Birmingham

Turning point, 3

For the third in this sequence of three Birmingham buildings, I return to Hockley Hill to look at a close neighbour of Gem Buildings, posted the other day. This is a retail building, originally the premises of Harry Smith, ironmonger. It survived as an ironmonger’s until relatively recently and the lettering of its signs, including those of the adjoining shop, is still clear. An old-fashioned ironmonger could function in any kind of shop, provided there was plenty of space to house the bewildering variety of stock. This embraced virtually anything made of metal and much that was not. Locks, cutlery, and tools, of course; but also buckets, pots, and pans; stoves and kitchen ranges; knobs for doors and drawers; bell systems for calling one’s servants, or for responding to the ringing command if one was a servant – all of these things were the preserve of the ironmonger and might well have been on sale here in 1913, when this building, like my previous two, was erected.

So if you think this building stark, if you prefer the traditional shop next door with its sash windows and conventional shop window, I sympathise, but pause for thought. Harry Smith might well have wanted to look up to date – or to want to combine the traditional virtues of good service and reliability with the latest in household convenience, c. 1913. What’s more, the plain facade in its heyday would have been, I suspect, little more than a picture frame for the lively composition of goods, from brooms to incinerators, that would have spilled out on to that broad pavement. Personally I still find something to admire in the frame, even now the picture is no more.

Ashburton, Devon

The sweep of history

Places like Ashburton warm the cockles of my heart. Any small town with an ironmonger and a bookshop is bound to please me. Anywhere with a good selection of charming houses, dating from the medieval period to the 19th century, is likely to please me too. Put the two together, with some decent coffee shops and a smattering of other eateries and pubs eateries, and you have a winner.

I was, of course, immediately attracted to this medieval arch, around which later buildings have grown up and multiplied with a casualness which, combined with slate-hung walls, or timber framing, or decent brickwork, makes satisfying townscape. That sort of satisfying milieu is just the context here, and the arch, charmingly encumbered with washing-up bowls, dog baskets, and other impedimenta of ironmongery, plays its part. It’s thought to be late-medieval, and looks it, and there have been remodellings in various periods, from the 16th century onwards

The building must have changed use a few times. It is said to have once been the Mermaid Inn. It’s easy to start fantasizing about the life this building has seen – everything from drunken brawls to debates about the merits of plastic and galvanized metal buckets – and this modest building played a part in at least one of the pivotal phases of the great sweep of English history. It’s reported that General Fairfax, Parliamentary General of Horse and supreme commander (before he was replaced with Cromwell when he refused to march against the Scots, who supported Charles II), stayed here after he drove the Royalists out of the town on 10 January 1646.

Fairfax is certainly a figure worth remembering, but this small medieval building, with its arch made of huge chunks of granite, is worth looking at for itself. Not least because medieval town houses are unusual. In Devon they’re almost as scarce as hens’ teeth.

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* During their advance into the West Country, the Parliamentary army were active in Tiverton, Bovey Tracey, Torrington, Launceston, and Truro. There is more information here.

Old Street, London

Sign of past times

Crowning a rather utilitarian looking building on Old Street – mostly a mix of brick walls and long, metal-framed strip windows – is this fancy pediment carved in an elegant letterform ‘H. Snuggs & Co’. I can’t be the only person to have looked up there above the fourth floor and wondered who H. Snuggs was.

He was, it turns out, an ironmonger, who was in partnership with Joseph Snuggs and John Edward Harwood in the late-19th century. This partnership was dissolved in 1899, when Henry Snuggs seems to have left, but the firm carried on until at least the 1920s. The notice of the partnership’s dissolution in 1921 says they were ‘Wholesale ironmongers’, so they would have been supplying goods to many different retail outlets, probably mainly in London but perhaps further afield. Ironmongers offered huge ranges of stock, from cutlery and kitchenware to stoves, grates, doorbell systems, tools of all sorts, and, in the country, agricultural equipment too. No doubt those light upper rooms would have been full of such stock.

It’s a tall, narrow building, and the sign, with its thin-stroked lettering, seems rather subtle for a commercial company that needed to signal its presence on a busy street. However, I recall a photograph from more than twenty years ago showing the sign looking rather different, with the letters picked out against a terracotta background, as if it, like the walls, were built of brick. With this sort of colour scheme, and no doubt a bold sign lower down at shop-front level, it was probably clear to everyone where H. Snuggs was, and what it was he was selling.

Castle Cary, Somerset

Mr White’s shop

Taking a step back to photograph the lovely Market House in Castle Cary, I bumped up against this delightful shopfront, which looks as if it dates from around 1900. The building itself has a date stone that suggests it was built in 1804, but the ironmonger Thomas White was not in business here until the late-19th or early-20th century (he appears on a list of local businesses in 1906). The tiling on the lower part of the shopfront (the stall riser is the term for this bit), especially the decorations on each end, is very much in the Art Nouveau style of c. 1890–1910. The lettering, though, isn’t in the highly curvaceous manner of some Art Nouveau scripts – it’s a bit more sober than that, appropriate perhaps for a business selling buckets and spades, pots and kettles.

White Ironmonger, Castle Cary, tiled stall riser

I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether this elegant tiling would have been invisible when the shop was open. Ironmongers have a traditional preference for reclaiming the pavement as an extra display area, populating the space in front of the frontage with large items such as dustbins and mop buckets. There was no mistaking what was on sale – you could see the stuff before you got anywhere near the shop. At the end of the day, though, when Thomas White brought in his stock and locked up for the night, his name was displayed, bright and clear, to remind everyone that tomorrow they’d be able to buy beeswax, wire wool, bells, and whistles – you should have known you needed them – right here.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Still bright, still sharp

"Built to last" is something people like to say about architecture, and buildings are usually seen as enduring structures. Nearly all the buildings I post about are considerably older than I am, and some of them are 1000 years old or more. But I also like now and then to notice the ephemeral bits and bobs that get attached to buildings. Notices and advertising signs especially: old signs and posters pointing us towards camera film, wagonettes, elastic glue, beer, tea… Most of these weren't meant to be permanent, but somehow they cling on to walls and windows, against all the odds and against ideas that tell us that advertising has to keep up with the times, keep reinventing itself.

I saw two more examples at the weekend, stuck to the windows of an ironmonger's shop, Rickard's in Ludlow, a building of which I took many more photographs that I will no doubt share with you eventually. Two stick-on advertisements, one on either side of the shop door, still hanging on, and hanging in.

First, a vibrant sign for Atlas Lamps, which caught my eye because it's so colourful. Atlas lamps were in existence by the 1930s – in 1932 or 1933 Jules Thorn, the founder of the Thorn electrical company, started as a lighting manufacturer by buying up the Atlas Works, in Edmonton, London, where Atlas Lamps were produced. The "For staying power" slogan was in use in the 1940s and 1950s – I've seen it in newspaper advertisements of 1949 and 1950, both using the same distinctive typeface for "ATLAS" that appears on this shop sign. Thorn was still using the Atlas name in the 1960s and 1970s, after which the range was absorbed into the Thorn catalogue. This sign may date from the 1950s, as 1960s Atlas items I've seen online use bold lower-case type for the brand name.

Second, a sign for garden tools made by Wilkinson's. Beginning in the late-18th century as gunmakers, Wilkinson's started producing swords and bayonets in the early-19th century, building up a reputation for producing strong, good quality blades. Diversification into razors (1890) and garden shears (1920) followed. At various points the company produced bicycles, motorcycles, typewriters, and other items too. I've no idea how old this sign is – the style has a late-1950s or early-1960s feel to my eyes, but this is little more than the guesswork of someone trying to cast his mind back many years.

And I like the way these signs take the mind back, though my pleasure in them is more than just nostalgic. I'm interested too in the way that artists and designers presented brands in different ways – from the larky drawing of a modern Atlas lifting a light bulb to Wilkinson's more purposeful twin swords. The use of colour is a big contrast too, Atlas's bright, cheerful, appropriately well illuminated, Wilkinson's more subtle, with its mottled background like an old terrazzo floor and its hint of gold. A lot to think about on either side of this shop doorway, before you even step inside.

Earlham Street, London

More candles

As a pendant to my previous post about the ironmongers on the Market Place in Uppingham, here is a photograph of the sign above F W Collins, the ironmonger in Earlham Street, on the edge of London’s Covent Garden. In business since 1835 and owned by the same family until just a few years ago, Collins is the archetypal ironmongers, first stop for tools, screws, buckets, oil, etc, etc, for many who work in Central London and for those who live in the Covent Garden area too. The sign is a reminder that traditional ironmongers made – and occasionally invented – things as well as selling them.

Back in the 1980s I worked in an office in Covent Garden as an editor of illustrated reference books, and I or one of my colleagues often had to pop over to Collins to buy items for photo shoots. The shop usually came up with the goods, but not without a lot of banter, which usually involved the shopkeeper looking down on customers coming in to buy screws, say, or saws, with no intention of actually using the things.

I once had to buy a hammer and a sickle for a photo shoot. The response came pretty smartly: “You don’t want a ’ammer and sickle.” What business did I have with such tools of manual toil? But of course it didn’t take long before a hammer of exactly the right shape was found. Then came the question of the sickle: “A sickle? What you want a sickle for?”
“Well, I...”
“I haven’t got a sickle.”
“Oh.” Pause.
“But I’ve got a short-’andled baggin’ ’ook.”
Mr Collins vanished into a pile of garden tools, bins, and buckets, emerging, with remarkably little clanking, holding two bagging hooks, large and small models. To my untrained eye they looked very like sickles.
“Which one d’you want?”
“I’ll take the small one, please.” It looked best with the hammer.
“This? It’s a boy’s one. You want that one. That’s a man’s ’ook, that is.”
Exit “boy”, looking sheepish.

Uppingham, Rutland

Four candles

“Four candles,” says Ronnie Barker, starting off a chain of misunderstandings with his comedic partner Ronnie Corbett in one of the funniest sketches in British comedy. Corbett, behind the counter, is soon climbing stepladders, opening drawers, shifting boxes of goods, and sorting through a seemingly endless stock to find what his customer wants.† He is also evoking the world of the old-fashioned ironmonger.

Going back a few more decades, the Victorian ironmonger was one of the key people on the High Street. You could see his shop from far off because of the arrangement of buckets, bins, and brooms on the pavement outside. Coming closer, you would be able to make out rows of lamps in the window, a range of metal items such as kettles, pans, jelly moulds, and all kinds of other kitchen equipment. Then there would be tools, from hammers to saws, and all kinds of fancy work, like bell pushes and bird cages. The cavernous interior would be full of drawers and shelves, and in the gloaming beyond the front of the shop were larger items, such as tin baths and baby carriages, kitchen ranges and stoves. Somewhere in the rear would be a doorway leading to an outhouse full of farm equipment, such as the kind of plough that was often the ironmonger’s sign, and a forge where some of the stock was manufactured and where the proprietor would repair metal goods.

D Norton and Sons in the middle of Uppingham was probably like this once upon a time. It is still a cornucopia of gardening equipment and household goods and still has its 19th-century shop front, with a plough above the door and elegant classical columns on either side. I would like to ask my Uppingham correspondent to go up to those columns and tap them next time he passes by. When I was there I forgot to give them a tap to see if they produced the dull thud of stone and plaster or the ring of iron. I have posted before about an ironmonger’s shop with an iron facade, and I did wonder whether these were metal columns, but a commenter on this post says that he has tapped them, and that they feel like wood.

A lovely feature of this shop is the stained glass panels in the upper sections of the windows, advertising some of the goods and services on offer when the window was installed in the 19th century. The one on the right tells us that the proprietor was a “FURNISHING IRONMONGER”, which I take to mean that his stock was aimed mainly at the domestic market – whether fitting a kitchen range or supplying a canteen of cutlery, he would be your man. And on the left, there’s more: “GAS FITTER & BELL HANGER”. Does that mean church bells? The business of fitting door bells and the kinds of bell systems that Victorians with big houses used to summon their servants was more the usual line for ironmongers, but who knows? When the interior gleamed with oil or gas light, these stained-glass panels must have glowed, drawing the eye of passers-by on winter evenings.

Now shops like this also sell more up-to-date items such as bulbs and batteries. Part of a stick-on sign for the latter, a bygone of a more recent period, survives on this window, the blue suggesting the Ever-Ready brand. Its presence reminds me once again that there is so much more to look at in shop windows than the goods on display.

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† Or what he doesn’t want. What Barker is actually after, he soon reveals, are “Fork ‘andles. ‘Andles for forks.” And so the dialogue goes on.