London, Weymouth Street

 

A kind of cocktail

Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do with Queen Anne. It brings together a mix of stylistic influences – a bit of Dutch, some Christopher Wren, a hint of Renaissance – that its historian, Mark Girouard, described as ‘a kind of architectural cocktail’. Architects added to the mixture features such as red brick, white-painted woodwork, fancy gables, oriel windows, and steep roofs to produce an impression that, to the Victorians of the 1870s onwards, represented a breath of fresh air after the stuffiness of the Gothic revival on the one hand and 19th-century classicism on the other.

This house in Weymouth Street exhibits many of the typical Queen Anne features, plus a few more that are equally decorative: circular windows, a dormer with a curvy pediment above it, and big ‘look-at-me’ swags in those eye-catching gables. It’s the work of F. M. Elgood, who built (or added new facades to) many houses in the Marylebone area. He was surveyor to two of the big landowners in this district, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Hop[e-Edwards Estate. This house was built for the former. By the time it was on Elgood’s drawing board, Queen Anne was widespread, influencing the design of even such downmarket buildings pubs. Perhaps for a large town house like this, both architect and client felt that there was a need for some extra bells and whistles, hence those elaborate swags. A heady cocktail indeed. Cheers!

Church Langton, Leicestershire

The old order

This house, which I’ve admired several times when I’ve been driving northwards through the Langtons, a cluster of villages in Leicestershire north of Market Harborough, seems to be the epitome of Georgian country life, something that looks as if it has been at home in its setting since the 18th century, an admirable and unchanging bit of domestic architecture in the style of the great Robert Adam. The balanced composition, the central arch, the urns and swags – all these evoke the age of Adam (1728–92) beautifully. And yet, although I can do no more than scratch the surface of a building I’ve never been inside, it has actually changed a bit over the years.

The house was built, probably in the 1780s, for a member of the Hanbury family, one of a line of Hanburys who were rectors of this once prosperous living. Its architect is not known for certain, but the design is very similar to that of a house in Mountsorrel and both buildings have been attributed to the architect William Henderson of Loughborough. However, it’s now the Old Rectory, so is no longer the home of the rector. A friend who lives locally showed me a photograph taken in the 1970s from the rear, which shows that the side wings were then little more than brick walls – dummy wings, in short, made to make the house look larger and to balance the grand centrepiece; now they seem to be proper wings with rooms in them.

A further change is that at some stage the urns on the parapet were removed, along with the decorative relief of swags and urn in the central pediment. An illustration in the old Highways and Byways book on Leicestershire, which came out in 1923, shows the front of the building without these adornments. By the time the revised Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Leicestershire and Rutland was produced and published in 1984, there were urns on the parapet once more (modern cement ones, as now) but no pediment decoration. But the other day when I passed and took the photograph above the decorative ensemble had been restored (my local friend assures me it was there in 2007 when he took another photograph), so perhaps the house now looks as good as it ever did. Which in my book is very good indeed.

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J. B. Firth, Highways and Byways in Leicestershire (Macmillan, 1923)

Kingly Street, London

Mr and Mrs Atlas

Here’s a brief post as I wrestle with a deadline.

There are whole books about looking up in London, and rightly so: you miss a lot if you don’t. A chance glance when hurrying along Kingly Street in search of congenial friends in a pub led me to stop briefly and take a photograph of these figures through the gloom of dusk. They remind me of those baroque atlases – common in central European cities like Prague – that seem to strain to hold up doorways in grand city houses. I’ve noticed them in London too, in particular in a very studied baroque revival facade in Mortimer Street.

Here the figures are on a more modest frontage, with lots of glazed tiles. It’s almost as if the architect threw in a bit of baroquery as visual relief and to stop the frontage looking like a kitchen. It’s a standard assemblage – swags (heavy), scrolls (curvaceous), date stone (bulgy). And the figures: male and female supporters straining at their job and somewhat squashed-looking, but with enough space to stick their elbows out and their knees up, as if to support the swags. A neat and confident bit of decoration from 1911, in defiance of the Cubism, Futurism, and abstraction that were bursting out everywhere in the visual arts. Tradition still had its place.

Mountsorrel, Leicestershire

Bricklayer’s classical

After my recent encounters with garagiste’s corrugated iron and chunky fragments of railwayana, perhaps this blog could do with a some more polite architecture. So here’s a lovely house from the 1780s on the main street in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, a small town I have known for years and mused about before.

The winning combination of brick arches and the building’s classical proportions typify the late Georgian period. Those urns, swags, stucco stringcourses, and white balusters give the facade that bit of extra interest and, indeed, swagger. We can be a bit Adamish, the house seems to say, even if we are in a provincial town in the Midlands. The white stucco details stand out effectively against the background of red brick, a material that’s been common here for some 200 years. There was a local brickworks from the early-19th century, but when this house was built the prevailing materials in the town were probably Mountsorrel granite and Swithland slate. So from brickwork to stucco, from doorstep to rooftop urns, this is a building that stands out.