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.

Chester

 

A good front

A couple of posts ago, I noticed an early building serving the automotive industry in Clifton, a structure of 1898 that showed how swiftly architecture began to adapt to house the new business of selling and maintaining cars. This facade in Chester is what remains from another early automotive building, the Westminster Coach and Motor Car Works of 1914. The front that remains shows a combination of practicality (big arches for the easy toing and froing of coaches and motor cars) and lavish display – terracotta cladding bearing rich decoration in the sort of Renaissance revival style popular at the time, with semicircular rusticated arches, dentil courses, balusters, and lots of ornament including scrolls, foliage, fanciful beasts and the occasional human face. The building’s name and purpose are displayed in fancy lettering in the pediment.

The building was actually a replacement of another, similar in design and purpose, which was destroyed in a fire; there had been a coachworks on the site since 1870. Its owners, named Lawton, built their own cars and carriages, as well as selling Mercedes and other vehicles, together with Michelin tyres. Lawton’s also ran a motor cab company. Their building remained a car showroom until the 19709s, after which a new city library was built behind this facade, a structure that was itself recently replaced by the current shopping arcade.

I’m usually pleased when an old building finds a new use – the alternative is so often decay then demolition then the construction of a new building of poor quality and short life. Hanging on to an old facade and erecting a new structure behind it is rarely an ideal solution either. But here I think it works. The current arcade has a landmark for a frontage, with a central arch that provides a grand entrance. The signage could have been handled better in my opinion, but that terracotta extravaganza has been kept, and Chester is the better for it.

Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire

 

Local industry

Many people visit the Cotswolds, and most of them come to see quaint limestone cottages and medieval churches, and to walk in the hills along the many waymarked footpaths, taking in stunning views of vale and hill as they go. They come for rural beauty and tranquility, but many of them end up in the most popular showcase towns and villages, from Chipping Campden to Lower Slaughter.* They find find what they’re looking for, but also sometimes what they don’t expect, like surviving evidence of past industry, from cloth-weaving to corn milling, for Cotswold sheep produced wool from which cloth was made and Cotswold people needed flour to make bread. The area is crisscrossed by fast-flowing streams that provided water power for some of these industries.

So it was at Lower Slaughter, which is mainly a stone village that also contains this former corn mill, built partly of brick. There was a corn mill here at the time of Domesday Book, drawing water power from the local stream, the River Eye. In the 18th century, the mill was rebuilt partly in brick, and at some point steam power must have taken over from water, hence the chimney. The millstones turned to grind corn into flour until 1958, when it closed, no doubt unable to compete with larger mills elsewhere. From the late 20th century until the very recently, the mill was a tourist attraction, with displays showing the history of the village and its mill and where visitors could still see the round stones that ground the corn and the other mill machinery.

Although according to online sources, corn ceased to be ground in the 1950s, I’m sure I remember visiting the mill in around 1997 or 1998 and buying a bag of flour ground there. Perhaps the flour was ground at another site belonging to the then owners? Maybe one of my readers could enlighten me. There was certainly a shop and tea room on the premises until recently.

However, the mill is now closed to tourists and its future is uncertain. But at least visitors can still see its impressive chimney and water wheel, evidence that, for centuries, there was more to the Cotswolds than agriculture and quaintness. I hope the building finds new owners who can find a use for it and preserve it.

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* The name Slaughter has no macabre origins. It comes from an Old English word for ‘wet land’.

Northampton

Big in brick, big in beer

Walking past the entrance to the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton, I focused rapidly on the large building beyond and its tall, multi-windowed brick frontage. I’m fond of Victorian buildings of polychrome brick, the jazzier examples of which often date from the 1860s or 1870s. What was this one, I wondered, with its attractive mix of red, buff, and blue brickwork? Following the line of the vertical buff bands upwards, I noticed quickly how they end, above the top windows, in pointed arches, each pair united under a larger rounded arch. The dark triangular areas beneath each pointed arch seem to contain wooden louvres, for ventilation.

In the kite-shaped space between the pairs of pointed arches is an area of buff masonry, and I could just make out a carved date, 1876, in one such space and some initials, P & S, in some of the others. The P, at least, is a clue, since it turns out that this building belonged to Northampton’s biggest brewer, Phipps. They produced beer in nearby Bridge Street and the building in my photograph was their warehouse. What a scene of bustle this must have been in the late-Victorian period, with horse-drawn drays setting off from here to pubs not just in Northampton but also in towns and villages round about. In the 20th century, the local Cooperative Society put up a large building in this street, and nearby there was also a handsome Victorian hotel, to add to the hubbub. There is still much coming and going in the street, including people seeking out the Museum and Art Gallery, on the opposite side of the road from the Phipps building. The hustle and bustle continues.

Gloucester

Fragile with care

Back in 2008 I posted a picture of this ghost sign in Gloucester. I used the picture as a jumping-off point for a discussion of how such old signs accumulate meaning and significance. They represent the kind of craft that takes pains – with the choice of the letterforms, the way they are arranged, and the care with which the sign-writer painted them. They tell or remind us of long-forgotten industries. And in this case they summon up the way that beer might have been enjoyed, reminding us of the variety of different local brews that are no more. Signs like this, I thought then and still think, are worth taking notice of because they are triggers of memory, the sort of memory that tells us where we came from.

So whenever I’m in Ladybellegate Street in Gloucester, I remember to have a look at this sign, to help me summon up such memories, and to reassure myself that it’s still there. A couple of weeks ago it was still there, but in the 15 years since I took my original photograph, it has become more decayed and frayed around the edges, and looks as if there’s is risk of more of it parting company with the wall. That’s the sign as it was the other week in my photograph above; if you want to see the 2008 version and what I wrote about it back then, it is here. Both images are for me a reminder of something else: not only that these signs are fragile, but that their very fragility – the indistinctness of some of the letters and the way in which bits of plaster and paint have disappeared, is part of how we see them. The roughened surface and fragmentary text not only is more authentic than a repainted sign but looks the part too.

One day, the Talbot’s sign will be gone, like hundreds of others. Someone may choose to repaint it, as people have done with other ghost signs, and a repainted sign has some value. But much better in my view is the decayed original, still hanging on to the bricks that support it – hanging on, one hopes for another few years. Pay it homage, while it’s still there.

Evesham, Worcestershire

Off piste in Evesham, 1

Sometimes, when I have time on my hands in a familiar place (or a place I think of as familiar) I give myself the simple task of walking around and trying to find some feature of the townscape or architecture that I’d not noticed before. Often, small gems are to found down alleys or in side streets I have no other reason to visit; sometimes it’s just a question of going a little further along a main street than I’ve done previously; and sometimes, of course, it’s a matter of looking a little harder in places I’ve been many times before, because we all miss things and we’re likely to overlook even the obvious when we think we know a place well.

In Evesham the other day, I decided to try some side streets, and it wasn’t long before I found this stone sign in a brick wall on a corner in Bewdley Street. The small building to which it’s attached doesn’t look industrial – I’d easily have mistaken it for part of a house. But clearly there was once a brewery here, a local concern that closed some time during the last century. The invaluable Brewery History Society website doesn’t say much about it, apart from noting the sign and adding that the other brewery buildings have been redeveloped.

I fancied I saw the remains of a polychrome brick tower not far away, with a factory-like building nearby: could this have been part of the old brewery? I think, looking online, that these buildings actually belonged to another company, probably brewers Sladden and Collier’s. Like many towns, Evesham had several breweries, all of which have gone, prey to takeovers or closed for some other reason. I cherish signs like this, faded and damaged but still in situ, as reminders of these forgotten industries, and of times when many trades were largely locally based. One of the cheering things about modern life (yes, there are a few!) is that parts of the brewing industry have again become more localised and diverse. Long may this last.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Hidden industry 3: Handing it to them

My third example of Tewkesbury’s industrial architecture is just opposite the vast Borough Flour Mills in a recent post. It’s the Tewkesbury Brewery, built for Blizard, Colman & Company, and it shares the larger mill’s combination of red brick with blue brick dressings. There’s a band of stone running beneath the 1st floor windows that bears the building’s name, now visible only as a very ghostly image indeed. A closer view also reveals the careful details around the windows – the way the blue bricks are curved to meet the window frame, and the neat way they merge with the horizontal string course. The best detail of all is the roundel bearing a carving of a hand grasping a bunch of hops. This motif is repeated on the side elevation of this corner building.

The overall effect is similar to many industrial buildings of the mid-19th century – not so much in Gloucestershire as in neighbouring Worcestershire: I was reminded especially of some of the former carpet factories in Kidderminster. And the roundels and brick details give the structure that bit of swagger that I associate, not altogether unjustly, with brewery buildings of the Victorian period: the fine buildings of William Bradford spring to mind, although this is not, I think, one of his. After brewing ceased here, the building became a warehouse, but now it seems to be empty. Let’s hope someone finds a purpose for it, and soon.

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Hidden industry 2: Able survivor

As I indicated in my previous post, milling in Tewkesbury goes back many centuries before the Victorian Borough Flour Mills were built. The earlier history of the industry in the town is beautifully reflected in the Abbey Mills, originally part of the property held by Tewkesbury Abbey at this end of the town, and rebuilt in the 1790s, long after the dissolution. Unlike the Borough Flour Mills, which were first powered by steam (later by electricity), the Abbey Mills were water-powered. There were four water wheels, of which one remains.

The structure is a focal point for this part of the riverside townscape, a once practical and now simply handsome collection of hipped and gabled roofs, mottled brick walls, and weatherboarded extensions and gantries – all this partly from the 1790s, partly the result of an extension in the mid-19th century. Harmonising with all this is the weatherboarded structure in the foreground, a relatively recent building acting as control house for a sluice installed in the 1990s.

Unlike the Borough Flour Mills, over the years the Abbey Mills have found a succession of new uses that have ensured the building’s survival. I remember it in the 20th century festooned with signs and  housing a café, together with shops selling antiques and souvenirs. It was then capitalising on its role as Abel Fletcher’s Mill in the best-selling Victorian novel John Halifax, Gentleman, by the writer known back then as ‘Mrs Craik’.* More recently it has undergone conversion to apartments, and is looking well on it from the outside at least. As I took my photograph, I was joined by a number of visitors to the town – some vocally envying the residents, some simply admiring the view.

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* I’ve read quite a few 19th century novels in my time, but the works of Dinah Maria Craik, aka Dinah Maria Mulock, aka Mrs Craik have passed me by. John Halifax, Gentleman is apparently a Victorian rags-to-riches story exemplifying the virtues of middle-class life. I’ve read it described by one critic as ‘moving’ and by another as ‘mawkish’.

Corsham, Wiltshire

Being busy together

Bees and their hives have been powerful symbols for thousands of years – probably ever since human beings first observed communities of bees working together and first tasted the honey they produced. As well as standing for sweetness (think of the madrigal "Sweet honey-sucking bees" by John Wilbye and "the bag of the bee", icon of sweetness in "Her Triumph", Ben Jonson's most mellifluous lyric) they're also symbolic of industry, especially industry that involves working together. And that's why bees and hives have been powerfully symbolic of the Co-operative movement ever since it was founded in the 19th century.

So I wasn't surprised to find out that this plaque showing an old-fashioned bee skep, high above a shop window in Corsham, was put there by the local Co-op when they built their shop here in 1906. Whoever carved the plaque thoughtfully included some flowers for the bees too. A century on, there's still a Co-op in Corsham, but on a different site. However the concern for bees continues with   "Plan Bee", the Co-op's campaign to support much-needed pollinators in our gardens, market gardens, and fields. From this Arts and Crafts influenced plaque to Plan Bee, advertised on my pot of breakfast honey, the link between natural and commercial cooperation is still vital.