Stamford, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire Tuscan

‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is plain and empty and about as simple as you can get, with a ‘dentil course’, widely spaced, either made up of the ends of supporting timbers or suggesting their presence.

Why such plain Tuscan architecture for a library? Not, I thought, in some kind of tribute to great Tuscan poets (Dante and Petrarch, for example). But when I researched the building, I found that it didn’t start life as a library at all. What you can see in the photograph was originally the entrance to a market and shambles,* built to designs by local architect William Daniel Legg† in 1804–8 and converted to make the front of a library in 1906. Those windows and the walls that surround them are additions of the latter phase.

So the Tuscan portico was no doubt a simple and relatively inexpensive choice to create a strong statement at the market entrance – an entrance that’s easy to see from a distance among the shops that surround it. It stands out, while providing a generous central span to allow not only people but also goods to pass in and out with ease.There’s no fancy ornament to get damaged by barrows or carts, just good plain building. It’s a landmark on the street. And now it’s a library, its stand-out design is still valuable in what I’m sure is a much valued community asset.

- - - - -

* A shambles, in this sense, is a row of stalls selling meat, or a row of butchers’ shops often built on the site of former market stalls.

† Casewick Hall, the stables of Panton Hall, and Vale House in Stamford itself are among Legg’s Lincolnshire works. He also designed some gate lodges for Burghley House near Stamford.

Cromford, Derbyshire

A bit of a shambles

To begin with, I hardly glanced at the small low terrace of tiny shops, most of them seemingly unoccupied, that runs along the northern side of the market place in Cromford. Big stone blocks filling in the gaps between low doors and rather small windows, plus a space above that seemed rather too large for a shop sign, all below a hipped roof of slate. Even so, the design of this unregarded building seemed un usual, and I wondered… Then I saw a brief account of these buildings and gave them another glance, because I learned that they’re actually – in origin at least – Georgian. This is a tiny Georgian shambles, in other words a row of small shops running near or along the edge of a market place, usually originally occupied by people such as butchers.* They came about when market traders, needing more permanent premises than a temporary stall, built shops either on the site of their old pitch or nearby.

These must have arrived in Cromford during the heyday of Arkwright’s mill, when the town was growing and there would have been a ready market for food such as meat that could not be grown or raised at home. Sadly, they have now seen better days. Nearly every window is different from its neighbours, suggesting that most are replacements.§ Likewise the doors, some of which are boarded up or even, like the one in the foreground of my photograph, replaced with masonry. My picture is not very good – I had to shoot at a an angle to avoid a row of parked cars and vans that would have virtually hidden the shops from view. But it gives one an idea of what’s here†…and perhaps of the potential that could be unlocked if the building were restored.

- - - - -

* Usually butchers, although fishing ports sometimes have ‘fish shambles’, and Dublin has a Fishamble Street on the site of a former fish market. 

§ Although the small panes in some of the windows, especially the two on the left, do suggest an early date.  

† There was once another row at the other side of the market place.