Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025

Lewes, Sussex

 

Glowing in the sun

For a small island, Britain has a large number of local building styles, in large part as a result of the bewilderingly diverse geology. For most of human history, most buildings (with the exception of some churches and the houses of the rich, where funds were available to cover the cost of transporting stone) were made from locally available materials. Most of my readers will have travelled across England and noticed how the styles and materials of older buildings vary from one region to the next, a phenomenon I noticed for the umpteenth time driving from the limestone country of the Cotswolds to the very different architectural landscape of Sussex.

In southeastern England, where good building stone was limited, timber-framed houses were common. Towards the end of the 17th century, however, brick and clay tile became increasingly popular – for their cheapness, appearance and weather-resistant qualities. In counties such as Sussex and Kent, people took to hanging clay tiles vertically on the walls of houses, to protect the wood, wattle and daub from driving rain. Attaching the tiles was relatively easy – the builder nailed horizontal oak laths to the timber framework of the wall and attached the tiles to these.

Tile-hung houses are still common all over this part of southeastern England. My photograph shows a couple in High Street, Lewes, a street that boasts stone, brick, timber-framed and tile-hung buildings in diverse profusion. I noticed these two because they’re so different from each other (and because one of them houses a second-hand bookshop, which of course I had to visit). The two-gabled building on the right is the bookshop, and I admired its bright orange tiles and the way in which the sun has not only brought out the warm colour but also cast shadows between the rows of tiles, giving the surface of the wall form and pattern. The eaves of the roof now hardly overhang the wall at all, presumably because of the amount of room needed to accommodate not only the tiles themselves but also the wooden laths on which they hang.

The tile-hanging on the building to the left is altogether more showy. The two colours of tiles have been used to create diamond patterns and the shapes of the tiles themselves vary – there are curved, pointed and straight tiles, producing a more complex effect than in the simpler, all-straight tiled wall next door. A lot of trouble has been taken with this patterning, and it’s impressive, but personally I prefer the plain tiles, which, with together with their glowing orange hue, add something special to this delightful street.

Snape, Suffolk

 

Vernacular nostalgia

Sanding by the river at Snape Maltings and looking across at this house I was suddenly transported back decades to the time when, as a small boy, I began to realise that houses varied in their appearance according to whereabouts in England they were. It must have been on one of our family trips from Gloucestershire to visit my grandparents in rural Lincolnshire. It had been pointed out to me that many of the older houses in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds were built of local limestone; although we did not live in such a house, I soon got used to seeing them everywhere in the area around where we lived. In Lincolnshire, by contrast, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny farm worker’s cottage built of brick with a clay-tiled roof. My cousin’s farmhouse was bigger but similar in materials and overall architectural style. In perceiving the differences between these kinds of vernacular architecture I was starting to develop a sense of place.

There are many similar houses to those Lincolnshire ones in East Anglia too. This one in Snape reminded me instantly of what I’d grown used to in Lincolnshire. Walls of brick laid in Flemish bond, curvy pantiles on the roof. Shallow brick arches over the windows and doorways. Such houses are testimony to the fact that in many areas hereabouts, the local building stone (flint or chalk) is not as well suited to construction as Cotswold limestone. Bricks began to be used in East Anglia earlier in the Middle Ages than in most parts of England – thanks largely to sea contact with the Low Countries, where bricks were common.

Hence these lovely houses, built in a material that people soon grew to like, adding aesthetic preference to practicality. There was a time, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, when houses like this were regarded as old fashioned. They had low ceilings (look how close the windows are to the roof in this Suffolk example). They were ‘pokey’. Bigger windows made houses that were lighter. And so on. Thanks to depopulation following the mechanisation of agriculture, many were simply demolished, like my grandparents’ house in its field. Now they’re fashionable again, as more and more people appreciate traditional buildings and their practical advantages (small windows and rooms are easier to keep warm, for example). I think there are enough of them left so that they can still be part of that blend of the natural and the man-made that comes to together to create a sense of place.

Overbury, Worcestershire

Acts of remembrance 

Listening to an excellent talk on Arts and Crafts war memorials given by Kirsty Hartsiotis last month, I was reminded of a very special war memorial at Overbury in Worcestershire. This is not only a war memorial but also a building – the lych-gate through which one enters the churchyard of St Faith’s church. Like so much of the architecture of this village it came about through the care and generosity of the Martin and Holland-Martin familes, once the owners of one of Britain’s largest banks. The Martins live in the large house just visible from the churchyard and employed architects and craftsmen working in the vernacular and Arts and Crafts traditions to construct a school, a village hall, even a bus shelter. It was natural, then, when 19-year-old Geoffrey Holland-Martin was killed in action in France in 1918, that his parents should think not just in terms of a personal memorial to his son but also of something more widely relevant to the village. Hence this lych-gate, which combines a memorial to those in the village who fell in the Great War with a monumental entrance to the churchyard.

The architect was no less than Sir Herbert Baker, who had imbibed vernacular and Arts and Crafts ways of building when as a young man he was assistant to the prominent practice of Ernest George and Peto. He subsequently had a busy life, packing in what almost amounted to three consecutive architectural careers. After a promising start in London, he followed his brother (a fruit farmer) to southern Africa, met Cecil Rhodes, and designed a string of buildings for private clients, the church, and the colonial government. Next he went to India and worked with Lutyens on New Delhi. By the time World War I ended, Baker was in his fifties and might have rested on his laurels. But this was not Baker’s way. Instead, he became architect to the then Imperial War Grave Commission, designing 113 cemeteries on the western front.

Baker’s building at Overbury is on a tiny scale compared to these grand projects, but it’s designed with plenty of care. It wonderfully combines a monumental quality with the use of oak and limestone, materials that feel completely at home in this stone village where, on some days, the most obvious sound is the wind stirring the leaves of great trees. The wooden superstructure that rests on the limestone plinth is certainly imposing, with its large arches, but it’s also inviting, an irrestistable draw both to the eye and to the feet. ‘Come to church, good people,’ it seems to say, to those who have arrived through countryside in which Bredon Hill rises in the middle distance.

In the centre of the interior is a large coffin rest, a reminder of the time when the bearers paused in the lych-gate while the priest said the first part of the burial service. This is designed in the shape of a chest tomb, and this has reminded more than one person of a cenotaph, an empty tomb like the one in Whitehall that acts as a focus for national remembrance ceremonies. From thoughts of those laid in earth to thoughts of the celestial: the other special thing about this structure is the carvings of angels resting in those massive wooden beams. They are by Alec Miller, who was head of wood-carving and modelling in the Campden Guild of Handicraft when the lych-gate was built. My photograph shows the angel on the side of the lych-gate pointing towards the church, its wings outstretched. 

The northern face of the coffin rest is carved with the lines from Blake’s poem Jerusalem that speak of building Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’. For many rural people in the interwar period, England was far from green and pleasant, but thanks to the Holland-Martins, Overbury seems to have made at least the aspiration credible.