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, Bixteth Street

Liverpudlian Gothic

There are still a large number of good 19th-century commercial buildings in central Liverpool, and some of them are highly decorative, as if to emphasise the prosperity of the city in this period. Some of these structures are enormous, but even relatively small ones can be visually exciting, and Gothic, a style primarily but by no means exclusively associated with churches, lends itself well to showy facades. Here’s a good example, an office building, dating probably to the 1860s.

This building is called Lombard Chambers, but its architecture is the Victorian version of Venetian Gothic – polychrome masonry (red brick with stone dressings and a grey stone plinth), with lots of pointed arches and a distinctive gable with a row of tiny arches beneath the cornice. The central shafts of the pairs of windows on the second floor are made of iron although they could easily be mistaken for grey stone.* Some of the pale stone is carved with intricate foliage designs and creatures curled around one another (see my photograph below). 

I say it’s probably an 1860s design not only because that’s the verdict of the Pevsner guide to Liverpool,† but also because it was in the 1860s that this kind of highly ornate, rather jazzy, facade became fashionable. Venice, once the base of a maritime trading empire, appealed to businessmen in Britain’s big commercial ports like Liverpool. John Ruskin had compared the empires of Britain and Venice in his monumental book The Stones of Venice in the 1850s, and he loved the Gothic architecture of the city.

Ruskin’s admiration of Gothic architecture, and of Venetian Gothic in particular, was influential, and Venetian Gothic offices and even factories popped up in many English cities. Industrialists generally liked them not for Ruskin’s refined moral and aesthetic reasons, but because you could make a colourful splash with polychrome brickwork, pointed arches, and crisp carving. A building like this could act as a landmark and an advertisement for the owner. I don’t know who built this particular example, but the result still catches the eye and lodges itself in the memory.

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* I count the floors upwards from the lowest visible level thus, in English fashion: basement, ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor; above the latter a modern attic floor, set back from the front, is just visible.

† Joseph Sharples, Liverpool (Yale University Press, 2004)

Lombard Chambers: carved details

Birmingham

Turning a corner, 2

Few buildings turn a corner with such grandeur as this one in Birmingham’s Constitution Hill. It dates from the 1890s and was designed architects William Doubleday* and James R. Shaw for H. B. Sale, a firm of die-sinkers. The plan was to have offices and shops on the ground floor with each upper floor taken up by one large workshop, plus an office in the corner tower. Five floors were planned, but the fifth was not added until the mid-20th century, hence the difference in style.

The exterior is built of red brick with a rich array of terracotta dressings – foliage, flowers, and medieval-style heads all feature and the top of the building as originally constructed was given some distinction with the row of small curved gables still present in front of the 20th-century top storey. The stylistic label given by English Heritage’s short ‘Informed Conservation’ book about the district is Spanish Romanesque-style. The stand-out feature is the tower, which is still a landmark on the junction of Constitution Hill and Hampton Street. Each storey of the tower has a different kind of opening, from the first floor† upwards: trefoil, slightly wasp-waisted arches; flat-topped openings; windows topped with ogees; semicircular openings; and quatrefoils in the tiny gables around the dome. The tower also displays the owner’s name,¶ standing proud from the band of foliate decoration – a popular late-19th century effect that I always admire. Finally, the ogee dome at the top, with its fish-scale surface, provides a pleasing climax, although it’s slightly hidden by the gables and finials that surround it. What a glorious building. I hope its owners are soon able to remove the plants that are taking root towards the top of the tower, so that it can continue to provide the area with a landmark and an admirable collection of exuberant architectural decoration.

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* William Doubleday was based in Wolverhampton when this building was designed; he later moved to Birmingham.

† American second floor.

¶ You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it, which might make this a little easier to see.

Leominster, Herefordshire

Incidental pleasures, 2: Old news

The things we have lost. In the increasing list of things that have vanished or are vanishing as the world becomes ever more reliant on digital media, communications, commerce, and the rest are local newspapers. Long ago, when I was growing up, my parents took a national newspaper in the morning and a local newspaper in the evening. There were lots of national papers to choose from, but there was also a choice of locals – not just our town’s own paper, but one from the neighbouring city too. Even small towns had a newspaper of their own, containing a mix of local news plus advertisements, announcements of births, marriages and deaths, the results of the local sports matches, and announcements for forthcoming meetings of every local group from the Young Farmers club to the Literary and Philosophical Society. Most of these publications have gone, some completely, others to some sort of online presence.

Often, they’ve vanished without trace. Occasionally there are small, fragile traces, like this door (now belonging to a shop), glazed with engraved glass bearing the words ‘Leominster News’. That, plus another nearby, is such a trace of what was once The Leominster News and North West Herefordshire and Radnorshire Advertiser, a paper that covered not just the Herefordshire hinterland of this small market town but also the neighbouring Welsh border county of Radnorshire (itself another thing long gone, having been absorbed in the 1970s into the large county of Powys*).

This kind of engraved glass is the sort of thing I associate mostly with pubs – used for windows advertising a local ale or the availability of ports and sherries.† But it works just as well for a printing or newspaper office. Both would have doors that were beacons for people, and engraved glass with a light behind it was a good on-street advertisement. In the evening, through such doors local reporters would rush with their latest copy about a council meeting or some unexpected police report that simply had to be squeezed in somewhere. Out in the early hours of the morning would come weary printers, pleased to have got the latest edition printed and sent on its way in waiting vans to take the news to Herefordshire apple growers and Radnorshire sheep farmers. Later in the day, in would go members of the public wanting to place an ad or insert an announcement. Such places were at the heart of the community, and the light behind a door like this a sight that would be taken for granted.

From a little research online, this newspaper was around in the late-19th century and still going during World War II. How much longer did the light behind the door bring to mind the light shed on people’s breakfast or tea tables and the illumination brought by local news? Just the incidental pleasure of an old sign now, but back then, an essential part of life.

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* The name lives on, though, to denote the district of Radnorshire, the ‘Radnorshire part’ of Powys.

† There is much about engraved, embossed and other ornamental glass in Mark Girouard’s excellent Victorian Pubs (Studio Vista, 1975; Yale UP, 1984).

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Staggering architecture

This is a building that startled me in two distinct ways when I was looking at the wonderful 18th-century clothiers’ houses in Trowbridge the other week. Jammed into a corner between two of these classical almost-palaces, this building is constructed of the same creamy limestone and is also in a classical style. But look at the detail! At the top, a triangular pediment with a cornice that sticks right out from the main wall, producing deep shadows and emphasising the very large dentil blocks that punctuate its lower edges. The bottom of the triangle is interrupted in the middle to make room for swathes of carved ornament that hangs deep down on either side of a window and extends upwards into the triangular space made by the pediment. In the middle there’s a blind oval with four exaggerated stones – one at the top in the position of an arch’s keystone, the others matching it on the bottom and sides, like the cardinal points on a compass. Lower down this end wall run pilasters with deeply cut blocks of stone, each pilaster topped with more carved ornament.

So what was this highly ornate building that caught my attention and made me rush across the street so that I could examine it more closely? At first I took it to be an especially showy example of a clothier’s house, the residence of someone who had more of a taste for the baroque that the apparently more classically minded neighbours on either side. It was, of course, something quite different and much later: the imposing offices of Ushers Brewery, built in 1913 to designs by local architect W. W. Snailum in a style sometimes called brewer’s baroque. Thomas Usher had established their brewery in the centre of Trowbridge in 1824 and by 1913 the firm must have been doing well. By the mid-20th century, they had expanded hugely but were no longer so profitable and were eventually taken over, like so many provincial brewing firms, by a larger company, Watney Mann. When the baroque office building was put up in 1913, Usher’s must have been growing and optimistic of further success: the architecture seems to reflect that.

I began this post by saying that this building startled me in two ways. What was the second surprise? It was more sudden, and less pleasant. When I crossed the road to look at this extraordinary architectural confection more closely, keeping my eyes on the stonework and not on the ground beneath my feet, I tripped on a metal bar meant to stand upright to define a parking space but actually hinged down, parallel to the ground, and fell flat on my face, my smartphone and my dignity slipping from me instantly. The Resident Wise Woman, crossing the road more slowly than I, was soon behind me, and a passer-by was also offering help. I was, thankfully, able to climb to my feet unaided, and although I was bruised on my knees and chin (the main points of impact), I sustained no lasting damage. It has, though, made me warier of looking up without watching where I put my feet, not wishing to repeat what happened when I went to look at this doubly staggering building.

Rochester Row, London

 

Built to last?

When I first passed this piece of 1960s concrete sculpture in London’s Rochester Row, I’d no idea who created it. A while later I found out about the sculptor William Mitchell, who made a specialism of creating abstract sculpture out of concrete. I’ve since encountered his work in Coventry and elsewhere. However even then I didn’t make the connection because it slipped my mind that I’d taken this photograph (I got carried away with a nearby fire station, not to mention the famous Blewcoat School just up the street.) Much later, looking for the image of the fire station, I found this picture next to it in my files, and thought, ’Surely, that must be by William Mitchell.’ And so it proves to be.

What the image shows is actually only part of the artwork, which is too long to photograph in one go because it stretches all the way along the concrete beam that links the building’s main structural columns. So I photographed a bit that I particularly liked. Even when I found the picture again, I didn’t realise its full significance. William Mitchell told a friend: ‘This was the first integral piece of concrete art ever produced.’ It’s a ‘ring beam’ which linked all the columns and on which the remainder of the structure depended. ‘I designed it, made the moulds and the builder poured the concrete,’ said the sculptor.

Now William Mitchell’s work is better known, in spite of the fact that much of it has disappeared because it forms part of buildings that have fallen out of use and been demolished – like the northern part (about one third of the whole) of this very building. I think that’s a shame, and I hope plenty of Mitchell’s remaining sculptures do survive. I think they often enliven streetscapes and buildings that are otherwise dull, and that they show a true artist responding to a 20th-century material in creative ways. They are very much of their time, but also, in my opinion, deserve to outlast their time. I’m glad the work of William Mitchell is appreciated at last.

Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (2): Doing the office proud

This building not far from the gigantic town hall in Leeds is grand, but not gigantic, and compared to its more famous neighbour, it’s on a small scale. It’s the sort of thing that still survives here and there in Britain’s large cities: a compact office block in the Gothic style. For Leeds, it has a special significance because it is said to be the first dedicated block of office chambers in the city. It was built in the late 1860s and housed the offices of Charles Fowler, a Leeds surveyor who also acted as architect on some buildings. He may well have designed this one.

It is not an unusual building for the 1860s: Gothic in style, red brick with stone dressings, and quite ornate. Its triple lancet sash windows have slender stone shafts that hold up stone arches. The windows on the ground floor also sit above a stretch of wall that’s stone and decorated with quatrefoils. These are more quatrefoils in the stretch of parapet at the top of the building between the two gables.

But the really striking feature is the doorway. This is pointed, with a cinquefoil inner arch and two pairs of shafts. Around the main arch run several bands of carved ornament – a mixture of dogtooth and stylised leaves. All this is the kind of thing seen on medieval Gothic arches too, but the difference is the band containing the name, Britannia Buildings. You would not normally see such a name panel on a medieval structure, and if there were an inscription it would certainly not use the very Victorian letterform that features here, with its fancy capitals – very rounded Bs, a curly G, and an I with extra ornament halfway up.* With such a bold architectural statement, we can have no doubt where we are. 

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* It’s worth clicking on the photograph to enlarge it.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

In situ

Theme and Variations, 1969–72 is a sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth fixed to the facade of a building in the centre of Cheltenham that was originally the headquarters of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society. The 25-foot long piece was made especially for the building, has been part of the Cheltenham scene for well over 40 years, and was the artist’s last public commission. She made the sculpture to exploit the slightly curving frontage of the building – the relationship of the groups of semicircles is revealed more clearly as one walks along appreciating the artfulness of the way they are stacked. I think the work enhances the street and deserves to stay there.

However, a while ago the sculpture’s owner (not the same as the company that occupies the building) announced a plan to remove the piece and replace it with an exact replica. Many objected to this proposal, not because the appearance would change but on the grounds of integrity: Hepworth made Theme and Variations for the building and it should remain where it is. It is one of very few works Hepworth created to be attached to a building, which makes it still more important that it continues in situ.† Fortunately, Cheltenham Borough Council and the Twentieth Century Society agree. As a result of the Society’s work, the facade of the building with its integral sculpture have now been listed. It’s with pleasure that I report that this Hepworth is not going anywhere.

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† The Twentieth Century Society says that her Winged Figure from ten years earlier, attached to the facade of the John Lewis store in London’s Oxford Street, is the only other work by Hepworth designed to be fixed to a building and still in its original position. It is listed at Grade II*.

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Above standard

I thought this building, just a couple of streets away from the timber-gabled, tile-hung pub in my previous post, would make a good follow-up to it. This is the former offices of the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard newspaper.* It’s almost the same age as the pub – 1904 rather than 1902 in the case of the Brewer’s Arms – and also has timbered gables. But there the resemblance ends. The ground floor is in a sort of Cotswold Renaissance revival style – the mullioned window, Elizabethan-looking pilasters, and carved capitals would be at home in any Cotswold town, Painswick, Chipping Campden or Cirencester itself. But above, things change gear and the whole frontage is timber-framed, with big oriel windows and very fancy woodwork, from carved beams studded with Tudor roses to elaborate bargeboards. The upper floor is also jettied out to overhang the street.

This fine and rather surprising† building is the work of a Cirencester architect called Vincent Alexander Lawson, who worked in the town between 1885 and 1928. This example of his work is clearly very assured. He designed plenty of other buildings in the town and round about, and civil engineering work (he was a qualified civil engineer) as well as a lot of more straightforward Cotswold revival buildings. This striking office structure shows him exploring styles a bit more widely, if not wildly.

“Photograph it before it goes!” exclaimed the Resident Wise Woman, and she was right. The building is for sale, and though I’m sure the frontage will be preserved, the signage should be protected as well as the structure. The building is listed, and the signs are mentioned in the listing text, so there’s hope. That’s good because signs are often what go first from an old town-centre building, and the former newspaper office has not only some good lettering above the door and window but also a lovely hanging sign. This is shield-shaped, well lettered, and suspended from a very lively wrought-iron bracket with a touch of Art Nouveau in its curves. Information, craftsmanship, and enjoyment in one small package. Worth holding the front page for, I’d say.

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* The building only ceased to be used by the newspaper in 2017, and for much of its life combined the editorial office at the front with a print works at the rear. 

† Surprising, that is, in the context of Cirencester, where one might expect that a fine building of this period would be built entirely out of stone.

Nottingham

Mr Fothergill

A discussion on Facebook about the name Fothergill reminded me of an architectural Fothergill – Watson Fothergill, a late-19th century architect who did a lot to transform the streets of the city of Nottingham. I’ve posted about Watson Fothergill before, featuring in particular the office building he designed for himself in his characteristic mix of Gothic and ‘Old English’ styles, in glowing polychrome brick. I think of him as one of the ‘local heroes’ of English architecture, one of those architects whose impact was confined mainly to one town or city but whose work was both distinctive and high in quality. Of course Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a ‘local hero’, in that nearly all his buildings are in or near Glasgow, but his impact was worldwide. I’m thinking of lesser, but still notable, talents. The Jearrad brothers, who built quite a bit of Cheltenham; the Bastards, who created Blandford Forum, virtually from scratch, after a devastating fire; the Goddard family of Leicester, and so on. Many towns have one such architect, many have more than one – Leicester has Arthur Wakerley as well as the Goddards; Nottingham has Thomas Hine as well as Watson Fothergill. 

Watson Fothergill began life as Fothergill Watson. He swapped his names around in mid-life, in an attempt to perpetuate his mother’s maiden name. But he failed to keep the Fothergill line going: both his sons predeceased him without fathering children. He worked industriously all over Nottingham and in some nearby places, designing banks, offices, at least one church, and a lot of houses. His legacy, then, is his buildings and his architectural character is portrayed in his own office building, which lays out his artistic lineage like an architectural family tree. Here’s what I wrote about it in the early days of this blog:

It’s a wonderfully Victorian mixture of advertisement and creed. ‘I can do multi-coloured brickwork, timber-framing, and intricate Gothic details,’ it says. And also: ‘I employ the best carvers and take trouble with my lettering.’ But it’s more than this. The little heads above the windows are identified as A W N Pugin and G E Street, two of the most revered Gothic architects of the Victorian period. The man who displayed mentors like these on his office façade was insisting that he could deliver the best – and that he believed in the transcendent value of Gothic architecture. Further along the front are more names – William Burges (another Goth with a flair for decoration) and Norman Shaw (pioneer of the Old English style that inspired the Arts and Crafts movement). Fothergill learned from these designers too, to Nottingham’s benefit.

In spite of the emphasis on Gothic that his choice of architectural mentors suggests, it’s the Old English style that comes through most strongly in his buildings. Colourful brickwork abounds, as do timber-framed gables, large chimneys, and ornate turrets, often poking up at different heights to give variety to the skyline. It’s intricate stuff, and much of it is not just asymmetrical, but almost hyperactive, as bay windows break free of the building line here, and turrets enliven a corner there. Daring work, in its way, but also thoroughly right for a busy, fast-moving Midland city that’s also aware of its illustrious past. Its virtue is long-lived indeed.

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Photograph, top, of whole building by Darren Turner, reproduced with thanks under Creative Common licence CC BY-SA 3.0.
Other photographs by me.

Sheffield

  
White heat

Sheffield, of course, is known above all as a steel town. Even in the commercial city centre, away from the larger forges and factories, we’re often reminded of this. The White Building on Fitzalan Square is an office block of 1908 clad in faience and is one of the many substantial such buildings that reflect the prosperity of this place in the 19th and early-20th centuries – prosperity that was largely down to the steel industry.

The faience cladding was unusual here in 1908 – the dominant hues in this city are red brick, orangey terracotta, and stone. There are more later white buildings (together with the late-20th century’s contributions of concrete in a range of greys) so when this one was erected, it was known as The White Building, as if there was just the one. It certainly stands out, with its flattened arches and unusually shaped pediments above the upper windows, not to mention the surprising, almost rococo swags below the cornice. Gibbs & Flockon,* the architects, did a more than decent job.

But what I most like about it is the way the building acknowledges Sheffield’s industrial activity with a series of ten reliefs of Sheffield trades, by Alfred and William Tory. These are in low relief and beautifully delineate various metalworking jobs, from casting to engraving and planishing. The figures are well modelled, and look as if drawn from life, with both sculptors adept at rendering the surfaces of flesh and garments. If the white surfaces, recalling classical marble, give the reliefs a sense of calm and cool that’s a world away from the heat and noise of a real factory, they still have an authentic feel to them: this looks like real work, combining strength and skill. Above all, the workers, variously employed, are united in their intent concentration on the job in hand.

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* A longstanding Sheffield firm, which changed name as family members and other partners came and went.

Water Street, Liverpool

Blowing bubbles

The third of my Liverpudlian trio is Oriel Chambers, an office block in Water Street that has been catching eyes since 1864. It was designed by Liverpool architect Peter Ellis (who did the equally striking 16 Cook Street and a number of other, less notable, Liverpool buildings) and it has always fascinated me.

What’s striking at first glance is the amount of glass, and its arrangement. Dozens of similar oriel windows protrude from building’s two street facades. They have very narrow glazing bars, so the effect is almost like a series of glass bubbles. There are no structural outer walls. This is a framework building, and the frame is of cast iron, although the material is concealed from the world by a thin cladding of stone.

So, how very modern, one thinks, for 1864: a tall, metal-framed building with a ‘curtain wall’ of glass, like a 20th-century skyscraper. And yet, also, how old-fashioned: the metal is covered with stone, and the skyline is punctuated with pinnacles that look almost Gothic. The oriels themselves have little finials too. So it’s a mixture, this building, and no less fascinating for that.

When it was built, the press disliked it. Building News thought the oriels looked as if they were ‘trying to escape from the building’ and called it ‘greenhouse architecture gone mad’. A Liverpool critic in a satirical magazine called The Porcupine called the building ‘this vast abortion’ and said that ‘the plainest brick warehouse in the town is infinitely superior, as a building, to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles.’ They didn’t much bother about the back of the building, which is even more remarkably modern, as the video below about Oriel Chambers and Ellis’s Cook Street block, reveals.

There used to be a lot of speculation that Ellis’s career was derailed by the contemporary criticism he received for Oriel Chambers. But historians Robert Ainsworth and Graham Jones* have researched the architect’s life and work, and have found a man quietly thriving as an architect and surveyor – and pursuing new directions, which I hope to cover in a further post. Meanwhile, we can, I think, admire Oriel Chambers as a fascinating building that looks forward to modernist architecture while also glancing back towards tradition: not a bad way of working, to my mind. His building is an asset to Liverpool and deservedly famous.

With many thanks once more to Joe Treasure for the pictures of Oriel Chambers.


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* Robert Ainsworth and Graham Jones, In the Footsteps of Peter Ellis (Liverpool History Society, 2013)

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

Great Marlborough Street, London

Beau ideal

The light was already going when, just before Christmas, I walked past Liberty’s along Great Marlborough Street, glanced for the umpteenth time at the building formerly known as Ideal House, and remembered that I’d never taken a photograph of it. So the conditions were less than ideal for capturing this monumental art deco block, built as offices for the National Radiator Company in 1928–29, but I went ahead anyway, doing my best to avoid bumping into people as I backed towards one of Liberty’s windows to get the building in the frame.

Ideal House (it’s now called Palladium House) was designed by Raymond Hood and Gordon Jeeves as a smaller cousin of New York’s headquarters of the American Radiator Company, of which the National Radiator Company was the European offshoot. The company started in the 1890s, just as central heating using boilers and radiators was catching on, and did well in both North America and Europe.  In the interwar period, more and more houses were being fitted with central heating: to many people it seemed like the latest thing, even though it had been around for decades by then, and a landmark building in the latest, swankiest style must have seemed to project just the right image.

The most lavish finishes were employed. The walls are covered in polished black granite (in the right light it looks very black) and the cornices and lower window surrounds are done out in gold enamel cladding with touches of red and green. These details are in the Egyptian style (art deco could be very modern and very ancient at the same time): Egyptian decoration was very fashionable in the late-1920s, in part because the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb had got so much publicity. So the radiator-makers would have felt they were getting the latest thing – and in their corporate colours, black and gold, too. Nearly 80 years on, the building is still an eye-catcher, even if most passers-by have eyes only for the seductive windows of Mr Liberty.

Fleet Street, London

Getting your message across

I’m in the process of preparing a course about architectural ornament, and looking through my photographs to find examples of ways in which 20th-century architects turned against the modernist call in the 1920s for architecture that should be functional and devoid, or largely devoid, of the decorative elements that had so preoccupied their predecessors. There are numerous ways in which they made this turn, of course, one of them being the increasing use of ancient Egyptian design as a source: think various cinema facades and factories of the late-1920s and 1930s. To make this point in the past I’ve often used a personal favourite – the old Carreras tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent, with its Egyptian columns and wonderful black cats. Here’s another example, the former Telegraph building in Fleet Street.

The Telegraph building was designed for the newspaper of that name by Elcock and Sutcliffe with Thomas Tait and built in 1927–8. It has a very bold, ultra-imposing facade with a row of giant fluted columns topped by carved Egyptian capitals. Bands of abstract carved ornament run along cornices and over window lintels. The whole thing is designed to make a big mark, to overwhelm the passer-by.  And so it does – look at the way it dwarfs the pedestrians in front of it.

Further decorative touches make a big difference. The clock, itself enormous, lends colour to this stony frontage. Its design is full of the diamonds, jagged edges, chevrons, and radiating, sunburst-like motifs that Art Deco artists loved. The relief above the doorway, by, Alfred Oakley, is another such feature. With its sun-rays, compass rose, Britain at the centre of its hemisphere, and the two caduceus-bearing messenger figures racing out across the empire with news, it symbolises the newspaper’s business of communication, and sets it, and Britain, at a pivotal place in the world that would not have seemed inappropriate in 1927. On the bright day I passed by, some rather dramatic shadows were obscuring some of the detail of this carving, but it’s strong enough to make its point without the direct light of the Art Deco lamp above it.*

As ever, God (or the Devil, if you wish) is in the details. If this gigantic facade does seem over the top, the carving and that jewel-box of a clock give it different accents, and make one pause to look closely. Which is one of the things good architectural ornament can do so well.

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*As so often, the excellent Ornamental Passions blog has more about the carving on this building, with more photographs.

Nottingham

Waterhouse in Nottingham: a postscript

As often happens, I had a number of appreciative comments – both by email and in the comments section itself – on my previous post, and a couple of my readers mentioned the profuse decoration of this building, the former Prudential offices in Nottingham, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. It occurs to me that I perhaps rather under-did my account of this decoration, so, to compensate for this, here's another image, a close-up of part of the wall above the doorway, to show that Waterhouse, at least, could not be accused of under-egging the pudding.

The centrepiece is the figure of Prudence, the Cardinal Virtue most appropriate for the Prudential company, elegantly robed and holding serpent and book. It's worth clicking on the image so that its details can be seen more clearly. I particularly like the way in which the sculptor has shown the tail-end of the snake, which appears between the folds of Prudence's garment. Around the figure a riot of decoration breaks out. From the arched and vaulted canopy above Prudence's head to the columns and pilasters on each side, there's plenty of architectural embellishment. There are also vigorous leaves, scrolling and intertwining bands, and the heart-shaped cartouches that contain the Roman numeral representing the date of the company's foundation. These letters, although they represent a Roman date, are not exaclty classical in their forms – the Cs in particular seem, in their varied but gentle curves, to look forward to the freedom of Art Nouveau. Altogether, this decoration is a glorious array, a tribute to the visual resourcefulness of the Victorians, and of Waterhouse in particular.

Nottingham

Energy and eclecticism

I’ve just finished teaching a course on Victorian architecture, so thought I’d share a Victorian building or two in the next couple of posts – perhaps one or two that I’ve seen recently but did not find space for in the course. Today’s example is a building from the centre of Nottingham. In my course I talked briefly about the vast, very red brick Prudential Building in London’s Holborn, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. Here’s another example of this architect’s work for the insurance company, this time in the centre of Nottingham.

Nottingham’s former Prudential building stands in the centre of the city, on a tight corner looking towards the market place. Waterhouse used the corner to take the building through a dramatic curve, with the entrance at the centre of this curve, and as you look up, you see an array of pilasters and statues (all in terracotta), rising to a square tower that has turrets at the corners and a chunky spire. Like the London Prudential building, it’s very red, but it stands on a very heavy-looking stone base. This base seems to speak a language of solidity and security that’s echoed by the turrets and tower – appropriate, perhaps for an insurance company. Another ‘security’ feature is provided by the false machicolations – the row of little arches above the doorway that are meant to recall similar openings on the gatehouses of castles, through which defenders could pour boiling oil (or boiling water, or whatever else they could find) on their enemies below. 

Yet this very eclectic 1890s building* also looks quite palatial, with its big windows and curvy Jacobean-style gables and its rich decoration, This was also conceived as the office of an institution that wanted to suggest   
financial security as well as physical security. Waterhouse clearly knew what his client wanted – he designed Prudential office buildings in London, Leeds, Sheffield, and in around 20 other locations. His vivid red brick work for the insurance company reflected the Victorians’ restless eclecticism, but also their unstoppable energy.

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*There’s a date on the front, 1848, but this refers to the foundation of the company, not the construction of the building.

Savile Row, London

Well suited?

This elegant bit of lettering is an interesting variation on the capital’s standard black and red street name signs. By keeping the usual colours – black for the name of the street, red for the postal district  – the sign recognisably relates to London, but the letterform and layout are completely different from the London norm. The architect of this building, Gordon Jeeves, seems to have had the idea of integrating the lettering more closely than usual with the design of the building, setting the letters in a purpose-designed horizontal slot, and using this slot to mirror the strong horizontal lines of the rest of the design.

The building (essentially an office block, though meant to have shops on the ground floor) was designed in the late-1930s: the Survey of London says in 1937. On the opposite corner is the West End Central Police Station, a pale, stone-clad building of 1938–9, with modernist features (glass bricks, strong horizontals) and similar lettering. So it looks as if the architects of the Police Station (Burnet, Tait & Lorne) decided to follow the lead of their neighbour and include matching lettering.

I like the way the sign sits in its horizontal slot – although the fit isn’t exact: the ‘Savile Row’ and ‘Boyle St’ parts of the slot have been made the same length so there is more white space around ‘Boyle St’. The letterform is strikingly different, too, from the usual Univers Bold Condensed of London’s street name signs. Could it be Futura, or something very like it? My graphic designer readers will no doubt enjoy telling me. I hope the rest of you enjoy the sign too.

Derby

Insurance agent's baroque?

Here's a building arrestingly adapted to its site, the baroque structure that forms the continuously curving corner of Wardwick and the Strand in the centre of Derby. I know it as the Refuge Assurance Building, and that company certainly occupied it for a long while, although I don't know whether it was originally built for them. Its grand style, the high baroque of the late-19th century, is rather well adapted to follow this tight corner. The cornices, string courses, balustrades, and window ledges all go with the flow, taking the eye around the curve, while the windows – one lot plain and rectangular, the other lot more fancy, with semicircular tops, carved keystones, and little balustratdes along the bottom – form a steady rhythm punctuated by various upright pilasters. All these classical details give the place a kind of grandeur, which is augmented by the striking skyline, with its French pavilion roof crested with ornamental ironwork. The narrow profile of the building at the corner also adds to the effect of the height, making the building look taller than it is.

This is how the 1880s did urban grandeur and when they went for, they were cooking with gas, to use a figure of speech that might have been made for the Victorian era. It's roughly the style that has been dubbed 'banker's baroque' and the insurance-men of the late-19th century had it taped too. There are examples all over Britain's major cities, especially in London, but few are graced with such a dramatic shape. Here's to Victorian confidence!

Barbican, London

Turned on
The other week I walked up London's Farringdon Street, hoping to find and photograph a series of tile murals made by Dorothy Annan for the Central Telegraph Office, a building housing a large telephone exchange that was built in about 1960. When I got there I found nine boarded-up spaces along the ground floor of the building: the murals had gone and the building, empty, dusty, and forlorn, looked ripe for demolition. I soon discovered that the tile panels, thanks no doubt to the recent campaigning on behalf of such architectural art by the Twentieth Century Society, had been saved. They have been installed on one of the High Walks in the Barbican complex and I quickly found them, not far from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which was emitting seductive high-pitched flute and violin sounds as I settled down to have a good look.

Overseas Communication Showing Cable Buoys
 
Annan's tile panels have names like Cross Connection Frame and Lines Over the Countryside. They make evocative compositions out of arrangements of aerials, cable buoys, switches, wires, and bits of circuit diagrams, all of which Annan researched carefully before turning them into semi-abstract compositions which – as the accompanying caption remarks – are part Ben Nicholson, part Joan Miró. Looking at the panels (the two most clearly visible in the photograph at the top of this post are Radio Communication and Television and Cables and Communications in Buildings) it would be easy to make remarks about the optimism of the 1960s and the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson's famous enthusiasm for 'the white heat of technology'. But in the restrained palette and artful rhythms of these panels (the Ben Nicholson aspect of them, as it were), there is something less insistent, less frenetic. Their lovely handmade textures are beautifully crafted, too. There is tension in the spiralling wires and chunky aerials in these panels, it's true. But there is also landscape in them, hints in the colour and texture of the tiles of grass and sea and sky; cables that flow like rivers or rise and dip like hills and valleys. I think they're turned on to nature as well as to technology. And for that reason they seem to me to sit rather well in the Barbican, where water and planting complement the chunky hammered concrete, where your feet are always on tiles, and where intriguing sonic signals emerge from student musicians in their practice rooms to captivate the ear.

 Cable Chamber With Cables Entering From Street, detail

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Thanks to one of my readers for pointing out that the blog Spitalfields Life has also covered these panels. I was pleased to see that the Gentle Author, proprietor of the Spitalfields Life blog, also appreciates the combination of technology and organic forms that's evident in these works. The Gentle Author illustrates all the panels here.