Banbury, Oxfordshire

Still hanging on

My recent visit to Banbury threw up one further highlight in the brief interval between rain and more rain. A short-lived shaft of sunlight made me look around me – and look up since the modern shop fronts in the street in which I found myself were generally uninspiring. So up I looked, and saw this bit of history: a house built in 1650 for a mercer called Edward Vivers. In its heyday this must have been a grand building, home and place of work to a successful town trader. In the intervening 360-plus years it has been through quite a bit, and the recent shop fronts, successors to earlier but still intrusive ones no doubt, are not the least of the changes. From street level, it’s impossible to appreciate the rest of the facade unless you step well back.

Above the windows offering coffee and the conveniences of 21st-century life, the frontage is more original, but still has the air of trying to escape through the accretions of the more recent past. But one can still take in the original form: three bow windows jettied out over the street, and, above them, three gables likewise protruding. Framing them is a collection of quite elaborately carved timbers – bargeboards with finials and a wooden frieze with pendants – plus moulded wooden window mullions. Adorning the white infill sections is pargetted plasterwork in bold geometrical patterns.

All this is very much of its time, when what has been described as a sort of baroque began to spread across English vernacular architecture. The pargetting is especially interesting because the received wisdom is that this is a regional craft, found in eastern England, especially Suffolk and Essex. This is true, but not the whole truth – there are pargetted fronts dotted around all over the place. Here a prosperous owner wanted a showy front, and pargetting fitted the bill. It’s a shame that the ground floor is now singing to a different tune. Maybe one day…

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

A bold front

Pargetting, decoratively moulded exterior plasterwork, is a technique I associate with Suffolk, where plastered walls bear images of flowers, fruit, heraldry, and all kinds of abstract patterns. But decorative plasterwork is also found farther west, and here it is in Hertfordshire, adorning the front of the former White Horse pub in Bishop's Stortford, a building that’s now a restaurant.

The White Horse was a pub for most of its life, closing in the 1930s, after which it was home to a succession of different shops. It has been a restaurant since the 1990s. The yard at the back, which housed the inn’s stables, has also been home to activities as diverse as a poultry market, a slaughterhouse, and a small brewery. So the building had a chequered history behind its bold and striking frontage.

The plasterwork on the facade is modern (I’ve seen early-20th century photographs of the building with plain plaster) and conceals a timber frame that dates back to the 16th century. The design is quite simple – mostly abstract patterns set off by bands of bunches of grapes – but it makes the building stand out and was catching the sun beautifully on the day I passed by.

Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire

Stone roses

There are some buildings that just make me smile, no matter how often I see them. This is one: a house of about 1730 (now a café) on the market place in Stow on the Wold. What I love about this house is the decoration. It’s Classical, up to a point – look at the fluted pilasters with their Corinthian capitals. But whoever built this place was determined not to stick to the rule book. Those pilasters begin, not with a base, anchoring them to the ground, but with a peculiar block of stone sticking out from the wall, a couple of feet above pavement level. The strips that run up from either side of the central niche, dotted with carvings of flowers, are another odd, but charming, touch.

Pevsner (who describes this façade as ‘rather gauche’) tells us that there’s a local tradition that the building was the work of a pargetter named Shepherd. That’s odd, as pargetting (the art of decorative exterior plasterwork) is native to eastern England. It’s not something you see much round here, where the decorative medium is stone. And yet the exuberance and richness of the carving, especially the flowers, is not unlike the sort of thing you might see on a pargetted house in Essex or Suffolk. It certainly sticks out here, not in the manner of a sore thumb, but like an elegantly manicured digit raised in defiance of convention. Stow off the wall.