York Way, London

The ‘Theophrastus effect’

It happens every now and then: you’re walking round a town or district that’s unfamiliar to you, and you notice something – an architectural detail, a combination of colours in the paintwork, a type of sign – that seems more common here than elsewhere. It can be a bit of local distinctiveness like a preference for certain patterns in pargetting, or evidence of a craftworker with notable skills, or just a fashion that has taken hold in a few neighbouring streets. Or maybe it’s just that, as you look, something strikes you and your eye and brain are alerted to other examples nearby. My personal name for this is the Theophrastus effect, because years ago I had to write something about the ancient and some would say obscure Greek writer Theophrastus and suddenly, because I was thinking about him a lot, I began to see references to him everywhere.

Walking around some of the streets near Euston Station the other week, the Theophrastus effect came into play when I started to spot metal lettering positioned over entrances to courtyards, a housing complex, and even a pub. Some of these signs incorporated fancy wrought-iron decoration and a particularly good one, the sign above the entrance to the Lincoln Arms pub, has some superb metalwork.

This is a lovely way to mark the entrance to a hostelry, drawing you into the oddly angled doorway or making a memorable impression if you’re just passing by. The letters aren’t at all bad – maybe the curved ones are less assured than the other letters, but they’re good enough to hold their own. The surrounding wrought-iron spirals, scrolls, and foliage are outstanding, in my opinion. Their inventive curves, some of which scroll, then bend in a different direction, are redolent of Art Nouveau and the way in which the foliate forms overlap the ends of the lettering slightly I find particularly appealing.

This memorable sign certainly made me want to go in, although I had a commitment elsewhere that made this impossible. I intend to go back though, not least because the building next door was covered in scaffolding, making a decent photograph of the whole pub impossible. And because, according to CAMRA,* the Lincoln Arms, which had a phase as a ‘trendy bar’ is now a traditional pub again. How pleasing that this sign has survived the various changes.

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* The Campaign for Real Ale, the organisation that has done much to improve the quality of the beer available in British pubs, as well as encouraging improvements in the quality of pubs as a whole.

Chester

Alas: Smith and Jones…

In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things in and trying not to focus too much on the obvious. This involves looking up, as we’re always told to do (by people like me, for example) above shop fronts, but also looking down towards semi-basements and cellars, and looking horizontally, down alleys and along back streets. Drifting is not easy in a busy city centre in the middle of summer, but when looking up I did manage to catch sight of some interesting details without bumping into too many people. One such was this old sign for W. H. Smith, newsagents and booksellers, a name about to disappear from Britain’s high streets after more than 200 years.

Smith’s was founded by Henry Walton Smith in 1792, but its great expansion occurred under his grandson, William Henry Smith, who had the idea of station bookstalls during the railway boom of the 1840s and turned the business into a nationwide multiple retailer. By 1905, when this hanging sign was designed by artist Septimus E. Scott, there were branches of Smith’s in hundreds of locations, both high streets and stations. The sign shows a Smith’s newsboy, who sold newspapers, magazines and the occasionally book from a large basket, crying his wares as he went along, as did many other on-street newspaper sellers in days gone by.*

There are still a few newsboy signs hanging above what are still, at the time of writing, branches of Smith’s. They’re not all exactly the same – many were standard enamel signs but others seem to have been hand-painted – so it’s worth giving each one a good look. The brackets vary too, with different combinations of wrought-iron curlicues, some also featuring the name of the business, others incorporating the company’s oval-shaped ‘WHS’ device. Now the shops they adorn and advertise are being sold, as W. H. Smith undertakes the most drastic of the various restructures that have marked its recent decades. Because selling books, newspapers and magazines from high-street locations have all been hit by online sales, the role of a bricks and mortar newsagent is a tough one to play. Smith’s say they make most of their money from their travel agency business (mostly in separate shops). So another owner is buying the traditional Smith’s stores and they’ll be rebranded as ’T G Jones’.†

It’s a sad end to a long history and one hopes that the new owners are able to run the stores profitably. In spite of the effects of rival online trading, there seem to be plenty of customers in my local branch, some buying newspapers, books, or stationery, some using the Post Office counter the store contains. I also hope that the signs that still hang above such shops as those in Cirencester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Worcester, Chester and elsewhere, are retained and looked after, to remind us of the long history of retailing by this once-pioneering business,.

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* I remember as a boy listening to a street newspaper seller in Lincoln repeatedly chanting a mantra that sounded to me like ‘Hurry up, folks’. When I got nearer, I saw the name of the newspaper he was selling: the Nottingham Post.

† T G Jones (which will probably be written ‘TG Jones’), is not named after a real person. It’s a name chosen, according to a piece in the Financial Times, to reflect ‘these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street’. Hm.

Kelsale, Suffolk

Craft and harmony

In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford Movement and of influential architects like A. W. N. Pugin had encouraged a reaction against the plain and simple church buildings of the 18th century, with their boxy interiors and classical details, and a return to the ornate Gothic of the Middle Ages. Restorers often tidied up the Gothic of their medieval predecessors, too, so a row of ancient windows from different periods and in different shapes and sizes would be replaced by a set of matching Gothic windows. Other habits of Victorian restorers, such as scraping off the plaster from interior walls, replacing box pews with Gothic-looking ones, raising the floor level of the chancel, and so on, changed the character of many a church and removed layers of historic fabric. The great artist, writer, designer and polemicist, William Morris, argued against this approach, advocating repair rather than wholesale restoration, and founding the SPAB to promote this approach and monitor progress. Many of the most distinguished late-19th century architects followed Morris, or at least took up some of his ideas, and church repair of the 1880s and 1890s is often more tactful and historically sensitive than what went on before.

The architects who worked on the restoration of Kelsale church in Suffolk, Norman Shaw and his pupil E. S. Prior, were close to this tradition. There is a variety of window designs, the interior walls are still plastered, and the seating is 19th-century, but in a very plain and simple mode (Prior copying a design of his master Shaw). I felt, strolling around the church one day in November, that the additions, including the benches, were sympathetic to the building while also speaking of craft and skill. The same is true of the screen between the nave and chancel. Rather using wood, as was usual, the restorers chose wrought iron and brass. The makers were Pratt and Son, and their filigree ironwork does a good job of separating the two spaces while allowing the congregation to see the altar clearly from their seats. I show a detail of the spiralling forms, stylised leaves, and crosses on one of the gates in the screen.

If the screen is very obvious to the eye, along with details such as more ironwork (for example, light fittings) and stained glass (which includes some pieces by William Morris’s firm), there are more subtle pleasures too. One of my favourite things about this church is how Prior enhanced some of the windows without going to the expense of pictorial stained glass. A number of have coloured glass in pastel shades set within attractive patterns of glazing bars. It shows how even a modest window can look good, and a small window like the one in my second photograph can provide subtle visual pleasure, or form a pleasant background to a flower arrangement. Church flowers were themselves something that became widely popular in the Victorian period. Here’s a small arrangement in front of one of Prior’s windows. Art in harmony with nature.

Newport, Shropshire

Gilded glamour

The time-honoured advice to ‘look up’ when walking down a street in a town or city seems spot-on for the centre of Newport, Shropshire, where one can see good quality Georgian and earlier buildings standing proud above much later shop fronts. It’s also worth pausing to look at the shop fronts, though. This is one of the best. I don’t know its exact date, or what the business was that put it there, but I’d say it’s 1880s or 1890s, and the building’s listing descriptions concurs, with an estimate of ‘late 19th century’. By the end of the Victorian period, many High Street shops were being fitted with quite lavish fronts, as retailing became highly competitive and shopkeepers vied to catch the eye of everyone who passed by. Increasingly too, shopping was becoming a leisure activity for the middle classes and, as some of this leisure was window-shopping, the people behind the counter liked to put on a good show to lure the window-shoppers inside. Part of this tendency was also about glamour or exclusivity – a fine shop front projected an upmarket image.

The designer of this shop front was given the scope to produce something outstanding. Polished pink granite, a popular material in the 1880s and afterwards, was used for the pilaster running up the front on the left – the stoneworker added vertical flutes to the upper part for extra visual interest and an elaborate cartouche design above with scrolls and a green oval. Polished grey stone lines the sloping stall riser (the strip beneath the bottom of the windows) and the windows themselves are large and lined with only slender metal columns. The panes would have been smaller in the 19th century – the big sheets of plate glass that we see today are modern.

The really special part of the front is the central section, with a dark wooden glazed door and a stunning panel above. This panel with its gilded scrolls and putti, plus the ironwork, also partially gilded, beneath, oozes quality. I wonder if this was a jeweller’s shop, or if it belonged to a seller of some other type of luxury goods. My photograph of this centrepiece also shows another telling detail., The ceiling of the entrance lobby has a dark wooden frame holding four pieces of mirror glass. This was a cunning trick to make the doorway a little lighter, while also giving those entering the odd sensation of seeing the reflection of the tops of their heads. I’ve seen this trick at least once before, above the entrances to what was originally the big ‘flagship’ store of Boot’s the Chemist in Nottingham. In combination with the gilded putti and scrolls, this makes a stunning shopfront that must have impressed the people of Newport in the 1890s and still impresses me today.

The complete frontage: Georgian above, Victorian below

Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

The angular meander

Is there a pattern that says ‘Greece’ louder and more clearly than the ‘Greek key’? This motif takes the form of a continuous line that bends back on itself through a series of right-angles, before bending again to resume its forward course. It’s sometimes called the Greek fret, sometimes the meander, and some say its form derives from the Greek River Maeander (or Meander). It was widely used in the architecture of the Greek revival, a style popular in Britain during the decades on either side of 1800.

Here it is in the iron supports of the veranda that runs along the front of the houses in Lansdowne Crescent, Leamington. They were built in the mid 1830s to designs by local architect William Thomas. The uprights with their Greek key design ensure that the canopy above the veranda is held up securely, while also proclaiming the classical heritage of these town houses. The verandas were not so much for sitting out on – they are quite narrow – but more to provide shade for the almost south-facing rooms while also ensuring that if the floor-to-ceiling window is open, no one absentmindedly steps out and tumbles into the area below.

Soon after the residents moved in, Queen Victoria was on the throne and the fashion for elegant middle-class houses would turn from the classical to other styles – Italianate, Tudor revival, or Gothic. But the people who lived in Lansdowne Crescent in the mid-1830s (whether they were permanent residents or visitors who rented a house for the ‘season’, in order to make use of Leamington’s spa) must have delighted in their homes, which were both chic and Greek, courtesy of the angular meanders of their exterior ironwork.

Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

Tea in the park

Visiting Leamington Spa recently, I was particularly struck by the decorative ironwork on many of the buildings. Much of this was from the town’s Regency heyday – the iron balconies that resemble those in Cheltenham and Brighton, although in many cases with different designs. One example from a later period, however, stands out: the ironwork that makes the Aviary Café in Jephson Gardens so special.

Several of the structures in this beautiful urban park have a serious memorial purpose. This paragon of ornamental park structures is different. It was built in 1899 simply to house tea rooms – there’s an Edwardian-looking photograph online showing elegantly dressed people relaxing in front of the café amid a small copse of umbrellas that shade outdoor tables from the sun. At some point in the 20th century, the café closed and was turned into an aviary, but by the last decades of the 20th century this had closed and the building fell into disuse and disrepair. As part, I believe, of a millennium project to enhance the park, it was restored and turned back into a café, in which form it still seems to be thriving.

At the front, the roof is held up by slender iron columns, allowing it to overhang and shelter a narrow porch or veranda, which now houses several small café tables. Look up, and you see the splendour – several metres of intricate iron latticework filling the spandrels, cornices, and the space beneath the central gable. Look closely, and you see multifoil arches, patterns of circles and scrolls, and iron finials at the ends of the eaves and at the gable’s peak.

The whole thing is a showpiece of the Victorian metalworker’s art and the epitome of the ornamental public park building of the period. It’s up there with the best bandstands and other pleasure buildings, with decoration that at once enhances the view and catches the eye, beckoning us in to sample the delights within. To my mind, it’s a small architectural triumph.

Swindon, Wiltshire

Mighty delicate

If you think of Swindon as a railway town, which, as the location of the GWR locomotive works it certainly became in the 19th century, you’d expect it to have at least one water tower. It still has more than one, and this is my favourite. It’s on the edge of the railway works site, and is extra tall so that it could provide water at high pressure, for fire-fighting. It was built in 1870 using components of cast iron and the strength of the ironwork and its bracing is enough to create a tall structure bearing what must have been a prodigious weight of water in the tanks on top.

The delicacy of this structure, which reminds me of the appearance of the iron frameworks around gas holders, tricks the eye somewhat. There are four stages to the tower, marked by a succession of cast-iron girders, and each is far bigger than a single storey of a conventional house – it’s roughly 75 feet tall all told I think and the tanks are about 2 metres high. By 1870, Victorian engineers were very good at building iron framework structures. After all, they’d had lots of experience, constructing bridges and making load-bearing frames for factories. It might have been easy for them, but, seeing a frame exposed like this – and beautifully preserved too – still impresses me, mightily.

Dartmouth, Devon

 

Summer days, 3

On one of many recent days stuck in doors, the Resident Wise Woman reflected that it was fortunate at least that we’d managed a trip to Devon and another to Aldeburgh late in 2019. The virus couldn’t take those memories away from us, even if it has deprived us of the trips we’d planned for 2020.† Drifting around the streets of Dartmouth was one of the pleasures of the Devon trip. It’s a town full of architecture pleasures, but here’s one of the more incidental ones: a house near the water and another exemplar of that seaside style I’ve been exploring in my previous two posts.

Well, partly. Actually this is a bit more sophisticated than the pretty but random-looking houses on the front at Lyme. This is Regency sophistication, and plenty of it. The house has the pale blue finish that one could find near the sea at any coastal town. But in other respects we’ve moved away from architectural casual wear and got into high fashion. That pattern of glazing in the window, with narrow panes near the edges (and there are several more of them in the storey above) is classic early 19th century. What you can’t see in my photograph is that the window also has a curving top, enhancing the Regency feel. Also very much of its time (1820s or 1830s) is the cast-iron balcony with its pattern of crosses. This balcony is an interesting combination of solidity – the ironwork looks very substantial – and fragility: the floor is thin timberwork and the brackets, as so often, seem very modest; indeed, diagonal iron rods have been fitted so that the ironwork is fixed to the wall higher up (one of these is just visible among the foliage at the left).

Then there is the doorway. This is a show-stopper. The doorcase alone is special, with its diagonal grooved decoration up the sides and across the segmental top; then a bat-wing design with oval medallion carved between the segmental curved and the fat hood. The door is also impressive, with its pattern of studs. This may be a terraced house, but its doorway make one feel as if to go in would be to enter the home of a person of consequence. For the mere passer-by it at least had the effect of lifting the spirits, something that all good seaside houses should do,.

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† Not to mention any plans we might have had for 2021. Old Czech joke: Q: How do you make God laugh? A: Tell him your plans.

* Pevsner calls this ‘an unusual pattern-book doorcase’. Well, provincial builders did indeed lift their designs from pattern books, but wherever it comes from, this example is certainly unusual.

Lyme Regis, Dorset

Summer days, 1 

As the sleet came down in late December, I found myself looking through my files of photographs and came across a number taken near the English coast when the sun was out and the sky was blue. In one way it was good to look at images of summer days at a rather bleak moment, though in these times of confinement it’s not easy to imagine being able to jump in the car and decide, spontaneously, to head to the coat and visit somewhere like Lyme Regis. Looking at the photograph above, though, also reminded me how the houses in so many coastal places have a recognisable ‘seaside look’. What does it mean to say this, and how is it expressed, architecturally? It’s a combination of things, not all present in the picture, not all constant, for seaside houses as much as the homes in an inland town are built for different people with different needs, priorities, and budgets. But a few features of these Lyme houses can point the way to an answer. 

One thing is colour. A lot of seaside houses are finished in stucco or other render that’s painted, either white or in pastel shades. Here there are pale pink, green, and blue houses, along with the ubiquitous white. There might be several reasons for this. A lot of seaside houses were built in the 18th and, especially, 19th centuries as stays beside the sea became fashionable, first for the leisured classes, then for poorer people. Sometimes these houses were built quickly, and stucco was a way of hiding rough masonry beneath a civilised surface. This sort of finish was anyway popular in the late-Georgian and Regency periods, when many such houses were built. Lyme developed as a spa in the 18th century and was still popular when Jane Austen visited in 1804. A lot of Lyme still has a late-Georgian or Regency feel to it and these houses reflect that. As well as walls with a pale finish they have another typical seaside feature: bow windows. These curvaceous windows were very much a Regency fashion – there are lots of them in the Prince Regent’s favourite town, Brighton. They’re used at the seaside because they let in lots of light and offer good views. I think there’s also a ventilation benefit. If you want some air, but there’s a stiff breeze blowing, some part of a bow window may well be out of the line of the wind, so you can get some ventilation without having all your papers blown off the table – most advantageous to writers, as I have found.*  

So far, so practical. But it may simply be that the reason for these features, along with such elements as the fancy ironwork around the porches and the elegant fanlights with their nicely curving dripstones, is that they look good, and look good in a celebratory way. They’re meant, I think, to make you smile, to lift the spirits. This is informal beauty, too. The houses make a virtue of being asymmetrical – it doesn’t matter that they’re not the matching, carefully proportioned Georgian boxes or terraces that you might see in the ‘best’ streets in London or Bath. Again asymmetry was popular in the Regency period more general, but add all these features together and I don’t think it’s fanciful to see this as relaxed, kick-your-shoes off architecture, where sitting outside on the pavement in front of your house is acceptable, and where you won’t be scorned if you’re engaged in the idle enjoyment of summer days. 

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* Of course, you might be a ship-owner and have more than a passing interest in the vessels in the bay; a good view is useful for you too.

Dartmouth, Devon

Lionwork

In the list of things I’ve meant to post, for ages, but not got round to, the south doorway of Saint Saviour’s church, Dartmouth, must be near the top. As so often with medieval church doors, it’s the ironwork that stands out. Indeed ‘stands out’ is putting it mildly. This ironwork gets up and roars at you, ‘Look at me! Have you seen the like?’*

What we’re looking at above is the the top half of the door, which shows one of two strap hinges in the shape of stylised heraldic lions. As well as incorporating the working hinges (at the tail end), the lions help tie together the half dozen wooden planks that make up the door. They stand in the branches of a tree, and their extended bodies look heraldic.

This lion’s face is crudely drawn and, frankly, not very leonine, although there are traces of jagged lines, presumably to indicate a mane, incised on the creature’s chest. The tail, doubling back on itself, its thin length ending in a tufted tip, is clearly a lion’s tail, however. Such tails (and the raised front paw) are very much drawn from heraldic convention, witness the three lions passant guardant on the English royal arms.§

The tree the lions stand in has gently curving branches and a few charming notched and serrated leaves. It’s the style of these leaves that suggests to most authorities† that this ironwork is medieval, and probably 15th century. The date on the door, 1631, may indicate when a major repair was carried out. Whatever the date, this ironwork is a terrific example of English craftsmanship producing something satisfying – a strong image that also makes for a strong and effective door.

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* Special thanks are due to the Resident Wise Woman, who got busy with her camera while I just stood there in amazement.

§ They’re certainly not literal copies of heraldic lions – there are lots of details that would make a herald send them back to the drawing board – but surely that’s where the inspiration came from.

† Such as the inspector who wrote the listing text for the building, and the most recent edition of the Pevsner volume for Devon.

St John's Wood, London

‘I try the door of where I used to live’

For me, that’s one of the most haunting lines in ‘Dockery and Son’, a poem by Philip Larkin, in which the poet describes how he returns to the university where he studied* and talks to one of the tutors about a near-contemporary he hardly remembers. The poem is famous for being about Larkin’s repudiation of parenthood: the barely-remembered Dockery has a son; Larkin has no children, and prefers it that way. But it’s also about going back to a place that once meant a lot to you and is now somehow remote.

In the middle of these half-memories comes this moment: ‘I try the door of where I used to live’. It turns out to be locked, this door, but the line brings one up short: what sort of nerve has Larkin got, trying people’s doors? Well, one has to remember that this is an Oxford college he’s visiting, and such places sometimes have semi-public doors that let one into buildings, beyond which are the more private doors that lead to students’ rooms. It would be quite in order to try such an outer door.†

But perhaps the jolt that the line gives me is about more than this. It’s also, I think, about the awkwardness of going back to a once familiar place, the discomfort I at least feel when that sense of familiarity is combined with a feeling of distance. In St John’s Wood the other day, walking along a street where I lived briefly over 30 years ago (or more accurately, where I was taking advantage of a friend’s hospitality and sleeping on his floor while I found somewhere permanent), I felt a similar remoteness. It was partly the time gap, partly that this bit of London is even more the preserve of the very rich than when I lived there. Even then, the person living opposite drove a Ferrari. You’d not be walking around trying doors here. These premises are probably alarmed, and so would other passers-by be, if they saw you taking a chance with a door knob.

And in any case I couldn’t try my old door because the entire house was cordoned off: the builders were in, long-term. Instead I contented myself with looking at some of the Regency ironwork a few doors along. The Greek key pattern on the upright (1830s probably, or thereabouts) particularly appealed to me. And the memory of those high windows, that let in so much light, and up beyond them ‘the deep blue air, that shows nothing , and is nowhere, and is endless’.§

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*For Larkin, this was St John’s College, Oxford.

†The older rooms in my own college also had individual outer doors, which you closed if you didn’t want to be disturbed. It would have been forgivable, just, to try such a door, but impolite then to try the inner one. Another explanation of Larkin’s apparent chutzpah is that his visit is in the vacation and the room is likely to be unoccupied.

§Philip Larkin, ‘High Windows’. The poem ‘Dockery and Son’ first appeared in The Whitsun Weddings; ‘High Windows’ was published in the volume also called High Windows.

Cheltenham. Gloucestershire

The heart and the honeysuckle, revisited

Walking around Cheltenham this afternoon I was reminded that I was going to post an example of the town’s iron balconies – specifically one using the ‘heart and honeysuckle’ motif I also spotted a while back in London. These iron balcony fronts, produced by the Carron ironworks in Glasgow, seem to have become very popular in Cheltenham because they were stocked by a local builder and because they seemed to exemplify the classical sophistication that Cheltenham’s developers wanted. This was a place, after all, that was marketing itself, with some success, as a country spa and resort for the upper and middle classes who wanted a break from London.

The trouble is, there’s a tendency to paint this ironwork either black (which blends with the window glass) or white (which blends with the stuccoed walls), which makes clear photography difficult. I see now that I must get up early and go around with my camera while the white shutters are still closed, then the black ironwork at least will be clearly visible. Here’s one house with some closed shutters, together with a clearer detail below.

Classical sophistication? That’s because the honeysuckle (aka anthemion) was much used as an ornamental pattern in ancient Greek architecture. In Cheltenham, instead of running round cornices, it’s most common in the ironwork, inside the heart, as you can see here: it looks like a fan of sylized petals. The balconies themselves cantilever out from the walls in such a way as to make it unlikely they’d take a lot of weight. They’re there mainly to make it safe to open the glorious floor-to-ceiling windows, and to accommodate plants. Real honeysuckle to complement the iron version? Perhaps that’s unlikely.  But something green and flowering, at least.

Hercules Road, London

The heart and the honeysuckle

Growing up in Cheltenham, I was fascinated early on by the variety of the ornamental ironwork patterns in the town. Leaves, stylised flowers, scrolls, Greek key patterns and all kinds of designs in ironwork trail their way across balcony fronts all over the parts of the town, delightful details dating from its Regency heyday. One of the most common and distinctive is a combination of hearts and the classical anthemion or honeysuckle motif, usually in pairs and usually on their sides. Ironwork of this pattern was made by the Scottish Carron ironworks in the 1820s and sold to builders by a local supplier called Wheeler.

I identify this design so strongly with Cheltenham (and with reason – there really are quite a lot of examples) that it’s a shock when I come across it elsewhere. But hearts and honeysuckles could travel from Scotland as easily to other towns as to Cheltenham, so they do pop up here and there. Here’s one I spotted the other day in North Lambeth on my way to meet up with a friend in London.  As in many of the Cheltonian examples, the structure it adorns isn’t a full-scale balcony – it’s too narrow to step out onto, though it could support a window box full of flowers. But its main purpose is stop you falling out when you open the generous floor-to-ceiling window: an elegant solution to a 19th-century health and safety problem. A world away from the lumps of concrete (or indeed lengths of coloured tape) with which we solve similar problems today. Autre temps, autre moeurs…

Market Harborough, Leicestershire

Swans, up

I know I’ve gone on about swans on this blog before. About their seductive combination of strength and softness, their place in English tradition (swan-upping), their role in poetry and mythology, their presence near buildings such as the Archbishop’s Palace at Wells, even the memorable appearance of these usually quiet creatures in English music. Swans get me going, and there it is.

I was reminded of all this a while back when passing one of my favourite inn signs, which protrudes from the front of the Three Swans in the middle of Market Harborough. History books say that the first mention of the inn – then simply The Swan – dates from 1517. By the 18th century it was well established as a coaching inn, with stables at the back servicing regular coaches to London.

The central portion of the sign is probably the oldest – some sources guess 17th, others 18th century, when the inn was still The Swan. The collection of curlicues shows off not just the central sign but also the work of some local blacksmith. He was fortunate indeed to get the chance to display his work in such a prominent place, and took full advantage of the chance for a free advertisement. For who would not want a garden gate, or some andirons, or a trivet made by this craftsman?

At some later date, perhaps in the later-18th century, perhaps in the early 19th when the building was remodelled, the hostelry added a further two swans to its name and its sign. The smith’s successor came along and attached them in place, and, with their sinuous necks and the equally curvaceous ironwork that they bookend, they make distinctive silhouettes against the sky. No doubt I’m not the only one to crane my neck in homage.

Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Quite a lot of Malvern is built in local reddish stone laid in a ‘rock-faced’ fashion. If this rather rustic finish seems a trifle wild and woolly for this somewhat buttoned 19th-century town, the crazy-paving effect is reined in by contrasting pale stone dressing. That’s the approach adopted by E W Elmslie for Malvern’s 1860s railway station, where the details are French-influenced Gothic with lots of gables, pointed windows, trefoils, tall chimneys, and niches.

None of this, though, prepares one for what’s inside, especially the decoration on the columns that support the platform awnings. Here are just three:
They’re ironwork foliage, created by William Forsyth, and they’re exactly right for Malvern, a town of trees and laurel bushes and shrubberies. The idea, apparently, was to feature species that can be found in Malvern’s streets and gardens. They’re also a splendid re-working of a medieval idea. Gothic cathedrals have capitals carved in stone; this Victorian station has capitals made of iron. All change!

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Postscript 2018 I have done a post about the outstanding late-13th century carved capitals in the chapter house at Southwell Minster, here. These stunning carvings, full of life-like portrayals of the foliage of trees, must be among the ancestors of Forsyth’s capitals at Great Malvern.