Liverpool, St John's Lane

 

Liverpudlian Goth-ish

St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s eye with a very ornate corner entrance. It’s a phantasmagoria of arches, shafts, and Gothic details such as trefoils, stubby pinnacles, carved capitals and openwork parapets in a mixture of grey granite and buff-to-reddish stone. Over the door, a semicircular tympanum bears the name of the company in green and gold mosaic. Look up, and this entrance is crowned by a tower and spire. Beyond, four sets of office windows with gables above lead the eye down St John’s Lane while a slightly shorter facade of three gables stretches along Queen Square.

This building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1896–8. It’s a relic of a time when many large insurance companies had offices in large provincial cities as well as headquarters in London. Waterhouse’s bread and butter was designing such structures for Prudential – most of those are in bright red brick and terracotta and many, like the huge Prudential HQ in London are still there, occupied by other companies. For Pearl, Waterhouse used stone. Struck first by the entrance, I mentally filed the building under ‘Liverpudlian Gothic’, like the office block in my previous post. But a quick look made me realise that it’s more complicated than that. The details on the corner are Gothic, sure enough. But the arches are all semicircular, not pointed as one would expect in a Gothic building. And the side windows and gables seem to speak more of a Jacobean revival style.

View of the building showing the facades on St John’s Lane and Queen Square

By the 1890s, many architects were leaving behind the kind of strict, would-be accurate revivalism adopted by their predecessors earlier in the Victorian period – especially in secular buildings but even in churches too. The more vernacular building of the Arts and Crafts movement had arrived; Art Nouveau was just around the corner; and for designers like Waterhouse, working for clients who wanted buildings that were part landmark (the spire), part status symbol (the decoration), and part economical use of space, an eclectic kind of architecture was a good solution. Although Pearl Assurance has disappeared (after a takeover in the late-1980s), this building carries on, a tribute to an architectural blend of ideas and requirements that led to something practical, but hardly a visual compromise.

Note Thank you to my regular readers for indulging me in my splurge of Liverpool buildings over the last few weeks. I had not visited the city for years and it was even more architecturally rich than I remembered. My next few posts will be from elsewhere, but I plan to do more Liverpudlian posts in the future.

Liverpool, Hope Street

Listed

When visiting a city I don’t know very well, I make lists of major buildings that I want to see, but once I arrive I’m constantly on the lookout for unexpected delights – the assorted unregarded shopfronts, pubs, sheds and shelters, many of which make up the subject matter for blog posts. In Liverpool, I made a bee-line for two pubs that can hardly be described as ‘unregarded’ – they’re among the most memorable drinking-places in Britain, a must for anyone who revels in the excesses of Victorian or Edwardian architecture and decoration.

The first is the magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a pub so ornate that my usual blog formula of one (or sometimes two) pictures and a commentary simply isn’t enough. You can see it’s a remarkable place before you enter. The exterior is a riot of freestyle details of 1900, the work of architect Walter Thomas for Liverpool brewers Robert Cain & Sons. Stepped gables, finials, turrets, balconies, and a big protruding corner feature all vie for attention – but somehow manage to cohere into a whole. You see the stand-out feature as you go in: a set of Art Nouveau gates in black iron and gleaming gilded copper.

Gates: by Henry Bloomfield Bare; Liver bird, gazelles, women’s heads, and the motto of Cain’s brewery, Pacem amo (I love peace).

Step inside, and you’re in another world. An intricate plaster ceiling, carved mahogany fittings, a mosaic-fronted bar counter and stained glass panels immediately catch the eye. The sheer quality is obvious at once – the crisp lines of those ceiling pendants, the beauty of the woodwork (many of the joiners also worked on the interiors of great ocean liners, swapping between architectural and marine jobs according to the availability of work). 

Mosaic-fronted bar, mahogany fittings, heraldic stained glass, and Jacobean revival ceiling. The interior work was supervised by George Hall Neale and Arthur Stratton of Liverpool’s School of Architecture and Applied Arts.

Repoussé copper panel by Henry Bloomfield Bare, reflecting the pub’s musical links. 

Then as you grasp your pint and settle at one of the tables, you take in a variety of other decorative touches that go in quality and quantity way beyond what anyone has any right to expect in even an elaborate Victorian gin palace. Repoussé copper panels, etched glass, decorative mirror glass, tiles, a vast room (referred to as the Billiards Room, though some say it may have been a restaurant) with a plaster frieze, even the marbles and tiles of the gents toilets* – there seems to be no end to it.

Plaster frieze in the Billiards Room. Major figure work is by the sculptor Charles John Allen (his friend, a Mrs Ryan, modelled for the caryatid figures); other plasterwork was by a talented Irishman, Pat Honan.

This magnificent pub surpassed the expectations I had when I put it on my list. It’s a testimony to the huge prosperity of Liverpool, which was at its height in 1900 when the Philharmonic was built. I noted when I read about the building in Geoff Brandwood’s excellent book Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, that it was listed by English Heritage at Grade II* – an exceptional rating for a pub. However, I noticed on checking the current listing that it’s now actually listed at Grade I, the top listing reserved for the country’s most exceptional buildings. Rightly so. I’d encourage anyone who likes this kind of thing to put it on their personal list, head to Liverpool, stand themselves a pint, and toast Robert Cain & Sons and the team of architects and craft workers who made this place possible.

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* There’s an old post about the lavatories here.

Hanley Swan, Worcestershire

Saints and flowers

Although as someone who writes about historic architecture, I make trips especially to look at buildings, it’s always been a feature of this blog that many of the structures I include have been seen by chance, viewed en passant, while I was on my way to somewhere else entirely. ‘When you’re shopping, look at the shopfronts. If you take the train, spare a few minutes to notice the station,’ as I’ve said more than once. Some of my buildings are ones I’ve often passed, like the church of St Gabriel at Hanley Swan, Worcestershire. I’ve glanced at its Gothic revival exterior many times as I’ve passed – precisely accurate 13th-century tracery, broach spire, chunky grey masonry. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that it was designed by George Gilbert Scott.

Finally the other day I stopped and looked inside. What drew and held my attention was not Scott’s architecture, but what lay at the focus of all this stone: the reredos behind the high altar. This is a very Victorian marble composition with a pair of mosaic portraits of saints. My photograph above shows one of these, the archangel Gabriel, revered as St Gabriel, richly robed in front of an architectural background, carrying the lily that is this most familiar attribute.This reredos, which also features lovely tiles embellished with stylised flowers (showing perhaps the influence of the aesthetic movement), was the work of two of the most prominent Victorian firms of craft workers, Clayton and Bell, to whom the design of the figures is attributed, and Powell & Sons, who actually constructed the reredos and put the whole thing – marble, mosaic, tiles – together.

So, in the early-1870s in a small Worcestershire village, a group of the most prominent artists and craftsmen came together with one of the most celebrated architects of the period to build a church and furnish it with style. They did this thanks in the main to Samuel Martin, a former Liverpool merchant who’d become a local grandee, who provided the funds. No doubt local stonemasons, carpenters, and others were responsible for the building work, too. A happy combination of local and nationally known talent.

Grantham, Lincolnshire

Everywhere in chains

Where William Henry Smith (stationer) and Jesse Boot (chemist) began, the other chain retailers followed. In the late-19th and 20th centuries, countless high street shops belonged to chain store companies, who aimed to have a branch in every town and to corner the market in their specialist area, ensuring that a shopper in Brighton could travel to Bradford and find some* if not all of the same familiar names: Montague Burton (‘the tailor of taste’), Freeman, Hardy and Willis (shoes), MacFisheries, and the various grocers and dairymen – Sainsbury’s, Lipton’s, Home and Colonial, Maypole. So many have gone now, victims of takeovers or losers in the wars of commercial competition. But now and then a bit of a shopfront, a sign, or a threshold mosaic like the one in my photograph hangs on to remind us of their former presence. Not just ghost signs, wall-emblazoned faded phantoms of former glories, but also these resilient threshold brandings. Look down in any high street, and you’re likely to spot one or two.

So here in Grantham is a reminder of Maypole Dairy, The company began in 1891 and by 1918 they had 889 branches. Their formula was simple: stock a very small range of the dairy products that ordinary people bought all the time: milk, butter, margarine, eggs, tea. At first they did well, but profits fell after World War I and they were taken over by Home and Colonial, although the stores kept their old name; there were still Maypole shops until the end of the 1960s.

The shops were small but stylish. They had tiled interiors (sometimes with pictorial tiles) and gilded lettering in the name signs. Most of that has gone, but a number of these threshold mosaics can be found. The one in Grantham is typical. The letterforms, with their forked terminations to the strokes, have a touch of late-Victorian whimsy about them, even a touch of Art Nouveau. If you look at those terminations closely you can see little ovals, as if they are made of tree branches that have been sawn to size. Arranging the tiny tesserae to make the letters (each of which has a surrounding border of even tinier tesserae), the central flower and leaf, and the background pattern, took both skill and time. But a century ago and more, this was a standard way of branding a shop exterior. Over 60 years after the last Maypole closed, this one is still putting recent shop entrances to shame.

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* Although not all chains had nationwide coverage: some stuck to their local area, some covered the north but not the south and vice versa.

Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Hidden treasure

A few miles from where I live, hidden in a wood on a slope of the Cotswolds, lie the fragmentary remains of a Roman villa. The site was excavated in 1882, when some mosaics were uncovered, the remains of a few walls were noted, and the plan of a courtyard villa, which had developed from an earlier corridor-based structure, was made out. The ruins did not fare well in the years after the excavation. Damage due to frost, burrowing rabbits, and visitors occurred, and Emma Dent, the owner of the land on which they stood, removed one of the mosaics to her home, Sudeley Castle.* She had part of the site protected by wooden sheds to help preserve it, but those sheds have long rotted away and most of the remains are now all but enveloped in undergrowth and concealed by trees. One mosaic is protected by a low shelter roofed in corrugated iron. By bending down into the shelter and peeling back some sheeting held down by stones, one can see the mosaic, fragmentary but beautiful, its patterns of loops, curves and diagonals standing out in the gloom.

It’s not known for sure how old the villa is. Coins of the 3rd and 4th centuries were found on the site, and I’d guess that the building goes back well before that. That this much has managed to survive in its isolated and quiet location, in spite of animals, weather, and the removal of tesserae by ignorant 19th-century visitors, is heartening, and to me at least, somewhat moving.

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* She justified this removal because it was necessary to protect the mosaics from locals, who walked up to the site and removed handfuls of tesserae. A panel of the mosaic, having been removed to the castle, was apparently subsequently lost: its present location is unknown. A mosaic from another Roman site that Miss Dent removed had a happier fate: she had it restored and reinstalled in its original position.

Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

Border control 

I’m always telling people to look up at buildings, but sometimes it pays to look down. Look down, especially, as you enter a shop, and you might see one of these elegant Victorian (or later) threshold mosaics advertising some past proprietor’s business. In Moreton-in-Marsh, a Cotswold town full of limestone buildings of various dates and degrees of picturesqueness, I’d not necessarily expect to come across this sort of thing, but even here, shop fronts have been continuously modified, and, as we know now more than ever, businesses come and go on the high street. Sometimes they leave their mark by the entrance. The one that surprised me in Moreton must be early-20th century, or at any rate done under the strong influence of Art Nouveau.  

Although I’m often mightily impressed by the way mosaicists form letters out of tiny tesserae, the letters here are far from perfect. There’s a wilfulness about stroke widths (look at the final ’s’), an uncertainty when it comes to curves (the lower part of the ‘B’, and an inconsistency with the serifs (the peculiar backward-facing foot of the second ‘R’) that mar the effect for me. Getting this sort of thing right isn’t easy, and in some mosaics the letters are formed with such flair you hardly notice the effort that must have been involved; not so here. What I do like, though, is the border, with its beguiling combination of curves which go this way and that, overlapping and doubling back on themselves, in an orgy of Art Nouveau invention.* Even the way in which the reddish-brown lines abut and interact with the fan-like arrays of white background tesserae is well judged. If the mosaicist’s letters are weak, his border is admirably well controlled.  

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* How inventive is it? Is this the kind of thing you could lift from a pattern-book? Possibly, but you’d certainly need to be resourceful to plan it out in little tiles and combine it with the rest of the design.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Hurrah for Jesse Boot!

When searching among my Ludlow pictures a couple of days ago, I came across this one, the mark of one of the most familiar names on the UK High Street. Jesse Boot was an exemplary businessmen of the 19th century. In an age of quack medicine and dodgy ingredients, he sought to sell only pharmaceuticals that were made of pure ingredients and that had the effect that was claimed for them. In a period when it was common for bosses not to care about staff conditions and wellbeing, he made these things a priority. At a time when many were driven (as when are people not?) to accumulate a huge fortune and use it for selfish ends, he gave away vast sums on education and workers’ welfare. He worked hard, and drove himself so hard that he risked seriously damaging his health – but was saved by a forced holiday…on which he managed to meet Florence, the love of his life, who became equally influential in the business they built together.

Among the many things, it is said, that Jesse did was to design his company’s logo, the distinctive wordmark with ‘Boot’s’ in a flowing script, usually enclosed in an oval. That symbol, dating from 1883, is recognised all over the country. Like any good logo, it has been used everywhere, from invoices to shop signs, advertisements to paper bags. Here it is below the window of a Boot’s premises in Ludlow, made, for a change, in mosaic. This method was often used to attach the shop name indelibly to an entrance, on the ground in front of the door. Here it works just as well on the narrow strip (the stall riser, in archi-speak) beneath the window. Making a sign of such durable materials, and ones needing a craftsman and plenty of time to produce, is a testimony to the way companies like Boot’s took a long view of their business. A shop with a sign like this was not going to be here today but gone tomorrow. Nor was it gong to reinvent itself every five minutes, in the way businesses have wanted to do more recently. Boot’s developed, to be sure, but it was still Boot’s. And to millions of shoppers, sick and healthy alike, that spoke volumes.

National Gallery, London

 Season’s Greetings  

It is time once more for me to say ‘Happy Christmas’ to my readers. I know no better architectural way of doing this than with the floor mosaic of a Christmas pudding, by Boris Anrep, from London’s National Gallery. Regular readers may feel that the Christmas pudding mosaic is an old friend, and I’ve written about these mosaics in an earlier post. So for now I’ll add one further panel from Anrep’s National Gallery mosaics, one that I’ve not posted before, to express the hope that your lives be filled with wonder this Christmas.

Poole, Dorset

Fine detail

It occurred to me after I did my previous post about the threshold mosaic in Hereford that I had a recent picture of another, which is better preserved and more artfully put together. On my recent trip to Poole I noticed the entrance lobby of Morton’s jewellers.* I was struck at first glance – and when I looked at it more closely, it seemed better still.

On this shop front the lobby starts at right-angles to the street before deviating to the left, making an odd shape for the mosaicist to work on. However, the result here is actually very impressive. One immediately notices a stylish border with groups of three short vertical lines that recall the triglyphs of Classical architecture. also clear to see is a very effective piece of lettering, with elongated Art Deco influenced forms and an extra-long central T. But look closer (clicking on the image to enlarge it will probably help) and you can see the careful way that the pale background tesserae have been laid. Those closest to the letters follow the lines of the strokes. Those outside the lettering area form fan-shaped swirls.

The whole thing is an impressive piece of work. It’s not strictly necessary, of course, to have an entrance floor like this. A few large tiles would have done the job. But advertising helps any business and intricate decorative work is appropriate for a jeweller’s premises. It suggests that the company cares about details, quality, and style.

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Like my Poole tile finds, this was thanks to an excellent walk guided by The Tile Lady. 

Hereford

Jones the entrance

Threshold mosaics were common in shops in the early-20th century. These shops often had a doorway recessed in a small lobby, and the mosaic on the floor was a way of reinforcing the owner’s identity – another kind of advertising, if you like, to add to the name on the shopfront and the display in the window. Now customers and passers-by can enjoy them as charming bits of craftsmanship or as useful historical clues to the past owners of shop premises.

I have to say, though, that I don’t know who the Jones was who had this shop in the centre of Hereford. He or she* has long gone, but their mosaic remains, framed by the rich green tiles of the curving stall risers on either side. The mosaic isn’t in the best condition – it’s a shame about that crack, and the missing tesserae† – and perhaps the person who made it wasn’t the most accomplished mosaicist: I’ve seen other examples where all the ‘blank’ tesserae are laid in staggered courses, like a perfect brick bond. But there’s still much to enjoy, from the multicoloured border to the stylish lettering.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised that it’s the lettering that caught my attention.¶ The N, with its curving cross-stroke, and the very curly J are my favourites. To create these, with tiny bits of stone or tile, would have taken plenty of art and effort, as did the serifs present on some letters, and as did the outline tesserae – look at the way the black line of the O is followed by the white pieces that surround it.

If threshold mosaics like this are modest compared to the work of master artists like Boris Anrep and the mosaicists with whom he worked, they still show their share of flair. They deserve to be noticed as we step over them or walk past, as reminders of a time when shopkeepers built their names into their premises in the hope that their businesses and their reputations would prosper and endure through the generations.

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* Probably a he, but businesswomen’s names are sometimes concealed behind the gender-neutral initials of a shop sign. Did you know that the H. Samuel of the famous jewellery chain was a woman?

† Tesserae: the small individual pieces of stone or other material that make up a mosaic.

¶ Am I predictable, or am I predictable?

Gloucester Road, London

On the tracks of old railways (2): Mosaic

The London underground network developed and grew long before Leslie Green designed his distinctive tiled stations for London (see my previous post). The first line opened in 1863, and by 1868, this station was built on Gloucester Road to accommodate lines run by the Metropolitan Railway and the District Railway (later the word ‘Line’ replaced ‘Railway’ in the names). This part of the station, on Gloucester Road itself, has a Classical facade of cream coloured brickwork topped with ball finials and stone urns.

What sets off this frontage, though, is the large and excellent sign, just beneath the cornice. I suppose nowadays few people look at it. Their eyes are drawn to the signage down at pavement level, which clearly identifies the building as an underground station. But when I’m passing, I always look up and admire the effort that went into this sign: its pleasant lettering (with rather a top-heavy ‘R’ but a lovely extra curly ampersand) and its pale green mosaic, the green tiles varied enough in hue to give the background some interest. It’s worth anyone’s glance.

The photograph of the whole facade, above, is by A. Brady; the one of the mosaic sign, at the top of the post, is by me.

Castle Street, Liverpool

Insurance at sea

The second of my clutch of buildings from Liverpool illustrates a trend common in the manufacturing and mercantile cities that were expanding in the last decades of the 19th century – the fashion for terracotta used in combination with either brick or red sandstone. These materials produced buildings of deepest red, and terracotta – ‘baked earth’ similar to brick but usually with a finer grain to give fine detail – allows a variety of ornament. This is a kind of decoration beloved of architects of city office buildings and their clients.

This example is the British and Foreign Marine Insurance Company offices (1888–90) in Castle Street. Insurance, of course, was an important business in a maritime city like Liverpool, and the place has several Victorian insurance offices, a number, like this one, by the local architects Grayson and Ould. The British and Foreign offices, in red sandstone and terracotta, are outstanding because the designers turned up the decorative volume with the use of mosaics.

The mosaics were designed by Frank Murray (they bear his signature) and produced by Salviati, the glass- and mosaic-maker that was founded in Venice but worked all over Europe. They show marine scenes, naturally, along with the flags of Liverpool and England, and feature a whole panoply of historical shipping, from galleys, through galleons in full sail, to what would in 1889 have been the latest in steamship technology. They ply, these ships, a beautifully depicted ocean in shades of green, punctuated by occasional dashes of bright reflected colour and enlivened by pale spray. Behind, as a background, an enormous sunburst spreads across the sky.

The British and Foreign was established in the 1860s and the friezes of historical shipping no doubt gave what was quite a young company an air of historical respectability and soundness, as well as alluding to Liverpool’s history of sea trade. They did their job – and still do a very satisfying decorative job today.

With many thanks to Joe Treasure, whose new novel is just out, for the images

National Gallery, London

Architectural delicacy

One of my most popular posts of 2016 has been the one I did back in August on the floor mosaics by Boris Anrep at the National Gallery in London. These lovely floors in the old gallery foyer, hardly noticed by many gallery-goers who are, not unnaturally, keen to look at what's on the walls, are a project of the 1920s by an artist (a Russian who had settled in England) making his name in the medium of mosaic. My earlier post concentrated on their wealth of contemporary portraits – Anrep's friends and acquaintances pose as personifications of virtues or pleasures, or as the nine Muses, and they're mostly a cross-section of cultural London, from Bertrand Russell to Margot Fonteyn. They contain more than a hint of the exotic, but many of their subjects are quintessentially English, as if Anrep is paying homage to the qualities of his adopted country. The pleasures of life include universals such as Dance (this being the 1920s, it's the Charleston) or Speed (an invigorating ride on a motorcycle), but also very traditional British activities such as hunting, football, and cricket. One of the most British of all is the seasonal delicacy shown above.

Christmas pudding, for my non-British readers, is a very rich concoction containing a lot of dried fruit, sweet spices, and alcohol. It is traditionally decorated with a sprig of holly and when served it is doused in spirits which are set alight, hence the flames in the mosaic. I am one of those who think Christmas is pudding is very much one of the pleasures of life, and I'm rather touched that the Russian Anrep thought fit to include this British dish in one of his mosaics. I offer it with all my best wishes to my readers everywhere. Thank you for reading the blog this year, and may you have an enjoyable festive season, wherever you are.

Tate Britain, London

Looking down again

Among my recent posts, one of my personal favourites (and if web statistics are anything to go by, one of my readers’ favourites too) is one I did in August about the mosaic floors in the National Gallery, created by the Russian-born artist Boris Anrep, starting in the 1920s.* Anrep adorned one other London gallery, the Tate (now Tate Britain), and these mosaics are just as fascinating, though not quite so easy to see.

The Tate was damaged in a Zeppelin raid in World War I, and after the hostilities ended needed a new floor in one of the octagonal corner galleries. Boris Anrep, who was yet to do his bigger floors in the National Gallery but had established himself as a mosaic-maker of some flair, offered to make a mosaic floor for the room. Better still, from the gallery’s point of view, he was prepared to work for nothing if no funds could be found.

This suited Charles Aitken, the gallery’s keeper, although as it turned out he was able to secure some money for Anrep’s materials, and Anrep settled on illustrating eight of William Blake’s proverbs, this being a room, at that time, where some of the gallery’s considerable Blake holdings were displayed. The proverbs are of course very Blakean: ‘Exuberance is beauty’, reads one; ‘If the Fool would persist in his Folly, he would become wise’ is another.

There’s quite a lot of tension in these mosaics. In ‘The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion,’ the lion has a bottom-up pose, a spiky mane, and prominent claws: a well-fed and powerful feline. The fox by contrast in long and rangy, with matchstick legs: providing for yourself can be a hard business. ‘Expect poison from standing water’ has a different kind of tension: the female figure seems about to drink, but the restraining hand of God hovers above – will she heed it? 

These striking mosaics are easy to find. Blake’s works have been moved elsewhere and the octagonal room is now given over the the Tate’s print sales area. The gallery have tactfully positioned the display units so that they do not cover the main parts of the mosaic, but the floor cannot have its full effect, and it’s hard to photograph some of the panels without also including bits of the gallery’s tasteful grey display units in the frame.† However, the mosaics are well worth searching out, and one can understand the excitement that attended their unveiling in 1923. The general praise for Anrep must have helped him secure the National Gallery commissions a few years later and the Tate had a colourful new work of art, full of exuberance and beauty.


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* This earlier post also has more information about Anrep, which I have not repeated here.

† There is also a certain amount of reflection from the lighting, which I have tried to minimise but which can still be seen in the photographs.

National Gallery, London

The floor is yours…

We often don’t give much thought to the interiors of art galleries. It’s what’s on the walls that counts, and that holds our attention. But there are some galleries in London with architecture or decoration that repays a good look. If you’ve ever cast an eye down as you’ve entered the National Gallery and made your way through the old foyer (it’s no longer the building’s main entrance) you’ll know what I mean. The mosaic floors are a sight for sore eyes, and a fascinating window on a past world. Their story* is interesting too…

In 1926 the Russian (but British-resident) mosaic artist Boris Anrep, was disappointed when an expected commission from the industrialist and art collector Samuel Cortauld didn’t materialise. Cortauld was sympathetic, and said that if Anrep ever had a project in a public building he’d back it financially. The canny Anrep went straight to the National Gallery and said he had a potential patron – why didn’t they commission him to make a series of mosaic floors for the building’s entrance hall? The gallery was enthusiastic, so Anrep went back to Cortauld and said he’d found a project. Cortauld backed Anrep even though the cost turned out to be some ten times the donation he’d originally expected to give, and the mosaicist was launched on the most high-profile project of his life.

Anrep planned and executed a series of three floors (there was later a fourth, sponsored by a different benefactor), each involving a complex design with several mosaic panels. The subjects were The Labours of Life, The Pleasures of Life, and The Awakening of the Muses; the later fourth floor portrayed The Modern Virtues. The Pleasures included Dance (a girl dancing the Charleston) and Speed (another young woman, this time riding pillion on a motorcycle), and also Hunting, Football, and Cricket. The Labours are such things as Commerce (a market porter carrying baskets), Science (a figure in the Natural History Museum), Exploring (filming a zebra), and Engineering (a man wielding a drill). Anrep (one for serial affairs) could not resist including Sacred Love as a Labour and Profane Love as a Pleasure.

On the half-way landing is the third of the original three mosaic floors: The Awaking of the Muses, in which Apollo and Bacchus preside. The figures here (as in many of the other mosaics) are based on real people that Anrep knew. Euterpe the Muse of music, for example, is Christabel, Lady Aberconway, beloved of William Walton and dedicatee of his viola concerto. Clio is Virginia Woolf, Terpsichore the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Melpomene is Greta Garbo.

Fred Hoyle reaches for the stars: Pursuit

The fourth mosaic floor, The Modern Virtues in the North Vestibule, is also full of portraits: Defiance is Winston Churchill repelling a monster, Lucidity is philosopher Bertrand Russell, Pursuit the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Two of Anrep’s own loves are here too: the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova† is Compassion and Maud Russell (below), patron of this fourth floor, is Folly. This lovely mosaic portrait is perhaps a private joke, referring to Anrep’s and Russell’s folie à deux.

Maud Russell personifies Folly

I’ve not listed all the portraits – and there’s so much else here: a resplendent Christmas pudding, a pub sign (yes, these are very British subjects), a harpsichord (being played by the Hon Edward Sackville-West while Margot Fonteyn listens (photograph at the top of this post). That scene represents Delectation (a pleasure of life, obviously). And I hope I have convinced you that there is much here for your delectation too. The consistent clarity of Anrep’s line (in a medium that hardly seems to encourage it), the telling use of colour (the huntsman’s ruddy face, for example, is terrific), the period touches (cigarette holders, the old-fashioned football), the range of poses, the use of frames and borders. It’s a set of pictures fit to stand beside those in the gallery, and a fitting prelude to London’s palace of art.

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*Lois Oliver, Boris Anrep: The National Gallery Mosaics (National Gallery London, 2004) tells their story in detail.

†Anna Akhmatova (pronounce the name with the stress on the second syllable): one of Russia’s great 20th-century poets, much translated into English. She and Anrep were close when they were young, but did not see one another for decades once Anrep had left for western Europe. They met again in old age. A number of Akhmatova’s early lyrics were dedicated to Anrep; these poems are in her volume White Flock; most of what I know of her life is from the biography by Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage.

Bristol

Café and curves

The Resident Wise Woman and I have a habit of parking in Park Street in Bristol and either climbing up the hill to browse in the Oxfam bookshop or going a bit further to find something to eat or drink. One day I wandered down the hill to College Green and, turning my back on the cathedral and library to my right, had a look above some of the shop fronts. This one stood out in particular: a study in turn-of-the-century classicism with a hint of baroque. There’s a mix of traditional details (the little pediments trailing stone carving down the wall) and elements that could only be from this period: above all the windows – the shallow bow; the segmental (curve-topped) window just above it; the tall, narrow openings right at the top; and those tiny round windows (oils de boeuf) below the pediments. All these are features straight from the school of turn-of-the-century English design.

But there’s something more. A mosaic frieze of stylized plant forms running in a band across the bow window. The pale-green stems twist and turn in curves that are more art nouveau, as if whoever designed this frontage wanted a hint of the continent, a breathe of French air, to enliven the building. On either side of this frieze are perhaps the best bits of all, a pair of lead canopies, flaring slightly and adorned with art nouveau pomegranate reliefs. The stems here form those multiple curves doubling back on themselves (‘whiplash curves’, in design-speak) that are so redolent of French and Belgian art nouveau. Such curves are not that common in England, but you find them occasionally on shop fronts that wanted to look highly fashionable between 1890 and 1910.

This little gem of a building was built as the Cabot Café. The architects were La Trobe and Weston, but the art nouveau decoration was created by the owner’s daughter, Catherine Hughes. Pevsner sources the mosaic from an 1891 bookbinding design by Charles Ricketts. He further observes that there are traces of the original interior inside, although these certainly weren’t in evidence when I peered through the door. I must return, buy myself fish and chips, and investigate further.

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In previous posts I’ve noted a full-blown art nouveau shop front in Cambridge and a hint of one in Leamington Spa.

Sudbury, Suffolk

Craftwork

Look up. People are always telling me to do it. I am always telling people to do it. Look up above the tree line, at church towers, above the doors of houses, above shop windows. You often see something unexpected and rewarding. So when a splash of colour caught my eye above the modern shops of North Street in Sudbury I looked up and saw this: a bit of 1870s Arts and Crafts design that can still take your breath away about 140 years after it was built.

I’ve called it Arts and Crafts because it demonstrates so many crafts in such a small space: colourful floral mosaic, incised plasterwork, stained glass, ornate metalwork (those floral finials that tops the little hipped roofs of the oriels), and the use of neat openwork ridge tiles. All of this is set within a strong design, with the Tudoresque timber framing, the pair of tall, narrow oriels (topped and tailed with hipped roofs and plastered undersides), and the russet roof. It’s an impressive piece of work and in a different league from the upper fronts of so many shops, where you find a bit of brick wall and a couple of sash windows if you’re lucky. I don’t know who commissioned this facade or what business was first housed beneath these mosaic flowers and Tudorish windows, but it’s good to see such care being lavished on so small a frontage back in 1876.

Although the Arts and Crafts movement is often said to have got into full swing in the 1880s, William Morris’s firm was in full swing by the 1860s, and Morris and his colleagues founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. Morris’s work, the interest in design fostered by the embryonic Victoria and Albert Museum, and, above all, the kind of ‘Free Tudor’ architecture of Norman Shaw (as in is famous 1860s house, Cragside), set the tone. So, if we’re surprised by the restrained richness of this facade, we should’t be surprised at the date, the curvaceous numerals of which are incorporated into the mosaic. This kind of design was in the air.

Maida Vale, London

Roundel, deluxe version

London’s roundel symbol, conceived for the underground but also used on buses and coaches from the 1930s onwards, is one of the most successful logos in the world. When shown bearing the word UNDERGROUND it alerts us instantly, and combined with the underground’s typical architecture (oxblood-tiled early-20th century stations by Leslie Green, 1930s ones by Charles Holden and his colleagues, for example) it quickly becomes part of the visual vocabulary of anyone visiting or living in the capital.

The roundel appears in various forms – painted, reproduced in tiles, or printed, for example – but I know of only one station (maybe there are others) where it’s reproduced in the form of a mosaic. This is at Maida Vale’s station (opened in 1915), where two big mosaic roundels, their red tesserae glinting slightly, greet the passenger at the top of the stairs. The roundel is complemented by the off-white tiles around it, and the elegant linear pattern of off-white and green tiles, a lovely touch. It’s an early version of the roundel, with the red disc that preceded the now-familiar red ring (it’s actually one of the last to have the disc) and with non-standard typography, but still striking.

I don’t know why Maida Vale station was singled out for this visual treatment, but it’s an absolute treat. Excellent as the exterior is – it’s one of the oxblood tiled ones, with segmental-arched windows and bold white diamond glazing bars – it doesn’t prepare one for these mosaics. A pleasant visual surprise for the visitor and a feature in which locals can take justified pride.