Radstock, Somerset

Ups and downs

When I looked up Radstock in the Pevsner volume Somerset: North and Bristol, I had to smile. It seems that my perception of the town has changed, and that this alteration reflects exactly a change in the way the great architectural guides have seen the place. When I first saw Radstock, passing through with my father some time in the late 1960s, it seemed dark, dusty, and, frankly, ugly. It was a small mining town and, although there was some interest to be gleaned from passing trains and trucks and clanking machinery, it didn’t seem as if the place need detain us. The other day, the sun was shining, the buildings in the town centre were clean, and the architecture revealed interesting details; the pit had long gone, of course.

Pevsner, writing in 1958, found Radstock ‘really desperately ugly...without dignity in any building’. But his successor Andrew Foyle, in the revised volume of 2011, commented ‘...yet Radstock is among the best survivors in England of a small Victorian colliery town’. Tastes have changed, of course, and architectural historians are now open to a wider variety of subjects than they were in 1958 – thanks, it has to be said, in part to the work of Pevsner himself.

What struck me the other day was an array of buildings in clean, pale stone (white lias, I believe), festooned with interesting details. Most of these structures were part of a redevelopment by the Waldegrave family in the late-19th century, and they range from public buildings like the Victoria Hall to shops and a hotel. The peculiar capital in my photograph is a detail from one of the buildings. It must be an adaptation of a Classical order, perhaps the composite, but instead of a pair of downward-curving spiral volutes, there is a kind of scroll, in which one spiral goes upwards, the other down. For further adornment, there’s a rosette in the middle of each scroll. In spite of the worn stone, it’s still a charming detail, one small confirmation that there was plenty of room for inventiveness in this small, long unregarded, Somerset town.

Lamport, Northamptonshire

In the shadow of the great house (1)

The village of Lamport in Northamptonshire is dominated by Lamport Hall, a vast country house of various dates, designed principally by John Webb in the 17th century and the Smiths of Warwick in the 18th. Looking away from the hall’s long, sash-windowed facades, I began to notice interesting smaller buildings in the main village street, all of them related in some way to the great house.

This one was built as the rectory in c. 1727–30 for Dr Euseby Isham, who was rector and a member of the Isham family who owned the hall. The architect was Francis Smith of Warwick, principal member of a renowned family of architects and builders who came to prominence (rather like the Bastards of Blandford Forum) when their home town burned down at the end of the 17th century. The Smiths built many buildings in the Midlands, especially with striking distance of the home town.

The rectory was actually the first work that the Smiths did at Lamport – Francis Smith started to extend the hall a couple of years after this house was built – and it displays the typical features of its time and of Smith’s work: limestone quoins, sash windows with limestone eared architraves, a pediment above the door, and so on. Its design is very much of its time, its materials – especially the toffee-coloured lias stone – very much of its place: it is a gem of an early-18th century house.