Somewhere in the Cotswolds

 

Corrugated surprise

There’s a way of thinking about architecture that puts building materials in a hierarchy of prestige and value. At the top of the list is stone, the material of cathedrals and palaces, a substance that requires great skill to work, is long lasting, and can be carved to produce the kind of ornament that sets off a grand facade or an imposing interior. Next in the order comes brick, also long-lasting, but mostly mass-produced; there are some major buildings in brick, but for those who think in hierarchies, brick has something of the everyday about it. The descending order continues with wood, and thence on downwards. The position of concrete in this league table is more debatable than most. But one thing that many people have agreed on is that buildings of corrugated iron come somewhere near the bottom of the heap. And of course I am here to tell you that this whole notion – the hierarchy itself, and the dissing of corrugated iron, is all so much nonsense.

There was a time when no one thought of corrugated iron buildings as architecture at all. The material is missing from most histories of architecture and when people consider it, it’s in terms of utilitarian structures like sheds, barns, and aircraft hangars – ‘tin sheds’ was the old deprecating phrase.. These days, however, corrugated iron is taken much more seriously. Its history has been researched, there are several books on the corrugated iron architecture,* there’s even a Corrugated Iron Appreciation group on Facebook. People who worship in a ‘tin church’ or live in a corrugated iron house can be proud of their buildings, and rightly so.

Recently I came across a small group of corrugated iron houses in the Cotswolds, little more than ten miles from where I live. I’d no idea they were there, and to preserve the privacy of their occupants I’m not revealing their precise location. I show one of them in my picture. It appears, to me, very attractive, cosy-looking,† framed by its well kept garden and screened from the nearby road by trees. The green paintwork helps it blend in – corrugated iron buildings are often green, a colour that works well, although I’ve also seen them painted almost every colour of the rainbow. The sun casts strong shadows and brings out the pleasing texture of ridges, although it was in the ‘wrong’ direction when I saw these houses to enable a photograph that really does them justice.

Back in the 19th and early-20th centuries, you could buy a flat-pack corrugated iron house from a manufacturer and have it shipped to your site. You needed to prepare a good base, lay on services like water and plumbing, bolt the frame together, screw on the sheets of wriggly tin, and add interior cladding, perhaps with insulating material in the gap between the inner and outer ‘skins’. Perhaps these houses started life in that way. Or maybe, since I’ve read about an old hospital somewhere near where these buildings are, they started life as part of that – corrugated iron hospitals were produced and constructed in a similar way, and were often used as tuberculosis hospitals in remote rural areas. However they started life, these green-painted houses still seem to be doing good service and have no doubt lasted longer than their original builders could have predicted. And that’s surely green in another important sense.

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* For example: Simon Holloway and Adam Mornement, Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (W. W. Norton, 2008) and Nick Thomson, Corrugated Iron Buildings (Shire Books, 2011)

† Doubters ask if corrugated iron buildings aren’t very cold in the winter, and wonder whether rain on the roof makes too much noise. Some say that good insulation goes a long way to solving both problems.

Lisle Street, London

A good skin

I’m endlessly fascinated by the ability of the late Victorians to produce buildings that, while basically in a revivalist style, exude decorative added value. They had lots of different ways of doing this, using styles from Gothic to Jacobean revival, as well as a whole range of different versions of classicism – plus extra decorative bells and whistles that buildings in these styles would’t have included.

Here’s a highly ornamental late-Victorian building, but one in an unusual style: a sort of northern Renaissance, with Dutch stepped gable (and what a stepped gable), scrolls, terracotta panels, and obelisk finial – not to mention a variety of window types to enliven the frontage and no doubt the interiors too. It’s the sort of thing you’d see on the main square of a Dutch Renaissance town – Haarlem, suggests Pevsner – and even among a host of neighbouring stepped gables it would stand out.

The design was by Frank Verity and when it was finished in 1900 it housed the French Club, before being taken over by the film company Pathé, before, in 1935 it became St John’s Hospital for Diseases of the Skin. The idea of this hospital was that regular clinics were provided discreetly where members of the ‘artisan class’ could attend without it being obvious (once they’d made it through the door, presumably) that they had an embarrassing skin disease. By the 1930s the skin specialists had outgrown their premises in Leicester Square (they were treating around 1,000 outpatients a week) and had this building in Lisle Street converted for their needs. They remained here and in adjoining buildings until moving to the St Thomas’s Hospital complex in the 1980s.

At that point the lower part of the building became a pub, the Crooked Surgeon, later becoming a Slug and Lettuce. If this feels a step down, no doubt the hospital gains from its site at St Thomas’s, and the wonderful facade remains. And it still does something (pleasurable, absolutely) to the skin at the back of my neck as I pass.

Waterloo Road, London

Hospital corner

Walking northwards along Waterloo Road, I paused by the corner of Stamford Street, not for the first time, to admire this bit of architectural joy before coming to the bridge. It’s the former Royal Hospital for Children and Women, a brick building of 1903–4 and of all its felicitous architectural details – big windows, ornate gables, little pepper pot finials, tall chimneys – it was a bit of the building’s rich ceramic ornament that I thought I’d share today. The decoration was made by Doulton and includes a green Doultonware entrance porch given by the Doulton family themselves, and numerous terracotta female heads in the arches over the upper floor windows.

There is also some very strong Doultonware lettering, emblazoning the name of the hospital high up at parapet level, and proudly telling us lower down that the hospital was ‘Supported by voluntary contributions’. Lower down still is another Doultonware sign pointing us towards the outpatients’ department and complemented by this beautiful panel of a naked woman in the Art Nouveau style, with long hair that flows this way and that, in impossible whiplash curves, down her back and above her outstretched arm. Another similar relief rounds off the other end of the sign.*

I don’t know which of Doulton’s artists designed this panel.† But it didn’t have to come far from its place of origin, the Doulton Lambeth works a short distance upstream. It’s a memorable work of London art on a memorable London building.

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*The lettering is very effective too. I particularity like the E, with its central curving stroke.

†The panel is illustrated in Paul Atterbury and Louise Irvine, The Doulton Story (Royal Doulton Tableware, 1979) but the authors do not attribute it to any particular Doulton artist. The children's wards of the hospital originally had beautiful tile panels illustrating fairy tales. The building is no longer a hospital and the tile panels are now at St Thomas's.

Britain, 1946

Build it new: Illustrations of the month

Edward Bawden (1903–89) is probably one of the best loved of British illustrators. His work, from glorious big linocuts like the one he did of there interior of Liverpool Street Station to his tiny lithographic illustrations for the King Penguin Life in an English Village, from London transport posters to adverts for Twinings Tea, will be familiar to many readers. And Bawden has been made more familiar by books such as Malcolm Yorke’s lavish Edward Bawden and His Circle* and smaller glories like Peyton Skipwith’s One Lump or Two,† on Bawden’s work for Twinings.

But sorting through a pile of old Architectural Reviews of the 1940s I was pleased to come across a couple of Bawden’s illustrations that I’d not seen before. They are from a series of advertisements for the Zinc Development Association promoting new building in the post-war period and the use of zinc (for roofing, flashings, and so on) in new buildings. Each advertisement covers a specific building type and begins with the line ‘We need new…’. The two I found were ‘We need new hospitals’ (above) and ‘We need new houses…’ (below).

The tone is gently humorous, pointing out that much of Britain’s infrastructure in the post-war period was old and out of date and needed replacing with buildings fit for modern purpose. Bawden’s illustrations bring to amusing life the state of things. In front of the Victorian hospital (19th-century Classical and Venetian Gothic), nurses march purposefully, carrying brooms, chamber pots, and teapots, visitors turn up with flowers, and the walking wounded exercise in the courtyard. In a suburban street people get on with their lives in an assortment of buildings – an Art Deco house, a Victorian corner shop, a highly eclectic bungalow with an assortment of mock-Tudor detailing. This is 1946, but people are still bravely making do, whether they’re tending their gardens or gamely hobbling along on crutches, and the artist has delineated each of them in a few purposeful lines. This is all very British and picturesque, but the text puts us right about the realities. Here’s a bit of the ad featuring hospitals:

Some of the older hospitals were evidently designed by and for a hardy race. Cold winds blew down long grey corridors. Only the most strapping amazons could clean those labyrinths. Only the strongest patients could be cheerful in those wards. Only the fittest survived – which was perhaps the aim. The new hospitals and hospital wings will, let us hope, be different. Not gaol-dark and portentous, but bright, open, airy, labour-saving, hospitable…

And roofed with zinc, of course.

As usual, Bawden is well up to the task of capturing the right mood and helping the copywriters make their point. There are just enough telling details – the Gothic gate lodge, the finials on the hospital fence piers, the diamond-pattern tiles on the bungalow roof, the boxy shop window. As so often, he evokes the atmosphere of the times and of England’s eclectic, organically grown, mashed-up built environment, as much of it was back then. And as it still is in some places: the general hospital in my own local town still looks a bit like the Bawden illustration at the front, although there are any number of new wings around the back.§ Plus ça change…   

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*Antique Collectors’ Club, 2007

†The Mainstone Press, 2010

§My thanks to a reader, Mike Rigby, who has pointed out the similarity of the porticoed frontage of Bawden's hospital to the General Hospital in Cheltenham, precisely the hospital I had in mind. Apparently Bawden was in Cheltenham in 1946, so the similarity may well not be a coincidence.  

Salisbury, Wiltshire

LETTERS FROM SALISBURY (2)
These carved letters are from a building that began life as the city’s hospital in 1767. The building was designed by John Wood the Younger, son of the great architect of Bath, in the form of a single big brick block, topped with battlements and bookended with side towers containing services such as water tanks and privies.

The inscription proclaims proudly ‘GENERAL INFIRMARY SUPPORTED BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTION’ and by setting it in a band of stone the architect made sure it stood out from the surrounding brickwork. The incised lettering is reminiscent of the Georgian street signs that Wood would have seen on the stone-clad houses of Bath.

The infirmary’s exterior is dominated by rows of big sash windows. Plenty of fresh air was said in the 18th century to be good for the sick, and architects and doctors alike saw the generous provision of windows as essential in hospital buildings. No doubt these windows also make for light interiors in the apartments to which the building has been converted.

Bartlemas, Oxford

Tucked away up a lane (signposted ‘Private’) just a few hundred yards away from Cowley Road in East Oxford, Bartlemas is the remains of a hospital founded by Henry I, who ruled England from 1100 to 1135. This little building is the chapel, which, going by the windows, looks 14th century and so must be a replacement of an earlier original. Just to the north is a long stone range, part of the hospital’s domestic buildings.

When the hospital was built, and for centuries afterwards, this would have been an isolated enclave, far away from the city of Oxford, a place of quiet and seclusion where a few old or infirm inmates could live out their years in peace. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Oxford grew eastwards in ribbons of houses, shops, and factories, the new buildings surrounding and sometimes engulfing what was already there. What’s remarkable is that Bartlemas still keeps its air of quietude, even though it’s now so near to the bustle of the Cowley Road. A haunt of ancient peace.