Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Still flushing

As I am not quite ready to post any recently visited buildings, this is a structure from a trip to the Chiltern Open Air Museum last summer. It consists of a number of standard manufactured parts that are designed to be shipped to the site where they can be assembled. What the original owners got when they assembled the building was a rather large public lavatory. It was built in 1906 in Caversham,. at one end of a tram line that terminated near the River Thames by Caversham Bridge.

I have posted before about metal lavatories or ‘public conveniences’ as they used to be called in Britain,* in cities such as Bath, Bristol or Lincoln. However, the loos in my earlier posts were quite small – ideal for tucking away in a small space where demand would not be too high. The Chiltern Open Air Museum’s example, on the other hand is really large. It’s made up of 451 panels of cast iron and a series of iron uprights with slots in them into which the panels slid. For privacy, there are no windows in the wall panels, but light comes in through clerestory windows in a ‘lantern’ feature that sticks up in the centre of the roof. The upper parts of the wall panels are pierced with numerous holes arranged in an ornamental pattern, to allow smells out and fresh air in. The building is divided in two, with separate parts for men and women, and the original users (from 1906, when the building was erected) inserted one penny into the slot on the door of one of the cubicles.

Now the public loo is at the museum, it is still used for its original purpose and still seems to contain the original plumbing and sanitary ware. It’s the first of these metal-panel public loos I’ve seen that is still fulfilling its original function. Impressive, it seems to me, after some 118 years of service. Most of the buildings in open-air museums are no longer used in the way that was first intended – they’re displayed as houses, shops, workshops, churches, toll houses, and so on, and very interesting they are. This example of continued use deserved to be celebrated – and not only when one is feeling the need for it after much refreshment in the museum’s tea shop.

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* British English: lavatories, public toilets, public conveniences, loos; American English: restroom, bathroom.

Gents: interior showing clerestory grilles to admit light and air

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

 A convenient place of refuge

I was born in Lincolnshire, and therefore know what it’s like to walk along a beach in winter in a howling easterly wind, when you have mixed feelings if the top of your ice cream is blown away because the weather was really too cold for you to be grazing on such delights. A cup of good hot strong tea is more to the point. East-coast seasides need some shelters, so you can drink your tea or just get out of the wind, and they know this just as well at Aldeburgh, Suffolk as they do in Skegness, Lincs (famously ‘so bracing’) or anywhere else.

This shelter is not far from the Moot Hall in my previous post and that bit of patterned brick nogging, low down between the timber uprights, is a sort of homage to genuinely old buildings like the Moot Hall. I suppose this shelter is 20th-century – maybe it was built in the interwar period, although the nogging, with its pristine pointing, looks like a recent repair, and the whole thing could be post-war.* But its age doesn’t matter. It’s not unsightly, incorporates public lavatories, and provides a useful refuge. Good enough for me.

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* However, looking at old photographs, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the site of the shelter in 1910. Another image labelled ‘interwar’ includes it.

Bristol and beyond

Small but perfectly formed

Before I return to regular posting, I would like to offer my readers one more selection of past posts, to celebrate this blog's tenth anniversary. This, time, I've chosen a handful of very small buildings. This is in part a reminder that, over the past decade, the English Buildings blog has taken pride in noticing very small structures that many people pass by without a thought. It's also, in a way, a tribute to the great architectural writer Nikolaus Pevsner and the colleagues with whom he worked. A very long time ago I bought my first volume in his Buildings of England series: it was Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds, and I added it to my shelves shortly after it came out, in the 1970s. In fact, it was one of the volumes not actually written by Pevsner – the great man was getting old and realised that the only way to complete the series was to enlist some help. So the Gloucestershire volumes were written by local expert David Verey. Be that as it may, they followed Pevsner's lead in including many small buildings among the more obvious churches and big houses.* I was made aware of this when I looked up the entry on a place I knew to find that the most unassuming building of all – a privy – had been singled out for notice. I learned something that day, that even the most modest structure could be worth looking at. I have tried to keep that in mind ever since. So here are five of my posts on small buildings, easy to miss but very memorable...

A public lavatory in Bristol

A Turkish bath in London

A fountain in Warwickshire

A lock-up near Oxford

A churchyard seat in Herefordshire.

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* Now that revised editions of the Pevsner volumes are appearing, with more and larger pages allocated to each county, more and more of these small buildings are included, and a good thing too.