Liverpool, Wapping Dock

Stand-out structure

Not far from the Albert Dock, whose gatemen’s shelters were featured in my previous post, stands Wapping Dock, and alongside this dock is an even more extraordinary small building. It’s slightly later (c. 1856) than the Albert Dock shelters, and stands by the site of the Wapping Dock’s entrance gates. It’s variously described in Joseph Sharples’ Pevsner City Guide to Liverpool (2004) as a policeman’s lodge and in the listing description online (c. 1975) as a gatemen’s shelter. Given the more recent date of the Pevsner guide, I’m inclined to accept its verdict, reinforced, to my mind, by the extraordinary architecture. The tall, spire-like roof seems to answer the old question, ‘Why can you never find a policeman when you need one?’ with a very visible point of contact. A reader has been in touch (see Comments section) to point out that the 1849 large-scale OS map marks two ‘Policeman’s huts’, one at either end of the dock. I think we have our answer.

If the tall roof and the unusual oval plan make this building stand out, so does the irregular stonework, laid like very high quality crazy paving, like the cyclopean masonry in my previous post. Other notable features are the horizontal protruding bands and the peculiar cross motif visible in my photograph. This cross is not unlike an arrow loop of the kind found in medieval castles, enabling an archer within to shoot at enemies outside. But this castle detail is very much an ornamental allusion to the old style of building – it’s not an actual opening and the lower part of the cross is not straight, but ends in a slight curve, diminishing in width as it tapers down.

Apparently this striking lodge or shelter once formed a central pier of a two-section gateway, making the visual reference to castle gatehouses and defensive architecture relevant in a way. The stone – tough granite – is also good for a gate or entrance. No wooden cartwheel, passing through, would do much damage to this hard stone. It must have done its job well, this tiny tower, eccentric as it looks.

Liverpool, Royal Albert Dock

Small structure, giant stones

On a visit to Liverpool recently, I was very taken with the docks, the Royal Albert Dock in particular. Its imposing and innovative structure deserves at least one post of its own, but before I get there, a post or two about some of the smaller dock buildings, no less meticulously designed and built than the vast warehouses nearby. My first example is one of three dock gatemen’s shelters built in 1844 to designs by the Albert Dock’s engineer and designer, Jesse Hartley.

The shelters are not large – there’s just enough room for a small group of men to gather and shelter before rushing out to open or close the dock gates, do maintenance work on the docks and their gates and bridges, light the dock’s lamps at night, and so on. Inside was a fireplace and some wooden benches and not much else. The octagonal plan with windows facing different ways enabled those inside to keep a good watch on what was going on nearby.

Hartley was an innovative designer who took his ideas from many different sources. Here he specified Scottish granite, one of the toughest stones anywhere and a costly choice; it needed bringing all the way from Scotland and it was hard to work. Nevertheless, Hartley’s masons did a good job of working the stone to a smooth surface and laying it in the ancient Greek manner known as ‘Cyclopean’*, with very large rectangular blocks at the corners and smaller, irregularly cut pieces filling in the space in between. The roof is made of the same stone, cut into enormous slabs, laid stepwise, and supported by the stout walls and fancy stone brackets (referencing oriental pagodas) at each corner.

What a lot of skill and effort devoted to such a small building in a place where some dock companies might have made do with a cheap wooden hut. The result is something beautifully made that is still, some 180 years after is was constructed, almost as good as new. Hats off to Jesse Hartley, his masons, and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board for their parts in the shelters’ creation, and to National Museums Liverpool for their informative display in one of the huts.

- - - - -

* After the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants of Greek mythology, most familiar to readers of Homer’s Odyssey. Cyclopean masonry is normally made of very large stone blocks (as if only giants could handle them), with some if not all of irregular shape (suggesting the primitive skills of the giants). There is nothing primitive, however, about the masonry in Hartley’s shelters. 

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

Multifaceted

My liking for small, unusually shaped buildings meant that I was immediately drawn to this one, an octagonal structure near the sea at Bexhill. I wasn’t at first sure exactly what it was – a café? a meeting-place? a seaside shelter? It turns out that it is known as the Bexhill Coronation Bandstand, and was commissioned by the 8th Earl de la Warr in 1895, as part of various improvements that he made to the town, most of which his family owned. The listing description, however, suggests that it may originally have been a seaside shelter and became a bandstand later – apparently it is described as a bandstand on a photograph of 1927 and there are other early photographs of musicians playing inside it. The window back then looked slightly different, openable and with less woodwork, to let the sound out to listeners on the surrounding paved areas. Musicians still sometimes play in front of the bandstand, but these days it’s a multi-use building fulfilling all kinds of needs. When I was there, it seemed that its main purpose was to shelter people who were enjoying an ice-cream and admiring the view.

The structure looks good after its recent restoration, and its colourful paintwork is just the kind of thing that seems right for the seaside. Some of the decorative touches hint at an Indian source – the horseshoe arches of the window frames and the repeating star-like motifs that run along the lower walls. This reflects a number of buildings nearby in a similar, Mughal-inspired style, which I’ll cover in a separate post. But the bandstand is not a purely Mughal-style building. The roof tiles are typically Sussex in appearance, and the wavy bargeboard beneath them are the sort of thing one sees on ornamental buildings of many different styles Seasides need buildings like this, structures that provide a bit of decoration and a dash of the unusual. This one manages to achieve this by finding a middle way between the tawdry and the dull. Hoorah!

Boxford, Suffolk

 

Preserve, re-use, re-use again

In Boxford primarily to look at the church, my eye of course was caught in addition by other things. This small building in the middle of the village made me scratch my head. What is it? The date, 1838, took my mind back to the era of village lock-ups, and this seems to have been the answer. Two stout wooden doors would have originally provided security for a two-celled mini-prison, where wrongdoers were kept, usually just for a short period before they were either released or taken to court. Drunks would be left until they were sober, two people who had got into a fight could be locked up and separated by a solid brick wall, those suspected of more serious misdemeanours would be locked up until they went before a justice or magistrate.

Lock-ups usually featured simple and functional architecture, but here the builders allowed themselves a couple of four-centred arches and a generous brick gable to make the structure look imposing.* The bricks are the pale ones seen widely in East Anglia. When no longer needed as a lock-up, the building was used to store the village fire engine (it would have been a small, hand-pumped device). Today it’s used simply as a shelter, a nice example of an antiquated building finding a new use that makes it worth preserving as something more than a mere eye-catcher – although it certainly fulfils that function too.

- - - - -

* Although we are a fair distance from the sort of chunk prison architecture that is sometimes seen; for an example, see this one here in Bewdley, Worcestershire.

Yoxford, Suffolk

What made me stop and look

Stop and look. This thatched shelter is just the sort of thing I like, and a sight of it from the main road was what gave me the initial prompt to stop and take a look at Yoxford (see also my previous post). Stop and look: what I try and do when I have time, and what I try and make time for when I have less. This time what brought me to a halt was a simple structure, made with traditional materials, that enhances public space and is useful. It’s just a timber framework – four stout posts, some horizontals, some struts – a thatched roof, and two seats. It was built in 1935 to celebrate the silver jubilee of King George V, one of several in eastern Suffolk.

Even a small building like this can have a resonance over the years: a facility that I’d guess locals and passers-by have been using gratefully ever since, whether waiting for a bus, going for a walk, or carrying a heavy bag bag home from Horner’s Stores. The shelter also carries a simple message carved on one side: ‘’Love Brotherhood Fear God’. A shame people in Europe didn’t pay enough attention to the first part of that twofold instruction back in the 1930s. We could still do with it today. Stop, look, and think.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

 A convenient place of refuge

I was born in Lincolnshire, and therefore know what it’s like to walk along a beach in winter in a howling easterly wind, when you have mixed feelings if the top of your ice cream is blown away because the weather was really too cold for you to be grazing on such delights. A cup of good hot strong tea is more to the point. East-coast seasides need some shelters, so you can drink your tea or just get out of the wind, and they know this just as well at Aldeburgh, Suffolk as they do in Skegness, Lincs (famously ‘so bracing’) or anywhere else.

This shelter is not far from the Moot Hall in my previous post and that bit of patterned brick nogging, low down between the timber uprights, is a sort of homage to genuinely old buildings like the Moot Hall. I suppose this shelter is 20th-century – maybe it was built in the interwar period, although the nogging, with its pristine pointing, looks like a recent repair, and the whole thing could be post-war.* But its age doesn’t matter. It’s not unsightly, incorporates public lavatories, and provides a useful refuge. Good enough for me.

- - - - -

* However, looking at old photographs, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the site of the shelter in 1910. Another image labelled ‘interwar’ includes it.

Sticklepath, Devon

The Quaker graveyard in Sticklepath

I came to Sticklepath by accident, stopping there because the village shop advertised coffee, which I needed. I didn’t have time to visit the place’s most obvious attraction, the Finch Foundry (a working forge, not a foundry) other than pausing to admire its water wheel from beneath the head race, dodging drips as I watched the ironwork turn. But I did stop for a moment in the Quaker graveyard behind the forge, for a short contemplative break, and to wait for the clouds to part and the sun to shine on the tiny structure in my photograph.

It’s a shelter in one corner of the graveyard. I’ve no idea how old it is – the very solid looking walls seem to have some age, but the lovely thatched roof is recent, though no doubt a replacement of earlier thatch, perhaps of many generations of earlier thatch. It’s tiny, just big enough to contain a bench seat with room for two, looking out over the graves. It seemed to me to be an excellent example of the value of taking pains over a modest structure: how much pleasure it must have given, over the years, to people who need a rest, and to those who just like to see something well made.

I don’t usually feel morbid in graveyards and, in spite of the proximity of the tables where visitors to the forge could take refreshments, the place was quiet and peaceful. Could I hear the occasional drip and splash from the water wheel? Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t recall noticing it, but if I had it would have seemed a sound fit as much for calm as anything. The mood was enhanced by a poem by the hymn-writer and humanitarian James Montgomery (1771–1854) about just such a place.* The words are hand painted on a noticeboard attached to the back of the shelter. The poem seemed apposite: it ends:

Green myrtles fenced it, and beyond their bound
Ran the clear rill with ever-murmuring sound.
Twas not a scene for grief to nourish care,
It breathed of hope & moved the heart to prayer.

They’re lines very much of their time, and somewhat conventional, but well made and right – like the little shelter that contains them, and no doubt the products of the forge nearby. Fortified by such thoughts – or maybe by the coffee – I went on my way.

- - - - -

*James Montgomery was just a name to me, someone whose work was praised by Lord Byron. He seems to have been a good egg, supporting abolitionism, upholding the right of protestors to make their case, and writing a poem against the practice of employing small boys to climb up chimneys to sweep them. He wrote the carol ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’ and adapted Psalm 23 to create the hymn ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’.

Seven Springs, Gloucestershire

Staging post

This tiny building was always a bit of a mystery to me. Passing it years ago, I’d assumed it was a bus shelter, before I reflected that its position at a road junction would not be a convenient stopping-place for a big bus; it’s even less convenient now the junction has been converted to a double roundabout.  So I filed it away mentally, and put it down to the work of some local philanthropist offering shelter to passers-by.

Then, a few months ago I heard a reference to ‘the old parcel house at Seven Springs’. This is what it is, as a little googling confirms: a building where parcels were left and transferred from one carrier to another. The siting at a junction now made more sense, as the traffic passing here could be on the Cirencester to Cheltenham road or the one crossing it, which links Stow-on-the-Wold with Gloucester. In the direction of Stow, it also connects with the road to London.

I’m still not sure how long the parcel office has been there. It seems to be 19th century and the Victoria County History confirms that it was there in 1894. The Gothic openings and thatched roof lend it a picturesque air, although one might have expected it to be walled in Cotswold stone, like many a small bus-shelter in these parts. It must be a long time since it was in use, and one hopes it will survive when the roof reaches a state beyond pleasing decay.

- - - - -

Postscript: Having looked at this again, I’m convinced that the brickwork is relatively recent and must date to a rebuild of the structure. This is confirmed by a drawing I have located online, showing a tiled roof, a more elaborately carved window opening, and other differences. More research is required.

Much Marcle, Herefordshire

Growing your own buildings

I used to smile at Arthur Mee, the author of a series of mid-20th century county guides called ‘The King’s England’ who, whenever he encountered an unusually large tree, recorded its girth measurement for his readers. I imagined him whipping out his tape measure with glee and chuckling over the figures, like a trainspotter or a twitcher or the composer Anton Bruckner, who liked obsessively to count the leaves on trees.

And then today I encountered this magnificent specimen, and began to think that perhaps Mee had a point. It’s the yew tree next to the parish church at Much Marcle, Herefordshire, and its hollow trunk has enough space inside for three benches. I began to wonder whether, if we could grow buildings, they would look like this. And I began to wonder too just how big this monster is. I do not travel with a tape measure, but a notice in the church porch enlightened me. When the girth of the trunk was measured in 2006, it was found to be 30 ft 11 ins. What’s more the notice goes on to say that the best estimate of the tree’s age is 1,500 years. In other words, it was planted in around the year 500, about 90 years after the Romans pulled out of Britain, and around the time that the Britons (led, according to some, by the legendary King Arthur) were said to be beating the stuffing out of Saxon invaders at the Battle of Mons Badonicus. So this tree has been here longer than any extant standing English building, Roman ruins excepted, and its spreading branches are still pushing out abundant greenery. They way it has, as it were, invited human shelterers inside its trunk while also continuing its vigorous growth is admirable, and rather humbling.

I’ve got a good long surveyor’s tape in the shed somewhere. Perhaps now I’ll keep it in the boot of the car…


The yew tree, almost completely hiding the spacious nave of Much Marcle church

Denham, Buckinghamshire

Corrugated iron to the fore

Regular visitors to this blog will know all about my enthusiasm for corrugated iron as a building material. Barns and, especially, churches, made of the material have caught my eye in the past. So it will come as no surprise that I’m also keen on corrugated iron railway architecture. These are amongst the humblest examples of their kind, but are not without a certain flair. They’re called pagoda shelters, and were a form of building introduced by the Great Western Railway in about 1904 as a way of providing cheap platform waiting space at small stations and halts.

These particular examples are at the station at Denham Golf Club, which came along a couple of years after the club itself was founded in 1910. I found out about them from Peter Ashley, photographer and chronicler par excellence of Unmitigated England, who supplied the photograph in which the wrinkly surface of the metal stands out like magnified corduroy in the sun. They have been repainted since this picture was taken, but are otherwise the same.

He and I both like the way in which corrugated iron’s propensity to yield to a gentle curve has been put to use in the galvanized roofs of these little buildings, giving them their pagoda-inspired outline. This care with a humble building comes from another age, an age in which, as Peter has said, ‘it is not difficult to imagine plus-foured golfers arriving here and lighting up their Player’s cigarettes in the dim recesses of the iron shelters’. The Players (though not, perhaps, the players) may be gone, but these unassuming shelters have survived from another age.

Bee shelter, Hartpury, Gloucestershire

Almost too small to be a building, this structure is simply too special to ignore. It is a shelter containing 33 niches or boles to accommodate straw bee skeps, the traditional English forerunners of bee hives. There is nothing else like it in the world.

The shelter was originally made in the Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth by a stone mason, Paul Tuffley, some time between 1824 and 1852. Its carved scrollwork decoration shows that Tuffley was an accomplished carver and from the beginning the structure must have looked impressive. By the 1960s, though, it was unused – the bee skep had long been replaced by the wooden hive and the shelter looked likely to be demolished. But it was rescued and resited at Hartpury Agricultural College – only to be moved once more to Hartpury churchyard in 2002, when it was thoroughly restored. It’s still there, showing how well housed some of Gloucestershire’s bees once were.

Mundesley, Norfolk

ARCHITEXTS: Things written on buildings (1)

Good friends that to this seat repair
Rest and be thankful but forbear
With sordid scraps the ground to strew.
OTHERS REST HERE AS WELL AS YOU.

Shelter, Mundesley, Norfolk (and elsewhere?)