Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Far from sheepish

This is one of five elaborate carved piers set at the entrance to a driveway that serves some houses in Cheltenham’s Bath Road. The houses stand back from the road, and have their own driveway, running parallel to the street, so that owners could dismount from their horses and carriages (and now from their cars) away form the bustle of the main drag. The five piers vary in design (some are topped with urns) but these caught my eye one day when waiting in a traffic queue on the Bath Road.

The fluted columns and the swags put them very much in the Regency taste – that’s exactly the period (the late-18th and early-19th centuries) when Cheltenham expanded as its fame as a spa grew. The neighbouring houses were built in the 1820s and early-1830s, and online sources date the piers to c. 1823. The rams’ heads are a charming and intriguing touch. I doubt if they’re symbolic of anything specific. They’re a popular motif of the period, seen sometimes as terminations for arms on chairs, as bits of ornament on buildings, or with fountains gushing out of their mouths. Now I’ve noticed these, no doubt I’ll be seeing others in all kinds of places.

The piers look as if they have been carefully restored, but they have actually changed quite a bit. They originally provided a bit of local street lighting: they were topped with iron tripods bearing oil lamps. Later these were converted to gas and later still they were removed completely. Now the piers simply perform the other part of their function: to mark the entrance to the driveway and to add to the elegance of this bit of Regency Cheltenham. And they’re good enough at that and at complementing the nearby houses to ensure admiration and a grade II listing. Hurrah!

Bridport, Dorset

Line and liveliness: Illustration of the month

This month’s illustration is by Barbara Jones (1912–78), one of my favourite illustrators, whom I like for her eclectic interests, her love of the byways of architecture, and her lively line. But she was much more than an engaging illustrator: she crammed a lot into her life. After school in Croydon she went to Croydon Art School and then the Royal College (first in the Engraving department then in Mural Decoration, which she preferred). She graduated in 1937 and began work as both a mural painter and a commercial artist when the war came. She contributed paintings to the wartime Recording Britain project (subjects ranging from fairground horses to the Euston Arch), worked as both an author and illustrator (Watercolour Painting, The Unsophisticated Arts), put together the exhibition ‘Black Eyes & Lemonade’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery as part of the Festival of Britain, and pursued a tireless interest in eccentric and unusual architecture, resulting in her fat book Follies and Grottoes. And this is just a selection: her working life seems to have been a beguiling combination of interesting jobs, from more Festival of Britain Work, to designing exhibitions, pageants, and book jackets, and embracing interests that ranged from the decoration of canal boats to the design of tombstones. Popular or vernacular art – barge-painting, signwriting, fairground ride-making, the art of advertising, the creation of seaside amusements, etc, etc – was always close to her heart.

One book series including work by Barbara Jones is Visions of England, edited by Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis. Her illustrations for the volume on Dorset include this stunner of a shop front, which illustrates her art and her enthusiasms rather well. The frontage has a kind of exuberance that I associate with the work of the woman who drew it.

Dr Roberts, pharmacist and manufacturer of patent medicines, set up in business in Bridport in 1788. By the early-19th century he had commissioned this outstanding shopfront, which unleashes the whole architectural works – double bow windows with Gothic and other patterned glazing bars; a fascia above the ground-floor widows that features a band of Gothic arches; double doors with more ornate glazing. The whole is topped with a very fancy pediment, plus scrolls. Barbara Jones clearly relished all the fancy details, as well as the abundance of lettering, not just on the panels bearing the business name, but also on the sign between the windows, with its central curve: more scrolls.

Such details are close to the popular art that Jones loved. Those exaggeratedly large scrolls at the top and the rows of star-like finials along the upper edges of the windows are kindred in spirit to the carvings on carousels or ships’ figureheads that feature in some of her books. The combination of swagger, bold gestures, and the common touch: that’s what she liked.

Barbara Jones: Hambro Arms, Milton Abbas

I’ve included a couple of other examples from the Dorset volume. The sign for the Hambro Arms, Milton Abbas, displays the lively lettering that the Victorians and Edwardians often used for publicity, whether printed or sign written. It’s set in the context of a lot of curvaceous ironwork that holds up a lamp and the canopy over the door. Yes, yet more scrolls to delight the eye and to give Jones the chance to show off her way with an expressive line and a pen stroke of varying thickness. The gateway at Mapperton is slightly different, closer to the tradition of polite design. But it’s no surprise that similar curves – shell-topped niches in the stone piers, barley-sugar twisted uprights in the wooden gate, and those lead eagles (enlarge them and they could do double duty on a carousel)  – have caught her eye and been caught by her pen.

Barbara Jones: Gate piers near Mapperton House

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Ruth Artmonsky, A Snapper Up Of Unconsidered Trifles (Artmonsky Arts, 2008) is a fitting tribute to Barbara Jones’s life and work
Barbara Jones, The Unsophisticated Arts (originally published in 1951) has been reprinted by Little Toller Books

Great West Road, London

Setting down a marker

Gate piers. They're one of the primary architectural signals of large buildings. You see them and straight away the eyes are peeled, the neck is craned. Somewhere beyond there's going to be a big house or somethings else – a school? a hotel? offices? something industrial? And rapidly your buildings correspondent is summing up the possibilities: is this a welcoming gate or one that wants me to keep out? If the latter, is there a gap in the hedge somewhere that offers a view of what's inside? Gate piers, like entrance lodges, are often the prelude to something interesting and exciting.

But sometimes, as I've noticed on this blog more than once before, the anticipation can no longer be fulfilled. The gate may be there, but what it heralded has long gone. It is often the way with country houses, which disappeared in their scores in the 1950s, less often with industrial buildings. But these gate piers on the Great West Road are reminders of an architectural loss as great as that of all but the grandest country house. From 1928 to 1980 they fronted the Firestone tyre factory, one of the most spectacular of the Art Deco factories on the western approaches to London. After it closed, it was demolished, during a public holiday in August 1980, just before a listing was due to come into force.

A long white Art Deco front, with big windows separated by white piers topped with colourful capitals; a central doorway with ornate surround in blue tiles; the company name emblazoned across the top in large letters that were illuminated in red neon at night – the factory was a stunner, worthy to be compared with two others that have survived, the Hoover building on Western Avenue and the Carreras tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent. And on a summer weekend in 1980, it all disappeared, save for these gate piers and gates, elegant and very Art Deco reminders of the building and its sad fate.

If every cloud has a silver lining, the consolation here is that the factory's demolition galvanised campaigners and architects to look out for other vulnerable 20th-century structures. The Thirties Society (now the Twentieth Century Society) had been founded in 1979 to protect buildings of what was then an under-appreciated period in British architecture. News of the Firestone demolition focussed public opinion, led to the listing of many important 20th-century buildings, and helped 1930s enthusiasts convince people of the merits of such structures as lidos, 1930s underground stations, and telephone boxes. The Firestone gate piers are a reminder of what it took make people realise what they could be missing.