Gloucester

 A riot of tiling

The sun caught the facade of the Imperial Inn in Gloucester’s Northgate Street as I passed the other day, so out came the camera. At last. I’d been meaning to photograph this tiled frontage of 1904 for years, but the building passed often is least often studied closely, and I’d not got round to it.

I was surprised to find out that the architects were Knight and Chatters. I’d linked this old Gloucester firm with serious stuff – church restorations, big Gothic vicarages, Cheltenham’s monumental neo-Jacobean Public Library and the same town’s cemetery. So I’d not have guessed that Knight and Chatters designed this building – pubs were often the work of specialist pub architects, figures whose careers are described in Mark Girouard’s fine book Victorian Pubs.

However, the senior partner, W H Knight, is the one I most associate with the libraries, churches and other ‘serious’ work and he died in 1895, so could have had nothing to do with the Imperial Inn. And the design of a pub facade like this has as much to do with the people who produced the glass and the tiles as with the architect. And finally it’s likely in any case that a busy provincial practice like Knight and Chatters could turn their hand to all kinds of architecture, letting their hair down to create lively pub frontages when the demand arose.

 This small building is a riot of tiling and bright red brickwork. The face of Pan peeps from the tiles running between the main windows, as if hinting at revelry within. Patterns of scrolls twirl their way across the etched glass. A more restrained and rather art nouveau effect is produced by the stained glass over the door, with its shapes of hearts, its a hints of leaf and bud, and its whiplash curves. Burning gas mantles would no doubt have made this frontage very enticing of an evening in the early years of the 20th century. No doubt the enticement still works, helping to ensure the facade’s fortunate survival.

Nunney, Somerset

What's that château for?

Castles. Bastions in the defence of the realm, of course. Homes of grand feudal lords, to be sure. But also status symbols to impress the knight down the road. And what better status symbol for a knight who had done well in the Hundred Years War than a castle in the French style in the middle of his English domains?

That must have been the thinking behind Nunney Castle, a small building like a miniature Bastille in a quiet Somerset village. It was built for Sir John Delamere in 1373, and it was said that he paid for it with ransom money he collected during the wars in France. It’s just four corner towers connected by lengths of high stone wall, the latter so short on two sides that the towers are nearly touching. The four towers originally had conical roofs, and a protruding walkway ran around the tops of the walls, linking the towers at the upper level. The whole thing would not have seemed out of place in an illustration for a fairy-tale, and was not unlike some of the châteaux forts that Delamere would have seen in France.

Curiously, although there is high, defensible ground nearby, land that would have made a good site for a castle, Delamere chose to build down in the village, near the river. One advantage of this site was a ready water supply to fill the moat. But one can’t help thinking that Delamere put his castle where he did so that it would be seen and admired by the neighbours.

The drawback was that an enemy could take up a position on the nearby high ground and blast holes in the castle walls. Nunney Castle got blasted during the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, when Cromwellian artillery blew a big hole in one wall and the building’s military career was over.

Writers about castles used to stress the solid, soldierly, utilitarian aspect of these buildings, treating them as the homes of hardened war leaders and as bases for military operations. All that is true, and yet the more you look at castles, the more you see that there’s more to them than that. Recent research has revealed, for example, that the lumps and bumps in the ground around many medieval castles are the remains not of defensive works but of ornamental gardens. Fancy windows, especially ones placed high up, out of arrow range, also hint at status-conscious owners. Many castles, especially ones built, like Nunney, in the later Middle Ages, seem at least partly built to impress. And even in its ruined state, impress this one still does.

Wells, Somerset

Wells Cathedral was begun towards the end of the 12th century and its builders, as was usual in the Middle Ages, began at the east end with the choir and then worked their way westwards. By the 1220s they had got to the west front, one of the most striking fronts of any cathedral, consisting of a vast stone screen of niches, in which were set hundreds of statues of saints, bishops, Biblical figures, and others.

In most English churches the medieval sculptures were destroyed during the period of puritanical iconoclasm in the 17th century. But for some reason many of those at Wells were spared, and more than 300 remain, although in almost 800 years the elements have eroded some of them badly. What is more this screen of sculptures, which covers the entire western wall of the cathedral, also extends around on either side to cover part of the north and south walls. The whole makes up England’s greatest collection of statuary from the early Gothic phase of the 13th century.

Most visitors, deterred by eye strain, vertigo, or impatience to get inside the cathedral, don’t spend very long looking at each statue, especially those around the sides. So here are a pair of knights that stand high up on the north side. One has his head covered in a kind of proto-balaclava helmet of mail. His neighbour wears on his head a great helm with eye slits and breathing holes.

Their heads fit neatly into their intricate trefoil-headed niches, which are beautifully carved even though unregarded except by those with enthusiasm for such things, preferably backed up with binoculars or a telephoto lens. A bird's-eye view would be best, though birds are clearly apt to look at a Gothic niche in terms of its suitability for a nesting site.Thanks to Zoë Brooks, her sharp eyes, and her zoom lens, for the pictures.