York

Curves and arches

In the next couple of posts I’m looking back to my summer visit to York, with its magnificent railway station.

I’m an admirer of the great train sheds of large Victorian stations. Their scale, and the elegant engineering that makes this possible, still inspire awe a century and a half or more after they were built. But there’s something especially admirable about York station – it’s built over a line that curves. Some 795 feet in length, the platforms are spanned by ribs that take the form of five-centred arches, coming to rest on stout Corinthian columns. These ribs are pierced with quatrefoils and circles, which gives them a lightness (both visual and in terms of weight), allowing the sun to shine through where the roof above is glazed. As the platform and the roof describe their gentle curves, there’s a pleasing visual counterpoint on a scale that’s unmatched in any other English station, with the exception of Newcastle. It’s a magnificent sweep, hardly noticed by most passengers as they alight from their train – minding the gap between the train and the platform edge, of course – and hurry to the exit and whatever has brought them to York in the first place.

It’s a stunning structure, and there are visual pleasures to be had from the details too. Not every one of the arches has its own Corinthian column – only every third arch is immediately above a column. The intermediate arches are held up by lateral girders supported on elliptical brackets. Parts of this supporting metalwork are pierced in the same way as the arches, and there are displays of railway symbolism and heraldry in the spandrels. The coat of arms of the North Eastern Railway Company, which built the station, are prominent, and are picked out in bright colours.

To railway historians this is York’s ‘new’ station, having been completed in 1877 to designs by Thomas Prosser. It was built to replace the ‘old’ station of 1841, which had been built inside the city walls. This station was not only too small for the increasing railway traffic, but was also inconvenient, because trains had to reverse to get in or out through the arch that had been cut into the city walls to allow access. The new station has served its purpose well, both for the NER and for the other companies whose trains have used it since.

York, Feasegate

Iron on display

Look up in central York and, above the shopfronts, you’ll see all kinds of evidence of the city’s architectural and social history. Georgian brickwork and sash windows are quite frequent (I think there are some Georgian sash windows reflected in the upper-level glazing of the building in my photograph). Tudor or earlier timber framing can also be found with ease – with great ease as its black and white patterns readily catch the eye. Here’s something different, a legacy of York’s later history. Above the frontages of the Yorkshire Building Society and Motto Sushi is a facade that’s nearly all glass, held together with iron beams and slender columns and punctuated with still more slender glazing bars.

The generous iron eaves cornice at the top allies the building to classical culture, but the proportions of the rest are not at all classical – this is a structure of the industrial age, and it shows. Its builders have put the technology of the railways and factories to use in a shopping street – this was a substantial multi-storey shop, with upper windows in which large goods such as furniture could be displayed. It’s the shop as showroom, and 100 years ago made a bold architectural statement amongst the brick and timber facades, although most people now barely notice it.

The building was completed in 1885. The architect was called W. Brown* and the framework he specified was manufactured by York’s Thomlinson Walker foundry – the foundry incorporated their name into the structure’s right-hand upright, where it can still be seen (albeit made less distinct by successive coast of paint), low down on the base.† The presence of the founder’s ‘signature’ draws attention to the fact that in spite of the modern shopfronts, the whole structure, from pavement level to cornice, is still very much intact.

Iron foundry name on base of column

The other key element in this facade is of course the glass. This is plate glass, the production of which had come on in leaps and bounds since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a huge quantity of the material was produced for London’s Crystal Palace. So the technology was well up to speed by the 1880s. Even so, using such large sheets of glass with such slender supports was unusual – Pevsner refers to the facade as ‘a remarkably radical piece of work’. True. It’s well worth craning one’s neck to take a look, though many will draw the line at getting down on one knee as I did to take a picture of the founder’s name.

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* I wonder if he was the William Brown listed as ‘architect and sanitary engineer’ in York in the late-Victorian period.

† This foundry’s reach extended far beyond York – they made the railings at London’s National Gallery.

Coleford, Gloucestershire

 

Wood, coal and iron

The Forest of Dean, the area of ancient Gloucestershire woodland between the Rivers Severn and Wye, is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. Ancient trees, including oak, beech, sweet chestnut, birch, holly and various conifers, abound, while parts of the forest are rich in wild flowers and fungi. What surprises many visitors is that the region also has a rich industrial history. It was once studded with coal mines (a few were still worked when I was a boy) and places where iron ore was extracted. Because there was both iron ore and trees to make charcoal, there was a major iron-smelting industry in Roman times and in the Middle Ages, when the metal was sent to centres such as Gloucester as well as being worked locally.

In the late-18th century, iron smelters in many regions realised that coke could be a more efficient fuel for their furnaces and by the 1790s, some industrialists were making coke from the local coal and using it to smelt iron. Just outside Coleford there are the remains of a large coke-fired blast furnace that was built for smelting iron ore in 1798. Investors in the furnace included a stockbroker from London called Thomas Halford. He became unhappy with the money that iron from the furnace was making him – it took about 80 tons of iron ore and 120 tons of coke to make a mere 20 tons of pig iron. Halford began to correspond with an expert in the field, David Mushet of Derbyshire. Mushet went into partnership with Halford and by 1810 had moved to the Forest to run the furnace.

It quickly became clear to Mushet that he couldn’t make a profit from the furnace – rich as the local ore was, the Forest coal simply didn’t lend itself to coke production. Mushet sold his shares and Halford eventually went bankrupt. The ruined furnace remains, its great arch leading into a vast space where the ore was heated. The size of the structure, the very thick walls, the chunky masonry all speak of a purposeful industrial structure here among the trees. There was originally also a steam engine to pump away and send a blast of air into the furnace to keep the internal temperature high enough to melt the iron. The clanking engine, the horse-drawn tramroad bringing in coal and ore, the activity of the workmen – all of this must have made this a noisy, bustling place. It’s quiet now, with the occasional sound of traffic on the road to Coleford the loudest sound, and between the cars, the song of birds.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

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* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.

Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Still flushing

As I am not quite ready to post any recently visited buildings, this is a structure from a trip to the Chiltern Open Air Museum last summer. It consists of a number of standard manufactured parts that are designed to be shipped to the site where they can be assembled. What the original owners got when they assembled the building was a rather large public lavatory. It was built in 1906 in Caversham,. at one end of a tram line that terminated near the River Thames by Caversham Bridge.

I have posted before about metal lavatories or ‘public conveniences’ as they used to be called in Britain,* in cities such as Bath, Bristol or Lincoln. However, the loos in my earlier posts were quite small – ideal for tucking away in a small space where demand would not be too high. The Chiltern Open Air Museum’s example, on the other hand is really large. It’s made up of 451 panels of cast iron and a series of iron uprights with slots in them into which the panels slid. For privacy, there are no windows in the wall panels, but light comes in through clerestory windows in a ‘lantern’ feature that sticks up in the centre of the roof. The upper parts of the wall panels are pierced with numerous holes arranged in an ornamental pattern, to allow smells out and fresh air in. The building is divided in two, with separate parts for men and women, and the original users (from 1906, when the building was erected) inserted one penny into the slot on the door of one of the cubicles.

Now the public loo is at the museum, it is still used for its original purpose and still seems to contain the original plumbing and sanitary ware. It’s the first of these metal-panel public loos I’ve seen that is still fulfilling its original function. Impressive, it seems to me, after some 118 years of service. Most of the buildings in open-air museums are no longer used in the way that was first intended – they’re displayed as houses, shops, workshops, churches, toll houses, and so on, and very interesting they are. This example of continued use deserved to be celebrated – and not only when one is feeling the need for it after much refreshment in the museum’s tea shop.

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* British English: lavatories, public toilets, public conveniences, loos; American English: restroom, bathroom.

Gents: interior showing clerestory grilles to admit light and air

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

The great and the goods

Huddersfield station (see my previous post) had imposing buildings for passengers, but a lot of its traffic carried goods. As a result, its goods yard acquired two warehouses, the first, a plain stone building, conventionally built with load-bearing stone walls, and the one in my picture, an enormous structure held up by internal cast-iron columns with an outer ‘skin’ of red and blue bricks.

This monster storage facility was built in 1885, cost £100,000,* and came with its own built-in wagon hoist. The part of the building that protrudes from the facade at the far end, supported by large cast-iron Doric columns, contained this hoist. The mechanism used hydraulic power to raise railway wagons to an upper floor for loading and unloading. Once at the upper level, the wagons could be moved around on internal tracks using electric power, thanks to overhead wires like those supplying modern electric trains. There were also internal hoists and capstans for moving the unloaded goods around, and separating it on to the different floors, each of which was allocated to a particular commodity – textiles, grain, potatoes, miscellaneous goods.

The building has an interesting past but a challenging future. Recent years have seen a roof replacement, and works such as window and door replacements to conservation standards, and work on the interiors with the aim of making them fit for office accommodation and other uses. Marrying such diverse requirements as UK Net Zero targets, thermal efficiency and conservation standards is part of the challenge. But at least the building is being cared for and plans are being made for its future life.

 
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* There are different ways of calculating the value of historical sums of money, but the Bank of England’s inflation calculator puts the value of goods and services costing £100,000 in 1885 at £10,764,769.09 in 2024.

Black Country Living Museum, Dudley

New departure 

With England still under restrictions of various kinds, my mind goes back with something like nostalgia to a visit the Resident Wise Woman and I made to the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM), several months before Covid 19 struck. Britain has some magnificent open-air museums. Some are places like Avoncroft or the Weald and Downland Museum, where the primary aim is to relocate and preserve interesting old buildings that would almost certainly have been demolished; these are totally fascinating places that do wonderful work in both architectural and social history. At the other end of the scale are enormous sites like the Black Country Living Museum, at which costumed guides explain exhibits that range from rolling mills to Victorian sweetshops and you can buy fish and chips using Britain’s pre-1971 non-decimal currency. I have to say, before I went to the BCLM, I’d thought this was too gimmicky for me, but the guides are well informed, the food decent, and the work of architectural preservation very impressive indeed.§  

The BCLM contains several houses, all well cared for and beautifully displayed. Most of them are built of brick, but this one is different and without the museum’s excellent guidebook I’d not have known what it was. It’s actually a pair of semi-detached council houses, built in Dudley in 1925. It’s a reminder that, after World War I, people tried alternative ways of house-building because of a shortage of materials and skilled labour. This pair, one of only two pairs built, was an experiment with building using two-foot-square cast-iron panels, made in the Eclipse Foundry in Dudley and bolted together on-site.  

The house was impressive to anyone brought up on Victorian accommodation and its basic or absent plumbing – there were bathrooms with fitted baths and hot and cold running water for a start, although the kitchen had a traditional coal-burning range and the house was lit by gas.* But the main problem was not the mix of old- and new-style fittings. The problem for Dudley council was that the dwellings cost more to build than traditional houses, so this type of house was not produced in volume. 

So few people had the chance even to see this innovative dwelling (or to think of an ‘iron house’ as anything other than a corrugated iron house) until this one ended up in the museum. Something similar happened with the attempts at prefabricated house building after World War II. Postwar prefabs were built in large numbers, but most have now vanished and today you’re almost as likely to see one in a museum as anywhere else.† We’re still putting up houses using old technology today.  

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§ I should add that such performative and informative fare is also sometimes available at museums like Avoncroft, where I once saw nails made by hand, just as they were in the Victorian Midlands (John Ruskin memorably described nail-making in Fors Clavigera). But there such things are occasional extras, not part of the usual offering as they are at the BCLM. 

* When we visited, the interiors were not open because work was being done on the houses; a further reason to return to the Black Country Living Museum, one day. 

† I exaggerate slightly. There are still postwar prefabs about, but most have been adapted and reclad out of all recognition. There are some pristine ones, well looked after and listed, at Moseley, Birmingham.

Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (1): Time for shopping

One of the things I’d like to do while travel is restricted is to make some virtual revisits to places I’ve mentioned before on the blog, but which deserve more coverage. A good example is the fascinating city of Leeds – which I covered in September 2019 as ‘Gigantic Leeds’. Maybe it’s time for a short selection of samples of Leeds on a smaller scale.

My first is one of the half-dozen arcades in the city. It’s Thornton’s Arcade, built as part of a development that included some offices and the City Varieties Music Hall, in the Victorian period. Back then, shopping was becoming very much the leisure activity it was in the 20th century, and many cities were building arcades, where people could shop away from the bustle, traffic, noise, and mess of the streets. Such an idea had an obvious appeal to late-Victorian and Edwardian women, who wore long dresses that could get muddied – and worse – on busy and horse-bound city streets, and who liked the idea of a safe, covered environment in which to shop. 

Architect George Smith produced a narrow but comfortable small arcade with an iron and glass roof, which, like that of a railway station, ensured that the interior was flooded with natural light. So shoppers could see where they were going – and what was on display in the shop windows – and security staff could keep a watch for pickpockets, a menace that, years after Oliver Twist, was still very much with us.

The roof is pointed and its is supported by and rests on unusual horseshoe-shaped trusses. These trusses, similar to the one visible in my picture, are painted blue and take the viewer into a different world – the kind of mild orientalism that reminds me that the bazaar in one of James Joyce’s short stories was called ‘Araby’.

At the far end is the piece de resistance: a clock with cast-iron automata. The figures include Richard Coeur de Lion, Robin Hood, Gurth the Swineherd, and Friar Tuck,† and are drawn from the once very familiar Robin Hood stories, in particular as made popular by Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. Potts and Sons (eminent clockmakers who sold public clocks nationwide but were based in Leeds) manufactured the clock and the figures (almost life-size – not quite so small-scale, then) were done by J. W. Appleyard, a Leeds stone-carver and sculptor. Clocks were invaluable in a period when owning a watch was by no means universal, and the colourful tableau also turned the timepiece into a bit of entertainment – another example of the tendency for shopping to become – as fitting in an arcade next to a music hall – part of the entertainment industry.

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† Friar Tuck has presumably pulled up his habit to give him freedom of movement as he does his share of the heavy work of striking the bells.

Farmington, Gloucestershire

Well shod

When it comes to exploring churches, sometimes the fun starts before you even get to the building.

Pausing by the churchyard wall in the Cotswold village of Farmington, you see this: a gate made up of 90-odd horseshoes, artfully arranged. Horseshoe gates are not unusual. I suppose they’re a pragmatic example of recycling – with the added attraction, for the superstitious user, that horseshoes are supposed to bring good luck. But what struck me with this example was that the horsehoes had been arranged architecturally. What I mean is that the central motif, a quatrefoil made up of four horseshoes, is a  piece of architectural ornament, and one often used in medieval churches. I have noticed quatrefoils before, on church fonts, church walls, church windows. The quatrefoil, you might say, is a way of making a horseshoe gate into a fitting entrance to a churchyard.

Or you might just say that it’s a winning bit of fun.

Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, Shropshire

 A view of the bridge

The Darby family of Coalbrookdale were among the greatest industrialists of their time, the people who revolutionized the production of iron. Abraham Darby I pioneered ironmaking in blast furnaces fuelled by coke, enabling the metal to be produced in the quantities needed for industry to expand rapidly. He also developed a way of casting pots using sand moulds that proved very lucrative. Later generations carried on in the business and Abraham Darby III, grandson of the first Abraham, working with the architect Thomas Pritchard, gave us the area’s most famous structure, the world’s first iron bridge.

The Darbys lived in a pair of houses a couple of hundred yards up the hill from their furnace and works. These houses are substantial Georgian middle-class homes, but not at all flashy. The Darbys were Quakers and did not go in for lavish living – the rooms are quite small and rather plain. But look closely, and one sees evidence of their achievements. This fireplace must be one of thousands produced at Coalbrookdale. But they don’t all have an image of the celebrated iron bridge cast into them. Examine the lower arch of this fireplace and that’s just what you see – an outline that’s world famous now and must have been one of the things of which the Darbys were most proud. How like them to mark this achievement so discreetly.

The iron bridge itself has survived over 230 years, a marvel of graceful design. It manages to span the Severn almost transparently, but its outline is instantly recognisable. It’s in need of repair now – ground movement over the years, an earthquake in the 19th century, and stresses that have always existed have caused cracking. A major project is beginning to repair the bridge, so that it can last far into the future as a monument to the skill and ingenuity of the Darbys and their architect.

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire

 Showing your wares

In my previous post I focused on the former Severn Warehouse at Ironbridge, an industrial building that was built with an eye to appearances, a deliberate eye-catcher. This time, a rather plainer industrial building not far from the one in the previous post, but one with one particularly eye-catching feature, something that is perhaps more effective as advertising than the Gothic structure of the old Severn Warehouse.

My photograph above shows the building housing the Museum of Iron, which the Resident Wise Woman and I had decided to visit. It’s a fascinating museum, giving us plenty of background on iron and inorworking in general, on the various generations of the Darby family and the great John ‘Iron Mad’ Wilkinson in particular, and on the products of the industry in Coalbrookdale, from fire grates to firearms. All this is housed in a brick-walled warehouse building, put up by the the Coalbrookdale Company some time in the first half of the 19th century. The striking clock tower bears the date 1843, but this is said to be a later addition to an already existing building. Some sources say that the warehouse was first built in 1792, but it’s not shown on a map of 1805. 1838 is the likely year of construction.

Part of the structure is appropriately of iron – there are iron columns inside holding up the floors, but there’s also much wood in evidence: this is not one of those fireproof buildings that many textile mill owners, mindful of sparks igniting wool or cotton, liked to put up. Iron is also in evidence on the outside. The white-painted window lintels and sills are cast iron and the window frames are metal. So too is the clock tower, an elaborately decorative addition to an otherwise utilitarian building. It’s an effective piece of publicity for what you could do with metal in a decorative way, and a signal, perhaps, that as the Victorian era got up steam, manufacturers in Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale would increasingly be asked to produce highly decorative items – kitchen ranges, stoves, tables and chairs, not to mention garden railings and post boxes. There is a lot of this sort of stuff inside the museum. The clock tower is, you might say, exhibit number one.

Ironbridge, Shropshire

Industrial eyecatcher

You drive through Ironbridge with the river on your left and suddenly you see a row of brick gables with a pointed Gothic window under each and buttresses sticking out on to the pavement. A little further on, the end of the building reveals its from behind some trees and your jaw drops as a pair of slender turrets – crenellated and with faux arrow loops, but far too small for an archer to stand inside – and an apse-like structure with more crenellations and pointed windows appears. Whatever can it be?

The short answer is that it’s the Museum of the Gorge, where visitors can go to learn all about the  Ironbridge area. But of course it has not always been a museum. It was built in around 1840 as the Severn Warehouse, where finished items from the foundries were stored until the River Severn’s water level, which varied greatly from season to season, was high enough for boats to transport them away. The main block, with the row of gables, was the warehouse; the apse was an office; the turrets conceal chimneys. The architect of all this was Samuel Cookson, who clearly wanted a ‘statement building’, something to stand out and catch the eye: architecture as advertisement. There are other warehouses nearby, but they are quite plain.

Looking at the end of the building, one can see a bit more clearly how it worked. On either side of the office are large doors, through which big cast iron objects could be wheeled on carts down the slope to the river. The paved slope has grooves – plateways – along which the carts would run, down to the sandstone walls of the riverside wharf to the waiting Severn trows.

The ironmasters of the industrial revolution liked to show off the versatility of their chosen material, making furniture, signs, even coffins of iron, as well as the more expected industrial machinery and bridge components. But this area was not just a source of iron, it was also rich in clay, spawning potteries, tileworks, and brickworks. Cookson’s extraordinary building is an example of what Ironbridge’s brick workers could do when they tried.

Water Street, Liverpool

Blowing bubbles

The third of my Liverpudlian trio is Oriel Chambers, an office block in Water Street that has been catching eyes since 1864. It was designed by Liverpool architect Peter Ellis (who did the equally striking 16 Cook Street and a number of other, less notable, Liverpool buildings) and it has always fascinated me.

What’s striking at first glance is the amount of glass, and its arrangement. Dozens of similar oriel windows protrude from building’s two street facades. They have very narrow glazing bars, so the effect is almost like a series of glass bubbles. There are no structural outer walls. This is a framework building, and the frame is of cast iron, although the material is concealed from the world by a thin cladding of stone.

So, how very modern, one thinks, for 1864: a tall, metal-framed building with a ‘curtain wall’ of glass, like a 20th-century skyscraper. And yet, also, how old-fashioned: the metal is covered with stone, and the skyline is punctuated with pinnacles that look almost Gothic. The oriels themselves have little finials too. So it’s a mixture, this building, and no less fascinating for that.

When it was built, the press disliked it. Building News thought the oriels looked as if they were ‘trying to escape from the building’ and called it ‘greenhouse architecture gone mad’. A Liverpool critic in a satirical magazine called The Porcupine called the building ‘this vast abortion’ and said that ‘the plainest brick warehouse in the town is infinitely superior, as a building, to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles.’ They didn’t much bother about the back of the building, which is even more remarkably modern, as the video below about Oriel Chambers and Ellis’s Cook Street block, reveals.

There used to be a lot of speculation that Ellis’s career was derailed by the contemporary criticism he received for Oriel Chambers. But historians Robert Ainsworth and Graham Jones* have researched the architect’s life and work, and have found a man quietly thriving as an architect and surveyor – and pursuing new directions, which I hope to cover in a further post. Meanwhile, we can, I think, admire Oriel Chambers as a fascinating building that looks forward to modernist architecture while also glancing back towards tradition: not a bad way of working, to my mind. His building is an asset to Liverpool and deservedly famous.

With many thanks once more to Joe Treasure for the pictures of Oriel Chambers.


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* Robert Ainsworth and Graham Jones, In the Footsteps of Peter Ellis (Liverpool History Society, 2013)

Potterne, Wiltshire

A downward glance

‘Isn’t that slag?’ The Resident Wise Woman’s mind was more on geology than the elegant but rather forbidding Early English Gothic Gothic architecture of St Mary’s church, Potterne. What caught her eye was the black material among the masonry lining the steps in the churchyard, a by-product of smelting (probably of iron, though one sometimes sees copper slag): a substance that is hard, irregular, dark, and durable.

It’s something we’d noticed before in a different form in the Gloucestershire town of Newnham on Severn, where there’s a house partly built of slag. There, the material, produced during copper smelting, had been poured into moulds while still liquid, so that it set in big rectangular blocks ideal for building. Here at Potterne, though, it’s simply made up of irregular lumps. It’s dark, and more forbidding in its way that the architecture of the church, but has found a useful function.

I don’t know where this slag came from – Wiltshire is not a place I particularly associate with historic ironworking (the Weald and the Forest of Dean were more the places for this kind of thing) although I have seen online references to Saxon-period smelting in the Ramsbury area and Westbury had an iron industry in the 19th century. I’d love to know more about the origin of this unusually located and unlooked-for slag.*

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* Thanks to a reader who has pointed out that the Seend ironworks was not far away: this is a likely source.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

The church of pizza

Cheltenham has some fine restaurants, but few have interiors as striking as this one, set in a redundant church of the early-19th century.

The church of St James, Suffolk Square, in Cheltenham, was built in the 1820s, originally to plans by local architect Edward Jenkins, designer of several of the surrounding streets of houses. But Jenkins hit problems – or at least his clients had difficulties with his plans.* He’d proposed a very ambitious roof, spanning both the nave and the aisles on either side, and misgivings were expressed about its structural strength, So an independent architectural enquiry was called, and the result was that another architect, Cheltenham stalwart J B Papworth, was brought in to finish the church.

Papworth saw that the way to make the roof work was to build its supports out of iron. So those slender columns, apparently of stone, have hidden iron cores, and the dark-coloured arched trusses that sit on them and carry the roof are iron too, with Gothic detailing to distract us from their industrial origins. It’s an elegant and effective solution.

In the nave, the architecture is not too fancy but carefully detailed – the stone that clads the slender iron columns is topped and tailed with very plain capitals and high bases. The columns support balconies halfway up that have fronts with Gothic tracery on them. But looking eastwards towards the big window, the carving gets much more lively. This is in part due to a makeover in 1876–82 when the church got a new east end. No doubt this was in response to architectural and religious fashion. Whereas the Georgian and Regency periods had gone for mostly rather plain box-like churches with good acoustics (ideal for listening to sermons), the later Victorian period saw a movement toward stressing the importance of the sacraments and providing a beautiful architectural setting for them. Carving, ornate arches, and a window with filigree tracery, were the order of the day.

Now diners look towards the east end and watch priestly chefs demonstrate the craft of dough-kneading and the artful arrangement of toppings while the oven glows in splendour where the High Altar once stood. Sacrilege? Surely not. When a church falls redundant, it’s a happy day when someone finds a viable new use for the building. Against the odds, perhaps, St James’s makes a good place to enjoy a meal while contemplating the ways of architects, their engineering challenges, and the delicate Gothic architecture of the 19th century. I didn’t need much encouragement to stay for a very choclatey pudding, and I enjoyed it all the more for the surroundings.

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* Footnote Problems with Jenkins may have been exacerbated by the fact that around this time he eloped with Charlotte Balfour, the daughter of one of his patrons. By 1828 he had moved to Leamington, so perhaps he felt that discretion was the better part of valour and that his talents could be useful in a different spa town.

St James's Church, Cheltenham is a branch of Zizzi.

Evesham, Worcestershire

Emporium

Look up in Evesham High Street and you see this extraordinary bit of late-19th century facade above a modern shop front. Four very large plate-glass windows separated by columns in cast iron, surmounted by an ornate cornice emblazoned with the building’s name – Anchor House – and a balustrade, complete with urn finials and ornate decorations with palmetto leaves and scrolls that derive from ancient originals known as acroteria. As so often with the buildings I single out for comment, we’re not in the realm of great architecture here. The columns between the big windows are almost laughably slender; the lettering of the name is rather workaday; and as for the modern shopfront, I’ll restrain myself and not comment.

And yet it’s a striking frontage. It must originally have been quite an impressive shop. Quite a few late-19th century emporia had upper showrooms with big windows, letting in lots of light and even, should the objects on sale be large, the opportunity for a display that could be seen from the street. Dealers in furniture, for example, could take advantage of that kind of display, and late-Victorian department stores (which had commonly evolved from businesses such as drapers) often had lots of glass at the front, to light the deep interior and shed the best light on the goods within. Now, alas, the panes are blank and the upper floor, presumably, is given over to storage. But Anchor House still makes its mark.

Postscript
One of my readers, whose family comes from the Evesham area, notes that this building once belonged to a department store called Hamilton and Bell, which also occupied several of the adjoining buildings. This snippet of information is an example of the kind of thing that makes blogging worthwhile – I give me readers a little information and the pay me back in kind. My hunch that this could have been a department store is confirmed. I'm most grateful and have included the information here because not everyone reads the comments pages of blogs.

Thaxted, Essex

Weather forecats

Plain vanes or pennants often, fish now and then, foxes and hounds, ships, and human figures occasionally, and the ubiquitous cockerel more frequently than not; sometimes a stag, a horse, or a beast from the field of heraldry; a dragon or grasshopper or two. That list sums up the iconography of weather wanes (or wind vanes, or weathercocks, as in ‘That weathercock’s a fish!’), though no doubt my readers can think of some more examples.

There are also a few weather vanes that are famously unique landmarks: Old Father Time at Lord’s Cricket Ground, Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s ship The Rodney at Rochester, Erasmus seated the wrong way round on a horse in Whitechapel.

My picture shows one that’s more humble than these examples, and far from unique. But I’ve not often come across feline weathervanes, so wanted to share this cat in Thaxted, set on his pleasantly scrolly mount. His tail is scrolly too, and his markings admirable, although I wondered when I saw him if they had faded from a deeper ginger. Whether or not that’s so, he still stands guard effectively, catching the eye, and the wind.

Bath, Somerset

From the sun to the stars

My journey to Bath, which I interrupted to visit the Bristol public lavatory in the previous post, encompassed another pissoir, this one looking sadly dilapidated, although the scars are probably mainly superficial. The building hangs on, locked up and unkempt, in a shady corner of Sydney Gardens, the park behind the Holburne Museum.

This example, like the Bristol one, is made of iron. Apparently it’s a product of the Star Works in Birmingham (the Bristol example came from the Sun Foundry in Glasgow – clearly these Victorian businesses looked to the heavens for their onomastic inspiration). The Star Works produced many such conveniences, although very few now stand. Rectilinear where the Bristol gents is rounded, it has openwork ventilation panels around the tops of the walls and rectangular panels below, each decorated with an abstract design that recalls, without reproducing exactly, a compass rose. This kind of decoration, which leaves behind the curvaceous lines of Art Nouveau, suggests a date somewhere in the second decade of the 20th century. At some stage after this, the pissoir was painted a tasteful grey, although the peeling paintwork on the side in my photograph reveals early green coats beneath – green being the most common colour for such buildings, especially when sited, as here, in public parks.

Sydney Gardens now has new public lavatories in a nearby stone-clad structure that looks very substantial. I don’t know what the future is for the Victorian building, but I hope, in preservation-conscious Bath, that it has some hope of survival.

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

On the road to recovery

There will be celebrations today in Shrewsbury, with the announcement that one of its major buildings, which has been 'at risk' for years, has been allocated a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Ditherington Flax Mill (also known as the Flax Mill Maltings) looks set for a fresh start.

This is an enormous building and was made still larger when it was converted to a maltings. The original part, the flax mill on the left built in the 1790s, contains some 30,000 square feet of factory floor ranged over five storeys. But the key thing is not the size, but the structure. It's held up by a framework of iron – not just iron columns, but iron horizontal beams and tie rods too – and this makes it the world's first fully metal-framed building.

The mill was designed by wine merchant, textile manufacturer, surveyor and engineer Charles Bage. Bage's interest in the use of iron in building wasn't surprising – the first iron bridge at Coalbrookdale was not far away, there was an iron foundry in Shrewsbury, and he was a friend of civil engineers such as Thomas Telford and William Strutt of Derby, a builder of mills who had already employed iron columns in his structures but hadn't gone the whole hog and used iron beams as well. Bage made that extra step to a full metal frame.

The advantages of this kind of building were clear – modular construction, minimal interruption of the floor space by the slender columns, and resistance to fire. The fire-resistant quality of a building made of an iron frame supporting brick walls and arches was especially attractive to mill owners, although this building was not truly fireproof – the metal would have buckled at high temperatures. Bage used cast iron and, although later engineers would later prefer wrought iron, and then steel, for structural frameworks, he had made a beginning, one which would make possible the rise of the skyscraper, and all that has entailed.

I'm pleased that this landmark building, one of countless historical industrial buildings that has lain unused because of the substantial repair and conservation costs, is now a big step further on the road to a secure future.

Flax Mill, interior showing iron columns and brick-arched ceiling
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There is more about the Flax Mill here.

Buckland, Berkshire*

Fit for purpose

I'm continuously humbled and astounded by the beauties to be found in English churches, especially those that are off the tourist trail and off the radar of all but the most assiduous and specialised art historians. Buckland, in the marshy area not far from Faringdon, is a case in point. You could spend a day or more in this building, which has evolved steadily over the centuries and incorporates the work of artists and craftworkers from every period from Norman to Victorian, and still not see everything. For now, I'll limit myself to a couple of details from either end of this vast historical span.

The first you see before you even get properly inside the building. This door dates to the 12th century, making its simple ironwork among the earliest one is likely to find. The metal has been cut quite crudely, but the broad horizontals, the great rounded forms, and the more tightly circling scrolls with which they terminate have been made with a certainty of purpose that no doubt made them as easy to admire in the Middle Ages as they are today. This ironwork has been fulfilling that purpose – multiple purposes rather, to provide hinges, to bind together and reinforce the timbers of the door, and to decorate its surface – for some 800 years. Standing near the beginning of a long craft tradition, it deserves to be far better known than it is.

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*Buckland is now in Oxfordshire, but I use the traditional English counties because they reflect the usage in Pevsner's invaluable Buildings of England books – and because I like them.