Amersham, Buckinghamshire

Underneath the arches

I break off my succession of posts about buildings in London and Liverpool to report that I found myself in Amersham the other week, having coffee with friends from the Czech Republic (as you do), and making brief observations of the local buildings before delivering said friends to Heathrow in time for their flight back to Prague. One building that we couldn’t miss was the chunky brick Market Hall, a structure of 1682, built thanks to Sir William Drake, the local Member of Parliament. It’s in the form of an open ground floor with arches supporting the enclosed meeting room above.

I found this large building rather difficult photograph without getting a lot of unwanted incidental detail into the frame, so I offer a closer shot of the arches (below), and a detail in one corner of the arched market area (above). This detail is a small wooden door with a barred semi-circular section above, where the fanlight would be in a Georgian doorway. This was the town lock-up, a small and rather dark cell where petty criminals could be detained for a night or so, before being taken to the local court to be tried. It’s not unknown for a lock-up to be incorporated into another structure – I’ve previously posted an example here – but it’s still a surprise to find one tucked away in the corner of this market hall. I don’t know whether the lock up is contemporary with the rest of the building – looking at the difference in the brickwork, I’m tempted to think it might be a later addition.

This kind of lock-up would have been in use until well into the 19th century. In theory, the County Police Act of 1839 made such provision unnecessary because the act obliged counties to set up their own paid professional police forces, who were to build police stations that would include secure cells to detain wrongdoers. In practice, however, some of these older lock-ups were retained in use after 1839.

The inscription above, a nice clear example of a ‘Commit no nuisance’ sign, looks 19th-century. I associate these signs with sites near pubs or other places of entertainment, their purpose being to discourage people from indulging in antisocial behaviour, especially when the worse for drink. I have noticed these signs before (there’s a rather light-hearted post about them and other old signs here), but I’ve not seen one on a lock-up before. It’s not inappropriate, and many a detainee must have read it and regretted that they’d not taken heed of it sooner. It takes more than a sign, of course, to discourage such antics, as a visit to any town on a Saturday night will reveal, if proof were needed. Amersham however, which looks a thoroughly civilised place, is I hope altogether more law abiding.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

Local colour

How could it be? I’d been to Suffolk several times and looked around so many of its towns – Aldeburgh, Southwold, Lavenham, Sudbury, Stowmarket… How had I not been to Hadleigh? This time, the Resident Wise Woman and I resolved to correct this omission, and quite early one December morning two weeks before Christmas, we arrived in Hadleigh, wandered around, and were very impressed. There is so much for the building-fancier to see, and so much of it is good.

It wasn’t long before we found the churchyard, and it was not only the church that caught our eye. Along one side of God’s acre is the conglomeration of brickwork, timber-framing and ochre-coloured plaster in my photograph. It’s now known as the Guildhall-Town Hall complex and the rooms inside are available to the local community for various uses. The earliest part is the timber-framed section in the middle, which was constructed in the mid-15th century. This was built as a market hall, with shops below and other rooms on the jettied storeys above. Behind this is the Guildhall, built as a wing projecting from the back of the market hall – a tiny portion of this is visible near the left-hand edge of my photograph.* The two-storey wings on either side of the timber-framed market hall are later.

The complex has had a variety of uses since the Middle Ages. It was the administrative centre when Hadleigh was a borough in the 17th century; until 1834, part of the building was used as the parish workhouse; more than one school had been based here; part of the structure was once almshouses; and in the early-20th century it was partly used as a corset factory. There’s something admirable about a building that’s in part almost 600 years old and has been used in so many ways – and is still an asset to the town. It’s also admirable that it has fulfilled these uses while keeping much of its ancient beauty.

- - - - -

* Guildhalls were the headquarters of guilds, associations of tradesman or merchants, formed for various reasons including religious (for example, paying for prayers for the souls of the dead) and charitable (for example, providing for the surviving families of deceased members).

Tetbury, Gloucestershire

Continuity and change

If there’s one building in the Cotswold town of Tetbury that is impossible to miss, it’s the Market House, all seven bays of it, with its upper walls of cream-washed stone, its rows of deliciously plump Tuscan columns, its large clocks, and its bell turret. It was originally built in 1655 as a market for wool and yarn, the main products of the Cotswold Hills in those days, as for centuries before. The building has changed somewhat over the years. It was enlarged in the 18th century and some of the building’s more ornamental features actually date from a remodelling in the early-19th century. The triangular pediments with their clock faces, the hipped roof, and the bell turret all date to 1816–17. At some stage the Market House also acquired the metal dolphins that are displayed on brackets all the way along each of the long walls. These creatures come from the town’s coat of arms and making a pleasant decorative feature that baffles some visitors.

So a building that looks as if it has been here, virtually unchanged, for about 370 years has actually been altered as needs and fashions have changed, reflecting different needs and the wish to make the structure more up to date, or more prestigious. Over the years and at different times it has housed council meetings, law courts, a lock-up for criminals, markets of various kinds, and the town’s fire engine. And its life goes on. Goods are still sold in the sheltered area behind the columns – when I took this photograph, it was rugs and baskets being sold – and the building is hired out for markets, events, and parties. It’s still an important asset to the town, then, though perhaps not as crucial to its economy as in Tetbury’s 17th and 18th-century heyday. If the town today is as much about tourism and shopping as it is about agriculture, the Market Hall still provides a handsome focus for these activities.

Somerton, Somerset

Well marketed

Looking up the dates of Joseph Chamberlain for a recent post that mentioned Birmingham, I noticed that the great Liberal mayor expressed the policy that the city should be, amongst other things, properly ‘marketed’.* Any town should have a proper market, whether it’s a big city like Birmingham or a small place such as Somerton in Somerset. This stone town is fortunate, in that its early builders left a generous area for a market place in the centre, an irregularly shaped space that has housed, in its time the town hall (the building that forms the backdrop in my photograph above), a couple of inns, and this butter cross.

There has been a butter cross – a shelter where dealers in dairy produce can find shelter from the rain and, importantly the sun – at least since 1390, but this striking octagonal one was put up in 1673. Like much of the old town centre, it is built of local grey lias stone, with some elements in Ham stone. Rather than the pantiles that are so common here, the building has a stone roof, supported by a central stone pier, topped with a ball finial, and edged with battlements.

Rainwater is channelled behind the battlements and drains away through eight gargoyles, one at each corner. These are similar to the grotesque carvings one sees on medieval churches, and they’re a small testimony to the old tradition of craftsmanship that produced stone masons who could also carve. You’d not call this round-arches structure a Gothic building, but the skills developed by medieval masons survive, not just ion the walls and roof but also in this ability to carve.† These masons assured that Somerton is indeed well marketed.

- - - - -

* He was referring not to marketing and PR but to civic facilities – his list of requirements was that the city should be ‘parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas & watered and “improved” .’

† And the tradition continues. Anyone who thinks such skills have died should visit a masons’ yard at one of the nine English cathedrals that still possess one, or read, for example, The Stone Mason: A History of Building Britain by Andrew Ziminski.

 

Newent, Gloucestershire

Hats on

These recent weeks of hot weather have seen me more often than not wearing a hat when out and about. The media have been full of advice about covering up and I’ve also seen statistics about the great temperature difference in the shade. I don’t need statistics, though – in sun this hot I instinctively make for shadows, overhangs, arcades, and other refuges, like this lovely timber-framed market house or Butter Market, built in c. 1668 in Newent. It has one big room upstairs and a ground-floor open-sided space for a market: the same layout as many others in English and Welsh towns. The timber work on the end in the sun is quite plain, but the side facing the street has a winning combination of diagonal and curved braces, together with curvy bargeboards to please the eye. The weather vane – in the form of a running fox – is an added touch of charm that catches the sun.

The space for the market has quite a low ceiling – there are about ten feet of headroom – and if not a forest at least a grove of thick supporting posts. The effect of standing inside it reminded me of a description by Ian Nairn of another market house, the one in Llanidloes. Nairn described the even lower space in the market house there as ‘a very personal possessed space: it is not so much a question of walking in but of putting it on like a hat.’ In Newent I tried on the building myself for a minute, before walking out again into the sunshine. The fit was not bad at all.

- - - - -

§ See Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Towns (updated edition, Notting Hill Editions, 2013)

Devizes, Wiltshire

Piper and after

One of my favourite blogs is Adventures in the Print Trade, in which Neil Philip, proprietor of the online gallery Idbury Prints, shares some of his discoveries and enthusiasms. Neil recently posted about some images of 1940s Devizes by John Piper and I was particularly pleased to see these prints because I’d already read Piper’s short essay about the town reprinted in his book Buildings and Prospects (the dust jacket of which is illustrated with versions of some of the Devizes images). In the essay, Piper praises the town’s ‘good minor architecture, magnificent museum (contents not building), brewery and tobacco factory (sensible, small-scale manufactures for such a town), branch-line railway, good inns and bars, hotels… fair churches and chapels, canal of handsome appearance, sensible plan, bracing air, good-looking inhabitants, cinemas (old-fashioned and super, the super not ostentatious).’ If the place has lost some of these amenities since Piper wrote in 1944, it retains enough of them, from inns to churches, to make it recognisably the same town.

Piper’s approach in his illustrations is similar to the way he worked on prints of towns such as Penzance for the Architectural Review. He shows us groups of buildings, throwing light on how they relate to one another along a street, and conjuring up in the process a powerful sense of place. I’ve chosen a couple of examples from Neil’s collection to show what I mean. The simple outlines, blocks of colour, and rapidly sketched details give us the essential information – the shapes of the buildings, their materials, key details such as windows and doors. We quickly grasp the character of the place – a mix of Georgian and Victorian buildings in stone, brick, and colourwash, with a minimum of modern modification.

The prints also appeal to me because they bring out an essential difference between the way an artist like Piper worked and the way I work when I point my camera at the same place. Piper could include or exclude anything or anyone he liked from his sketchbook. My camera is not so selective. So when I last went to this town on a busy Saturday morning (and I was pleased to see that the place was busy and the shops well used), I tended not to take general views like Piper’s which would have been full of cars and shoppers, but to concentrate on individual buildings when there happened to be fewer passers-by in front of them.


So I went, for example, for the Old Town Hall (also known as the Cheese Hall), visible in Piper’s print down a street of the Market Place itself. This George II building (see my photograph above) shouldn’t work really – the old open arches of the ground floor have been glazed to make offices for a bank. And even in its original state the building was a cobble: an even number of arches (and, therefore, a column in the middle of the façade) is a no-no in Classical architecture. But from chunky ground floor to sculpted pediment it holds together. And look how Piper, in the upper print at the top of this post, has caught the context – the distant tower of the church to the right, the elaborate shop (a former Boots) with domed white tower to the left, and the framing buildings on either side.


Likewise with Piper’s view of the side of the Market Place containing the Black Swan, a coaching inn dating from the 1730s. His sketchy style doesn’t show as many details as a photograph might, but he’s got the gist of it. And the setting – including the streamlined 1930s Co-op to the right, now replaced, as you can see in my photograph, with a blander building, no doubt designed to “fit in” to the townscape, but sadly losing the struggle.

There’s so much more in Piper’s Devizes prints, and looking at them again makes me want to revisit the town and see what other details noted by the artist are still there. These small works show that Piper, whether he was producing a very worked-up, consciously grand, print or painting of a big country house, or these more modest images of a market town, could pack in telling details – and make us look, and look again with fresh eyes.