Radstock, Somerset

More scrolls

I want to share one more stone detail from the Somerset town of Radstock, to add to the one in my previous post. It’s the name stone for the Victoria Hall, obviously, and the building bears the date 1897. That was the 60th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and the hall’s name apparently marks this milestone in the life of a queen who held, until the current queen surpassed it, the record for the country’s longest reigning monarch.

The building’s name plaque shown in my picture is one of a couple of carved plaques surrounded by small scrolls that adorn the front of the hall. The other gives the date and notes the commemoration of the queen. From all this, one would be forgiven for thinking this a hall of 1897. But beware of dates on buildings. They’re not all quite what they seem. This is in fact a building of 1866, which was enlarged in 1897. It was originally a Working Men’s Institute – a place, then, where men could attend informative and enlightening lectures, and where they would find other beneficial facilities, probably including a reading room.* However, in 1902 the hall’s function changed, when it became council offices, and it has now found another life as a community arts centre.

The building looks well made and solid, with some pleasant touches – the round-headed windows and the ornate gables, for example. The central gable boasts a pair of large scrolls, and scrolls, too, make their appearance as a decorative motif in the frame of the name plaque. The lettering is also decorative. It has not, it is true, broken out into the outré and curvaceous style of Art Nouveau lettering,† but it has its moments – especially the capital V, with its curving left-hand stroke, splaying to a forked termination at the top and its right-hand stroke, straighter but ending with a long flourish. That flourish is also interrupted by a tiny indentation about one third of the way along the top,§ so that the whole stroke looks like a raised leg with the foot enclosed in a tight-fitting shoe. Not so Victorian, then, after all.

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* For more on institutes, see a post I did long ago on a building in Banbury.

† There is an example of full-blown Art Nouveau lettering here.

§ My apologies if the small picture makes this detail difficult to see. I promise you, it’s there, and not a product of my imagination!

Banbury, Oxfordshire

On course

When I first saw this building, its vast windows shining in the sun across a car park, I thought it must be a school. Did the stone torch at the tip of the main gable confirm this? It certainly seemed to. But a closer look revealed a damaged inscription on another gable: ‘The Banbury In titute’. A mechanics’ institute, then, shining its torch of instruction on the working people of north Oxfordshire.

Mechanics’ Institutes began in the early-19th century to provide adult education for the working classes. A typical institute offered courses of lectures (usually on a range of subjects, both vocational and academic), discussion groups, and a library, and these offerings were free in an age when the alternatives (for example, subscription libraries) were only available to those who could afford to pay. Pioneered by George Birkbeck, they spread across the country, clearly filling a gaping hole in the education system in the years before compulsory schooling for all children. Birkbeck worked in Glasgow before moving to London and founding the London Mechanics’ Institute in 1823. The next couple of decades saw the foundation of hundreds of institutes across the country.

Not all institutes lasted. As the public library movement gathered pace, for example, some became local libraries. And there’s a historical debate about how useful they were to the working classes, with some historians claiming that the free lectures were soon taken over by the middle classes. As institutes were locally founded and run, clearly, an institute’s success depended on specific organizers and conditions – and the fates of mechanics’ institutes vary from early closure to evolution into universities offering the best in higher education (that first institute evolved into London’s Birkbeck, for example).

Banbury’s institute, founded in 1835, seems to have been well used and by the early 1880s had outgrown its original building. Hence this one, built in 1884 and designed by local architect W E Mills in a kind of Tudor semi-Gothic. Mills was clearly the man for the job – he also taught at the Institute as ‘visiting master for architecture and building construction’. At night his rows of windows must have shone like true beacons of learning.

Art and Architecture, Mainly has some interesting posts about mechanics' institutes in Australia, the first of which is here.