Jackfield, Shropshire

Guides to a better world. . . 

I’ve noticed that some of my most popular posts (finding many readers and numerous comments by email and in person) are those I’ve done about the tiled decorations once used by W H Smith on their shop fronts. Few of these now survive in the shops where they started out. I’ve reported before on a glorious duo of examples, one on either side of the W H Smith shop window in Malvern, showcasing postcards and maps, and a single panel on a shop in Bath (this one no longer occupied by Smith’s), depicting Nature Books.

The excellent Jackfield Tile Museum on the site of the Craven Dunnill factory at Jackfield near Ironbridge has a few more of these wonderful panels. Today I’m sharing two of these, both, like the others, produced by Carter and Co of Poole in the late-1920s, to designs by an unknown artist. One is a further, rather different panel advertising guidebooks. This one is less dramatic than the Malvern Postcards panel (which has a looming castle tower and stunning night-time colours). Instead it has a more restrained, perhaps faded, palette, and shows a couple looking across a stylised landscape of hills and trees. There’s enough detail on the woman’s dress to suggest elegance; her male companion is delineated in a few simple touches of brown. They look out over blue and green hills, as if they’ve found their way using one of Smith’s guidebooks and are now drinking in the view. The overall effect is like a faded Brian Cook book jacket: redolent of England between the World Wars and full of topographical promise.

My second example from Jackfield, Ladies' Papers, is another epitome of narrow-waisted poise. The turned head, the waving arm, the hand lifting the dress just enough to show the heel stepping out across the grass, the point of the other shoe just visible – there’s plenty to catch the eye. Once more, the setting is very sketchily drawn, but the pale colours set off the figure well.

As you can probably tell, I like these panels a great deal. Combined with Smith’s classical lettering (by Eric Gill), they project a sort of accessible sophistication that must have been right up Smith’s street. W H Smith’s were then, as now, more than just newspaper merchants. They sold books and maps, and their range of magazines was a large one. They hoped to remind potential customers that you could buy more than your Daily Express and a packet of cigarettes at their counters. There was self-improvement on sale here, and books that could guide you on a route to history or literature, or could tell you about the most interesting places to visit. Their shops could be windows into a better world.

Jackfield, Shropshire

Seasonally graphic

A few weeks ago the Resident Wise Woman and I visited the Jackfield Tile Museum in Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire. Housed in the former Craven Dunnill factory (visitors can see tiles being made in the adjacent buildings), this place is a visual feast, packed with tiles from the most interesting designers of the 19th and 20th centuries, from William de Morgan to John Piper, and the products of all the major British manufacturers, from Doulton to Carter's. Single tiles, panels of tiles, entire tiled room sets: the museum is a joy.

My picture shows one example from the Jackfield museum. Its cheerful and Christmasey image is on a tile produced by Maw and Co, one of the most prominent tile manufacturers in Britain during the second half of the 19th century. Maws started in Worcester in 1850, before moving in 1862 to the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, where there was plenty of good clay suitable for tile-making. They produced millions of architectural tiles and were especially famous in their early days for their encaustic tiles, which were widely used in churches, public buildings, and houses. They also made colourful pictorial tiles like this one, which were sometimes used, in the late-19th century, to decorate furniture.

This tile is one of several along the back of a washstand. Its combination of red-breasted robin and red-berried holly is very appealing: one can't be surprised that robins and holly have become symbolic of the Christmas season. They did so in the last decades of the Victorian period, the era when the Christmas card developed (it was officially invented in 1843 and was commercially widely available from the 1870s onwards); Christmas cards greatly helped popularize all the images now associated with Christmas. Their arrival and rise in popularity coincides pretty closely with the heyday of the decorative tile in England.

Some readers might find things to take exception to in this picture. The holly is a variety with variegated leaves, not the traditional deep green stuff that we find growing wild in England – but variegated holly is common enough in gardens. The robin* is rather sleeker of build than what we think of as typical – but the last couple of robins I saw in the garden did in fact look less plump than those on many a high-street card. I think of this robin, then, as an image from the garden, and offer it, with my seasonal greetings, to all my readers.

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Note
*And, of course, it's a European robin (Erithacus rubecula), which is very different from the North American robin (Turdus migratorius). Even now I can remeber my puzzlement as a small child when, watching the film Mary Poppins, the bird that popped up during the song 'A spoonful of sugar' ('A robin feathering her nest') looked nothing like the European robins that I'd seen in our English garden.

Badmin's England (1)

When I'm not actually looking at buildings or reading about them, I often seem to find myself looking at pictures of them. One of the artists whose work I have admired for longest is S R Badmin (1906–89), a British painter whose artistic responses to landscape were celebrated because of their clarity, detail, and sensitivity to the character of places – and because they were much used to illustrate the covers of magazines such as the Radio Times and British editions of the Reader's Digest. I first came across Badmin as the illustrator of the Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs, a classic of the 1950s. But I didn't realise until later that the hand that could delineate both arboreal verdure and the architecture of branches and twigs was also at home with actual architecture. If Badmin was brilliant at trees, he was also rather good at buildings.

The books that brought this home to me were two that Badmin illustrated for the children's series Picture Puffins – Sir George Stapledon's Farm Crops in Britain (which includes a striking depiction of an upland northern farm – and the lovely book Village and Town, which Badmin both wrote and illustrated. Here are a couple of illustrations from Village and Town, a book that is much concerned with the ways in which traditional architecture varies from place to place.

A Timber, Plaster and Thatch Village, from Village and Town

These villagescapes are generic: they don't, I think, represent specific places, but bring together examples of the building types and styles of particular areas of England. This first is titled "A timber, plaster and thatch village". It is of a place somewhere in eastern England – in Essex, perhaps, or the eastern part of Hertfordshire – where the lack of good local stone meant that people used timber for framing and thatch for roofs. In some of the houses, the timber frameworks have been left exposed, but in many buildings the frame is hidden behind a coat of plaster, which is sometimes coloured pale pink, sometimes, as in the house on the left, white and decorated with the moulded patterns known as pargetting. Some of the buildings – such as the shed or small barn in the foreground and the church tower in the distance – are boarded, and the tower is topped with a kind of splay-footed spire found quite widely in the south and east. If there is any stone, it's flint, as in the flint and brick wall next to the pargetted house.

 A Brick and Tile Village, from Village and Town

The other picture shows "A brick and tile village" and must be in Sussex or Kent, another area where there is not much good stone (though, again, there is some flint, as in the wall behind the pigs), but where there is plentiful clay for brick- and tile-making. Some houses are brick-walled, some have timber frames with brick filling the gaps between the timbers, and some have tile-hung upper storeys. Other wall finishes on display include weatherboarding, this time painted white, as is the stucco-fronted shop towards the top of the street.

These two illustrations wonderfully show how use of local building materials gave places in different parts of the country their own visual character. But they also show what is less often noticed: that vernacular and traditional architecture are not just about materials but also concern local fashions and aesthetic preferences. The timber, plaster and thatch village shows a love of plaster decoration that is much more common in eastern England than in the Midlands or west. The close-set vertical timbers of the central building – apparently now a pub – are another visual feature common in the eastern counties. In the brick and tile village, on the other hand, delight has been taken in the patterns of hung tiles and the clean lines of white-painted boarding. All these features, from the plasterwork to the white boarding, show local visual sensibilities at work. People in past centuries were not slaves to their materials and made aesthetic choices just as we do – and S R Badmin clearly realised this too.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

The Cheltenham Festival of Literature is in full swing at the moment, so I thought it might be interesting, in between listening to what the writers have to tell us, to listen to what some of Cheltenham’s buildings have to say. I could, of course, go on at length about the town’s Regency architecture – and very beautiful its stuccoed terraces look between the autumn trees – but everyone does that, so I’ve plumped for a different approach: to look at one minor street in the town centre and see what catches my eye.

So here are some buildings in Winchcombe Street, which contains a few Regency houses, some modern sheltered flats, some shops, and several hairdressing salons. One of the latter occupies the former premises of W. W. Dowty’s Photographic Studio. They’ve kept the original sign on the fascia, and there’s a door with a tall oval pane and glazed spandrels with bevelled glass. I’m not sure of the date: perhaps some time between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the second. At the other end of the street, another hairdresser occupies a shop that must have once housed purveyors of fish and game, narrow panels of Edwardian or Victorian tiles illustrating the goods within. Tiles like these are a telling reminder that the town once had several fishmongers, whereas now people have to go to a supermarket to find someone who will mong them some fish. Meanwhile, these tiles remain, a source of historical evidence and visual pleasure.As is Cheltenham’s former Odeon cinema. This finally closed when another chain opened a multiplex in the town. It’s an undistinguished Art Deco building, with the redeeming feature of these two naked women tangled in celluloid high up on the façade. Most passers-by see only the boarded-up entrance of the cinema, steadily becoming more and more of a blot on the townscape. I’d lay odds that most of them never notice the silver ladies, two of several reminders of the unregarded past of a quiet Cheltenham side-street.

Salisbury, Wiltshire

LETTERS FROM SALISBURY (3)
The last of my trio of bits of lettering from Salisbury buildings is what’s left of the shop front of Knight and Company, dealers is poultry, fish, and game. Tiles formed a very popular finish in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods for food shops and pubs. They were prized because they could be embossed with interesting designs and glazed with bright, eye-catching colours. They were also easy to clean – a plus for food retailers.

Companies such as Maws, Minton, Doulton, and Craven Dunnill produced acres of these tiles, which were stuck up walls and around windows, each piece moulded to fit the architecture. The lettering was part and parcel of the ceramic design, and often the strokes and serifs of the letterforms took on some of the flowing curves of Art Nouveau. There’s a hint of that tendency here in way the R breaks out of the imaginary box that normally confines an upper-case letter.

Pheasants no longer hang in Knight’s Game Mart and its façade is a sorry ghost of its old self. My guess is that the protruding bits were chiselled off when someone attached another sign, now vanished, over the tiles. The survivors stubbornly remain, to remind us of a time when shop fronts were seen not as the fruits of ephemeral fashion but as something built to last.