Combrook, Warwickshire

Ornamental

Thoughts of St Augustine, Kilburn, were still in my mind recently when I visited Combrook, a village in Warwickshire, not far from the Fosse Way. Combrook was an estate village of Compton Verney and seems to have had a lot of attention paid to it in the mid-19th century, when a number of cottages were built or rebuilt, a school was erected, and the church given a new nave. The architect of the church was John Gibson, who was also at work making alterations to the great house of Compton Verney in the early 1860s. Gibson gave the church a striking west front, a visual highlight in the centre of the village.

The style of this front is Gibson’s very ornate version of what the Victorians often called ‘Middle Pointed’, that’s to say the phase of Gothic fashionable in the first half of the 14th century. Elaborate window tracery, naturalistic carving, and ogee arches are typical features. However, this frontage is hardly typical. It’s a Victorian throwing everything at a small church – very fancy tracery (‘overcusped’, says Pevsner), unusual shapes in the form of a rose window and a pair of ‘circular triangles’, a very ornately carved ogee doorway, the small overhanging turret with its spirelet, and outward-leaning angels flanking both the turret and the doorway.

This is all very impressive in a slightly gawky way, and the oddity continues with the treatment of the aisle roofs, which consist of multiple gables rather than a single lean-to, a design that produces an odd junction between the downward-sweeping angle of the west front and the gables that stick out behind it. Gibson’s work here is a little like that of the Victorian ‘rogue architects’ such as S S Teulon – inventive, ornamental, unafraid to be different from the accepted Gothic models – but without Teulon’s polychrome dazzle or his skill in handling three-dimensional forms.† For all this, the overall effect is pleasant, rather like a large garden ornament, and an admirable focal point for this attractive village. 

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* This is the phrase used by the architect and writer Harry Goodhart-Rendel to describe an adventurous and sometimes outré group of Victorian church architects. For my post on a church by Teulon, look here.

† Gibson’s best known church, the ‘marble church’ at Bodelwyddan, in the lower Vale of Clwyd, also has very elaborate tracery and carving, but is more conventionally roofed and massed. Gibson is most famous for designing banks, but was clearly much more versatile than this suggests.

Huntley, Gloucestershire

Gothic on speed

Set back from the main road from Gloucester to Ross, St John the Baptist, Huntley, is a church I’d been past many times before the Resident Wise Woman and I took the trouble to pull in and have a good look. And we were pleased we did. It’s one of the most interesting Victorian churches I’ve come across. Apart from the tower, which is 14th century, the whole church was rebuilt in 1862–3 by Samuel Sanders Teulon. There must have been a very generous budget (provided by the rector, Rev Daniel Capper) because this little building shows what Teulon could do when he threw everything he had at a church.

Huntley: the window of the organ chamber

The style is a kind of Decorated Gothic, the style of the 14th century that is marked by flowing window tracery, much carving, and a rich approach to decoration generally. But here at Huntley, Teulon gave it many special twists and turns. He elaborated everything: the Decorated window tracery flows more curvaceously than ever, the carving is more profuse, the painted chancel ceiling glows jewel-like. The elaboration starts before we even get inside, with an extraordinary trefoil-headed window (above) that looks like the top of a conventional Gothic window, but with the lower part replaced with a row of five little blind arches filled with decorative carving. The reason for the lack of glazing lower down is that the organ is installed behind – it’s signalled, indeed by carvings of a couple of musical figures that adorn the window. And this is just a hint of what awaits us inside.

Huntley: one capital or two?

Here architectural sculpture breaks loose from its bounds. Profuse isn’t a strong enough word for this interior and its decoration. At the tops of some of the columns are not simply capitals, but what almost amount to pairs of capitals (above), one over the other, the two levels of carving separated by a band of masonry studded with polished stones. The nave roof is supported by carved stone corbels – but there are more carvings immediately below them, framed by banded masonry and picked out with gilding. Teulon was able to employ one of the best Victorian carvers, Thomas Earp, whose work on the reredos and pulpit was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1862.

This is just a sample from this rich and absorbing little building, a Gothic revival structure that’s so elaborated it’s like no medieval church. The architect and critic Harry Goodhart-Rendell wrote an essay, ‘Rogue Architects of the Victorian Era’, in which he included Teulon in a group of pushers of the architectural envelope, men who broke rules triumphantly, who trumpeted their innovations with noisy visual glee, who had, presumably, the kind of pachydermous skins that made them oblivious to the criticism of more conventional souls. How good that they did, and that they found patrons like Capper who gave them the resources to work in the way they wanted.

Huntley: the angels have gilded wings and haloes

Victoria Tower Gardens, London

A little roguery

Having admired the façade of St John’s Smith Square the other day, I glanced away from Smith Square towards the river and this wonderful little structure caught my eye. It’s the Buxton Memorial Fountain, and I’ve often noticed the way it adorns the Victoria Tower Gardens near the Houses of Parliament. But I’d not seen it from this angle before, its ornate Gothic arches and pointed roof aligned with the end of the street.

This little building was commissioned in 1865 by an MP, Charles Buxton, to commemorate the work of his father, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the group of colleagues who had campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade. It originally stood in Parliament Square but was taken down in 1949 and moved to its current happy location in 1957.

The fountain was the work of Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812–73), a Gothic architect who designed a multitude of churches, vicarages, and allied buildings and who was designated by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel as one of the ‘Rogue architects’ of the Victorian era. What Goodhart-Rendel meant was that these architects were original to the point of eccentricity, designing buildings that were Gothic, but not as we know it. They would combine styles from different sources, introduce jazzy patterns, and use vibrant, sometimes brash colours.

The Buxton Memorial Fountain begins like a conventional, if highly ornate, structure of Gothic arches. But the roof is something else – a brightly coloured extravaganza of enamelled iron tiles that sings in the sun and enlivens a dull day. In this part of central London, with its familiar mixture of brick and stone buildings, this jewel-like roof comes as a surprise, and a welcome dose of colour. Sometimes a little roguery is not such a bad thing.