with proper forecourts, on to which one pulled, and eventually safety considerations meant that the old roadside pumps disappeared. The occasional survivor, either rusty like this one or more consciously preserved, remains to remind us of a very different era of motoring.

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*And since this is an assumption, I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who knows more about the history of this building.

Church Stretton, Shropshire

Corrugated irony

Regular readers will not be surprised to see me posting a brightly coloured corrugated iron garage. I have a weakness for corrugated iron buildings, and as I drove along the A49 at Church Stretton, this one, big, blue and busy, could not fail to catch my eye. I don’t know anything about its history, though, so if any reader knows how old it is, I’d be interested to know.

As I looked at it – blue painted walls, full-height sliding doors, big windows, plentiful signage, and all – it struck me that, while I admire its purposefulness, this is just the kind of building that used to annoy writers about the countryside 50 or 80 years ago. As car use began to spread and garages and filling stations were on the increase, many were erected on highways, and they were often rather makeshift-looking structures of corrugated iron. When fitted up with big enamel signs for Castrol oil or Ferodo brake pads, they often looked untidy, unplanned, and unkempt. Writers and architects like Clough Williams-Ellis inveighed against them and I noticed a while back an example that provoked the scorn of one of the writers of the famed Shell Guides. The Reading branch of the CPRE even encouraged motorists to boycott garages with features such as ‘garish multi-coloured petrol pumps, corrugated iron and asbestos construction or the advertisements with which they were regularly covered’.

Most of these corrugated constructions have long gone. But a few hang on, like this one at Church Stretton, which is clearly very well used, a car servicing and repair business at the front end, a motorcycle company at the rear. Its paintwork is spruce, the inspection hoists are busy, and the whole structure is a delightfully different from the corporate sheds and plastic filling stations that we’re mostly used to today. A refreshing difference too, I’d say.
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In addition: Jane Brocket's Yarnstorm blog has a lovely post about corrugated iron roofs on Skye, here.

Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire

Pump and circumstance*

Sights like this bring back memories of a time when filling up did not involve a major hit on the credit card account and when, with relatively few cars on the road, thoughts of environmental costs were limited mostly to the effects of exhaust fumes on the air quality in big cities. A time, too, when the roads were quiet enough for the pumps to be right on the street, like these. There was no forecourt – you just pulled up and the supply line was long enough to reach your vehicle. These two pumps are on the main street in the centre of Great Missenden, not far from the museum devoted to the life and works of the village’s most famous resident, Roald Dahl. Apparently the Red Pump Garage features in one of Dahl’s books. The bright red pumps very much look the part and presumably their survival is at least in part a tribute to the celebrated author. The notice on the door says they have been “Out of fuel” since eight gallons cost more than a litre. In other words, the place has been closed for years – but it is still a repository of memories.

*Not my joke, alas. This line has already been used as the title of a book on gas stations and by manufacturers of ballet shoes.

Much Marcle, Herefordshire

On the curve

I remember a few years ago a conversation with a friend about garages and what they look like, how most of them are either very boring or very unpleasant to look at, but now and then, one stands out from the crowd. Before long, one of us said, ‘Do you know the garage on the road between Ledbury and Ross on Wye, at Much Marcle?’ and the other one instantly said, ‘Yes! Isn’t it terrific!’ We’d both been admiring the building for years, and I can’t remember which of us mentioned it first. There are several things I like about it. The way it stands at a slight angle to the junction. The gentle curve of the roof, a curve followed by the attractive lettering on the front. The mixture of corrugated iron and wood. The building began life as a World War I aircraft hangar. It was bought by the Weston’s Cider Company, who are based nearby, in 1926, and they used it to maintain their vehicles as well as offering a general garage service. In the 1990s, Weston’s sold it, and it continues as a garage serving the general public.

Not everyone admires this kind of thing, of course. It doesn’t happen often that I find myself at odds with the Shell Guides, old books that I admire because they still have a lot to tell us about architecture and the sense of place. In the 1955 Herefordshire guide, author David Verey found much to like in Much Marcle, but his admiration was ‘in spite of its approach from the Ledbury road being marked by an ugly new garage’. Verey couldn’t wait to get on to the village’s old church and houses, the place’s polite architecture, as they say. I, on the other hand, wanted to linger here on the main road, taking in this small landmark as the motorcyclists whizzed by enjoying the challenging mix of bends and straights on the way to Ross and perhaps themselves registering, through an eye corner, a curving metal roof and a painted garage sign.

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Footnote: Garagistes may like another post that I did a while back, about two garages in Upton on Severn.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

I’ve always liked Upton on Severn, an inland town with a marine feel to it, thanks to a riverside location that has brought trade and pleasure traffic to the place for centuries. The town is full of old inns, 19th- and early-20th-century shop fronts, and other points of interest, but what caught my attention on my most recent visit were two early garages.

The architectural history of the garage is hardly a tale of glory. Apart from the occasional Art Deco eyecatcher, it’s a story that began with converted farm buildings, makeshift huts, and former stables, and ended with corporate dreariness. Yet early survivors often rise above the total blandness and minimalist shells we’re used to when we fill up now.

Take Shipp’s Garage, up a side street in Upton. This building began life in the 1890s as a nonconformist chapel, but the garage proprietor found the building’s height and location conducive to conversion, A plaque on the wall says ‘Established 1926’, though I don’t know whether they’ve been in the old chapel that long. Of course, part of me thinks that converting a building like this is a travesty. Violence has been done to the front to knock through the big doorways, the one remaining window is a sorry version of its former self – and one could go on. But the rest of me likes what’s happened, for the building’s knockabout visual charm and for the fact that it wears its troubled history on its sleeve, for us all to see and read.

A few streets away, on the road out of Upton towards Malvern, is Pane’s Regal Garage, a place to make you swerve.


It has a big moderne frontage with the name Regal Garage spelled out in huge tall cut letters. But a building’s surroundings are often as important as the building itself, and what marks out this place is the remarkable collection of very large and very red trucks, breakdown wagons, and cranes parked on either side. This one, probably American and probably as old as the garage itself, caught the sun, and my eye.