Northwich, Cheshire

When wood works

This building stands out on Northwich’s main shopping street like no other. It’s very large and exhibits the timber-framed structure that is so often seen in other Cheshire towns, such as Nantwich and Chester itself. It has the typical Cheshire elaborate magpie pattern of posts, beams and struts, and there’s a jetty, the arrangement by which an upper floor sticks out above the storey below. It doesn’t take long, though, for one to realise that this, like the pub in my previous post, is not an ancient structure of the Tudor period or earlier. The regularity of the timber work, the windows with their pivoting openings, the tell-tale uniform quality of the timber work – all point to a building of the 19th or 20th-century timber-frame revival, a way of building sometimes called ‘Tudoresque’.

It’s a pub now, but whatever was this dazzling structure originally built for? The clue is in the pub’s name, the Penny Black, the name of the first adhesive postage stamp. This building was originally the the town’s Post Office and it was built in 1914, although it did not actually open until the end of World War I, in 1918. The timber frame was not only a visual homage to this traditional Cheshire style of architecture. It was designed this way so that it could be ‘liftable’.

If liftability is a new concept to you, I should explain that Northwich was one of the centres of England’s salt industry. Underground brine was extracted and boiled in vast pans so that the water evaporated and the remaining salt crystals were gathered and processed for sale. Removing the brine caused voids to appear beneath the ground, and buildings subsided as a result. Suitably built timber-framed structured could be jacked up – lifted – and stabilised, whereas masonry buildings were at risk of severe damage or even complete collapse.

What a triumphant building for an early-20th century Post Office. How unlike Post Offices today, which tend to share space with other retail premises – even in large towns the Post Office occupies some counter space at the back of a shop such as a branch of W. H. Smith. This trend to downsize happened before the current scandals surrounding the false prosecutions and convictions of hundreds of Post Office staff, but these days it looks almost as if the organisation is trying to hide away in these low-budget, low-profile locations. How unlike the situation in 1914, when a building like this could act as a landmark on the high street, a three-dimensional piece of publicity and a premises that was built, in the most challenging geological situation, to last.

Droitwich, Worcestershire

Salt and vinegar?

English Buildings: all architectural life is here, from cathedrals to parish churches, even unto the Droitwich Spa Fish & Chip Bar. I took this picture because it seemed to me a very clear illustration of a problem that became pervasive in Droitwich, leading to a major change in the economy in the late-20th century. The problem is obvious enough: subsidence, which occurs when the ground under a building sinks, causing the foundations and also the above-ground structure to move, leading to cracks, sloping floors, wonky walls, all kinds of structural chaos. The cause is less obvious. Subsidence occurred here because of the extraction of brine from the large underground deposits beneath the town.

Beneath Droitwich are large deposits of rock salt. When surface water penetrates the ground it dissolves the salt, producing the liquid called brine. By pumping the brine to the surface and heating it, people produced salt in huge quantities, for Droitwich’s brine contains around ten times as much salt as sea water. So brine extraction became a major industry in Droitwich and nearby Stoke Prior (there are more salt deposits in Staffordshire, Lancashire, and, especially, Cheshire).

Salt-working in Droitwich grew to a large scale in the 17th to 18th centuries, and continued through the 19th. By the 1920s, large-scale working in Cheshire and elsewhere sent the Worcestershire industry in decline, continuing on a small scale. But by this time, the damage to buildings had already begun. The resulting damage was a further nail in the coffin of the salt works, and by the late-20th century, brine extraction in the town had ended. Some buildings still show obvious signs of the damage caused by subsidence but none, I think, quite so clearly and outwardly as this one. It’s drastic, but the building still seems to serve up England’s traditional fast food. Salt and vinegar anyone?