Launceston, Cornwall

Almost perfect…

It’s almost a perfect Georgian town house, the sort of residence that a prominent citizen of a provincial town might build. The citizen in this case was Coryndon Carpenter, attorney, twice mayor of Launceston and Constable of Launceston castle, a member of a prominent local family, and his house is at once conveniently central, tucked away from the busy shopping area, and near one of the gates to the castle. In form it’s the classic 1760s detached house with hipped slate roof, red brick walls with prominent quoins and a centre portion breaking forward under a pediment adorned with urns. The basement, which would have contained service rooms, is distinguished from the two main floors by being rendered in stucco, which is rusticated (formed with grooves to give the impression of blocks of masonry) – a common term for such rusticated basements where the servants worked was ‘the rustic’.

But Coryndon Carpenter’s house is a cut above the already impressive Georgian norm. There’s a carved figure at the centre point of the pediment, looking out over the town. I don’t know who it’s supposed to be: ‘a Grecian style figure’ says the listing description, laconically. The round window in the pediment, the gate piers with their eagles and iron gates and railings are additional stand-out features. The central porch is a later addition, classical, rusticated, and columned, so as to be in the overall style of the rest of the house but failing somehow to look anything more than an added extra.

Even so, this is a delightful building (it’s now in fact a hotel) and if not quite perfect is near enough to please all but the Georgian ultra-purist. The people who compiled the official listing for this protected building gave it a prestigious II* grade, confirming its importance. Long may it be cherished.

Chichester, West Sussex

Another way

I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other week. On this occasion I had time to stand and stare until only a couple of people were passing, so I managed a virtually unencumbered photograph. The more I looked, the odder this building seemed, a remarkable hybrid between two variants of the classical style: the austere Palladian and the theatrical baroque.

The ground-floor brick arcade, quite plain and unadorned, has a Palladian feel to it. So does the giant Ionic order of four stone columns above. The niches on the upper floor and the trio of windows with the central one taller and arched are also features you see on Palladian buildings. But that enormous lintel, topped with a stone lion, is something else, a baroque touch if ever there was one. The large central window seems to be nodding to Gothic architecture in the way that the glazing bars intersect to produce the effect of pointed arches. And the sloping line of the roof on either side seems to suggest that there’s a pediment in there trying to get out, obscured by the masonry above the Ionic columns. As Ian Nairn puts it, writing in the first edition of the Pevnser Buildings of England volume on Sussex, ‘This is the baroque open pediment given a new twist with a vengeance!’

This impressive but outré design of 1731–33 is by Roger Morris, designer of such classic Palladian villas as Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and White Lodge, Richmond Park, as well as the main facades of Lydiard House near Swindon. These are sober designs that feature pale white or off-white walls, triangular pediments and rows of symmetrically arranged sash windows. Chichester Council House on the other hand is in a sort of pumped-up baroque style which, as Nairn says, would have developed into something special if the English baroque had not been ‘killed off by a kind of puritanism’.

The building houses the town’s council chamber. Assembly rooms were built on the back to designs by Wyatt in the 1780s. The public assemblies held here would not have been out of place in the novels of Jane Austen, but the Council House frontage would not, I’d have thought, been to her more conservative taste. Personally, I like it, and respect its unusual proportions and its determination to be different from the norm.

Lechlade, Gloucestershire

Headgear

As in so many streets in small Cotswold towns like Lechlade – at Thames-side town in fact on the edge of the Cotswolds not far from William Morris's Kelmscott –  there's an abundance of traditional vernacular limestone architecture and a sprinkling of the 'polite' architecture of the Georgian period too. So these low, limestone buildings, with the their roofs of stone 'slates' are countrified in overall appearance but have polite Georgian-style elements too: sash windows with small panes, and one door with a semicircular fanlight with glazing bars like the spokes of a wheel. Dressed stone window surrounds add to the formal effects, in keeping with the date of 1743 that appears on the sundial.

But what of the curved bay in the middle, encroaching on the pavement and surprising the passing pedestrian? It has a triangular pediment, but this has to curve to follow the line of the wall and ends up looking a bit like a bishop's mitre, taking the language of classical architecture in an unusual direction. Pevsner calls this feature a 'gazebo bay', and it certainly enables the inhabitants to look out on to the street in different directions, as those in a gazebo might do in a garden – or the occupant of a toll house might on a turnpike road. But it doesn't really look like a gazebo or a toll house. Nor does the bowed shape have quite the raffish effect of Regency bow windows in Brighton. It's a bit of Cotswold whimsy, I think, and none the worse for that. 

Glynde, Sussex

Palladian geometry

Coming along the main village street of Glynde, past cottages and an almost absurdly quaint smithy with horseshoe-shaped doorway, there is an abrupt change of gear when you reach St Mary’s church, a Palladian structure of the 1760s, which itself acts as a kind of prelude to the cupola-topped Georgian stables of the big house, Glynde Place, just a little further beyond. The west front of St Mary’s is all triangles and semi-circles. It would be a rather severe exercise in Palladian geometry, but its small size tempers the severity and gives it charm.

The architect was an amateur, Sir Thomas Robinson, and he made good use of flint for the main walls and neat ashlar for the porch and the triangular pediments. Like virtually every church architect using this kind of classical architecture, Robinson found no real solution to the problem of combining a “classical temple” frontage with a bell turret. So the turret looks a bit odd atop the pediment, but its triangular top and semi-circular arch echo the triangles and arches below, giving the design some consistency.

The charm continues inside, with an interior full of box pews that features a wooden west gallery and other Georgian furnishings. Best of all is the plasterwork around the east window, with its rosettes set in octagons. This is a lovely touch and isn’t quite spoiled by the stained glass by Kempe, in a sort of Renaissance revival style of the 1890s, which would look better in a Victorian church. But even it includes semi-circles and triangles, continuing the geometrical theme and maintaining a certain harmony.