Beverley, East Yorkshire

Moved but not shaken

The Resident Wise Woman and I had not been in Beverley long before we started spotting interesting details and evidence of an enthusiasm for preserving the old structures in which this town abounds. As we walked along Eastgate, this brick doorway stood out, as did the fact that its historical context was helpfully explained on an accompanying iron plaque. It was originally a gateway in the perimeter wall of the nearby Dominican friary, a foundation of 1240 that lasted until Henry VIII closed it in 1539. The gateway itself, however, is not as old as the original friary. The plaque puts its date in the ‘early 16th century’, but I detect a hint of the ‘artisan mannerism’ of the 17th century about it. Whatever its age, it’s a striking design, with its flattened arch complete with an inner order of knobbly bricks, a triangular pediment and a studded door.

Apparently, the gateway was originally on the other side of the street, closer to the friary, and was moved in the 1960s when Eastgate was widened, a welcome bit of preservationism in an era notorious for knocking old buildings down. The wall in which it is now embedded is itself made of an interesting array of old materials – bricks, stone rubble, and better quality ashlar masonry. Anyone seeing this as they are walking around Beverley, if they’re interested in the history of the friary, should head to Friars Lane and look at what remains of the building itself. A couple of details from this structure will be the subject of a future post.

Bramfield, Suffolk

Sinuous

One of the joys of my travels around England is going somewhere to visit one building and finding some other structure that gives me as much pleasure, or more, than what I was originally looking for. In Bramfield, south of Halesworth in Suffolk, I found something, if a bit less absorbing than the medieval church I was seeking, something still of interest, and right opposite the churchyard too. Even before I pulled up, I saw it, this long stretch of sinuous brick wall, a crinkle-crankle wall as it’s called, undulating its way into the distance.

I’ve noticed another such wall before on this blog, in Worcestershire, much nearer my home patch. But Suffolk is the true heartland of the crinkle-crankle wall (the very name is said to be Suffolk dialect for sinuous), so a ’native specimen’ was something to be noticed, especially one of such good length. For those who don’t know, the usual explanation for such a curvaceous wall is that it saves bricks. The wall gains its strength from the curves and so can be built with a single layer of brickwork, whereas a straight wall needs two layers (and sometimes buttresses) to stay up.*

Crinkle-crankle walls became popular in Suffolk in the 18th century and I’ve seen those that date from the 19th and even 20th centuries. This one is probably late-18th or early-19th century and marks the northern boundary of the grounds of Bramfield Hall. It’s impressive, and nicely begins with a gateway built in the contrasting materials of dark flint pebbles and pale white brickwork, also traditional Suffolk materials. Most people find these serpentine walls very attractive – curves have an appeal, especially in a context where we’d normally expect a straight line. Visual appeal is of course is another reason why you might build a wall in this unusual way, its repeated curves complementing the rounded arch of the gateway in the foreground.

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* Of course a curving wall is longer than a straight one, but the number of bricks required is apparently still smaller.

Lavenham, Suffolk

Pebbles and nodules

Regions said to be poor in building stone (or far enough away from good stone to make transport prohibitively expensive for all but the most high status structures) often display ingenuity in the way builders use what is available. One example is the use of pebbles and nodules of such materials as flint, chert and quartzite, all of which are found in and near Suffolk, among other areas. These rounded or irregular forms seem at first unpromising building materials, but they have all been used to make pleasing walls. I was reminded of them when I came across this picture of a section of wall in Lavenham when looking through my photographs for something else.

The wall has obligingly fallen into disrepair, giving us an insight into how it was constructed, There seems to be a core of brick combined with rubble, together with areas of brickwork on the surface that must key into the core masonry and give the structure strength. Much of the outer surface, however, is covered with pebbles and small nodules of stone. The majority of these stones come in various shades of grey and are probably flint. There are also a small number of orangey stones, which are likely to be chert. They’re all arranged roughly in courses and stick out a lot from the mortar in which they are embedded, which may have eroded away with time to produce the very knobbly effect.

Erosion, moisture and frost certainly seem to have affected the wall badly, as a large area of the pebble surface had come away when I took this photograph a couple of years ago. Water has probably got in at the top and then frozen, in spite of what looks like a top course of hard grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks, designed to protect the wall and probably added later than the rest of the structure. Full marks for effort. Perhaps with a little care and attention, what is still in part a very attractive wall could be put right – maybe it already has been.

Hadleigh, Suffolk

Clinging on

I do like an old wall. Walls around the gardens of town houses, kitchen garden walls, churchyard walls, crinkle-crankle walls in orchards. A 19th-century brick wall marks the western edge of the churchyard at Hadleigh. Pleasant enough in itself, this wall seems to have offered the chance for an interesting bit of antiquarianism – two late-medieval stone doorways and some very decayed niches from the same period are incorporated into the brickwork. My photograph shows the doorway nearest to the Deanery Tower featured in my previous post. It has a later, Gothic-style door leading to the land adjacent to the tower and its stone surround is now very worn. Above the arch, one can just about make out a row of seven carved quatrefoils. The arch itself has carefully carved mouldings.

I don’t know where this bit of medieval masonry came from. Was it part of the Deanery that William Pykenham was building when he died, of which the tower is the survivor? Was it a doorway in the nearby church that was later replaced? Did it come from some other vanished structure? Who knows? But I’m glad the 19th-century builders, so often too eager to replace rather than preserve, spared this doorway and the other architectural fragments in this wall.

Pershore, Worcestershire

Crinkle-crankle

You can’t beat an old brick wall as a boundary to a garden. The pleasant, variegated colours of old brick, the feeling of warmth, the shelter, the sense of seclusion – all of these things can be fostered by an English brick garden wall. But for something even more special, how about a crinkle-crankle wall, one that undulates like this one in Pershore?

Crinkle-crankle walls have been around at least since the 18th century. They’re unusual, and more common in Suffolk than anywhere else (‘crinkle-crankle’ itself is said to be a Suffolk dialect term meaning ‘serpentine’). I have read that people built them because a sinuous wall can be built soundly with only one thickness of bricks, saving materials. A straight wall built this way would easily fall down – you need a double thickness, and sometimes buttresses too, to give it strength. A curving wall can stand up on its own, its curves providing rigidity, like the corrugations in corrugated iron. With a serpentine wall the total length is greater, but not double that of an equivalent straight wall, so you need fewer bricks. On the other hand, the wall also needs more land.*

Another reason to build such a wall might be that it’s aesthetically appealing – many people find curves more pleasing to the eye than straight lines. Yet another might be that a crinkle-crankle wall, oriented correctly, is good for growing fruit against – the indentations provide a bit of shelter from the wind, and if the wall is south-facing, it catches the sun and makes pockets of warmth. This brings us to the town of Pershore, in the part of Worcestershire (the Vale of Evesham and nearby) which is traditionally a fruit-growing area. In this region there are numerous fruit farms and commercial orchards (and were once many more); Pershore itself is famous for its pears. Private gardens had fruit trees too, so the town’s crinkle-crankle walls could be part of this story. For those of us who appreciate these things, it is not just Pershore’s impressive Georgian houses where bricks have born attractive visual fruit.

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* Money-saving might possibly a factor that became more important when bricks were taxed.

Bridgnorth, Shropshire

 

Tribute bands

It’s easy to be dismissive about this sort of thing: a pattern of faux-timber framing painted on to a brick wall. ‘It’s not real,’ people say, hinting that it’s such a complete fake that it hardly exists at all. It’s the sort of thing you see quite often in counties such as Shropshire and Worcestershire, where there’s a long tradition of genuine timber-framed buildings. You’ll enter a ‘black and white’ village and stand at one end, admiring the view. Then you walk slowly forwards, realising as you go that, while many of the timbers are real, structural wood, a few are of this painted variety…and that there might also be some that are indeed genuine timber but are merely ornamental, tacked on to make the building look old.

There’s another ‘authenticity’ issue to consider when looking at this kind of thing. The familiar and much loved ‘black and white’ pattern of timber-framed buildings is itself something not quite original – most such buildings were constructed of oak that was left untreated, so that it aged to a beautiful silvery grey; infill panels were sometimes coloured with some natural pigment. Pink and grey, anyone? You can find this combination right across England now, from Tewkesbury to Lavenham.

So painted timber framing on a building like this one in a corner of Bridgnorth is obviously fake. And yet I’d not always want to remove it, to reveal the colour of the brickwork in a gesture of architectural ‘honesty’. Why? Because fake timber framing is itself now part of the history of many buildings. It is, one could argue, as much a part of the story of vernacular architecture in the West of England as oak beams and cruck frames. And it speaks of many things – an interest in history, or a respect for and tribute to the appearance of genuine timber frames, or a desire for a building to ‘fit in’. I’d not want every building to be like this, but I’m happy to find them here and there, wearing their artificial struts and showy braces with pride – and making some of us smile as we realise what’s going on.

Avebury, Wiltshire

Dream topping 

Was I dreaming? The west churchyard wall at Avebury seemed to have a roof of very neatly finished thatch. It seemed an unlikely covering for a wall made of sarsen stones, among the toughest kind around. The result seemed worthy at least of a photograph and some later research. 

Looking it up when I reached home, I discovered that this exceptional wall is listed at Grade II. The listing text describes the structure as built of ‘Squared sarsen approximately 1.6 m high, with topping of cob and thatched coping.’ So there we have it. The top of the wall, oddly is made of cob, a mix made with mud and vulnerable to damage if exposed to the rain. Wiltshire has many cob walls that have thatched coping, and this is one with a difference. 

The thatch also helps shelter a rather well cut monument to Francis Knowles, a biologist (and an FRS) and Professor of Anatomy at King’s College, London. Knowles bought the manor from Francis Keiller in 1955 and lovingly restored it.* It’s good that his memorial is nearby, protected by the thatched coping of the churchyard wall.  

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* The house is now owned by the National Trust, who did further conservation work around ten years ago. 

Filkins, Oxfordshire

What meets the eye

It’s easy to walk past an unassuming building like this without giving it any more thought than ‘Another well kept Cotswold cottage in a village of well kept Cotswold cottages.’ And yet there is so much to look at here beyond the neat masonry (Cotswold rubble, nicely looked after), the ‘stone slate’ roof (the ‘slates’ laid in the traditional way with large ones at the eaves, smaller ones higher up), and very Cotswold chimney.

First of all – it’s a museum. The nicely carved sign above the door says ‘Swinford Museum’, and the building houses a collection of traditional domestic, agricultural, and craft tools, so it’s very much a local museum. It was started in the 1930s by George Swinford, who was helped in the enterprise by the politician Sir Stafford Cripps, who lived in the village and did much to preserve and beautify it. A pair of ammonites have been let into the masonry on either side of the door way as an added visual enrichment, relevant to the building’s use.

Second – that side door on the left. It’s the entrance to a small lock-up, put there in the 18th century to deal with malefactors – usually petty criminals. I’ve posted several lock-ups in the past, a few of them architecturally notable. This one is about as modest as they come, but no doubt did its job.

Third – there’s what for many will seem a very unusual garden wall. This is known as ‘plank fencing’, and it is made up of thin slabs of limestone (rather like large stone ‘slates’) joined together with metal fittings.* Although we’re in the Cotswold region here, this is not your typical Cotswold drystone wall. No, this is something that’s local in this particular area – the part of West Oxfordshire that is on the edge of the Cotswolds and near the valley of the upper Thames. There are similar walls, for example, in the village of Kelmscott, where William Morris made his home, which is not many miles form here.

Nothing to see here? There’s more than you’d think from a passing glance.


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*Plank fencing made of stone, not wood; stone slates made of limestone not slate: terminology can get very confusing in these parts.

Idmiston, Wiltshire

A good hat

When I give talks about building materials or vernacular architecture, this picture sometimes elicits a gasp of amazement. A field wall, made of cob (here a mix mainly of mud and chalk I think) and roofed with thatch. Such a thing seems eccentric these days. People think cob must be an ephemeral material – but it can last a lifetime with the proper protection, given, in the old phrase, ‘a good hat and a good pair of shoes’. The hat is provided by tiles or thatch. But thatching is a skilled trade and roofing a wall like this takes a lot of effort and expertise: it must be a costly process. In past centuries, though, the cost of materials and transport could be a larger proportion of the total bill of a typical building project, and both time and labour could be cheaper than they are now. In the Middle Ages, if stone was not plentiful, mud and thatch could at least reduce the cost of the materials.

And yet, clearly, people who could afford to buy stone and bring it to the site also just liked the idea or the look of an earth wall. In c. 1320 at Lambeth Palace, London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury (who could have had stone for the asking), six perches† of garden wall were repaired and rethatched with reeds. Mud or cob walls for fields and gardens are not so common now, but you still find them in some places. I’ve come across them in Northamptonshire, for example. Chalk areas (parts of Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire, for example) also have chalk walls, similarly thatched. I hope people still like them enough to make the effort to maintain them.

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*Cob: a building material made from mixing earth and straw. Lime may be added and in some areas the cob can contain a large proportion of chalk. In Buckinghamshire, especially in the Haddenham area,  chalk cob is known as wychert; in Cornwall cob is also referred to as clob. 

† A rod, pole, or perch: an old measurement equivalent to 161/2 feet – just over 5 metres; so six perches would be a good 30 metres: quite a bit of wall.

Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire

Geologist wanted: apply within

When I passed through Ashby de le Zouch last year it was quite late in the day. There was time only to ponder an interesting shop front, have a high-speed browse in a bookshop, and walk around the town in the gathering dusk. The impressive parish church, St Helen’s, was open, but it was virtually dark in there and I made a mental note to return; and I had to be content with jumping and stretching in front of a stone wall to try to see bits of the castle.

Looking at the outside of the church, one thing that struck me was the interesting mix of building materials. My photograph shows a section of the west wall of the tower, which is part of the original 15th-century structure. Geology is not my métier, and I’m not sure what is going on with the materials here. The red stone is fairly obviously local sandstone; the grey stone I thought must be limestone,* although there are local sandstones with a greyer or yellowish tint, so it may be one of those. There are also bits of infill in what look like reused tiles. In the first version of this post I wondered if these could be Roman tiles, but a reader (see the Comments section) quite rightly points out that they're too thin to be Roman tiles, and represent relatively modern repairs.

A bit of research, online and in books, hasn’t thrown up any clear answers to the question of the stone.§ Various sources refer to the building as a sandstone church (which it is, predominantly); one or two say “limestone and sandstone”.† If anyone knows more about the various origins of this rich and colourful array of building materials, I’d be very pleased to hear from them.

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*The Resident Wise Woman, who has been, in her time, a keen collector of fossils, also thought it looked like limestone.

§English Heritage’s informative Building Stone Atlases for Leicestershire and the neighbouring counties show mostly sandstones in this area, although there’s a patchwork of other stones in small quantities.

†Some architectural sources, such as Pevsner and the building’s official listing, barely mention materials at all. Architectural historians are often at sea when it comes to geology.

Cookham, Berkshire

There’s a building there, somewhere

I often look at old photographs – postcards, pictures in mid-20th century books like those volumes about the regions of Britain published by Batsford, Victorian images – and I’m frequently struck by the way in which so many buildings are covered in vegetation. Ivy, Virginia creeper, and other boskage winds its way up walls, clings to window frames, aims for high battlements. Wisteria blossoms are blurred as they move in the breeze. Tendrils tap on window panes.

Today, conservation conscious, we’re more likely to strip away creeper and discourage this kind of threat to masonry and woodwork. Trees keep their distance. ‘Wisteria rhymes with hysteria.’* But flowers against a wall, even trailing ivy, can be good to look at. As the leaves turn in autumnal England, here’s an example I photographed a couple of months ago in Cookham, the town immortalized in the work of the artist Stanley Spencer.

Spencer, famous for his paintings of people, was also an exemplary painter of plants, flowers, fields, even of wisteria (‘Wisteria at Englefield’). I think he might have liked this display, with its splashes of colour that almost completely hide the building that supports them, a memory of summer as the nights draw in.

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* ‘Wisteria (Rhymes with Hysteria)’: the title of an essay by John Russell, The New York Times, 1980

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

A world of wood

Perhaps it should be one of the rules for the architectural traveller. As well as ‘Look up’, ‘Walk along alleys’, and ‘Go around the back’, the axiom ‘Look over walls’ has a place in the inquisitive traveller’s rule book. I am often to be seen looking over walls, in search of unusual outbuildings, garden structures, and other buildings likewise hidden from immediate view. Here’s an example from Shipston-on-Stour, the upper half of which, at least, is freely visible above a brick garden wall. It seems to be an octagonal wooden gazebo or summer house, with Gothic style pointed windows and walls made up of short logs arranged in geometric patterns. There’s a lovely fish-scale roof, too.

I don’t know how old this building is. Self-consciously rustic garden buildings go back at least to the 18th century, and they owe their form to various sources, from writers’ ideas about the earliest building of all (the ‘primal hut’) to hermitages, or people’s ideas about what a hermitage should be like. In a setting of trees, a brick wall and passing pedestrians, inquisitive or not, this wooden wonder enlivens the streetscape – and brightened up a dull day as I passed.

Winchester, Hampshire

A chronicle of years gone by

Admiring the front of the picturesque and presumably 18th-century offices of the Hampshire Chronicle in Winchester – dappled brickwork, bow windows, dentil course, tiled roof – I was irritated at not being able to photograph it without also including road signs, railings, and other irrelevant street furniture. So I decided to walk away. As I did so, I passed the end wall and was delighted to find this remarkable selection of bits and pieces amongst its collage of stone and flint.


A small iron plaque records that these stones were uncovered in 1959 when the building was being restored, but I expect a lot of people miss them even though the plaque is there to tell them that the stones probably come from the church of St Ruel, which once stood nearby. The selection includes a bit of Norman moulding and chevron, another piece of carving that resembles part of a classical acanthus leaf but may also be Norman, and the piece on the right. Is this a very eroded small figure, or am I imagining things?. There are also some fragments of brick that look Roman, and the larger block below, which bears interlaced Saxon carving. A wonderful group, making one wonder what the church was like, though the collection is not quite as richly eccentric as another wall full of fragments that I posted long ago. Here’s to recycling!

Guilsborough, Northamptonshire

Down to earth

Cob is one of the oldest and most basic of English building materials. It’s basically earth, with added straw, manure, and often small stones, built up in layers a foot or two thick and a foot or two high, which are then left to dry before the next layer is added. Building up a wall like this takes time, but, provided the cob wall is kept dry by constructing it on a stone plinth and protecting it with an overhanging roof, it can last for centuries.

Devon and Dorset have many cob buildings, but cob has been used in many other parts of England too, from Cumberland to Hampshire. This example is on the village green of the Northamptonshire village of Guilsborough. It’s known as a stable, but Alec Clifton-Taylor, in his classic book The Pattern of English Building, says that it was used to keep a supply of coal for the poor of the village. Its cob is reinforced here and there with brick and has the orangey colour of the local stone. Cob in sandstone areas can have a pink tinge, while in chalk districts it is paler – although cob walls are generally colour washed, so the colour of the earth is often hidden.

The shed or stable at Guilsborough probably dates from the 18th century, although the lower side wing was added in 1897 and is built of brick. Since the lettering I featured in the previous post was admired by several of my readers, I include a photograph of some painted lettering on this extension. This bit of sign-writing (“DIAMOND JUBILEE BUILDING 1897”) must date from a recent repainting, but its letterforms’ curvaceous As and Es and carefully detailed J, evoke the late-Victorian period perfectly, an added bonus to a little building that's already full of interest.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

A Ludlow in Worcestershire

The previous post about pillar boxes seemed to attract a lot of interest, so, although I’ve not managed to pass an Edward VIII post box recently, here’s a letter box with the monogram of his brother, George VI.

There have been wall boxes, post boxes set into the walls of Post Offices or into all kinds of other walls in the countryside, since Victorian times, and I don’t normally give them too much attention. But this one caught my eye because of the unusual enamel plate. Jonathan Glancey’s good little book Pillar Boxes (1989) tells me that this is what’s known as a Ludlow box, manufactured by James Ludlow of Birmingham, a company that supplied non-standard wall boxes from the late-19th century until the firm closed in 1965. Their boxes have a white enamel plate and no rain hood over the letter slot. The body of the box is not cast iron, like most post boxes, but is made of wood with a covering of sheet metal.

Perhaps the lighter body and the tendency for the enamel plates to come away from the front have made Ludlow boxes slightly less durable than their cast-iron counterparts. But it was good to find this one, still accepting mail and still catching the eye with its businesslike enamel panel.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

'What, has this thing appeared again tonight?'*

One aspect of looking at buildings is noticing the notices that appear on them. On my walk to buy a newspaper this morning, I was surprised to see that the walls of Winchcombe, the Cotswold home town of your English Buildings blogger, have been festooned with enigmatic signs. Something is afoot. Who is this Jack, where has he come from, and where is he now? Could there be a clue in the colour of the notices?

* Hamlet, Act I scene i

Stanway, Gloucestershire

Stanway is a magical corner of the Cotswolds. A stone manor house, mostly of the 16th and 17th centuries stands hard by an ornate gatehouse, a medieval tithe barn, a parish church, and a small group of cottages. Nearby is a thatched cricket pavilion, built for the author Sir James Barrie, who was a frequent visitor to the big house. The parish church was restored, heavily, twice, once in the 1790s and once in the 1890s, so a lot of the original medieval church has been swept away.

Some of the sweepings found their way into this churchyard wall, a charming bit of recycling. What can be seen here are lots of fragments of Norman stonework, various bits of moulding, some carved foliage of the 13th century, and a chunk of a figure from the early-14th century. Oh, and a stone coffin, performing the role of a kind of shelf.

One can imagine the zealous restorer of the 1890s – actually the then vicar, the Rev Bullock-Webster, feeling slightly sheepish about having run around the building like a bullock in a china shop, and getting his builder to reuse some of the bits he’d thrown out by putting them in the churchyard wall. If only more of the most enthusiastic Victorian church restorers had done the same.