Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire

 

Making it special

When I was in the Warwickshire village of Hampton Lucy the other day, my main aim was to seek out the large and imposing 19th-century parish church but, as so often happens, something else got my attention as well – this red-brick house. It is not large, but it’s not modest either. Wedged between the local pub, the Boar’s Head, and a single-storey building that started life as the village reading room, it stands out even when partly hidden by a parked van.

Built probably in around 1840, the house is made special first by the diamond glazing pattern and the bright white glazing bars of the windows. The usual thing in the early-19th century would have been to fit windows with square panes of glass (this was before larger plate glass panes became widely available) – diamonds, especially picked out in white like this, would have stood out originally nearly as much as they do now. A group of four diamond panes has been combined ingeniously to make a larger opening diamond in the left-hand part of the bay window, adding a quirky but practical touch to the design. Sometimes, fancy glazing like this was used as a signal that cottages belonged to a particular estate. I don’t know whether that was the case here; the only other building I saw in the village in a similar style was the early part of the village school, next to the churchyard.

The other stand-out feature of the house is the bargeboards fitted to the three gables.These twist along in a curved pattern, rising to ornate finials at the top, the icing on the cake of this building. Lower down, the front door of the house, a battened design with fancy strap hinges, is also attractive, if without the swagger of the bargeboards. To the right, behind the van, is a pair of modern garage doors that front what seems originally to have been a carriage entrance. Above it, a pain stone panel looks as if it might have been intended for an inscription, but it’s blank, leaving a tantalising question hanging over this notable building.

Newport, Shropshire

In the sun

As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s another shopfront, this time from the 20th century. The building behind and above the shopfront is interesting in its own right, but for what is hidden from the street as much as what can be seen. The brickwork above the shop window is Georgian, as in my previous post, but this time it’s an 18th-century refacing of an earlier building. What is behind is apparently a 17th-century structure that incorporates an earlier, 16th-century, timber-framed building – a palimpsest of periods that’s typical of English towns, though the accumulation is often hidden from the casual passer-by.

But as I’ve already hinted, it was the shopfront that made me stop and stare. This seems to be a shining example of Art Deco, the style of decoration and architecture that flourished from about 1925 to the start of World War II. So we have a glazed door with a pleasing pattern of panes, all neatness and straight lines. But what’s going on above is more remarkable. The transom, the glazing bar that separates the large lower part of the shop window from the part at the top, rather than being a straight horizontal as is usually the case, describes a gentle continuous curve, reaching its highest point in the centre of the shopfront, above the doorway.

The glazing in the upper section of the window (the transom light, as it’s called) makes three very graphic patterns of clear glass, frosted glass, and leading – in the centre, a sunburst (a classic Art Deco motif) and on either side a more angular, geometrical version of the same design. How revolutionary and modern this must have looked in around 1930. How redolent of its era, a time of glamorous cinemas, brightly coloured fabrics, and Clarice Cliff ‘Bizarre’ coffee sets, it seems today.

Ilmington, Warwickshire

Old school ties

On the day of my recent visit to Ilmington the sun was quite strong and while this brought out the wonderful colour of the church’s stone walls, other buildings were plunged into shadow. I had to work quite hard to get a clear picture of this building, Old School House. The house immediately struck me, with its geometric pattern of white glazing bars making diamonds and hexagons in the pointed Gothic windows. Then there’s the trefoil-arched entrance porch, another characterful touch in this house of the 1840s.

At first, the light being less clear than it looks in the photograph, I hardly noticed the masonry except to note that it’s the local butterscotch-coloured marlstone. The walls are mostly coursed and squared blocks, but not as finely finished as ashlar, except for the window surrounds, which are altogether neater. But look at the corner. Some of the quoin stones are whoppers, giving an impression of great if discreet solidity, even though the walls are strengthened these days by some X-ended tie-rods.

The Ordnance Survey map of 1885 shows a school to the northwest of the church, next to this house. So presumably this was the school-master’s house, and if it was built in the 1840s, that was well before compulsory state-funded elementary education – whoever paid for it did the teacher proud.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Off my piste

Catching the eye with white-painted walls and ogee hood moulds picked out in black, this building in Shipston-on-Stour stands out from its mainly red-brick neighbours. Although I’ve been to Shipston dozens of times I’d not been down this side street, so had no idea the building was there – not until I started using the recent revised edition of Warwickshire in the Pevsner Buildings of England series.*

The revised and extended editions of the Pevsner guides certainly do their job of picking out exceptional buildings in obscure places. My example is the very last thing in the entry on Shipston: “with ogee windows and hood moulds; originally a police station and lock-up, built c. 1840,” says the guide, which was enough to send me off to find Old Road, where the building stands. Those curving window tops are very typical of the early Gothic Revival and they’re certainly the first thing to notice. But I’d also point out the shape of the building – the broad curve with which it turns the corner. The metal glazing bars delineating tiny panes of glass and small three-pane opening panels are also delightful, especially their Gothic pointed upper panes.

Backstreet England. As Pevsner shows, it’s so often worth your while to stray from the main drag, to go those extra few yards from your usual route, to poke around in corners. You never know what you might find.

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*The Buildings of England: Warwickshire, Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner (Yale University Press, 2016). My review is here.

Coleshill, Berkshire*

Looking at Coleshill again (2)

Starting to think again about the lost country house of Coleshill reminded me about one thing especially that struck me about the place. As Karen Fielder says in her essay, although the house itself has gone, the estate still exists.† As well as the gate piers in my previous post, the many interesting architectural remains include a model farm, a dovecote, a walled kitchen garden, and a number of cottages.

Of course thousands of English cottages once formed part of country estates. They were built to house workers on the farms and those who maintained the house and serviced the estate in all kinds of ways. While household servants would live in, in the attic rooms of the big house itself, workers in other areas – from the fields to the carpenter’s shop – would have had cottages. Such estate houses often follow the prevailing architectural style of the area, but sometimes they have distinctive features that mark them out as special, something that shows that they belong to the estate – a special design of porch, say, ornate bargeboards, or a particular paint shade.

Glazing bars with fancy patterns are sometimes such a defining feature, and this seems to be the case at Coleshill. Perhaps it’s because cottage builders liked such glazing patterns in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and this was when many estates were ‘improved’ by their landlords, who built better housing for their workers and adopted modern farming techniques too. Coleshill has several houses with these lovely windows glazed in hexagonal and diamond-shaped panes (along with others that have plainer square panes). The way the masonry is set off with details in ashlar (smoothy worked blocks of stone) at the corners and around the windows is another sign that some care and expense was taken with the houses in the picture. Without such details, buildings like these would look like fairly standard Cotswold houses (Coleshill is near the edge of the Cotswolds, where the hills yield to the flat country around the Thames) but the details set them apart.

The 3rd Earl of Radnor (1779–1869) was a notable improver of the Colshill estate. I think that these cottages were built by him in around 1850; they look larger than many cottages, especially the one on the left, but seem to display the estate style and would have been among numerous beneficial changes made during the earl’s long life. Karen Fielder says that the appearance of the village today owes much to his efforts. Not all 19th-century landlords provided such good housing, but it looks as if some at least of the people of Coleshill were fortunate. As are we, able to pick up clues about their past in the appearance of some fancy glazing bars from perhaps 160 years ago.¶

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*I use the ‘historic’ English counties because of a sentimental attachment to them and because they are used by the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

†Karen Fielder, ‘X marks the spot: narratives of a lost country house’ in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Historic England, 2016)

¶A friend reminds me that Coleshill was also the home of the great record producer George Martin, who died recently. RIP.