Book round-up 3

Andrew Ziminsky, Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles

Published by Profile

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason who works on the repair and conservation of historic buildings, especially churches. He also visits Britain’s churches endlessly, and has met many fellow visitors in the process, noticing how many of them knew relatively little about the architecture, furnishings and fittings of the churches they were visiting. So he wrote this book to explain these things. CHURCH GOING guides the reader around the churchyard, the church exterior and the interior, describing the purpose and architecture of the different parts of the church (porch, nave, side chapels, chancel, vestry, etc), and of the fixtures and fittings (font, seating, altar, etc, etc). He covers everything from wall paintings to ancient graffiti.

But to summarise the book like this is to make it sound like a rather worthy handbook, and it’s much, much better than that. What makes this book so impressive (and often so entertaining) is that it’s written out of direct, practical experience. This is a guide written by a stonemason – Ziminski knows how these buildings work not just because he has visited thousands of churches (he has), not only because he has read about them (he has done that too), but because he has taken bits of them apart and repaired them.

Ziminski’s practical experience tells him that there are structural reasons why the doors of Irish round towers are set high up in the wall. He assures us that there are good structural reasons too for building a round tower when your building material is flint, as in many Norfolk churches. Contemplating the 89 carved Norman corbels on Kilpeck church in Herefordshire, he says that each one would have taken a single carver three days to create. Naturally, Ziminski shows a close familiarity with building materials, especially stone, and describes eloquently the explosive fizzing when water is added to quicklime to make lime mortar, and evokes the pleasing riven surfaces and undulations of stone church floors, whether of limestone, sandstone, granite or slate. Stone, of course, is everywhere in ancient churches, from the floor to the spire. Asked if he knows how to build a spire, Ziminski is pleased to be able to deliver a punch line he’s had ready for years: ‘Up to a point’.

One of the joys of CHURCH GOING is the author’s strong opinions. He dislikes much Victorian architecture and is particularly scornful of Victorian church tiles, with their ‘hard’ surfaces, so different from softer medieval tiles. He is against paying to enter a church. He is very much in favour of leaving in place even the most modest historic deposits. Working in a church roof he finds a pair of 19th-century shoes left by a Victorian roofer. When he shows the find to the vicar, she tosses them into the skip, declaring the idea of leaving behind such ‘offerings’ to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Ziminski continues, ‘It was uncomfortable to learn that she had broken her ankle the following day after tripping on an undone shoelace…only I know how it was that the shoes were returned to their original position.’

Whether writing about church bells, about animals in churches (bats, bees, doves), about the structure of fan vaults, about rood screens, or simply about the effect of the colours of medieval stained glass projected on to a church floor in York, Ziminski is engaging and informing and a pleasure to read. He brings details such as carved roof bosses, ‘green man’ or foliate head carvings, images of heaven and hell in wall paintings, and wooden misericords to life in his descriptions. Anyone who wants to find out more about Britain’s pre-Reformation churches will enjoy this book and learn a great deal. Those of us who think we know a lot about these buildings already will learn yet more.

Book round-up 2

Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Published by Yale University Press

Sir John Soane is widely considered one of the greatest of British architects. His work, his intellectual development, his country house designs, his biography have all been much studied and written about. But there has been no extended, scholarly account of the extraordinary collection that he amassed in his London house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This collection contains over 40,000 objects – paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural fragments, plus thousands of books. Among its many treasures are numerous works by William Hogarth (the series A Rake’s Progress and Humours of an Election), Reynolds, Turner and Canaletto; numerous ancient vases; sculpture by some of Soane’s most famous contemporaries; and countless architectural fragments. The latter especially are arranged with a theatrical flair that takes the breath away. This new book by Bruce Boucher, former Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, is the account we have been waiting for.

The great mysteries are why Soane collected so profusely and obsessively, what drove the arrangement of the objects, and what his collection was actually for. Soane himself saw it as consisting of ‘studies for my own mind’, a phrase that only inspires further questions. Boucher’s book begins with the context: Soane’s sad life – the death of his beloved wife Eliza, his falling out with his sons, the harsh criticism that a lot of his work was subjected to. It describes how he obtained the items and how he was inspired by the time he spent in Italy, by the collections of fellow architects, and by writers from antiquarians to Gothic novelists.

Separate chapters examine his antiquities, his ancient Greek vases, his sculptures, and his paintings. Additional chapters explore key themes. One such is Soane’s enthusiasm for items related to eminent British writers and artists such as Shakespeare and Hogarth – ‘British worthies’ like those celebrated in the famous garden temple at Stowe, a country house where Soane worked. Another theme is his interest in Gothic taste – not so much scholarly Gothic revivalism as the atmospheric Gothic of novels, of faux ‘monk’s parlours’, stained glass windows, and gloomy tombs. Yet another theme is Soane’s love of picturesque ruins, which fed his purchase of everything from paintings of ruins to architectural fragments and models of ruined buildings – he even imagined what his building for the Bank of England would look like as a ruin. One more thread is formed by the patterns of connections between the paintings he owned – their links to some of his friends, and the series of architectural paintings by his friend J. M. Gandy.

None of this was set in stone because, as Boucher makes clear, Soane’s collection was constantly evolving. As the number objects grew and as Soane’s priorities changed, the scope and arrangement of the house-museum changed too. So there is no single reason why the architect bought plaster casts, models of buildings, books, paintings and sculptures. His motivation altered and an account of Soane’s collection has to offer several different reasons why its owner sunk so much of his money into it.

Boucher teases out various reasons why Soane collected and parallel intended purposes of his collection. The motivation was part didactic (the architectural items were aids to teaching); part consolation for the various tragedies in the architect’s life; part expressive of his role as a patron of the arts; part a way of promoting Soane’s fellow members of the Royal Academy. As the collection grew, and because one of his two sons had died and one had become estranged from him, he decided to leave both his house and the objects in it to the nation, so that people could see it and benefit from it. Boucher explains the long process that eventually brought Soane’s wishes to fruition and also sets Soane’s museum in the context of other museums of the time. It was not quite an enlightenment museum, with objects carefully catalogued and arranged by period or type. Neither was it exactly like the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that Renaissance dukes and princes liked to display. But in its diversity, its lavishness, the place it finds for the curious, the aesthetics of its arrangement, its ingenuity, it is more like the latter – hence the title of this fascinating, rich, and superbly illustrated book.

Book round-up 1

 

Christmas is coming and with this in mind I am reviewing three recent books that will appeal to many who are interested in historic buildings. First, a book that debunks a number of historic buildings-related myths, while also taking pleasure in the stories that people tell about castles, churches, pubs, houses, and more...

James Wright, Historic Buildings Mythbusting

Published by The History Press

As I travel around looking at old buildings, I meet many people who tell me about the history of the places where they live, or shop, or worship. I’m always grateful to them and I often learn a lot from those with local knowledge. But every now and then a a story emerges which makes me sceptical. ‘There’s a secret tunnel that links the manor house with the abbey,’ they’ll say. Or, ‘This house was built using old ship’s timbers.’ Or, ‘Of course, this is the oldest pub in England.’ Why do I doubt such tales? Because I have known other places with similar stories where the evidence, once examined, is either non-existent or extremely flimsy. James Wright’s HISTORIC BUILDINGS MYTHBUSTING tackles several of these recurring stores head-on, looks closely at the evidence, and demonstrates why they’re more myth than reality.

Wright tackles ten or so myths and tests them against the available evidence. ‘Secret passages’ often turn out to be drains, ruined cellars, ice houses, wells, and the like. Many of the alleged tunnels are very long and would have to go beneath rivers, very unlikely given the engineering difficulties.

Spiral staircases in castles are the focus of another myth. They turn clockwise, it’s said, making it easier for a defender to swing his sword arm. Yet many turn the opposite way. The theory that the latter were built for left-handed castle owners seems wrong – in some castles there are examples of both types. Spiral staircases, Wright believes, are more important as signs of status: poorer people got to higher floors using wooden ladders. The very idea that spiral staircases were a defensive feature seems to date back only 100 years.

A small cluster of myths concern ancient churches. Rude carvings which upset the Victorians and intrigue us today, could not, as has been suggested, have been made by stonemasons cocking a covert snook at the clergy. The clergy took a close part in church building, collectiing the money and overseeing the work, and would have known what was being carved. A mason would probably not have dared to go against the wishes of priest or bishop and if they did, would have been made to redo the work. Another church mystery is stones in the walls that have horizontal grooves worn into them. These have been said to be the result of archers practising in the churchyard and sharpening their arrows on the church wall. There are many reasons why this cannot be true – most churchyards were too small for archery practice, portable whetstones were very common, and the ‘practice arrowheads’ used did not need sharpening anyway. Wright similarly disposes of stories about windows allowing lepers to see into church or from one part of the church into another, and ideas that blocked north doors in churches are ‘devil’s doors’, designed to keep Satan out.

Houses built of ‘old ship’s timbers’? Interestingly, Wright concedes that in a few cases this might be true. But it’s unlikely that the demands of the Tudor navy and ironworking, both often said to be responsible for a timber shortage in the 16th and 17th centuries, were the cause. Landscape historians seem to agree that the timber shortage came later, in the 18th century.

The suggestion that one public house or another is ‘England’s oldest’ is remarkably widespread. Wright comes up with a dozen pubs that are often claimed to be the oldest, six of which are said to date from before the Norman conquest in 1066. In each case, there simply is not the evidence that either the buildings as they stand are anywhere near as old as that, nor that they have been in continuous use as pubs for that length of time. Wright comes up with an alternative list of 12 with much better claims, the oldest of which go back to the 14th century.

In conclusion, Wright makes a good case for dismissing a selection of historic buildings myths. He argues that many of them have arisen out of patriotism or imperialism (England’s intrepid archers practising before winning such battles as Creçy and Agincourt), bolstered by local pride (our local’s the oldest pub), and upheld in popular films or social media. The result is a thought-provoking, entertaining, and sometimes very funny book that’s based on the scholarly research of a buildings archaeologist with deep knowledge of his subject.

Summer books: 3

Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee (eds), Lives of Houses
Published by Princeton University Press

The art critic John Russell said that the best way to educate oneself was to visit other people’s houses. There you would find the essence of the owner, and there would always be a place of focus (it might be the library, or the dining table, or the mantlepiece full of invitations, or the tray of drinks) that would reveal the person’s character and could, if one was lucky, open up new worlds. We hope for something like that, perhaps, when we visit writers’ houses that are open to the public – Hardy’s Dorset cottage, or Jane Austen’s Chawton, or the town house where Dickens lived for a few pivotal years.

This book is collection of essays (mostly by literary scholars and historians) and poems about houses once lived in by writers, artists, composers, and one architect. These essays bring out, often very movingly, how important these houses were to their occupants. Among the highlights for me are Felicity James’s essay focusing on Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, the house that confirmed for him how a life in the country had made him into a poet (the cottage is also the subject of a memorable poem, ‘Home at Grasmere’); James tellingly shows how for the Romantic poets, home was often the focus of nostalgia. W. B. Yeats’s tower at Ballylee, damp, inconvenient, problematic in many ways, but a vital symbol for Yeats and the inspiration of more great poetry, is the subject of an evocative essay by Roy Foster; the piece reveals how the tower fulfilled the poet’s need for a domestic link to Irish history. The houses in Tennyson’s life, so important, so celebrated in the contemporary press, but ambivalent to the poet (as were other houses, like the looming ‘dark house’ of his dead friend Arthur Hallam in his poem In Memoriam) are analysed by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Ainola, the Finnish country house where the composer Sibelius spent his last, silent years, famously not producing the eighth symphony for which so much of the musical world longed, is the subject of a moving piece by Julian Barnes.

Many of the occupants drew deeply on their houses and their locations, as Wordsworth and Yeats did. Some were grounded in their homes through family succession – most clearly, Elizabeth Bowen, recalled by Hermione Lee. To the novelist, Bowen’s Court, the family ‘big house’ in Ireland, meant so much. The tensions of the Anglo-Irish life are still vividly present in many of her books, but Bowen’s Court itself is gone, a bare patch of grass now, a house of air. In stark contrast are the writers and artists who struggled to settle down. Edward Lear seems to have spent much of his life as a lonely wanderer, then built his ideal home in Italy, only to suffer the spoliation of its setting soon after the house was complete. And Lear’s story, told by Jenny Uglow, was a happy one compared to that of poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who as an adult never really had a home at all and spent the last 15 years of his life in the bleak confines of the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford. As Kate Kennedy points out in her essay on Gurney in Dartford, the poet’s native Gloucestershire meant so much to the troubled poet-composer that a day there would have been worth years incarcerated in Dartford; only the arrival of Helen Thomas with a bunch of OS maps of Gloucestershire gave him some imaginative relief.

Lives of Houses is full of such anecdotes and insights – about the role of the great house of Uppark in the life of H. G. Wells, about Auden at Kirchstetten, Disraeli at Hughenden, Britten at Aldeburgh. Gillian Darley contributes a rich piece about Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – a house to read like the leaves formed by Soane’s ingenious fold-out picture-frames, a town house that seems to have been caught in the act of turning into a ruin, a building that is also an autobiography. Most moving of all, perhaps, are the people recalled by Alexander Masters in the essay ‘Fear of Houses’, men and women whom circumstances made homeless and for whom this state of homelessness produces reactions from longing for four walls to terror at the confinement brought by a life within closed doors. Fortunate are those with a home they can call their own; fortunate are those who can learn from other people’s houses.

Summer Books: 2

Andrew Ziminski: The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain
Published by John Murray

Here’s something different. A book about British buildings written not by an architectural historian, nor a travel writer, nor a generalist historian, but by a stonemason. Andrew Ziminski, who has been repairing old buildings for years, has written an enthralling study of the varied nature of our buildings, throughout prehistory and history, but especially in those eras when stone was the dominant material: the stone, the structures, their visual impact, and their aesthetic qualities. He tells the story chronologically, beginning with prehistoric monuments like Avebury and working his way towards Bath and beyond. The book is also chronological in another sense, in that the buildings and Ziminski’s encounters with them are described over the period of a working year, from the prehistoric West Kennet long barrow in November to a trip up the Thames about a year later.

It’s a unique perspective and for several reasons. Most obviously, Ziminski writes with the authority of someone who knows from personal experience how buildings are put together. The book is full of insights into the way a mason works, the qualities of different building stones, the ways they have been worked. He often points out the visual evidence for all this, noticing adze marks, for example, on stonework done before the chisel became ubiquitous, or finding stones laid not with mortar but with a layer of clay. A lot of these observations are a direct result of his working experience, as are his accounts of his tools and how he uses them. Inevitably he works with traditional techniques, and he’s willing to take this to extremes, for example, by trying out what it’s like to work sarsen – the hard-as-nails stone of which the big uprights at Stonehenge are made – using hand tools. At first this seems impossible – you end up covered in fine dust and in danger of giving yourself silicosis. The secret that helped the ancient stonemasons, Ziminki realises, was probably to work the stone when it’s fresh out of the ground and still has some moisture in it, the moisture to which stone workers still give the evocative name ‘quarry sap’.

Such insights are a frequent pleasure. Further shafts of light come from the way the author travels around. He has a penchant for taking to his canoe, and this gives him a special viewpoint, so that he can see how the landscape changes as you paddle up the Thames, or how, in travelling along a river you are also following the routes along which building stone was transported in the Middle Ages. When he’s not working at the top of a cathedral tower, Ziminski is usually close to the earth or the water, and this gives him a clear sense of the character and spirit of the places to which his work takes him. The descriptions of places, from Somerset to the City of London, are among the great pleasures of this book.

The author is full of admiration for the buildings he encounters and the skills of the men (and occasionally women¶) who worked on them. He’s appreciative too of his colleagues and their work, people who share with him hard won skills, a love of good craftsmanship, satisfaction in a good repair, even if it will only be noticed or truly appreciated by those in the know. His only scorn is for shoddy work as when he finds some appalling pointing on a part§ of Bath’s magnificent Royal Crescent: ‘It is as though a chimpanzee had been let loose on Audrey Hepburn’s face with a lipstick in the dark.’

But there’s little such scorn in the book. Mostly it’s a testimony to sensitivity and deep knowledge, to a vivid sense of place and to long experience on the ground. Whenever I talk to people about old buildings, someone will say, ‘Of course you can’t get skilled craftsmen these days; there are none of them left.’ Untrue, as the work of Ziminksi, many talented colleagues, and a couple of handfuls of cathedral masons’ yards all show. It’s good to have this tribute to the work of such exemplary craftspeople, ancient and modern.

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¶ There are of course female stonemasons today; one of Ziminski’s insights is that there were women masons in the Middle Ages too, to at least one reader’s surprise.

§ A part only: this crescent also exhibits very fine conservation work.

Summer Books: 1

Kathryn Ferry: Seaside 100
Published by Unicorn Publishing

What do you think of when you think of the British seaside? Sandcastles? Donkeys? Ice cream? Punch and Judy? Fish and chips? Bathing belles? What do I think of? All of the above, plus beach huts, grand hotels, bandstands, lidos, Clevedon Pier and the De La Warr Pavilion. There could be a hundred things, the features that sum up the seaside and embody its history, and they’re all here, given a couple of pages each, in Kathryn Ferry’s new book, Seaside 100.

They make a varied bunch, but they hang together because of their common theme. And although the book’s one hundred short sections make it look a bit like a selection box that you can dip in and out of, they actually build into a historical picture of the seaside, from its beginnings with the health resorts, bathing machines, and excursion trains of the 18th and 19th centuries to the conserved piers, art galleries, and seafront sculptures of today.

There is a great deal of research crammed into this short book, but its author’s learning is worn lightly and her text is liberally sprinkled with well chosen pictures that lend visual atmosphere as well as being informative in themselves – old railway posters, historic images of holiday camp chalets, or the Blackpool illuminations, or pierrots. I found myself often surprised by what I was learning – about 18th-century seaside voyeurs looking at bathers through telescopes, about the ubiquity of bedbugs in lodging houses, about the varied designs of bathing machines, or about the early history of seaside donkeys or suntan lotion. I was pleasurably reminded, too, of things I’d forgotten, like the way in which lodging house guests used to bring their own food, which the landlady cooked for them, or how the first railway-carriage buildings were not bungalows but Victorian fishermen’s net stores. And I was grateful to Kathryn Ferry for answering questions I’d never asked. Who did write ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’, for example. It was one of those tunes I’d just taken for granted (like the circus clown’s anthem, ‘The Entry of the Gladiators’*). Now I know the answer.

Many readers of this blog are British, and people for whom the seaside is part of their childhood and heritage. Such readers will find much to entertain, amuse, and enlighten them in Seaside 100. So too will anyone with an interest in seaside architecture, and that includes amusement arcades and ice cream parlours as well as the buildings that are now regarded as the sophisticated legacy of seaside modernism – streamlined lidos, apartment blocks that look like ocean liners, Morecambe’s Midland Hotel, and, yes, Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion. There is more to be said of these buildings than Kathryn Ferry has room for here, but she ensures that they take their place in this attractive survey of what makes the seaside distinctive. If like me you live far from the sea and want a breath of fresh salty air and seaside history, I’d recommend ordering this book, getting in some social distanced fish and chips from your local take-away, and soaking up the atmosphere. If you're by the sea already, the book will add to your enjoyment too.

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* And, for that matter, who wrote ’The Entry of the Gladiators’? Bouncing Czech march and polka king Julius Fučik, that’s who. Thanks to the musician-friend who told me. But he didn't write ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’. Get hold of Kathryn Ferry’s book to find out about that song.

Building touched with emotion

Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted, and Barley Roscoe, Ernest Gimson: Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect

Published by Yale University Press

The time is ripe for a new study of Ernest Gimson, a man whose multiple careers as architect, designer and craftsman, seem to exemplify the Arts and Crafts movement. Three scholars who have long been deeply immersed in Gimson’s world and work have obliged, and the resulting book, drawing on Gimson’s buildings, designs, extensive archive of drawings, and on the writings and work of contemporaries, fulfils its promise.

The first section deals with Gimson’s life. His upbringing in Leicester is covered, together with his time articled to a local architect, followed by a longer period in the office of J. D. Sedding in London. Already interested in such progressive ideas as Secularism, Gimson is brought through Sedding’s office into contact with luminaries such as William Morris, and he soon shows interests in socialism and in the work of the SPAB. Still a young man, he travels to Italy and France, widening his visual education like many a young architect of the time, and designs both houses and furniture, but he also starts to learn craft skills such as plastering.

The book next describes how Gimson becomes one of those young architect-designers who follows the example of Morris and moves to the country – not merely by finding a rural retreat, as Morris had done at Kelmscott, but by going the whole hog and setting up house and workshop in the Cotswolds. The book’s account of his life at Sapperton in Gloucestershire is full and absorbing. We learn about his marriage, his friends and colleagues the Barnsleys, who also move to Sapperton, and his houses. Above all, we learn about the variety of his work.

Never let it be said that a country life is a quiet one. Gimson soon became occupied practising a range of arts and crafts – architecture, design, plastering, chair-making – and of creating the conditions where related activities – furniture workshops, a smithy – could flourish. He found himself running workshops, managing numerous employees and apprentices, sorting out accommodation for single workers, and arranging for everyone’s work to be exhibited both in Gloucestershire and in London. He was pricing jobs, overseeing work, ensuring that high standards of craftsmanship were maintained, and balancing the requirements of designers, makers, and clients. And then there were houses to design, architectural competitions to enter, and projects for various churches and historic buildings.

Further light is shed on all this by a fascinating chapter on Gimson’s approach to design. This highlights they way he saw design as being integrated with every other concern of an architect – in other words, a design should emerge from a project’s construction and materials, and the tools and techniques used to produce it. This chapter also has illuminating things to say about Gimson’s love of drawing, his use of natural motifs and patterns, his interest in craftsmanship and building materials, and his Morris-like ideals of work. At the end of the chapter, the story of the chance survival of many of Gimson’s drawings. Daniel Herdman, Librarian Curator at Cheltenham, rescued them when they were on the point of being consigned to a bonfire. They remain a part of the outstanding Arts and Crafts collection in Cheltenham’s museum, The Wilson,* and are beautifully reproduced in the book, as are the many photographs of Gimson’s buildings and the objects he designed.

The second part of the book consists of a series of stunningly illustrated chapters on the various aspects of Gimson’s work – from plasterwork and metalwork to interior design and architecture. All are fascinating, but those on interiors and architecture will most interest readers of this blog. Nearly all his buildings use traditional materials and draw on vernacular architecture in their design. Yet the authors of this book show their unusual qualities too – innovative house plans, dramatic roof frameworks, meticulous workmanship, and occasionally unexpected choices of colour. The buildings range from small workers’ cottages to large middle-class homes to still larger houses, like Waterlane House, a Cotswold residence that Gimson enlarged seamlessly. Not everyone will know the striking hall and gorgeous library that Gimson designed for Bedales School – the latter a feast of interior woodwork. Fewer still will be familiar with the ambitious proposals he entered for the competition for a plan and design for the city of Canberra, all towers, domes, and Byzantine-looking arches. The proposed HQ for the Port of London Authority is also unknown to most non-specialists. Whether it is these grand schemes or little known cottages, Ernest Gimson does its subject a service by bringing them and their architect to wider notice.

Gimson himself was noticed by his contemporaries, by colleagues who carried on the tradition, like Peter Waals and Harry Davoll, and by members of groups like the SPAB, with which Gimson worked. W. R. Lethaby, architect, writer, and teacher, was one of those whose judgement continued to be respected when he described Gimson’s work approvingly as ‘building touched with emotion’. If time has been less kind to the ethos of craftsmanship that Gimson lived by and fostered, the buildings and craft objects remain – houses still lived in and loved, the Bedales library still in use, furniture and metalwork still cherished or admired in museums. The authors of Ernest Gimson deserve congratulation for making this legacy more widely known and more deeply understood.

* The Wilson is hosting a special exhibition, Ernest Gimson: Observation, Imagination and Making, until 25 February 2020.

Before and after

Eric Musgrave, Leeds Then and Now
Published by Pavilion Books

Leeds Then and Now is one of a stable of books featuring paired photographs of buildings and streets from great cities, each pair accompanied by succinct and informative text. They’re not the first books to take this approach, but they are certainly among the best. The quality comes through most immediately in terms of the visuals, well chosen historical images from a range of dates, some as old as the 1860s, some as recent as the 1970s, twinned with excellent photographs of the same scenes today taken by David Major. The text for each pair of images is succinct and informative. Both author and photographer have local roots and their knowledge of and pride in Leeds shines through.

The range of subjects extends from the city’s major buildings – such as the Corn Exchange, Town Hall, and City Market – to lesser structures that form part of the complex mix that makes up most of the central streets of Leeds. Impressed on a recent visit how well the greatest of the buildings are standing up to the trials of modern life, I turned to the pages on the Town Hall. Here, a photograph of 1905 shows Cuthbert Brodrick’s monumental urban temple substantially the same, less hemmed by signs and bollards than it is today, but without the trees that now soften its corners. The Corn Exchange is likewise slightly encumbered with signs compared to earlier, but the great sweep of street that runs up to it is still largely clear, and similar to how it was apart from one modern interloper. Another big building, the mock-Egyptian Temple Works, was looking dark and soot-blackened in 1935, but at least you could see it – when the ‘now’ photograph was taken the main block was hidden behind scaffolding and protective plastic; the frontage has also acquired railings that weren’t there in the 1930s. One hopes that the works will be restored and thrive, as have most of the city’s fine arcades like the Grand, Cross, and County, the latter a masterpiece of the great architect Frank Matcham, normally at work designing theatres. An image of 1949, however, shows the striking Victoria Arcade, one that has been lost.

I can get annoyed with a plethora of intrusive modern signs, but a look at the some the street views shows how much interesting signage we have lost. The losses range from Victorian and Edwardian monsters to more elegant bits of Art Nouveau, not to mention some jazzy signs from the 1930s onwards. A stretch of Briggate, for example, displayed enormous signs, with letters almost six feet high, across the upper floors of the Cash Boot Company in 1944. These signs are long gone, and the part of the front that remains has been cleaned so that its bricks and stone gleam; also gleaming is a facade of 2010 fronting one shop, a completely glass-clad front butting comfortably up against brick, stone and terracotta.

So Leeds Then and Now shows us some of what has been lost – stretches of Gothic or Renaissance shops demolished in the 20th century, 16th or 17th century merchants’ premises knocked down by the Victorians, Dickensian enclaves such as Rotation Office Yard, a striking Victorian market hall, the dazzling timber-framed premises of the Universal Furnishing Company, and so on and on. But it also makes us look more closely at what is still there, from details of 19th century shops to the City Markets (still fulfilling their function) to the Third White Cloth Hall, which is now a Pizza Express. Meanwhile we can weigh up for ourselves whether we’re grateful for some of the new building or in mourning for demolished architectural glories; sad about the vanished Victorian shop signs or pleased that the buildings beneath them can be more clearly seen. Either way, the book is a feast, and will encourage readers not only to study its engaging images further, but also to look carefully at what’s left – in my case by making further visits to Leeds.

Deco displayed

Elain Harwood, Art Deco Britain 
Published by Batsford, in conjunction with the Twentieth Century Society

Art Deco is fashionable now. For decades the jazzy and decorative design style encapsulated in many cinemas, factory fronts, apartment blocks, shops, and office buildings had been out of favour. So many Deco buildings have been knocked down that it’s sometimes hard to know where to look to find the survivors. It’s even a challenge to define exactly what Art Deco is.

Elain Harwood’s new book certainly helps a lot. It’s got an elegant picture-book format – at its heart are about 115 double-page spreads with one building each and one stunning colour photograph per building. But don’t let that fool you. The text is packed with information about the buildings, which are arranged by type, making it easier to compare wonders such as the Carreras cigarettre factory in London (all black cats and “Egyptian” lettering) and the more stripped-down but magnificent India tyre factory in Renfrewshire; or to weigh-up the virtues of the interiors of the Midland Hotel in Morecombe with the Regent Palace of Hotel in Westminster. All this provides a colourful picture of Art Deco buildings. They can vary from highly ornate structures that allude to the past, like the jaw-dropping interior of the Granada Cinema, Tooting, made over in around 1930 by émigré theatre designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, to the stripped-down architecture of buildings like the Saltdean Lido.

Can structures as different as these all be Art Deco? Well, yes, they can. One of the best bits of Harwood’s book is the Introduction, which explains how in the 1920s and 1930s architecture in Britain came under an array of influences – decorative developments in France, a leaner architecture in the Netherlands, a new appreciation of Viennese turn-of-the-century design and the closely related work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the theatre sets and costumes of the Ballets Russes, a fresh awareness of certain historical sources (notably ancient Egypt), the advances in building materials happening at that time. This rich soup of influences helped designers in Britain develop in different but parallel directions, creating a range of styles from the full-blown cinematic Art Deco to the plainer mode sometimes called jazz moderne or streamlined modern or just moderne. None of the latter was quite as plain and spartan as the purer architectural functionalism of white boxes and strip windows, though some came close.

It’s not all about classification, though. A joy of the book is the stories that some of these places throw up. Harwood entertains her readers with tales of firemen making covert use of light sockets to run wireless sets at Heston and Isleworth Fire Station; of the beehives and putting green once on the roof of Adelaide House in the City of London; of an intrepid flight across the Atlantic in a Puss Moth in 1931. And she reminds us of the not always obvious visual effects of Art Deco architecture. Some buildings, like Osterley Underground station, need to be seen lit up at night to reveal their full glory; some have details undreamed of (by me, at least), like the unaltered manager’s flat in Blackpool’s White Tower Casino.

Art Deco Britain is a cornucopia of buildings, although there could, as Harwood herself says, easily have been twice as many. I’m grateful for the hundred-odd that are here, and that the appreciation of these buildings will be extended and enhanced by this beautiful and informative book.

The joy of Essex

For the next ten days or so, I am offering a small clutch of reviews of recent books that might appeal to readers of this blog. First of all...

Gillian Darley, Excellent Essex
Published by Old Street

There used to be lots of county books: county histories, county guidebooks, meandering accounts of counties by bellettrist old “countrymen” full of clichés about nestling villages and “delightful churches”. There’s not so much of this about now, and some say we think less about counties than in the days of before local government changes messed about with county boundaries and names in the 1970s. That’s debatable, but people certainly have prejudices about counties, and none more so than about Essex – Essex Man and The Only Way is Essex are familiar parts of Britain’s media landscape. Gillian Darley’s Excellent Essex blows all this out of the window, and wafts some welcome fresh air into the idea of the county book.

Excellent Essex does a good job of evoking the great variety of Essex, which is part rich countryside, part London fringes, part absorbing towns, with a very long coastline thrown in too. And of confronting the contradictions of a place that’s widely pro-Brexit but has always welcomed newcomers. Darley knows her Essex, and gives us absorbing nuggets of history and topographical fact about all these aspects of the county. Essex is full of memorable architecture, much of it there thanks to the wealth coming in from local industries – whether it was Courtauld’s textiles, Bata footwear, or Tiptree jam. Interesting and sometimes highly influential ideas have been born, or at any rate bred, in Essex, which has been home to future American Pilgrims, Tolstoyan anarchists, and women’s suffrage campaigners.

Darley, who has an honourable track-record of writing about architecture and its contexts, is the ideal author for all this, and is alert to the county’s sometimes surprising buildings and their stories. Essex is where we will find historical wonders like Thaxted Guildhall and the pargetted quaintness of Saffron Walden. It is home to Critall metal-framed windows, the Bata buildings of East Tilbury, and the glorious “seaside modern” houses of Frinton – all at the heart of English modernism of the 20th century. The county is also, of course, the site of the memorable and wonderful House for Essex, created by the architectural practice called FAT along with Essex man and artist Grayson Perry. The county also has its share of plotlands and the various offbeat joys of Canvey Island. All human culture, oner might say, is here, from the music of Gustav Holst (who spent a lot of time in Thaxted) to that of Sandie Shaw and Wilko Johnson, from the art of the Great Bardfield painters to that of Alfred Munnings or, yes, Grayson Perry.

Essex is, then, as diverse in its combination of old and new, high and low art, idealism and entrepreneurship, inventiveness and conservatism, as England as a whole. Gillian Darley does a superlative job of portraying this, and her account, rich with history and anecdote, also makes the trip to Essex a highly entertaining ride.

Varieties of architectural experience

Susannah Charlton, Elain Harwood, and Clare Price (eds), 100 Churches 100 Years
Published by Batsford

Lots of people like visiting churches, but the image of the traditional ‘church crawler’ is of someone who likes old buildings – and often old buildings in the countryside. That range of interests excludes most 20th-century churches, which are widely seen as assertively modernist and are most frequently in towns. So 20th-century churches tend to be neglected by visitors, except for experts and the growing number of enthusiasts for the art and design of the last 100 years. This new book, published under the auspices of the Twentieth Century Society, presents a fresh look at British church architecture between 1914 and 2015, revealing the field to be rich and full of surprises.

The range is enormous. The period is not all about rebarbative modernism. It embraces such fine buildings as St Alphege, Bath (designed in the style of an early Roman basilica by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott) and St Mary the Virgin, Wellingborough (Ninian Comper’s masterpiece, in a style that blends Gothic and Renaissance); or St Saviour, Eltham, London (by Cachemaille-Day, Welch & Lander, under the influence of German expressionism) and neo-Byzantine St John the Baptist, Rochdale (by Hill, Sandy & Norris, with glittering mosaics by Eric Newton). There’s modernism aplenty too, like St John the Baptist, Lincoln, where architect Sam Scorer and engineer Kálmán Hajnal-Kónyi contrived a hyperbolic paraboloid roof of breathtaking sweep, or, yes Brutalist-fanciers, the sad, decaying corpse of St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, a concrete masterpiece (‘already British modernism’s most spectacular and erudite ruin’) that’s quietly rotting away.

One hundred of these diverse examples, each glowingly photographed and briefly described, make up the body of the book. There’s also a series of short chapters on notable architects and practices – including Edward Maufe, H. S. Goodhart-Rendell, George Pace, and Gillespie, Kidd & Coia (the latter the progenitors of the ruin of Cardross). And in addition the editors have called into being specialist chapters including revealing surveys by Jane Brocket on stained glass and by Alan Powers on the art and artefacts, from fonts to altars, murals to lettering, that enhance many of these buildings.

It’s often the art that lingers longest in my mind when I visit these 20th-century churches, but the book is more than a series of portraits of single buildings and fine artworks. It also gives a sense of how changing ideas about religious practice, different artistic influences from Europe, and varying social and economic conditions have influenced the architecture.  So we get a sense of the variety of architectural choices – but also the monetary constraints – at play in the 1930s, of the moves towards liturgical reform in the late-1950s and 1960s, of the influence today of the changing landscape of faiths (the subject of another specialist chapter, by Kate Jordan). And so the change and variety continue, and along with them the plenitude of artistic and architectural interest. 100 Churches 100 Years will inspire many to seek these qualities out.

From Berlin to Britain

Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America
Published by Thames & Hudson

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, the influential German school of design that began in Weimar before moving to Dessau and finally to Berlin. The school nurtured so many artists, designers, and architects who were pivotal to the modern movement during the 20th century. Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy were all at the Bauhaus: Gropius was its founder; Breuer was a student and then a teacher there; Moholy taught the famous foundation course, as well as heading the metal workshop. All three spent time in Britain after the institution closed under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. Other less well known Bauhäusler came to Britain too, a small host of people such as teacher and textile artist Margaret Leischner and Otto Neurath, an associate of many Bauhaus people, who created the important ‘picture-language’ system called Isotype. All these, and many more, appear in Alan Powers’ Bauhaus Goes West, a highly informative and readable study of the school’s influence on British art and design.

The British work of each of the ‘greats’ (Gropius, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy) merits its own chapter, and these chapters throw up fascinating insights. We see Gropius building in timber and brick, in contrast to his more famous works in concrete; we learn of Breuer’s insistence that modernism need not be ‘cold’ or ‘mechanistic’, we find Moholy at work on a model of a future city for the film Things to Come. And we learn about the networks sustaining the modernists. An example is the various ventures of Jack Pritchard who was behind a company manufacturing plywood furniture and the now-famous Isokon flats in Lawn Road, North London, designed by Wells Coates but also involving Breuer. Indded Pritchard was pivotal in the British careers of Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy.

All this is fascinating, but perhaps still more so are Powers’ general chapters. One of these, ‘Elective Affinities: England and Germany’ outlines the relationship between the two countries in terms of design. It shows how British interest in modernism and modernist ideas predates the Bauhaus émigrés, tracing links between Britain and such architects as Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, and noticing items with modernist elements being exhibited– carved reliefs by Eric Gill, textiles by Phyllis Baron, Dorothy Larcher, and Enid Marx, to name but a few. As businessman and social reformer Harry Peach (who himself visited the Bauhaus at Dessau) said of Britain in 1927, ‘we had a modern movement’.

So Britain was fertile soil for the Bauhaus designers when they arrived, a point shown in another general chapter, ‘The People With No Taste: English Modernism in the 1930s’. This chapter title is of course ironic. Powers shows that there was plenty of taste around, and much of it involved appreciating modern design. It was possible, as Paul Nash famously said, both to ‘Go modern’ and to ‘Be British’. A host of examples – some starting before the Bauhäusler arrived, some under the émigrés’ influence – shows British modernism alive and kicking. Powers covers both the endeavours that showed people ready to appreciate modernism – the efforts of Nikolaus Pevsner, the Council for Art and Industry, the magazine Circle – and the actual products of the designers – from innovative light fittings to revolutionary school buildings.

For anyone looking for an introduction to this aspect of British modernist architecture and design, this book is an excellent place to start. For someone keen to refresh and sharpen their knowledge of the Bauhaus and its influence in Britain, Bauhaus Goes West is likewise truly enlightening.

Carving out a life

Alex Woodcock, King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture
Published by Little Toller Books

When I’m wandering about looking at old buildings, I often get into conversations with people. One of the most frequent comments I hear when standing in front of a beautifully crafted bit of masonry or carving is: ‘Of course you couldn't find anyone with the skill to do that now.’ I usually respond by pointing out that, although skilled stone masons and carvers are hardly thick on the ground, they do exist, in the workshops attached to our great cathedrals, for example. A few cathedrals, like my local one, Gloucester, retain a full-time group of masons who work away at the conservation of their cathedral’s ancient and fragile fabric – replacing worn stones, carving new corbels or gargoyles, and so on.

Alex Woodcock – an archaeologist, expert on medieval sculpture, and poet, among other things – knows all about this. He took a mid-life career turn, perceiving that he might learn more about stone carving by actually doing it, and training to become a mason and carver. Coincidentally, he cites the writing of Richard Sennnett (whose recent book on cities I reviewed in my previous post), who said that when ‘the head and the hand are separate…it is the head that suffers’. By learning how to make the sort of sculpture produced by the builders of medieval churches one should come to a deeper understanding of the ancient work.  

This book is Woodcock’s account of the route he took from fascinated student of medieval carving to fully trained carver working on the repair of the sculptures of Exeter cathedral. His narrative is absorbing, even moving, and full of insights into the way such a carver has to work. It is nourishingly rich with descriptions of different kinds of stone (Woodcock loves stone), knowingly alert to the qualities of tools such as mallets and chisels, and atmospherically thick with the dust and stone fragments of the mason’s yard. It is also full of descriptions and appreciations of the Romanesque carvings in parish churches in the English West Country. It’s hard to describe the appearance of these carvings briefly – Woodcock evokes it in a series of accounts of different churches, building to a picture of a style that, broadly, combines figures carved with a simple and powerful directness and ornamental patterns of sometimes great complexity but similar boldness. Anyone who doesn’t know these wonderful carvings – on doorways, crosses, baptismal fonts – will find the book an eye-opener.

Woodcock describes these carvings, which date from the 11th or 12th centuries, in a way that brings them alive in the imagination. He has a go at the scholars and writers who pigeonhole this sort of work as ‘crude’ or ‘primitive’ with the implication that it’s far inferior to the more ‘finished’ and ‘naturalistic’ Gothic sculpture that came after it. By contrast, he sees in the simplicity and clarity of the Romanesque carver’s lines and forms something of the power of modernist sculpture, comparing it to Brancusi. I agree. Woodcock is with the artists in this – John Piper loved this sort of thing, for example, as did Henry Moore – and the descriptions in this book are persuasive and are worthy to stand beside Piper's photographs.*

There’s a clue in those references to past artists and fellow-appreciators of the Romanesque, a clue to what makes this book stand out. It’s raised above the level of another ‘mid-life journey from crisis to fulfilment’ narrative by its deep appreciation of the ancient sculptures and by its admiration for past advocates of these neglected works. Among the book’s heroes, along with Piper, are people like the historian Kate Marie Clarke, who learned to understand and appreciate Norman fonts by making line drawings of them, and architect Philip Mainwaring Johnston, who restored churches and whose talent for drawing informed his sensitive work on medieval churches. These are all people for whom hand and head worked effectively together.

By the end of this book I was ready to give a triumphant cheer for Woodcock when he found employment as a stone mason, and was ready to believe I understood the carvings a lot better for reading his informed accounts of them. I now have another list of churches to visit and sculptures to look at. I was also ready to applaud Little Toller Books for publishing the book and for commissioning the excellent artist Ed Kluz to do the jacket. I hope that face smiles out across Britain's bookshops and that it attracts many buyers. I don't think they'll be disappointed.

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* If you can get hold of the Shell Guide to Dorset, look at Piper’s photograph of the font at Toller Fratrum to see what I mean.

Civilization

For a week or so, English Buildings turns into a book blog as I review some recent publications that have struck me. To begin with, a book about cities and the life lived in them...
 
Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling
Published by Allen Lane

There are lots of books about cities and how they should be shaped to meet our needs today. They range from academic studies and guides for planners to more general works, all of which can be peppered with obfuscating jargon (that can be variously weighted with politically biassed meaning, or vapid, or both). Richard Sennett is part academic sociologist, part city planner, and part generalist. His recent books have included studies of craftsmanship and cooperation. Building and Dwelling is the third in a trilogy that includes those two predecessors. Like them, it’s direct and clear in its language, rich with telling examples and engaging anecdotes, and full of good sense.

Sennett begins with a useful distinction between what he calls, borrowing the French distinction, ville (the architectural, physical reality of the city) and cité (the human life lived in it). His particular interest is in how these two interact – how people live in cities and alter them physically, and how the built environment influences the dwellers within it. A key point of the book is that city planners – like Cerda in Barcelona or Hausmann in Paris – can have a huge influence on the way cities look and develop, but that those living there after the planners are gone alter the buildings and neighbourhoods in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Cerda’s wonderful plan for Barcelona with its distinctive grid of octagons still gives the city its character – but not quite in the way the planner intended; we still walk along Hausmann’s boulevards in Paris, but in 1968 we were reminded that no plan could stop protests and riots as the baron of the boulevards had intended.

In the course of the book, which is dense with examples, Sennett covers as many kinds of diverse territories as a wide-awake urbanist or an exhausted traveller could imagine. At one end of the historical spectrum is classical Athens, with its agora (part marketplace, part law court, part eatery, part temple precinct) and pnyx (home of popular assemblies and political discussions). At the other end is the New York Googleplex, a ‘shell renovation’ of an old building, in which everything is available to Google’s employees – they don't have to step outside to get their clothes laundered, visit the gym, consult a doctor, eat, or even sleep.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that it is best to plan for cities to be adaptable or ‘open’. Sennett finds this admirable quality in unlikely places – in Nehru Place in Delhi, where there are businesses that form a kind of downmarket Silicon Valley, and a market where Sennett buys a dodgy smartphone. Or in parts of Shanghai, where people are faced with garish new capitalist office blocks, but react against their stridency by looking to the past.

But Sennett is not after some nostalgic hankering for an ideal past. At the end, after a traversal of many cities and accounts of many reactions to them (including outright escape from the city altogether), he comes down in favour of adaptability, of reconfiguring or repurposing parts of the city rather than either restoration on the one hand or sweeping everything away on the other. It's a humane kind of conclusion, based on the recognition that grand plans never turn out as they were intended and that modern pieties like ‘public consultation’ are often ineffective. And it's based on an obvious love of the world’s cities. Any other lover of cities with an interest in their history and their future should read this book. 

Big house, small details

Holkham: The social, architectural and landscape history of a great English country house by Christine Hiskey
Published by Unicorn Press

At the end of Holkham by Christine Hiskey are two photographs that for me sum up the turns and turns-about in the history of a great house. The pictures show the same room, the Statue Gallery, in the 1960s-70s and the 1980s. In the first picture, the room is dominated by a rather fussily patterned (but very beautiful) carpet and some chairs upholstered in bright red. In the second, the room has been restored to create the effect it originally made in the 18th century, with bare, polished floor boards and chairs covered in blue leather. The evidence for the blue leather on the chairs comes from the earliest inventories of the house and a fragment of leather caught under later upholstery.

This coming together of documentary and physical evidence, this fine detail, characterises Hiskey’s fascinating account of one of our greatest houses, Holkham Hall in Norfolk, from the time it was built in the 18th century under Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, to today, with the 8th Earl (another Thomas Coke) in residence. Holkham is vast, one of the biggest English houses, and very, very grand. It deserves a weighty history and this is what it has got – it’s impossible to do justice in a short review to the 500-odd pages of dense social, architectural, and landscape history in this book. There is so much here and all of it backed up with evidence from the estate’s extensive archives (the author is Holkham’s archivist) and with scores of fascinating illustrations. 

Holkham tells the long story of the construction of the vast house, a task that took the 1st Earl 25 years and was still not finished when he died (his widow saw the building to completion) and involved several different architects, whose contributions are difficult to disentangle. The building of the hall (including the sourcing of materials, the work of the small army of craftsmen, the changes in design) is given a substantial portion of the book. It describes how the family lived in the house, and how the various bits of this vast pile were used – not least in the early years when the Cokes were living in the completed portion of what was otherwise a half-finished building site. It explains the estate, and how the village, farms, and park related to the house. And it chronicles the changes made to the house over the years, often in detail as fine and evocative as that scrap of leather under the chair upholstery.

It covers of course, the Coke who’s best known to anyone with a smattering of English social history – Thomas William Coke or ‘Coke of Norfolk’, who is most famous as an agriculturalist, as well as being a prominent Whig Member of Parliament, staying in office until the 1832 Reform Act was passed. As well as all this he was well liked as a host, and the book quotes several accounts by his guests, who praise his generosity (he seems to have been one of those people who made everyone feel that they were the favourite guest); they also loved his library.

And so it goes on, through the Victorian period and 20th century, to our own. We learn a lot about the vast corps of servants, about relations with tenant farmers and villagers (mostly good – the Cokes were not ones for shifting people willy-nilly or knocking down cottages to create lakes). Then there are the dealings with local tradesmen. The Cokes bought a lot of their supplies locally, and Hiskey has lists of local businesses (apothecary, brush maker, saddler, basket maker, cooper, cabinet maker, druggist, draper, glover…) who sold goods to the house. Even that most important of symbols of country-house grandeur, the servants’ liveries, came not from London but from nearby Holt.

One could go on citing fascinating and animating details – from primitive electricity generators to provision for fire-fighting: before the house was finished, men had to put out a fire in the room of Matthew Brettingham, resident architect, and by 1750 the house had its own fire engine, with leather hoses. Hundreds of such details make up this absorbing account, a fitting tribute to one of the greatest English houses, its builders, households, and owners.

Pix and mortar

The next in my short series of book reviews is a book full of photographs of buildings – and full of information about taking architectural photographs...

Photographing Historic Buildings by Steve Cole
Published by Historic England

One of my first jobs in publishing was editing books that taught people how to take better pictures. I noticed back then, in the days of film and darkrooms, that there weren’t many books about architectural photography (there was a good one by Eric de Maré, but not much else). There still isn’t much, and Photographing Historic Buildings by Steve Cole closes this gap and is written very much for the digital age.

The author is well qualified. He worked for more than 40 years as a photographer in the cultural heritage sector – for the old Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and for English Heritage. He knows his subject backwards and upside-down, and is able to tell us about it in clear, succinct writing backed up with exemplary images. He’s concerned with using photography to make a record of the built environment. That means he’s less exercised by mood and atmosphere (although many of his photographs convey these qualities) than with the techniques and standards needed to make a faithful documentary record. However, most people who photographs historic buildings, whether for the record or for more artistic purposes, can learn something from this book.

This is a very practical handbook and Cole starts with the most basic practicalities – logistics (getting to the location, obtaining permission to take photographs); equipment (the various virtues and drawbacks of digital technical cameras, SLRs, bridge cameras, and compacts*); digital file formats (JPEG, TIFF, RAW, etc); different lenses and their uses; lighting; colour rendition; and so on. Then there’s a terrific chapter on composition, showing, for example, the importance of selecting the right viewpoint and revealing the pitfalls of distortion that can occur with a wide-angle lens. The composition chapter also covers matters such as photographing interiors, capturing a building’s context, the importance of when the picture is taken, and the sense of scale. There are also useful chapters on light (especially helpful with buildings that are lit unevenly) and subjects (covering everything from staircases to plaster ceilings, industrial sites to stained-glass windows, all of which are challenging in different ways). Much of this information is pulled together in case studies, which show multiple images from four different buildings (a modernist house, a timber-framed house, a nonconformist chapel, and an industrial site) used to build up a complete record (and demonstrating in the process solutions to many of the challenges outlined in the previous chapters). The last part of the book deals with post-production, explaining a range of image-editing techniques from cropping to the correction of distortion, all with practical tips.

I’ve already learned quite a bit from this book. I’m hoping soon that, having read Cole on the subject, my photographs of stained glass will be much better than they were; that I’ll produce better images of interiors; and that I’ll benefit from understanding that my wide-angle lens, useful in tight spots but also prone to produce distortion, is not always my friend. This book, though, promises to be a welcome friend on my bookshelves.


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*I have to say that as a user of a mirrorless camera, I feel slightly short-changed by this section – but not hugely: my camera does most things that an SLR will, and most of what Cole says when it comes to taking pictures is relevant whatever your equipment. My guess is that most readers of this book will be users of digital SLRs.

Oxfordshire revisited

Around this time of year English Buildings becomes a book blog for a week or so, as I cast an eye over some recent books on subjects that I write about here. First, a new volume in a familiar series of architectural guides – but no less impressive for that...


The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire: North and West by Alan Brooks and Jennifer Sherwood
Published by Yale University Press


It’s time to ease the cork out of another bottle of the fizzy stuff in the Wilkinson household when another revised volume in Pevsner’s invaluable Buildings of England series comes out – especially if, as is the case with the latest, Oxfordshire: North and West, it covers an area close to my home. In the original edition, Oxfordshire (written jointly by Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood) was covered in a single volume, so this is a substantial expansion as well as a revision – it includes the bulk, in terms of area, of the county, leaving the city of Oxford and the southern part of Oxfordshire for another volume.

The revision is by Alan Brooks, who has already revised the two Gloucestershire volumes, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire. He did a fine job on those, and doesn’t disappoint with Oxfordshire either. Revising a ‘Pevsner’ is not a simple task. It’s not just a question of bringing the book up to date by adding new buildings and deleting those that have been demolished. It also involves taking in corrections, adding buildings that the original authors missed, noticing alterations to fabric, and, perhaps most importantly of all, incorporating the results of new research. Alan Brooks, for example, has benefitted from recent publications, especially on the vernacular architecture of the county, and is an expert on stained glass, so has strengthened the book’s coverage of that subject considerably. This adding of new detail demands a gentle touch. Brooks has been able to preserve a lot of the wording of the original book, although the words get moved around to accommodate new research and occasional changes of emphasis or modifications of opinion. Alan Brooks deserves congratulations for keeping all these balls in the air while delivering such a wealth of architectural information.

Looking at familiar places with a ‘Pevsner’ in hand is usually a revelation, all the more so in this case, for someone who has been used to using the 1974 first edition of Oxfordshire. Looking at places I’ve visited recently, I notice enhancements and interesting additions everywhere. At Fifield, for example, the architect who did the church’s 19th-century restoration is named, and we are told more about the artists who produced the stained glass. At Hook Norton there’s an extended description of the brewery, a wonderful building given short shift in the first edition. In many places there is more on small (and not so small) houses – at Horton-cum-Studley we are given more on the almshouses, cottages, and a timber-framed house that even merits a diagram. I was pleased to see the inclusion of the occasional bit of background, such as the expanded coverage of the stained glass at Horspath depicting John Copcot, a 15th-century student at the Queen’s College, Oxford, famous, we are told, for killing a wild boar with his copy of Aristotle. This is all about filling in detail on buildings that could have been given better treatment first time round. But there have also been changes in Oxfordshire’s villages. For example, North Oxfordshire’s great set piece village, Great Tew, has been transformed from the sorry state of dilapidation noted in the 1974 edition to the revived and thriving place of today. Brooks notes that ‘much solid conservation work has been carried out by the estate’: how true.

Towns get markedly better coverage. Chipping Norton for example, has much more detail about houses, shops, former hotels, and schools, sometimes with more precise dating than in earlier editions. Visiting the town with the new edition in one’s hand, one emerges with a better understanding of the place’s vernacular architecture, its notable local baroque buildings, and its 20th-century architecture. I’ll be returning to Chipping Norton, to look more closely at various buildings, from the masonic hall to the former workhouse, now converted to flats. Banbury and Burford, to name just two other towns I know quite well, will repay further visits with the new Pevsner. Repeated and redoubled visits, indeed. It will take a long time to drink dry the deep well of information marshalled in this latest Pevsner. Meanwhile, I’ll raise another glass of fizz.

Steeplechoice

Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples
Published by Thames & Hudson

This book arrived in my mailbag too late to be included in the handful of pre-Christmas reviews I posted last month. Once I opened it, though, and saw that its author’s favourite steeple was also my own, I couldn’t resist reading it – and then returning to its rich collection of photographs and drawings. So here’s a review, post-haste…

Fifty English Steeples presents author Julian Flannery’s selection of the finest medieval parish church towers and spires in England, from Saxon Earl’s Barton, Northamptonshire, to Louth, Lincolnshire (1515). They’re a varied lot: high and low, plain and ornate, square, rectangular, round, or topped with octagonal lanterns or spires. Their diversity comes shining out of the book’s many photographs and drawings – Flannery has surveyed all these towers himself, recording in painstaking and beautiful measured drawings their details of construction and design, and producing (for the first time) an authoritative list of their respective heights. The book would be worth having for these meticulous drawings alone.

However, it’s much more than that. Flannery traces a steady design development, taking in various broad types of tower and spire – the round towers of Norfolk, the ornate towers of Somerset, the plainer but still magnificent towers of East Anglia, broach spires, recessed spires, spires with or without crockets, spires with flying buttresses, and so on and on. Along the way, he pays attention to the design of windows, buttresses, parapets, pinnacles, vaults – to make a compendium of steeple architecture of the kind that has never been gathered in one place before.

The examples are all worth visiting and looking at. The book includes coverage of such triumphs of medieval architecture as the towers of St Cuthbert’s Wells, Leigh-on-Mendip, and Kingston St Mary (all in Somerset), Oxfordshire landmarks such as St Mary’s Oxford and Adderbury, great lantern towers like Lowick, Fotheringhay, and Boston, East Anglian monsters like Lavenham, and finally the great Lincolnshire spires, Louth above all. Louth is my personal favourite, a spire of unique gracefulness, and Flannery’s contender for the ultimate late-flowering of the medieval English steeple. There it is on the book’s cover above, 287 feet of glorious early-16th century architectural flair.

Emerging from all this detail and all these examples is a broad pattern of development that has little to do with the conventional classification of medieval architecture (which works, up to a point, for window tracery and vaulting, but is less useful for steeples). Another theme is how so many of the best parish church steeples are either on or within striking distance of the limestone belt – not an invariable rule but a reminder that these structures are often showcases of the masons’ sense of being at home with their materials. A further theme is the effect of elements such as buttresses and string courses on the appearance of towers. Yet another is the varied ways in which masons made the transition from square tower to usually octagonal spire.

The real triumph of this book is how it manages to look at an architectural phenomenon that we take for granted and subject it to new and revealing scrutiny. Its value is built on various foundations: thousands of hours at the theodolite and drawing board; an awareness of both exterior and interior impact; a balancing act between empirical analysis and an architect's aesthetic judgement. Above all it's the author’s good eye that is alert to qualities such as the strangeness of Patrington; the influential nature of St Cuthbert, Wells; the power of Boston's great relieving arches; the grace and sweep of Louth's tall openings and ogees; both the structural and visual impact of a buttress or a vault. Most of us appreciate the beauty and importance of England's towers and spires; thanks to this book we will see them more clearly and in more detail than they’ve been seen since they were built.

Strangers on the shore

Last of my current clutch of book reviews is a new book about London. It’s about mudlarking, the wonderful pastime of recovering objects from the banks of the Thames. But it’s also about the history of London, and the fragmentary nature of the mudlark’s finds says something too about the fragmentary nature of historical evidence, about the way the past comes back to us in bits – but bits that can shine with the vividness of jewels...

Ted Sandling, London in Fragments: A Mudlark’s Treasures
With a foreword by Iain Sinclair
Published by Frances Lincoln

Once or twice I’ve walked down one of the sets of steps by the River Thames in London, to take a photograph from the shore. I’ve always felt a bit uneasy down there (Should I really be there? Will I be apprehended by a River Policeman or some imagined embankment beadle?). But I’ve also wondered what it would be like to be a mudlark, walking slowly along the shore and scavenging the historical detritus – old clay pipe stems, bits of pottery, colourful chunks of glass, the odd Victorian lemonade bottle – that gathers there.

Now I know. Ted Sandling’s enchanting new book reveals what it’s like to be a mudlark, and tells stories from London’s history, based on the fragments he’s found down on the shore. It’s a winning way to look at history, juxtaposing photographs of the finds with narratives about their origin or use or context. Sandling makes bottle stoppers speak to us about the history of London’s consumption of mineral water; bits of glass reveal an international industry embracing Asia, the Levant, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic; an ink bottle has things to tell us about the history of literacy; pins provide evidence of early mass production; and so on.

There’s a very special immediacy about the connection with history. You pick up a bit of clay pipe stem. It’s one of the most common things to find on the shore, but you may be the first person to handle it since its owner threw it away, broken and useless, 200 years ago. It’s very intimate, too, this connection. That original user put his lips to that stem; another grasped the wine glass of which you’re holding a fragment; yet another curled his wig with those curlers.

Some of the fragments animate very specific stories. A bit of glass marked ‘ECKHAM’ and some bits of letters that look like ‘Manwaring’ lead to the origins of a South London pickle manufacturer. ‘BATTERS’, ‘ENGLAN’ and a bit of ‘Morgan’ is evidence of a firm making patent ceramic crucibles (first in Wales, then in Battersea, then back in Wales again). They were the state of the art then, and they still exist as manufacturers of crucibles – and, now, of parts for jet engines too.

There are even bits of buildings washed up by the tide. A chunk of masonry from the old Palace of Westminster that burned down in 1834 is a prize exhibit. Delft wall and floor tiles are no less fascinating. And I learned, in the course of a passage about a wine bottle neck, that bottles as well as buildings had string courses. Such things, the objects themselves and the short accounts of them, do not lose from being fragments – visually, they are stunning, and historically they exemplify how the past comes to us in fragments that we have to piece together.

Sandling’s enthusiasm for his material is infectious. He can luxuriate in the coloured decoration on a tile, the glow of a piece of glass, the texture of anything he holds. He’s good at recreating the surprise of discovery and the strangeness of some of the finds – some of them, after all, have taken long journeys to get here: the river both is the essence of London and is something flowing into it from outside. Even what were everyday objects – a pipe bowl in the shape of a horse’s hoof, a Tudor money box – can seem strange until their stories are filled in, and Sandling is good at getting this sense of strangeness, as well as giving us the background information we need to understand the objects better. He recognises, too, that odd, uncertain feeling that I felt when stepping on to the mixture of sand, gravel, and mud beside the Thames. Nearly everyone feels it, he says, when they first go down there. Bottles and buttons and bear heads (yes) and writers and mudlarks too, we are all strangers on the shore.

Shakespeare's county

The next of my handful of new book reviews is of the latest addition to Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. For many, these books are self-recommending. But now the revised editions are coming out, many of them getting on for twice the length of the original books, it seemed a useful idea to have a closer look at the benefits of revision – and it’s certainly not just a case of deleting demolished buildings and adding newly built ones...

Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Warwickshire
Published by Yale University Press

The arrival of a new revised edition of one of Pevsner’s Buildings of England volumes has me rubbing my hands with glee, especially when it’s on a county in my local area. As I live in north Gloucestershire, not so far from the border with Warwickshire, the new edition of Warwickshire is right up my street.

Pevsner’s original Warwickshire came out in 1966, so a full update was due. As seems usual these days, the new Warwickshire has 800 pages (there were just 529 smaller pages in the 1966 edition), but unlike its processor it doesn’t include Birmingham, which will appear in a forthcoming volume on Birmingham and the Black Country. There’s plenty of space, then, for new extended entries on Warwick and Coventry Universities, and for many individual new buildings (Pevsner’s account of Coventry Cathedral, a new building in 1966, is reproduced with little change, apart from some notes on recent minor alterations and additions). The old buildings (and there are some belters in this county: Warwick and Kenilworth Castles, Baddesley Clinton and Stoneleigh Abbey) are covered in more detail. The book also includes much more information about many places – small towns such as Bedworth and Atherstone, for example, are covered in much greater depth. We get a richer picture of this fascinating county as a result.

One huge gain in the revision process is the scope to draw on the results of new research about all kinds of buildings. Recent books on the architect Sanderson Miller (very active in his native Warwickshire) are a case in point. Andor Gomme’s work on the architect and builder Francis Smith of Warwick is another. Recent research also throws light on the designers of important houses such as Compton Verney. And on rediscoveries. Why didn’t the 1966 Pevsner tell me about the wonderful Norman tympanum in the church at Billesley, I wondered? Answer: because it was only rediscovered in 1988! The new book includes it, and provides a photograph of it too.

It didn’t take long before I got out and about with the new Warwickshire in my hand. It throws light even on places that are familiar to me, as I discovered when I took it on a journey through parts of the south of the county. There was much more than in the original book on the large village of Brailes, for example, and about smaller ‘hidden’ places like Idlicote, with its church, house, and dovecote, and about places I’d driven through hundreds of times, like Halford, a village on the Fosse Way with a good church (another bit of excellent Norman carving (who said Herefordshire had all the best Norman sculpture?) and some elegant early-19th century houses. I finished my trip in Shipston-on-Stour, which I thought I knew like the back of my hand. But the Pevsner encouraged me to explore more closely a former nonconformist chapel I’d overlooked before, and introduced me to a bit of the town I’d not visited, where it pointed me towards an extraordinary former police station with, of all things, 19th-century Gothick ogee windows.

So Warwickshire doesn’t disappoint with the familiar places. And I’m already noting down buildings I don’t know that I want to see. I think the list will continue to grow for some time. Anyone with any kind of interest in Warwickshire, its history, and its buildings, will I’m sure react in the same way. There’s no need to hesitate to buy this latest Pevsner.