Manchester, Kennedy Street

 

Venice in the North

Drawn along Manchester’s Kennedy Street by the sight of an interesting looking pub, I followed my nose and ended up in front of one of the most surprising bits of 19th-century Venetian Gothic architecture I’d seen in a long while. The least Venetian part of the facade, the stone band about three-quarters of the way up, is the most informative. It bears the words ‘MANCHESTER LAW LIBRARY’, which are emblazoned across the building to tell us the place’s original purpose: it was, in fact, one of the first specialised law libraries outside London when it opened in 1885. It must have been a boon to local solicitors and barristers who needed to look up a bit of obscure law. It continued in its original use until relatively recently.

The architect was Manchester man Thomas Hartas, a young architect for whom this was his first major commission – and, alas, his last since he died in his early thirties, about a year after it was built. The front is virtually completely covered in Gothic tracery – a mixture of tall, cusped windows and roundels expressed as quatrefoils or divided up into a number of flower-like tracery patterns. At the centre is an oriel window, which lights the large first-floor space that made up the library’s reading room. 

The facade is divided vertically into three bays, each made up of trios of windows. These bays are separated by stone uprights that project towards the street, making them more substantial, as they must need to be to support this lace-like frontage and the floors behind. Within, there are no doubt various columns and load-bearing walls that hold the structure together, as well as helping to bear what would have been a considerable weight of shelved books.

As the light began to fail on the winter afternoon when I took my photograph, the interior lights shone out, revealing ceilings and supporting arches within. Back in the 1880s, the effect of the whole building lit up at night must have been striking: a beacon of law and of Venetian architecture, although no canal laps in front or behind and this mock-Venetian palace is book-ended by more conventional Victorian office buildings. A welcome sight, now and then.

Hampton Lucy, Warwickshire

 

Making it special

When I was in the Warwickshire village of Hampton Lucy the other day, my main aim was to seek out the large and imposing 19th-century parish church but, as so often happens, something else got my attention as well – this red-brick house. It is not large, but it’s not modest either. Wedged between the local pub, the Boar’s Head, and a single-storey building that started life as the village reading room, it stands out even when partly hidden by a parked van.

Built probably in around 1840, the house is made special first by the diamond glazing pattern and the bright white glazing bars of the windows. The usual thing in the early-19th century would have been to fit windows with square panes of glass (this was before larger plate glass panes became widely available) – diamonds, especially picked out in white like this, would have stood out originally nearly as much as they do now. A group of four diamond panes has been combined ingeniously to make a larger opening diamond in the left-hand part of the bay window, adding a quirky but practical touch to the design. Sometimes, fancy glazing like this was used as a signal that cottages belonged to a particular estate. I don’t know whether that was the case here; the only other building I saw in the village in a similar style was the early part of the village school, next to the churchyard.

The other stand-out feature of the house is the bargeboards fitted to the three gables.These twist along in a curved pattern, rising to ornate finials at the top, the icing on the cake of this building. Lower down, the front door of the house, a battened design with fancy strap hinges, is also attractive, if without the swagger of the bargeboards. To the right, behind the van, is a pair of modern garage doors that front what seems originally to have been a carriage entrance. Above it, a pain stone panel looks as if it might have been intended for an inscription, but it’s blank, leaving a tantalising question hanging over this notable building.

Nottingham

 

The long view

Among the multitude of things that pop up on social media, one I take notice of is a blog produced by Historic England. For each post it takes a theme or an architectural style and gives a handful of outstanding examples. The theme the other day was Art Nouveau architecture in England, and I was pleased to see that Historic England’s gurus had picked four of my personal favourites: the elegant if eccentric Turkey Café in Leicester (all pale stripes and gobblers), the Royal Arcade in Norwich (with its air of Edwardian luxury) and the glorious former printing works of Everard’s in Bristol (with a facade that illustrates two luminaries of the craft of printing, Johannes Gutenberg and William Morris). All of these have featured on this blog in the past and all, by the way, are adorned with tiles designed by W. J. Neatby of Royal Doulton. However, another favourite of mine selected by Historic England was a building I’ve not blogged until now.

When I last passed by this imposing shop in the centre of Nottingham, it was a branch of the women’s clothes store Zara. It started out as something quite different, because it belonged to Boot’s the chemist – in fact it was their largest Nottingham branch in the early 1900s when it was built. As Boot’s was a Nottingham company, it was what modern retailers might called their flagship store. The upper part of the building at first glance looks like a baroque palace, with a dome to make the corner into a landmark. However some of the detailing, including the youthful figures hat support the balcony and cornices, together with some of the terracotta foliage, and the gently swelling columns that frame some of the window openings, are all of their time. It’s the ground-level shop front, though, that really looks Art Nouveau. This was the style of the sinuous curve, and the wooden window frames have curves in abundance, especially in the transom lights, the upper sections of the window, which have heart-shaped and tear-shaped panes, supported by a framework that’s both curvaceous and richly carved. Looking up as one enters, a similar pattern of glazing bars , this time with mirror glass, fills the ceiling, making the lobbies lighter.

It’s a lavish design, showing how Boot’s and their architect, Albert Nelson Bromley, made a special effort for this important store. The building was subdivided to accommodate the company’s variety of departments – everything from photographic processing to a lending library, as well as Boot’s core business of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, but this interior was reconstructed in 1972 after the chemists had vacated the building. The shop front remains, showing how it was built to last by a company that, unlike so many modern retailers who put up flimsy frontages because they known everything will be redesigned in a few years, took the long view.

Looking up in the lobby, Boots, Nottingham (now Zara)

Chichester, Sussex

 

Don’t look up!

I’m always telling people to look up in towns – look at old facades above shopfronts, look at windows, look at old signs, look at roof lines, and so on. But what I should really say is ‘Look everywhere.’ In other words, one is liable to make a mistake if one becomes too preoccupied with looking in a single direction alone. I was reminded of this when walking along South Street in Chichester and admiring the White Horse, once a pub, now a Prezzo. Of course, I’d noticed that the brick frontage of the upper storeys looked Georgian (the building turns out to be much earlier, having been refronted in the 18th century). As I was taking this in, the Resident Wise Woman prompted me: ‘Have you noticed the glass?’. I had not, because I was looking up. From yet another era come the late-19th or early-20th century windows, with coloured glass used to delineate white horses.

This use of glass to decorate or advertise the name of licensed premises was quite common in the late-Victorian period and just after.* Coloured glass was also used to advertise the drinks available – sometimes you can find ‘Beers’ or ‘Wines and Spirits’ picked out in coloured glass lettering. Here it’s just white horses, in various depictions – here, on the move (trotting perhaps) in the fanlight; elsewhere at full gallop, or stationary. There are also white horses with flared legs, to indicate they’re shire or ‘heavy’ horses; there are even horses’ heads in some of the windows. They’re all in a white, almost opaque glass, but are mostly surrounded by patterns and scrolls in a mix of colours including amber, dark red and deep blue: the windows must lookl very appealing when the interior is lit up at night.

So when you’re walking along an urban street, by all means look up, but also look sideways, straight ahead, and down. And try not to do this while on the move – it can lead to pedestrian collisions, and worse! And if you start colliding, people might think you’ve had one or more too many at the White Horse…

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* Pub architects also specified elaborate engraved glass. For an example of this, see a post I did a few years ago, here.

Coleshill, Berkshire*

Looking at Coleshill again (2)

Starting to think again about the lost country house of Coleshill reminded me about one thing especially that struck me about the place. As Karen Fielder says in her essay, although the house itself has gone, the estate still exists.† As well as the gate piers in my previous post, the many interesting architectural remains include a model farm, a dovecote, a walled kitchen garden, and a number of cottages.

Of course thousands of English cottages once formed part of country estates. They were built to house workers on the farms and those who maintained the house and serviced the estate in all kinds of ways. While household servants would live in, in the attic rooms of the big house itself, workers in other areas – from the fields to the carpenter’s shop – would have had cottages. Such estate houses often follow the prevailing architectural style of the area, but sometimes they have distinctive features that mark them out as special, something that shows that they belong to the estate – a special design of porch, say, ornate bargeboards, or a particular paint shade.

Glazing bars with fancy patterns are sometimes such a defining feature, and this seems to be the case at Coleshill. Perhaps it’s because cottage builders liked such glazing patterns in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and this was when many estates were ‘improved’ by their landlords, who built better housing for their workers and adopted modern farming techniques too. Coleshill has several houses with these lovely windows glazed in hexagonal and diamond-shaped panes (along with others that have plainer square panes). The way the masonry is set off with details in ashlar (smoothy worked blocks of stone) at the corners and around the windows is another sign that some care and expense was taken with the houses in the picture. Without such details, buildings like these would look like fairly standard Cotswold houses (Coleshill is near the edge of the Cotswolds, where the hills yield to the flat country around the Thames) but the details set them apart.

The 3rd Earl of Radnor (1779–1869) was a notable improver of the Colshill estate. I think that these cottages were built by him in around 1850; they look larger than many cottages, especially the one on the left, but seem to display the estate style and would have been among numerous beneficial changes made during the earl’s long life. Karen Fielder says that the appearance of the village today owes much to his efforts. Not all 19th-century landlords provided such good housing, but it looks as if some at least of the people of Coleshill were fortunate. As are we, able to pick up clues about their past in the appearance of some fancy glazing bars from perhaps 160 years ago.¶

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*I use the ‘historic’ English counties because of a sentimental attachment to them and because they are used by the Pevsner Buildings of England series.

†Karen Fielder, ‘X marks the spot: narratives of a lost country house’ in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Historic England, 2016)

¶A friend reminds me that Coleshill was also the home of the great record producer George Martin, who died recently. RIP.

Melverley, Shropshire

Well glazed

Bumbling around Shropshire in search of timber-framed buildings, I came across this small gem: a Primitive Methodist chapel dated 1865. It’s a tiny building, sited near a corner junction next to farms in low lying land not so far from the River Vyrwny. The red brickwork, with paler bricks defining the pointed doorway and windows is attractive, and was the thing that caught my eye first.

But what really stands out is the intricate pattern made by the glazing bars in the windows. The network of hexagons, rectangles and diamonds is the kind of thing I associate with big houses and cottages on large country estates, but it works just as well on this chapel. The tall windows – there are two others around the back as well, so that it’s possible to look right through the building – also let in plenty of light. And they have pivoting opening panels (look at the slightly open one in the right-hand window) which are made in an intricate shape to fit the overall pattern – a neat and painstaking touch.

The congregation in this compact chapel can only be small, but the building seems to be well cared-for and regularly used. Hats off!

Farthingstone, Northamptonshire

How Tudor is it?

Admiring the King’s Arms in the middle of the Northamptonshire village of Farthingstone (my photograph is taken from the churchyard across the road) I naturally wondered how old it is. The gables, dripstones, and flattened entrance arch all give it a Tudor or Jacobean appearance. Those distinctive lattice windows, though, look like a later addition, from the first half of the 19th century, perhaps. There’s a window at the side, shown in my second photograph that also has an early-19th century look, with Gothic Y-tracery glazing bars.

The facts are rather different. The building is actually a 19th-century neo-Tudor design, albeit done by masons working in a tradition that could still turn out Tudor-looking buildings in the vernacular without necessarily reviving the earlier style in a self-conscious way. They were conscious enough of their worth, though, to leave an initial H, for their surname, Hurley, on the middle gable. The carving protruding form the right-hand gable may be something reused from an earlier building.

The windows, by the way, are neither sash nor casement. They have clever pivoting sections, as you can see on the ‘Gothic’ example in my second photograph. The windows with diamond-shaped panes have diamond-shaped pivoting sections. It is as if the industrial age, in the shape of metal-frames and ingenious hinges (and indeed the rather hard-looking pale bricks that surround the ‘Gothic’ window) has added its contribution to this amalgam of Tudor and Victorian design. An interesting mix.

Mears Ashby, Northamptonshire

The looker-on

After my post about the lovely late-medieval manor house of Treago, someone asked me whether I'd been inside this fascinating house. Alas, I have not. Most of the time, the buildings I post about are ones that I see from the outside, en passant, as I travel around. Often I glimpse them from an eye corner as I drive past, before stopping and taking a closer look. Sometimes that look can't be too close – just what I can see from the public road.

This house, Mears Ashby Hall, northwest of Northampton, is an example. A flash of light on stone caught my eye, and something pale-coloured next to a big tree. There was a place to pull in nearby, so I did. What I found was a house of the 1630s with a gabled front and mullioned windows. It's a large house but not palatial (many a bigger house of this period has more space between the outer wings and the central porch), and it's the sort of building, perhaps, that the owners of Treago might have built if they'd lived 150 years later than they did. The curvaceous gable over the porch, the twin Doric columns on either side of the keystoned doorway, and the stepped windows in the smaller gables – all are touches that catch the eye and lift the building from the run-of-the-mill.

Pevsner's Northamptonshire volume tells me that there's a large Victorian wing designed by Anthony Salvin round the back somewhere. I didn't get to see that of course. From the gate I could see, in spite of that imposing tree, just enough of the entrance front to appreciate its architecture and its symmetry. This is the fate of the passer-by, the driver-past, the traveller-through. This blog is in part intended to show that one can see interesting things and make worthwhile (albeit brief) observations about them during such journeys: that, in short, one can use one's eyes and that it's worthwhile doing so. When I was a boy in Cheltenham there was a local paper that had amalgamated with an earlier publication in the way newspapers sometimes do so that the combined title was called, if I remember rightly, The Cheltenham Chronicle, Incorporating The Looker-On. Quite so. The looker-on. Keeping his eyes peeled for you. 

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From way back, there's another answer to the question 'Have you been inside?' here, which explains a bit more about why I blog in the way that I do.

Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire

Three ways  

In the bleak midwinter, with rain on rain in this part of the world, here's a photograph to remind us of last summer's sun, warming up the Cotswold stone at Wyck Rissington, northeast of Bourton-on-the-Water.  Aside from the obvious charm of this stone building in its tree-lined churchyard, I'm attracted to this building for various reasons. Here are three things that interest me about it; three ways of looking at a building, if you like.

First, the architecture. Although this is a small church, built by unknown masons and added to over the centuries in what looks like a haphazard way (look at the miscellaneous selection of window styles), it has had architectural pretensions, especially with regard to the chancel (in the foreground of the photograph). This small part of an obscure church represents a moment in English architectural history. It dates from the mid-13th century and the end wall, with its two pairs of lancet windows and small corner buttresses with pointed tops, is very much of its period. So is the surviving single lancet on the side wall (the larger windows are later; originally there would have been more lancets along this side). This was the period when English builders were beginning to group lancet windows together and add smaller openings (circles, trefoils, quatrefoils) above them to create windows with tracery – the window on the side wall next to the drain pipe is an example from a later phase of building. In the end wall, the two concave-sided lozenge-shaped openings above the pairs of lancets, and the plainer diamond opening above them, create a kind of proto-tracery, as if the masons were feeling their way towards this idea but not quite getting there yet: fascinating.

Next, what has happened to the building recently, for all old buildings need care and repair, and how this is done affects both their survival and their appearance. On my visit in the summer, the church architect happened to be there making an inspection, and we talked both about the 13th-century architecture of the chancel and about the recent work on the church roof. As you can see, the nave roof has been completely recovered in new Cotswold stone "slates". Some of the old slates were still in good enough condition to be recycled, as were quite a few on the chancel roof. So when the nave roof was finished, the chancel roof was redone with the best of the old slates. Both roofs are now good for many years, and the new slates on the nave roof will eventually darken in colour, attract lichen, and match the older ones on the chancel. 

Finally, a historical association, because the people who use old buildings are frequently just as interesting as the buildings themselves. In the early 1890s, the 17-year-old  Gustav Holst got his first job here, as church organist. He soon added a similar position at nearby Bourton-on-the-Water and this work helped to sustain the young composer until he got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music a couple of years later. Holst, who was born in Cheltenham, spent most of his adult life in London, but always loved the Cotswolds. One of his more ambitious works is his Cotswolds Symphony, the beautiful slow movement of which is subtitled "In memoriam William Morris". Perhaps his most familiar work, though, is one that many do not realise is by him, the tune called Cranham (named for another Cotswold village) which is the most popular music for the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Here it is, sung by that great British ensemble, The Sixteen.* Season's Greetings to you all.

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*Or there it was. The video I originally attached to this post has been removed from YouTube. There are plenty of other versions online, though, including one from the choir of Gloucester Cathedral, here.

Brighton, Sussex

Building society

I wonder if I would have noticed these carvings if I'd not been alerted to their presence by Nicholas Antram and Richard Morrice's Pevsner Architectural Guide to Brighton and Hove. Possibly not, as they adorn a 1930s neo-Georgian building and my eyes would probably have been distracted by Regency onion domes and other fancies. So I'm grateful to Antram and Morrice for pointing me in the direction of the former Citizens' Permanent Building Society.

Building Societies. If you are inclined to think of them in the way we think of banks, financial institutions offering a range of financial "products" from loans to insurance, think again and think back. Building was originally much closer to the heart of what building societies did – holding deposits from some of their members and lending other members money to build houses.

So when he designed the Citizens' Permanent Building Society J L Denman got Joseph Cribb to carve a series of relief panels depicting the building trades and set these panels around the three large windows on the ground floor. Capped and overalled tradesmen mix mortar, saw wood, attach roof tiles, and build walls, and Denman himself appears in one panel, unfurling a plan and discussing progress with another man (a foreman or clerk of works?).

 Joseph Cribb began as apprentice and assistant to Eric Gill, remaining at Ditchling to work independently when Gill left Sussex for Wales in 1924. His work is in numerous churches and I'd not expected to find his carvings in this context. They rise to the challenge of squeezing their subjects into the spaces and curves around the windows and pick out details, from roofing battens to pulleys, in a satisfying and realistic way. Their concentrated view of life on site also reminds us of what building societies were about. The building, however, is now occupied by a bank.

Letchworth, Hertfordshire

Postcards from England: 1. Old and new

In five years of blogging I've visited and passed by many buildings, and shared a good number of them with my readers. But there are lots, including many that I visited in the distant past, of which I have no photographs in my digital archive to share with my readers. I do, however, have a small collection of old postcards of some of these buildings so, to vary further the architectural menu, I'm presenting some of these in an occasional series called Postcards from England. This is the first. 

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My postcard shows part of the Spirella corset factory, built among lawns and trees in the garden city of Letchworth between 1912 and 1920. The tall, hipped-roofed parts of the building shown in the picture reveal a strong Arts and Crafts influence in the design – white window frames and brick walls that would almost fit in in Bedford Park, and grids of square glass that seem to hint at more modern architecture. In fact the factory's architect, Cecil Hignett, who had earlier worked alongside garden-city planners Parker and Unwin, was at once sensitive to the Arts and Crafts heritage of Letchworth and alert to the possibilities of the new – behind the brick walls is a structure of reinforced concrete.

Inside were light, airy workspaces in which Spirella's employees cut and sewed in comfort. William Wallace Kincaid, boss of the company, wanted to give his corsetières the best of working environments, because he was convinced that if they were happy they would also be efficient. "The Factory of Beauty", he called the building – implying both that it was a beautiful place and that his workers were producing garments that would enhance the beauty of their owners-to-be. Old-fashioned paternalistic values and an old-fashioned view of beauty, perhaps, but producing architecture that is worthy of more than a passing glance.

Although the factory is no longer used for its intended purpose, the building has survived. Since a restoration in the 1990s it houses office space and public facilities such as a café and a gym. Whatever one's views of corsetry (and I know enough about my readers to realise that their views will be very diverse indeed), one can only be thankful that this wonderful building is still standing, and looking as beautiful as it did when the photograph in my postcard* was taken.

*Don't forget that you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it.

Broughton, Oxfordshire

Tracery

In compensation for the gloomy picture in the previous post, here’s a more sunny image from earlier this year. It’s the parish church of Broughton, Oxfordshire, near to Broughton Castle, about which I posted back in April. I chose this picture partly because of the sunshine and partly because of the window tracery.

The use of window tracery, the intricate stonework in the heads of Gothic windows, was one way in which the masons of the Middle Ages could put an individual decorative stamp on their churches. Tracery developed steadily during the medieval period. In the 13th century it was usually made up of quite simple patterns, with standard elements such as circles or quatrefoils repeated in a symmetrical fashion. By the 14th century, though, tracery had got much more elaborate. 14th- century windows are often a riot of multiple curves, with stonework making exotic shapes and designs reaching sometimes dazzling complexity. It’s no wonder that the Victorians, classifying medieval architectural styles, called this kind of Gothic “Decorated”.*

These two windows at Broughton have outstanding tracery of the early-14th century, one ornately geometrical the other curvilinear in the classic Decorated style. The window on the left is a beautiful bit of geometry raised to the level of art. The circle at the top is divided by two triangles to form a six-pointed star, the points of which are themselves small triangles arranged around a central hexagon. But none of these shapes is left plain – they’re adorned with little stone flourishes called cusps, which break up al the straight lines.

In the top of the right-hand window there are hardly any straight lines at all: everything looks as if it’s about to melt. Every line curves restlessly this way and that, producing in the head of the window a collection of shapes ranging from ellipses and squashed circles to forms that look like flames or tears. The whole design threatens to fall apart, but it doesn’t, because the layout of the tracery is symmetrical and everything is held together by the emphatic overall pointed shape of the window.

We know nothing about the people who built this church, but perhaps they were brought here, or attracted here, nearly 700 years ago by the rich family living in the neighbouring castle. They brought with them skills in geometry and pattern-making together with great visual flair, Add warm morning sun and you have a treat indeed.

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* A reader correctly points out that the term was invented by the antiquary Thomas Rickman in the Georgian period. I meant to suggest here that it was in the Victorian period that Rickman's classification of Gothic architecture became popular. Rickman's book, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture From the Conquest to the Reformation (1817), was reprinted many times.

Bath, Somerset

Windows on the world

Every time I go to Bath I marvel at its Georgian architecture. The way both individual buildings and the larger plan of the town, the sense of both architectural and urban space, have survived into the 21st century is simply glorious. And the place is very well looked after, so its survival looks secure.

There’s so much to see in a place like Bath that the eye doesn’t know where to look next. At one moment the visitor is trying to take in an entire sweeping terrace or crescent, the next focusing on some detail – a door surround, say, a carved street name, a bit of ironwork. All of which can make it easy to miss things, such as how some of these buildings, beautifully preserved though they are, have been altered over the years.

Look at these two houses, part of a sequence that steps its way majestically up Gay Street. Most of my readers will notice quickly one difference between them. The windows of the house on the left still have their small panes, four up and three across, while the windows on the right have been converted to plate glass. All expect for the small unregarded windows in the attic and basement – the ‘low status’ servant-haunted parts of the house, which the Victorians did not think worthy of clear, shiny, plate-glass windows.

Examine the right-hand house more closely and you’ll see another difference. The windows on the central floor are taller than those in the house on the left. And the left-hand house has a band of stone running beneath the widows at this level. This suggests that the Victorians made another change – they lowered the sills of their middle windows to make them taller, eliminating the stone band in the process, to give more emphasis to, and bring more light into, the principal rooms on this floor. This would have been a labour-intensive job, but it was quite often done in Bath.

One cold go on, of course. About the preserved shutters in the right-hand house, which are at odds with the opportunistic and unfortunate window blinds. And the window box on the left. And the paint colours: who’s for National Trust green? Or neutral white? Do any experts in historic paint finishes read this blog, and can they tell us what colour they’d prefer?

The houses in Bath, then, well preserved though they are, exhibit lots of changes, many of which are themselves historical indications of how taste has changed. Such changes are interesting in their own right. These are real houses where real people have lived and it’s fascinating to find signs of their presence and traces of their taste.

Tudeley, Kent

Through the paths of the seas

I usually blog about buildings I’ve seen or visited recently, but today I’m breaking this rule to turn your attention to a church I visited years ago, but which I’ve been reminded of a couple of times in the last few weeks. It’s the church of All Saints, Tudeley and this unassuming building is remarkable because it contains a complete set of twelve windows designed by Marc Chagall.

In 1963, Sarah, the daughter of Sir Henry and Lady d’Avigdor Goldsmid, was killed in a sailing accident at the age of 21. The family commissioned Chagall to create an east window for the church as a memorial to Sarah, and it was installed in 1967. Subsequent commissions led to all the other windows in the building being reglazed with magnificent Chagall glass.


In the east window, a girl floats among blue waves, almost as if cradled on the water. Mourners are beside her, and there is a vision of the Crucifixion and angels above. To the right, a ladder connects the two parts of the scene, and a figure climbs the ladder towards Christ. There’s a tremendous strength here – the figures don’t flirt with sentimentality as Chagall sometimes seems to me to do – and the way the artist has used the shapes of the individual pieces of glass to suggest the swirling waves works superbly. You’d not think that Chagall turned to glass design towards the end of his life. These windows are the work of a master.

The combination of blues and yellows in the east window sets the tone for the rest of the glass, which is predominantly blue, and, in the nave’s south wall, yellow, to invite and complement the sun’s rays. It’s impossible to describe the effect of the Chagall windows, with their birds, figures, and angels. You have to visit the place yourself and experience the visual immersion in blue, and, if you are fortunate, the warming yellow rays of the sun.

Further illumination and interest can also be had from visiting an exhibition, currently on at Mascalls Galley in Paddock Wood, which includes Chagall’s designs for the Tudeley windows and a number of representations of the Crucifixion by British artists from Eric Gill to Tracey Emin.

There is more information about the exhibition here and about the church here.