York, Rowntree Park

Ice cream, confectionery and books

‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,’ wrote the American poet Wallace Stevens. This arresting line brought enquiries, including one from the US Amalgamated Ice Cream Association, no less, who no doubt wanted to know the poet’s precise meaning. But on a blisteringly hot afternoon in York, anyone who could sell us a good tub of the cold stuff would be high in our estimation indeed. A walk away from the crowded city centre towards Rowntree Park, in search of shade, nature and ice cream, seemed a good idea. I was sure there would be something of architectural interest along the way.

The Quaker Rowntree family, confectioners of renown, had their factory in York and were great benefactors to the city. After World War I, Jospeh Rowntree gave the 25-acre park as a memorial to the members of his staff who lost their lives in the war. He liked the idea of a place of quiet contemplation, and also of a recreational area accessible to all, and his architects set out the park with gardens, trees, a lake, large areas of lawn and places to play sports and games. It’s still popular today, even when a succession of heatwaves has dried the grass and much of the planting to a sorry crisp. In charge of the layout were two architects, Fred Rowntree and W. J. Swain. Fred Rowntree was from a branch of the family that lived in Scarborough and were cousins of the confectioners. He trained in his home town and designed numerous buildings in York as well as in London, which he later made his base.

Rowntree is said to have been the designer of the building in my photograph. It’s a multi-purpose structure. At the top is accommodation for the park keeper that looks out over the lake and gardens in the middle of the park. At the bottom are the open arches of what was originally a boat house. The middle part of the building, including the single-storey wing to the right, was designed as a café and still plays that role. It’s now the Explore Rowntree Park Reading Café. A café with books, no less, a relatively recent idea, but one that would no doubt have pleased the early Rowntrees. The whole was built just after World War I and completed in c. 1921. It’s a pleasant building, with casement windows, round-headed doorway and arches, and tall pantile roofs, that looks well amongst the surrounding trees and shrubs. It seems to evoke that moment in English architecture when traditional materials (brick, tile, render) combine with a plain, unornamented style to create something that has a hint of the old and a bit of the new too. The café also sells excellent ice cream.

York, Oglethorpe

 

All done in brick

Glancing up a York backstreet called Oglethorpe, I caught sight of this, a brick building of 1648, to which a pair of curvy, Dutch-style gables with dormer windows were added a bit later in the 17th century. It is said to be the earliest house in York built completely of brick, although bricks had been used extensively in eastern England by the time it was built. The Dutch gables give the house its name (it’s called the Dutch House) and cap a pleasant facade in which almost everything, from the door surround to the window mullions, the central oriel to the pediments above each window, is fashioned out of brick. A pantile roof completes the composition of orangey-red clay.

All those bold brick details give the building the air of the style known as Artisan Mannerism, although this style is typically applied to grander buildings incorporating brick scrolls, mouldings, and chunky eaves-cornices. Another house once called Dutch, the palace in Kew Gardens, is such a building at the grand end of the scale, Wilberforce House in Hull is a middling example. But something like York’s Dutch House, enlivening a quiet street, is certainly an eyecatcher. It has had a varied history. Starting as an impressive individual house, it was later divided into three separate dwellings, before becoming part of John Smith’s brewery. Needless to say, numerous internal alterations were made during the building’s first 300 years.

In the 1950s, Smith’s wanted to demolish the house, but the York Civic Trust restored it and it’s now a holiday home available to rent. It looks to be an excellent refuge in the city centre as well as a visual asset to the street. Convenience, history and style – it sounds like a good combination.

Marsworth, Buckinghamshire

 

Changing roles

To the traveller along the Lower Icknield Way, north of Tring, the village of Marsworth seems unimpressive, somewhere to pass by quickly perhaps, on the way to Dunstable. But it’s more interesting than that, because the village is set at a junction of the Grand Union (formerly Grand Junction) Canal, and was once an important transport hub. Nearby are the large Tring Reservoirs, built to supply water to the canal – Tring was the summit of the navigation and this stretch was vulnerable to running dry as locks shifted huge volumes of water. In addition, numerous cottages were built in the village of Marsworth to house those working on the canal and in related businesses.

One such related business was providing refreshment for barge workers – pubs were a familiar canalside feature and many also incoporated shops where the barge people could buy provisions. As I looked down at the waterway from the bridge at the end Vicarage Lane in Marsworth, I admired the charming thatched cottage in my photograph. I wondered whether it had once been such a pub, although I had my doubts because there’s another pub nearby on the lane, the Red Lion, which was covered in scaffolding on the day I was there, but still very much open for business.

The house by the canal is thatched and built mainly of white-painted brick. One end is weatherboarded. It’s said to be 17th-century in origin, although modified in the 19th century. At that time, and for much of the 20th century, it was indeed a pub, the Ship Inn. Later in the 20th century it was a shop, and now it’s a house (available as an Airbnb, according to some sources. So I was right about its role and its relation to the canal. In the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th, it must have thrived by quenching the thirsts of large numbers of barge workers. When the canal’s use declined between the two World Wars, it found other roles. Now apparently, having been part of a transport infrastructure that was so important to manufacturing industry, it serves a very different business, tourism. Such is the fate of so many historic buildings – the fortunate ones find a new use, and are preserved.

Hereford

 

From the far shore

Enjoying an aimless stroll across Hereford a few weeks ago, I decided to cross the bridge over the Wye in St Martin’s Street and turn left along a path that ran along the south bank of the river. I thought that doing this might give me a good view of the cathedral tower and wondered if another bridge would bring me back on to the opposite bank and into the city centre. Having admired the view of the tower, I checked the map on my phone, which suggested there was no bridge for miles. I carried on anyway, realising eventually that there was a rather elegant pedestrian suspension bridge, of all things, that would take me where I wanted to go. Shortly before I got to the pedestrian bridge, I saw the view above of a building in various materials and architectural styles reflected in the river.

I admired the long stone section on the left, with sash windows that could be Georgian or Victorian. To the right of this is a slightly taller section with a stone base and brick walls further up, and an attractive two-storey bay window jutting out over the water and propped on a pair of struts. On the far right was another stone wall topped by a more modern, glass-walled and flat-topped wing, where people were sitting out and apparently enjoying drinks or ice-creams. I was intrigued and resolved to find out if I could what this building could be.

Having crossed the bridge, I made for the building and had a surprise. The stone walls of the left-hand section are clearly much older than Georgian or Victorian. I was greeted by pointed arches, in some cases so slightly pointed as to be nearly semicircular – I’m thinking of the nearer of the two doorways and the central pair of window arches in the image below. Some of this work looked as if it could be 13th century. A helpful plaque confirms that the structure has medieval origins at least. Its inscription reads: ‘CASTLE CLIFF mediaeval water-gate of HEREFORD CASTLE, GOVERNOR’S LODGE & late the BRIDEWELL’.

So this building allowed access to the former castle form the river, at some point also providing accommodation for the governor, a person who undertook the management of a castle on behalf of the lord or sovereign who held it. An important part of a castle now virtually vanished, then. Later, it was the site of the bridewell, a term used for a kind of prison or ‘house of correction’, where wrongdoers, vagrants, runaway apprentices, and other people who in the 16th century and later were seen as miscreants and undesirables.

The current users seem to be a far cry from the undesirables of the early modern period and the people on the roof terrace certainly seemed to be relaxed and enjoying themselves. The building is now listed as a holiday cottage. With the park on one side and the river on the other, they enjoy delightful prospects.

London, Weymouth Street

 

A kind of cocktail

Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do with Queen Anne. It brings together a mix of stylistic influences – a bit of Dutch, some Christopher Wren, a hint of Renaissance – that its historian, Mark Girouard, described as ‘a kind of architectural cocktail’. Architects added to the mixture features such as red brick, white-painted woodwork, fancy gables, oriel windows, and steep roofs to produce an impression that, to the Victorians of the 1870s onwards, represented a breath of fresh air after the stuffiness of the Gothic revival on the one hand and 19th-century classicism on the other.

This house in Weymouth Street exhibits many of the typical Queen Anne features, plus a few more that are equally decorative: circular windows, a dormer with a curvy pediment above it, and big ‘look-at-me’ swags in those eye-catching gables. It’s the work of F. M. Elgood, who built (or added new facades to) many houses in the Marylebone area. He was surveyor to two of the big landowners in this district, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Hop[e-Edwards Estate. This house was built for the former. By the time it was on Elgood’s drawing board, Queen Anne was widespread, influencing the design of even such downmarket buildings pubs. Perhaps for a large town house like this, both architect and client felt that there was a need for some extra bells and whistles, hence those elaborate swags. A heady cocktail indeed. Cheers!

Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

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* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.

Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Whose farm is it anyway?

Many decades ago, when I was in my early teens and starting to study Shakespeare seriously, my father took me on a visit to all the Shakespeare-related buildings in and near Stratford. As well as the poet’s birthplace, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Hall’s Croft (the house of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her husband John Hall), we visited the farmhouse at Wilmcote then known as Mary Arden’s House. Mary Arden was Shakespeare’s mother and her parents were farmers, and the house sits next to a cluster of farm buildings.

The building in my photograph is the house we visited. What a glorious building it is – a mixture of a close-studded timber frame and a diagonally strutted section at the right-hand end, its wooden structure charmingly warped in places, in spite of the fact that it sits on a substantial stone plinth. As far as I can recall, the house was filled with period furniture and the ceilings, especially upstairs, were very low. Back then, the outbuildings housed a large collection of old (pre-20th century) farm machinery ranging from carts to seed drills. This collection, nothing to do with Shakespeare, engaged us for some time. I don’t think the exhibits could have been labelled, because I remember that we had a good time working out what some of them were.

If the farm machinery had little to do with Shakespeare, neither, it turns out, did the house. Later research has revealed that the young Mary Arden and her parents actually lived in the house next door, a less impressive looking building, although it incorporates a timber frame that has been dendrochronologically dated to the early-16th century. These days the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns both properties, calls the whole site, both the houses and the farm buildings behind them, Mary Arden’s Farm.* Currently, it’s not open to the public, but is used as a site that primary school children can visit and learn about Shakespeare and the life of country people during his period. So now children still younger than I was all those years ago get to enjoy this lovely house and learn from it and, much as I’d have liked it to be open to adults too, that has to be a good thing.

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* Separately, the house where Mary actually lived is known as Glebe Farm, while the house in my photograph is referred to as Palmer’s Farm.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Light industry

By the River Deben and at the foot of Wickham Market’s High Street lies this cluster of buildings: ‘An attractive group,’ says Pevsner, laconically. Indeed it is, a throw-back to a time when industrial buildings could look both purposeful and pretty. The river, the ducks, and bright light under stormy clouds help the picture too.

What we’re looking at takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The central building is an 18th-century corn mill, weatherboarded in the typical style of this part of East Anglia. The mill leet passes under the twin-arched brick-faced bridge (itself thought to be 19th-century) to the mill to provide its power. A lot of the original machinery remains inside. The mill’s lucam (the projecting structure that contained a hoist) still survives high on the right-hand end.

To the left of the central mill and adjoining it is a white-brick house, still with its windows with the small panes they would have had when the house was first built in the early-19th century. It would have been the miller’s house and the large central window with its semi-circular top suggests that behind is the main staircase, which must be well lit and probably spacious. One gets an impression of understated prosperity.

The brick-built structure on the right-hand side of the picture is another mill. This is again 19th-century and was purpose-built as a steam-powered mill with solid walls able to withstand the vibrations that a steam engine and its connected machinery would produce. The windows have cast-iron lintels now painted white and the lucam is still there, pointing towards the equivalent structure on the older mill. The small structure on the right with the round-headed window is said to be the original engine house – the chimney stack was taken down at some stage. The engine that ran there was made by local firm Whitmore and Binyon, the subject of my previous post, and is now at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life).

So milling no longer takes place here, but the buildings usefully survive – the mill parts house variously storage and a shop selling such things as logs for wood-burning stoves. While the buildings are in use, they are likely to be looked after, preserved, and shown off to their best by the light of the sun.

Launceston, Cornwall

Almost perfect…

It’s almost a perfect Georgian town house, the sort of residence that a prominent citizen of a provincial town might build. The citizen in this case was Coryndon Carpenter, attorney, twice mayor of Launceston and Constable of Launceston castle, a member of a prominent local family, and his house is at once conveniently central, tucked away from the busy shopping area, and near one of the gates to the castle. In form it’s the classic 1760s detached house with hipped slate roof, red brick walls with prominent quoins and a centre portion breaking forward under a pediment adorned with urns. The basement, which would have contained service rooms, is distinguished from the two main floors by being rendered in stucco, which is rusticated (formed with grooves to give the impression of blocks of masonry) – a common term for such rusticated basements where the servants worked was ‘the rustic’.

But Coryndon Carpenter’s house is a cut above the already impressive Georgian norm. There’s a carved figure at the centre point of the pediment, looking out over the town. I don’t know who it’s supposed to be: ‘a Grecian style figure’ says the listing description, laconically. The round window in the pediment, the gate piers with their eagles and iron gates and railings are additional stand-out features. The central porch is a later addition, classical, rusticated, and columned, so as to be in the overall style of the rest of the house but failing somehow to look anything more than an added extra.

Even so, this is a delightful building (it’s now in fact a hotel) and if not quite perfect is near enough to please all but the Georgian ultra-purist. The people who compiled the official listing for this protected building gave it a prestigious II* grade, confirming its importance. Long may it be cherished.

Cotehele, Cornwall

The business end

Cotehele is a wonderful house (see previous posts about our visit last month) but I want to pay tribute to one aspect that visitors in a hurry (and Cotehele is not a place to hurry) might miss. It raises an interesting point about country houses and their estates. We are apt to think of these enormous houses as the retreats of a privileged class, isolated from the lives of the lower orders, who toil away in workshops or factories or on farms, places far removed from the life of ease lived in places like Cotehele. There’s much truth in that, but it’s a simplification. The countryside has always been a place of work – not just the hard toil of the farm, but also of the mill and the mine – and some of this activity is surprisingly near the local country house.

Beautiful Cotehele is itself close to industry. There is a mill on the estate and within walking distance of the house is Cotehele Quay, the place where vessels on the River Tamar could moor and unload or load their cargo. There were several local industries – mining for tin, copper or arsenic; lime burning, and market gardening. All of these were busy in the 19th century, bringing much traffic to the quay. The remains of limekilns can still be seen a stone’s throw from the water. Mines were nearby (the old Cotehele Consols mine was the nearest) and brought much wealth to the area until the late-19th century saw a decline that accelerated with the effects of the two World Wars. Market gardens produced apples, cherries, strawberries, and daffodils.

The surviving buildings on the quay include the limekilns and the warehouse in my photograph, now housing an exhibition about the history of the quay and its boats and industries. This was known in the early-20th century as Captain Bill’s Store, after Bill Martin, skipper of the Myrtle, whose main job was to carry grain for Cotehele flour mill, another bit of the area’s industrial history. The Myrtle’s working life came to an end when she was commandeered during World War II and blown up by one of the many bombs dropped on Plymouth. Cotehele Quay is a backwater now, but an essential part of the history of the area that most visitors find out about because of the big house.

Cotehele, Cornwall

The beauties of imperfection

Modern window glass is almost perfectly flat, flatter than any pancake. It also has few if any internal imperfections, making it perfectly transparent, and it can be manufactured in large pieces, making sizeable uninterrupted shop windows possible. Old glass, especially pre-19th century glass, is full of imperfections and generally came in quite small pieces. It was often made by blowing a cylinder of glass, which the glass-blower then cut along one side and flattened out to make a sheet. Another method was to spin a mass of molten glass, producing a disc, which the glass-maker then cut up into small usable sections. Windows from the stained-glass one in medieval churches to the small panes in Tudor or Georgian windows, are glazed with glass made by hand in these ways.

Most of the time, people don’t notice the imperfections in old glass windows. But if you look closely you’ll see that their surfaces have a pleasant and characterful unevenness – which also distorts slightly what we see through them. The ancient house of Cotehele in Cornwall was built in the Tudor period; the interiors were modified in the 17th century and the building remains Tudor and Jacobean in character. Many of its windows retain their early glazing. You can see how, in my photograph, the imperfections – a series of curved and linear unevennesses or more random patterns – can be made out by looking at the shadows they cast on nearby walls and window reveals. These effects vary according to the light’s direction and intensity, but are wonderfully clear in the photograph that I took on a recent October afternoon.

The architectural character of a building is often very obvious, but sometimes reveals itself in subtle ways, catching us by surprise when a particular feature, like this window, has its time in the sun.

 

Cotehele, Cornwall

An ancient place

Cotehele is one of the most romantically beautiful houses in the care of the National Trust.* It was built by three generations of the Edgcumbe family during the Tudor period† and its interiors were upgraded in the 1650s. However, in 1547–53, when Cotehele was still unfinished, the family built another dwelling, Mount Edgcumbe House, about 12 miles away.§ Mount Edgcumbe became their main home, Cotehele was second in importance. Mount Edgcumbe was remodelled in the 18th century and its old, now unfashionable furnishings, were moved to Cotehele, where they have been ever since. As a result, Cotehele gives the impression of a rambling Tudor and Jacobean house, full of tapestries, oak furniture and four-poster beds, a perfect and apparently untouched upper-class country house of its period.

In fact there were later alterations, notably in 1862, when Cotehele became the home of the Victorian owner’s widowed mother. But these were done in harmony with the Tudor fabric. The right-hand end of the east range (lower photograph), dates to 1862, but you’d hardly know. It’s a house of local granite walls and chimneys, a mixture of tiny windows and large mullioned ones, of courtyards and towers. It covers a large footprint with architecture on a modest scale – there are no grand entrances or big architectural gestures. Even the towers are low-rise and only the hall has a high ceiling. The setting – terraced gardens, a steeply sloping valley garden, old orchards – is perfect. Inside and out, the place is uniquely atmospheric.

Cotehele seems a world apart from modernity or business, let alone industry. But it’s near the River Tamar, once a great highway for Devon and Cornwall, the counties of which it forms the border. The varied fruits of market gardening and mining were not far away. Perhaps that story will be the subject of another post.

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* The house passed to the Trust in 1947. They do, it seems to me, a fine job in looking after it and presenting it to the public. Electric light is kept to a minimum, which presumably helps preserve the contents and enhances the atmosphere. The volunteers who stand in each room are particularly enthusiastic and helpful in answering queries. There’s information, but nothing is over-interpreted. I’m indebted to the Trust’s guidebook for details about the house’s history.

† Specifically 1485–c. 1560

§ I’m not sure why they built this second house so close. More research is needed.

Cotehele, the east range, with 19th-century addition at the far end

Hull, East Yorkshire

Artisans at work

At the time of my visit to Hull in the summer, there was building work going at the Wilberforce House Museum, making photography difficult. So I honed in on a detail of the entrance, excluding as many distracting objects as possible, to give an idea of the extraordinary architecture of this house of the 1660s. It was built for a merchant called Hugh Lister, later became the official residence of the Governor and Deputy Governor of Hull, and still later, in 1730–1832, was owned by the Wilberforces, the family of the celebrated anti-slavery campaigner.*

The elaborate architectural style is known as Artisan Mannerism, a fashion created not by architects but by stonemasons and bricklayers, drawing on pattern books of classical architecture (some of which were produced in the Netherlands and France, where the merchant Lister had spent time on business) but disposing the decorative features in unconventional and naïve ways. Popular elements and motifs included curvy Dutch gables, exaggerated mouldings, unconventional arrangements of pediments and other details, and a disregard for the conventions of proportion. Although they disregard many traditional rules or guidelines of Classical architecture, Artisan Mannerist buildings can still have much vigour and charm.

A glance at the entrance of this building will reveal what I mean. Lister’s builder, who was probably a Hull bricklayer called William Catlyn, threw the kitchen sink at his design, incorporating not only round-topped niches on either side of the doorway, but crowning these with triangular pediments, outlined in pale stone. The round-arched doorway is also crowned, not with a triangular pediment but with a stone moulding that breaks into a semi-circle, topped with a carved feature a bit like a plinth or bracket for a statue, above which is no statue but a window lighting the next floor up. Elsewhere on the facade, ornamental stones bearing various geometrical carvings (here a diamond, there a square), are inserted. The undecorated runs of brickwork are laid with deep horizontal bands every half-dozen courses, to give the effect of rustication.

It’s a matter of taste whether one regards this effect as a provincial offence to Classical taste or a rich mélange. I belong to the latter camp, and can find much to like in the energetic effect produced by a local worker who was happy to pick up some motifs and run with them. Hull would be a poorer place without such a display.

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* William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was a hero of my childhood, partly because my mother came from Hull, where he was born, and partly because he was one of the people championed at my primary school. History in those days was often taught as a succession of great individuals (mostly, but not all, men) who had a major influence on the history of Britain. Such people included the engineer James Watt, the nurse and nursing reformer Florence Nightingale, the social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, and William Wilberforce. These historical stars were seen mainly in terms of specific shining achievements, and any negative aspects were ignored or played down. Wilberforce’s support for socially conservative moves such as limitations on gatherings of more than 50 people, the suspension of the right of habeas corpus, his opposition to trade unions, and his opposition to holding an enquiry about the Peterloo massacre, were quietly ignored. To recognise these views is not to devalue Wilberforce’s abolitionism, but to see the man whole. Neither is it an example of today’s so-called ‘woke’ attitude to history; contemporaries such as William Cobbett pointed these things out in the 19th century; today it’s still vital to realise when one’s heroes are not plaster saints.

Chastleton, Oxfordshire

 

A spirit of place and time

I have visited Chastleton House before, but the other week the Resident Wise Woman and I decided that it was time for a revisit, so once again we found ourselves parking in the designated car park and walking along the path across the field and past the dovecote, to arrive in front of one of the most perfect of English Jacobean country house facades. As I’ve shown this front before in a previous post, I want this time to dwell on the interior, its unique contents, and the unusual way in which the National Trust has preserved it all. When the house came to the National Trust in 1991, it was remarkable not just for its architecture of 1607–12, but also for the fact that many of the 17th-century contents were still in place, and nothing substantial had been altered. None of the inhabitants had been rich, so there were no makeovers, and no money for anything but the most basic necessary repairs. The effect was not much different from that described in a Country Life article of 1919: ‘one of those rare things that once seen can never be forgotten…for the retention of its ancient furniture, fittings, pictures, pewter, glass and tapestries…it stands out as a wonderful survival’.*

What the curators at the National Trust saw when they took over in 1991 was something very similar – but with an added element. The house was also testimony to the owners who had hung on, living in the house but doing very little with it. The evidence of their lives was all around them – recent inhabitants had included an art critic and a scientist – the cups and plates they used every day, boxes of chocolates, the books and magazines they read, the glasses they wore while reading them. The place was a time capsule, but evocative of two eras: the early-17th century and the mid-20th. How to preserve this legacy?

The Trust decided not to restore the building to what it might have been like in the Jacobean heyday, but to preserve it very much as it was in 1991 when they took over. They adopted the minimal of alteration, only the most necessary repair, to lay, as Mark Drury put it, ‘as light a hand as possible on Chastleton, to arrest 150 years of progressive decay with an almost imperceptible tightening of the reins’. So no wholesale repainting or regilding of surfaces, just touching up here and there, while retaining the overall feeling of flakiness; no new curtains but gentle repair of what was there; and so on. And in addition, retaining the marks of a life lived in the house – magazines left open on the bed or table; a teapot waiting to be poured; a half-empty decanter, old guidebooks to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds in a rack near the entrance.

The approach has always been controversial. There are some who believe that a place as beautiful as this deserves a more interventionist approach, to take it some way back towards its 17th-century glory; one good friend of mind calls the Trust’s approach at Chastleton ‘brilliantly wrong’. There are indeed ways of doing this without wholesale restoration and the SPAB and those who follow its tents have established best practice for conservation. But I’m more sympathetic. I love the way the house pays homage to both its original builders and its 20th-century owners. I also admire the way the house’s custodians can keep something so fragile in this precarious state indefinitely. But I’m also aware of the problems of doing this. All conservation is difficult, expensive, and painstaking; keeping this fragile place just so must be even more so. And as I stroll around the house with other visitors, our feet pounding the floor and staircases, our breath changing the humidity, our hands leaving marks on banisters, I realise that I and all the other visitors are ourselves part of the problem, a strain on the building, while also providing funds for its upkeep. And yet at moments, when one is alone in a room, there is an atmosphere, a spirit of place and time, like nowhere else in the world.

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* Quoted in The Art Newspaper, 1 December 1991

Chastleton house, teatime tableau

Burford, Oxfordshire

 

Street-facing

When you turn into the Oxfordshire town of Burford from the A40, you descend the High Street, the first part of which is called The Hill, towards the centre of town and the shops, the Tolsey (the market house and also, now, the town’s museum), and the parish church. The Hill is lined with houses of various dates, and one that I admire is Glenthorne House, the one on the left in my first photograph. This has a handsome 18th-century front with sash windows arranged in pairs, each window with a prominent keystone, each pair surrounded by a raised band of stone. There’s a central door with a pedimented surround and above it a blocked window, and the whole front is book-ended by stone quoins and topped with a plain parapet. It’s as pleasant a Cotswold-stone late-18th century composition as you could wish for and one might suppose that the whole house dates from the same period.

Perhaps the roof, however, is a bit of a giveaway. It’s not low-pitched and hidden behind the parapet, but higher and with an asymmetrical bow to its ridge that suggests something older. If you walk a little further up The Hill and look at the side of the house, the picture is very different. The building is emphatically not the symmetrical box implied by the street front. From the side, it can be seen how far back the house goes and how it has mullioned windows that suggest a rather earlier date – much of this probably represents a 17th-century remodelling of a medieval house. Pevsner reports that there’s a 14th-century stone archway inside the building. This side view also shows that the street front is an add-on, built against the house to present a once-fashionable Georgian face to the street.

Many house owners smartened up their street frontages like this. Often the position of the windows or proportions of the facade are incorrect, betraying a building of irregular or asymmetrical design behind. In this case, the proportions are just about right, and the makeover has been achieved with some style and grace. No doubt the house attracts as many admiring glances as it must have done in the 18th century. A few of the glancers, looking at the side elevation as well, will reflect that the human habit of responding to changing fashions has been around almost as long as architecture itself.

Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025

Chichester, West Sussex

Townhouse Doric

Chichester has a variety of 18th-century houses with admirable doorways designed using the classical orders. Many have Ionic or Corinthian columns, the two most ornate and showy of the Greek orders, but some employ the Doric order, with its very simple capitals and columns. The ‘standard’ Greek Doric has fluted circular columns without bases. Here they are framed by a pair of flat pilasters, plain and unfluted, a common device that sets off the inner columns well and, combined with the Doric entablature above, makes a pleasing, balanced whole.

Whoever restored the house has painted the broad brick strips on either side of each window white, to emphasise the way in which the proportions of the windows and surrounds mirrors those of the doorway – a nice touch although the bricks were probably originally unpainted. The quality of the brickwork is clear from the wedge-shaped blocks that form the arches above each window.

This is a sizeable town house by today’s standards, and it presents a pleasant face to the street, but its architecture is modest rather than showy. My photograph does not show its facade’s agreeable symmetry – to do so would have reduced the amount of detail visible in the doorway.* It would also have meant including more parked cars in the frame. Their presence in the street is not ideal, but they are part of modern life and one can see just about enough between and above them to give an impression of the beauty of the building.

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* Click on the picture to get a better, larger view.

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.

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Memories of empire

It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them. Close to the seafront is Marina Court Avenue, a row of dwellings built in the early-1900s. These houses have Moghul-inspired details including windows with horseshoe arches (like those on the bandstand in my previous post), together with a minaret and an array of chimney stacks in the form of miniature onion domes. The nearby Marina Arcade, with its copper-domed entrances, is clearly a development of the same period and style.

The Maharajah of Cooch Behar moved into one of the houses in 1911 to convalesce when he became ill after attending King George V’s coronation. However, the presence of the maharajah does not seem to have inspired the architecture of these houses – they were built several years before he arrived. Back then, however, this style of architecture looked less out of place in this English seaside town, because Bexhill had a major building partly in the Mughal taste: the kursaal.

Kursaal is a term derived from two German words meaning ‘cure’ and ‘room’, and a kursaal was a prominent feature in Central European spa towns, places where you went to be cured of your ills. In fact such buildings were more about entertainment than medicine – they usually had a large hall for concerts and assemblies, together with side rooms for other functions, including at Bexhill separate reading rooms for ladies and gentlemen. More to the architectural point, Bexhill’s kursaal was adorned with large ‘oriental’-looking domes and a minaret. Built in the 1890s, they survived until the building of the De La Warr Pavilion, with its theatre, café, and sitting areas, led to its demolition.

In this context, the smaller buildings ofMarina Court Avenue and Marina Arcade would not have looked out of place, creating a small cluster of onion domes, horseshoe arches, and ornate glazing to give an impression that would have seemed exotic to British visitors. This kind of architectural borrowing of foreign styles is now looked down on as ‘cultural appropriation’, but back in the 1890s and early-1900s, Britain had an empire, having appropriated not just the culture but also the land of numerous foreign powers. Buildings influenced by the architecture of India would have reminded people of British global power. They might also have reminded the people of Bexhill that if Brighton, just along the coast, could have an outstanding ‘oriental’ building in the Royal Pavilion, Bexhill too merited its share of the action.

Dome-like chimney stacks and ‘oriental’ windows, Bexhill

Lewes, Sussex

 

Glowing in the sun

For a small island, Britain has a large number of local building styles, in large part as a result of the bewilderingly diverse geology. For most of human history, most buildings (with the exception of some churches and the houses of the rich, where funds were available to cover the cost of transporting stone) were made from locally available materials. Most of my readers will have travelled across England and noticed how the styles and materials of older buildings vary from one region to the next, a phenomenon I noticed for the umpteenth time driving from the limestone country of the Cotswolds to the very different architectural landscape of Sussex.

In southeastern England, where good building stone was limited, timber-framed houses were common. Towards the end of the 17th century, however, brick and clay tile became increasingly popular – for their cheapness, appearance and weather-resistant qualities. In counties such as Sussex and Kent, people took to hanging clay tiles vertically on the walls of houses, to protect the wood, wattle and daub from driving rain. Attaching the tiles was relatively easy – the builder nailed horizontal oak laths to the timber framework of the wall and attached the tiles to these.

Tile-hung houses are still common all over this part of southeastern England. My photograph shows a couple in High Street, Lewes, a street that boasts stone, brick, timber-framed and tile-hung buildings in diverse profusion. I noticed these two because they’re so different from each other (and because one of them houses a second-hand bookshop, which of course I had to visit). The two-gabled building on the right is the bookshop, and I admired its bright orange tiles and the way in which the sun has not only brought out the warm colour but also cast shadows between the rows of tiles, giving the surface of the wall form and pattern. The eaves of the roof now hardly overhang the wall at all, presumably because of the amount of room needed to accommodate not only the tiles themselves but also the wooden laths on which they hang.

The tile-hanging on the building to the left is altogether more showy. The two colours of tiles have been used to create diamond patterns and the shapes of the tiles themselves vary – there are curved, pointed and straight tiles, producing a more complex effect than in the simpler, all-straight tiled wall next door. A lot of trouble has been taken with this patterning, and it’s impressive, but personally I prefer the plain tiles, which, with together with their glowing orange hue, add something special to this delightful street.