Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire

Castle-cathedral-church

Even after years of looking at architecture, buildings are still surprising me and pulling me up short. This little eye-catcher of a church near the A30 east of Shaftesbury is a case in point. Seen through the eye corner, the towers and battlements suggest a castle, but as soon as you look closely, it's obvious that this is a church – and one built in a very specific way to imitate a Norman cathedral on a small scale.

The church was built in around 1839, when a neighbouring building proved too small for a growing population. The architect, William Walker, designed it in this neo-Norman style, with round-headed doorway and tall, narrow windows, which was rather unusual in this period. I've seen it suggested that a local bigwig, a Mr Graves of nearby Charlton House, contributed a lot of the money required for the building, and maybe he had a say in the design. Whoever's idea it was, it's unusual and arresting. Small parish churches don't have two towers, do they? This one does. They usually have the entrance on the south. But this one's main doorway is at the west end. They don't normally have a west front. This one does. Neither do they usually have the rather forbidding, military-looking aspect of this building, with its very narrow windows and battlements. Even now, some time after taking the photograph, the unusual effect of this church makes me pause.

Eastnor, Herefordshire

The splendour falls on castle walls

In early March the trees are still bare of leaves and the landscape yields enticing views. This one, through a hedge on the A438 not far from Ledbury, is of Eastnor Castle, rising massively like the border strongholds built by the Normans to defend their lands against the Welsh. ‘Like’ being the operative word. Eastnor is no 12th-century pile, but a Norman revival castle built in the second decade of the 19th century. It was designed by Robert Smirke for the 1st Earl Somers and was perhaps intended to add the stamp of antique status to a man whose wealth came partly from banking and a judicious marriage.

The building is massive and the task of constructing it was formidable – a workforce of 250, stone brought from the Forest of Dean by water and cart, ten years of toil. Even under construction, the castle must have seemed a romantic place, a world away from the Napoleonic Wars. And yet these wars had an impact. Timber, in demand for ship building, was at a premium, and the builders drew heavily on the trees on the estate. Smirke looked to new technology for a way around the problem. Many of the roof trusses and beams in this neo-Norman building are made of iron.

In spite of its massive masonry and iron beams, Eastnor was suffering huge structural problems by the end of World War II. Perhaps with less tenacious owners than the Hervey-Bathursts the castle might have turned into a sad but Romantic ruin. But the last few decades have seen huge efforts made to repair the building, and it’s at last in very good shape. You can read more about it here.

Eastnor is now in fighting trim to host visitors, corporate hirers, weddings, and all the other uses that generate the income necessary to support a huge structure like this. One should not be sad about these new uses of this old building. Country houses have always been businesses, and their farms, timber yards, workshops, and kitchens supported armies of workers. Tourism to country houses has a long history too – remember those Jane Austen characters visiting big houses and being shown around by housekeepers. Eastnor has been open to visitors almost since it was built. The tradition continues.

Langham Court Hotel, Langham Street, London

The word ‘eye-catcher’ was coined for this place. When I caught a glimpse of it from a side-street I had to have a closer look. What I found was a hotel – but it hasn’t always been that. This dazzler was built in 1901 as a nurses’ home. The glazed-brick façade is no doubt meant to look hygienic – its shiny surface would have easily shed the build-up of city grime in the smoky period when it was built. The style is a kind of neo-Norman – the semi-circular arch above the doorway is a kind of homage to doorways like the one at Elkstone in the previous entry, as the jagged decoration around the arch and the spiral-twist shafts on either side of the door make clear. But no genuine Norman building was ever like this. The bold black-and-white design of the frontage takes the medieval love of pattern-making to new extremes – some of the treatment almost recalled the bold graphics of the Secessionist movement in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Arthur E. Thompson, the building’s architect, might have found this comparison strange. He’d no doubt have found it odd too that his nurses’ home had become a fashionable hotel. At least guests must find it easy to locate when they come back after a long night out.