Cogges, Oxfordshire

Sixty years a queen

The diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 inspired a host of commemorative items, from plates to trays, medals to jugs, including some jugs made by Doulton of Lambeth emblazoned with the legend, ‘She wrought her country lasting good’. I don’t know how much good Victoria did her country, how much her influence has lasted, but such commemoratives are certainly still highly visible, as a visit to any antiques fair will show.

One can also find Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee commemorated on buildings. Jubilee clocks are still keeping time on some public buildings. There are also ceramic plaques like this one attached to the lychgate to the churchyard at Cogges, telling us that the gate itself was built in Jubilee year. The 1880s and 1890s were a great age of ceramic decoration on buildings – terracotta sunflowers and sprigs of foliage were a favourite motif of builders constructing houses, especially the larger than average houses of well to do streets in the suburbs. A builder could buy standard sunflower or foliage tiles or order bespoke panels bearing house names and insert them into the walls as the courses of bricks went up.

This Jubilee plaque is on a still larger scale. A profile portrait of the monarch, like one from a coin or a postage stamp, is surrounded by a roundel, a band containing her title ‘Empress of India’ and a border naming her other principal domains, from Gibraltar to New Zealand. Lions and crowns fill up the remaining spaces, as if we needed the imperial idea to be emphasised still further.

A number of these plaques survive on buildings in Great Britain and, for all I know, in the countries of what was then the British Empire. They were made, I believe, at Stanley Brothers Brick and Tile Works in Nuneaton. This one on a lychgate would have been seen every Sunday by those going to church. Others, I’m sure were on still more prominent buildings on High Streets in major towns. As we know from recent decades, British people still know how to celebrate a jubilee, but in its memorialisation of empire and dominion, this commemoration belongs to another age.

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Rebus inspector

This is a pub that certainly stands out. Most of its neighbouring buildings in Cricklade Street in Cirencester are built of Cotswold limestone, which is also the dominant material in Cirencester as a whole. The Brewer’s Arms, on the other hand, is a resplendent concoction of 1902 with timbered gables at the top and red tile cladding on the middle floor – plus some red brick with bands of stone on the ground floor just visible in my photograph. The records show that a pub with the same name was here in the 1840s, so this must have been a rebuild, and the design was by William Drew & Son, from Swindon. The Drews threw everything at this facade, rather in the manner that the great brewery architect William Bradford liked to throw everything at a brewery, combining many different materials in a single structure, something he did most memorably perhaps at Hook Norton.

It’s no accident that the architects came from Swindon, because in 1869 the Brewer’s Arms became an Arkell’s pub, and Arkell’s brew their beer in the great railway town. No doubt the beer travelled from Swindon to Cirencester along the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway, which was built precisely to connect Cirencester to the GWR ‘capital’. The pub still serves Arkell’s beer, and it’s not just the big painted sign that tells us this. The facade also bears one of Arkell’s charming ceramic plaques with its boat and the date of the brewery’s foundation, 1843. It’s not just a boat, of course, but an ark, for this is a rebus: Ark + L = Arkell. The idea came from one of Arkell’s directors and the prototype was made by Heber Matthews in 1948, and went into production in 1952.* As with several other brewery plaques or ‘house marks’, the manufacturer was Doulton.† It’s just the sort of long-lasting marker of commercial distinctiveness that I admire.

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* I’m indebted to the website Defunctimissive for information about the date and designer of the plaque.

† I’ve previously posted examples of the West Country Breweries and Morland plaques.

Bampton, Oxfordshire

The brewer’s art

Since doing a post, over a year ago, about a lovely ‘West Country Ales’ brewery plaque, I’ve meant to return to the subject and post at least one more of the ceramic plaques or ‘house marks’ that breweries used to identify their brand on the outsides of public houses. So here, at last, is one of my favourites, the plaque of the Morland brewery of Abingdon, although I would like to be able to share more information about it than I can.

You get the idea quickly enough: the plaque depicts an 18th-century artist with his palette, eyeing a glass of beer, with the implication that brewing is an art in itself, and you’ll find the equivalent of a masterpiece of brewing at a Morland house. But it’s a little more than that. Morland was the name of an actual artist – indeed, a family of actual artists, in the 18th century. Perhaps the most well known of them was Henry Robert Morland (c. 1716–97), a portrait painter whose most famous subject was King George III. But the image on the plaque is said to be of his son, animal painter George Morland. I don’t think the brewing family, who founded their business in 1711, was connected closely with the artistic Morlands – but I’m not sure: perhaps a reader knows.

These brightly coloured artist plaques are quite common in the area around Abingdon – this one is on a residential building, presumably a former pub, in Bampton – even now the firm no longer exists as a separate entity (it was bought by Greene King in 2000) and the brewery in Abingdon has been covered to apartments. Probably the most brightly coloured of brewery house marks, the plaques were made by Carter’s of Poole or Poole Pottery and are said to have been designed by Reginald Bell. Was this the same Reginald Bell who was part of the Clayton and Bell stained-glass firm? Again, I’d be pleased to hear if anyone knows.

The Morland brand name is still familiar to drinkers – beers such as Old Speckled Hen (and a family of other ‘Hen’-related beers and ales) are widely drunk. A few who drink these will remember various brews with artist-related names that Morland’s once produced, when they were independent exponents of the brewer’s art.

Guiting Power, Gloucestershire

Brewery plaques (1): The best in the west

People like to know what they’re getting. Most of us read the menus posted near the doors of restaurants. And a lot of us want to know what kind of beer a pub serves, especially if it’s a tied house. One way of making this clear is with a plaque showing the company’s symbol and name, a simple and appealing graphic device that can be just as effective as writing the brewery’s name in big letters across the front of the pub. Several breweries adopted ceramic plaques that could be mounted on the outside walls of pubs, somewhere near eye-level, and which became instantly recognisable.

One particularly effective design is the stylised castle used by the Cheltenham Original Brewery, later Cheltenham and Hereford Breweries, later still West Country Breweries. The name changes came after mergers, and all the companies used these plaques with the castle and the slogan ‘The best in the west’. Plaques from the last incarnation, West Country Ales (see the image below), are still quite common. They were used between 1958 and about 1967, by which time the company had been taken over by Whitbread. But I’ve seen one ‘Cheltenham and Hereford Ales’ plaque, on the former Foxhill Inn in the Cotswolds, on the B4068 near Guiting Power. This plaque, shown in my photograph above, must date to some time between 1947 and 1958, when this name was current. The building no longer functions as a pub, but the plaque is a bit of its history that has been preserved.

These attractive plaques were produced by Royal Doulton of Lambeth in London, whose architectural ceramics I’ve featured several times on this blog. Barley and hops trail around the border of the plaque and the castle or tower design is instantly recognisable. It’s a clear design, easy to spot, and, although the colours vary a bit, the tower usually stands out from a deep blue sky. In Gloucestershire there are still so many of the of the West Country Ales plaques around that we take them rather for granted. But more than a passing glance reveals that the design is a class act.

West Country Ales plaque, Gloucester

Bath, Somerset

In splendour

In England in the dark month of February, we long for the sun and regularly comment on its appearance or non-appearance, and constantly consult the weather forecast to track the possible parting of the clouds. (What did we do before the internet? Consult the weather vane, for one thing.) And when the actual sun is not out, we find images of him everywhere, on buildings especially.

Not all these images are literal. Back in the 1970s, the photographer Tony Evans produced a whole book, The English Sunrise, of stylized sunrise images – the sun’s rays suffusing Art deco stained glass windows, Albion truck badges, Young Farmers’ Club emblems, cinema facades, tins for gramophone needles or tobacco, and suburban garden gates.

Marvellous stuff as this is, one could make another compilation of portrayals of the sun fully risen and radiating heat and light through 360 degrees. The sun in splendour. You see him a lot, once you get your eye in. On pub signs and door knockers, for example. I’ve even seen him peeping from a capital atop a pilaster in Central Europe. But back home in England he’s as likely as not to be found on old fire insurance plaques – the ones people put on their houses to show that they’d paid their premium, without which, in the good old days, the firemen would not call in times of need. Here’s a lovely example from Bath: nicely modelled face; lively, wriggly rays; pleasant lettering. Splendid!

Loughborough, Leicestershire

The exemplary bee

I've noted before how bees have been used as symbols of co-operation for hundreds of years, and as symbols of the Co-operative Movement since its first inception in the 19th century. This plaque, which I came across on a building in Loughborough, no doubt marks the site of Co-op store. The motto it bears, 'Unity is strength', was also adopted early on by the Co-operative Pioneers, although they sometimes used the form 'Union is strength'.

Although this plaque is not quite as beautifully made as the one I spotted in Wiltshire a while back, it scores highly in one key respect. While the Wiltshire example showed just the hive, this one includes actual bees in flight. These long-enduring creatures, here, so the fancy lettering proclaims, since 1865, remain to remind us of their links with industry, cooperation, sweetness, and continuing pollination and life. Whether represented artistically, as in this Loughborough street, or in their living form, they deserve our notice and respect.

Corsham, Wiltshire

Being busy together

Bees and their hives have been powerful symbols for thousands of years – probably ever since human beings first observed communities of bees working together and first tasted the honey they produced. As well as standing for sweetness (think of the madrigal "Sweet honey-sucking bees" by John Wilbye and "the bag of the bee", icon of sweetness in "Her Triumph", Ben Jonson's most mellifluous lyric) they're also symbolic of industry, especially industry that involves working together. And that's why bees and hives have been powerfully symbolic of the Co-operative movement ever since it was founded in the 19th century.

So I wasn't surprised to find out that this plaque showing an old-fashioned bee skep, high above a shop window in Corsham, was put there by the local Co-op when they built their shop here in 1906. Whoever carved the plaque thoughtfully included some flowers for the bees too. A century on, there's still a Co-op in Corsham, but on a different site. However the concern for bees continues with   "Plan Bee", the Co-op's campaign to support much-needed pollinators in our gardens, market gardens, and fields. From this Arts and Crafts influenced plaque to Plan Bee, advertised on my pot of breakfast honey, the link between natural and commercial cooperation is still vital.

John Street, London

Bring on the apple sauce

The other day I went on an inspiring trip* aboard a Routemaster bus to look at lettering on buildings around the capital. This expedition was led by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, experts in letters both typographical and architectural. We were privileged that our guides shared a wealth of information, giving background stories about familiar bits of lettering as well as pointing out examples that were new even to me (and I’m the one you’ll bump into as I walk around looking ever upward, oblivious to fellow pedestrians, who are probably cursing as they try to dodge me).

This boar is an old friend but I’d never been able to find out much about him. The building he adorns seems to have been a butcher’s shop with offices above, which seems fitting, this being close to Smithfield Market, an area rich in architectural lettering of all kinds. The text next to the boar says ‘Rebuilt by Wm Harris 1897’ and the façade also has a ‘WH’ monogram. So presumably the otherwise mysterious Mr WH was a butcher – probably a pork butcher, since butchers often specialized in the Victorian period.

The lettering, as our guides pointed out, is awkwardly arranged – the strokes uneven in width, the forms crude, the ‘S’ and ‘7’ top-heavy. And the boar itself has an unfinished look, as if Mr Harris, eager to get his premises rebuilt after some disaster – a fire, perhaps – was impatient to get the plaque up, the scaffolding down, and the doors open. In spite of all this, the plaque has a charm that, like so many decorations on buildings in the capital, made it worth an upward glance, and even a crick in the neck.

*And I must offer sincere thanks to both the friends who invited me on this memorable journey.