Guiting Power, Gloucestershire

New light on an old box

I interrupt my flow of blog posts featuring buildings seen on my travels to turn my attention to something only a few miles from where I live. Nowadays the village of Guiting Power is typical Cotswolds: well kept stone cottages, a couple of pubs, a church with Norman roots, a former Post Office now selling excellent coffee and food. Farmers, the horse racing fraternity, cyclists and locals mingle, mostly amicably. Battered old Land-Rovers vie for parking spaces with polished BMWs. The place looks prosperous.

It was not always so. In the early-20th century, agricultural decline brought poverty, together with dilapidated cottages. Two landowners turned the place around: in the 1930s, Moya Davidson bought up cottages and let them to local people; in 1958 Raymond Cochrane ran the estate and continued to improve the cottages. It was Cochrane who was faced with finding a new use for the old blacksmith’s shop on the green. Part of this building was converted to a bus shelter and next to this a telephone box was installed – not the usual red freestanding kiosk, but a small booth incorporated into the building and fronted by a standard door as used on a K6 telephone box. The familiar door is testimony to the effectiveness and ubiquity of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s phone kiosk design – we know exactly what it was designed for, even though there is no ’Telephone’ sign.

Some years ago, however, the public telephone, little used in the age of the mobile phone, came to the end of its life. A new use was found: the box became the home of the village defibrillator. More recently still the building's custodians have smartened up the door with new paint. The original colour scheme consisted of a grey frame and red door, a combination that was once the recommended livery for telephone boxes in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Guiting Power was in the Cotswolds AONB, which is now the Cotswolds National Landscape, so this box merited the design with the red door and grey frame. Maybe whoever looks after the box will come back with some grey paint and finish the job.

I hope people near and far will appreciate this small triumph of public service and its unusual design solution – only a handful of telephone boxes are incorporated into existing buildings in this way and this one, with its important new use, deserved to be preserved. As a result, the Twentieth Century Society has submitted applications for this building, and four more unusual telephone boxes, to be listed. It’s a good idea to afford them this protection and I hope the listing comes into place.

Lindisfarne, Northumberland

Reuse, recycle, repurpose

I’ve thought since my schooldays (learning about the history of the Anglo-Saxon period and the beginnings of Christianity in England) of the monastery of Lindisfarne and its wonderfully isolated position off the Northumberland coast. At long last, two weeks ago, the Resident Wise Woman and I finally made it there. We were, of course, delighted with the place – and glad we arrived early in the morning* a couple of hours before the hordes of other tourists turned up. Regular readers of this blog who know Lindisfarne will guess that as well as the obvious sites I wanted to look at the sheds near the harbour and near the castle that are ingeniously made of upturned boats.

I think it was probably a production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes that introduced me to the idea of upturned boat sheds. The opera’s eponymous hero has such a shed – Grimes lives in Suffolk (the country both of Britten and of George Crabbe, author of the poem on which the composer based his opera), but the practice of reusing old and leaky boats as fishermen’s storage sheds was once common on many parts of the east coast. At Lindisfarne, there have been such sheds at least since the 19th century and a dozen remain at the harbour and there are a further three at the castle.

Of course many decommissioned fishing boats were broken up for scrap – a lot of the wood became firewood.† But upturning a boat and preserving its timbers with pitch or roofing felt or some sort of waterproof cloth produced a cheap shed for storing a fishermen’s gear. You could put nets in there, a dinghy, and whatever else you needed to store. And the result, provided the shed is well looked after, is an aesthetically pleasing combination of lines and curves – basic model: an upturned boat alone; taller version: an upturned boat propped on top of a wooden substructure. We are used to recycling – breaking up everything from cardboard boxes to old motor cars so that they can be turned into something else. We’re familiar with reuse – especially, if we’re interested in building conservation, in finding new uses for old buildings. Repurposing, turning one (redundant) thing into a different (useful) item, is equally important and transformative. These little sheds, modest buildings indeed, shine an old light on an ever-present problem.§

- - - - -

*Two important rules when visiting Lindisfarne: check the tide tables so you don’t get cut off and if possible arrive before the crowds.

† Storing firewood was one of the uses of the sheds near the castle.

§ For another take on what to do with old boats, see this blog post from long ago.

Shaldon, Devon

Reuse it!

In the list of things that need to be done but which are better put off till tomorrow, book-weeding is near the top. When bookpiles stealthily grow like silent stalagmites on the bedroom floor, it’s an indication that there’s no let-up in the book-buying. My shelves of English architectural history, of English literature, of books about places, music, art, keep growing. And the Resident Wise Woman is adding to the accumulation with her collection of contemporary poetry. Our house is not of infinite size. It’s not even large. So occasionally, I try to go through my shelves, weed out some volumes I think I no longer need, and make room for the recent acquisitions.

The few that make it off the shelves and into cardboard boxes go either to second-hand booksellers or – mostly these days – to charity shops. That way, I feel better about things by telling myself I’m doing some good with these rejected treasures. There has been the odd one – usually an obsessively re-read book that has actually fallen to pieces – that has had to go into the fortnightly recycling collection. But on the whole, if my redundant books eventually reach new homes, that’s a plus as far as I’m concerned. Re-use is better than recycling.

It’s similar with redundant buildings. If a building is no longer needed for its original purpose, there’s often an impulse to demolish it and start again. But often it’s far less wasteful to find a new user who’ll take it on, fill it with activity, and maintain it. Years ago I wrote a trio of books to accompany the BBC’s series Restoration, about rescuing historic buildings that were empty, abandoned, or at risk. I quickly realised that the key step in this process was working out what each structure’s new use could be.

The buildings in those programmes ranged from large country houses to modest workshops. But none of them was as modest as a telephone kiosk. Red telephone boxes are vanishing from Britain’s streets. They’re out of touch with the times now we all have mobile phones and some of them are hardly used at all.

The telephone box was brilliantly designed by Giles Gilbert Scott. Its curving roof, glazed doors and sides, its sign, and its red paint make it instantly recognisable – it’s almost as powerful a symbol of our country as a Union Jack or the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament. The red box is ideal for its intended purpose. It must have seemed that such a tiny structure could do little else if it was ever found to be redundant. And yet the truth has proved very different. Communities that want to save their telephone boxes have found all sorts of uses for them – miniature libraries or art galleries, places to house defibrillators, village information hubs, mini-museums, even planters . I’d need quite a few telephone boxes to house even the books I ought to get rid of. But when I saw this box in Shaldon, with its shelf of books, I was impressed. It’s a charity shop in little, with a bit of this, a bit of that, books included, to raise money for a local good cause. Creative re-use exemplified.* When I passed it a while back, both the idea and its realisation shed some welcome light on a dull and rainy day.

- - - - -    

* With the exception of the clunky font used for the signage, which could be much better.

Melksham, Wiltshire

Five early pieces: 5

My final reprise (for now) is one of my smallest buildings (and one of my shortest posts). The roundhouse in Melksham...

This small surprise is tucked away in a side-street in the Wiltshire town of Melksham. It’s an 18th-century structure, built, Melksham being a wool town, as a wool-drying room. When the wool trade declined in the 19th century many such buildings were no doubt demolished. But this one survived, playing down the years a multitude of roles – armoury for the local volunteer militia, feed store, business premises, tourist information centre, and museum. England has many specialized structures like this, the often odd-shaped remnants of local industries – oast houses and lime kilns come to mind. Often they seem designed so precisely for their original function that adaptation appears impossible. But with a little imagination, many of them have been recycled to the delight both of their users and of passers-by.

Postscript 2012 This small paragraph contains a large truth: that the survival of historic buildings often depends on finding new uses for old structures. Even a highly specialized building like the roundhouse has lasted more than 200 years because people have found different things to do in it and with it. Sometimes a change of use requires some adaptation of the building, but a little sensitive alteration is better in the vast majority of cases than demolition or dereliction. Let’s hear it for thoughtful adaptation and sensitive reuse.