Leominster, Herefordshire

Wine, offline

On one of my past visits to Leominster I noticed a glazed shop door containing a pane of glass etched with the name of the Leominster News, a defunct local newspaper. When I wrote about the door I lamented the passing of local newspapers, victims of a market in decline as readers have moved to online news services. The internet of course is a rich source of information and for well over 25 years I for one have been using it – and for the last 15 years or so I’ve also been contributing to it, via this blog among other ways. And yet, as I said back in 2021, I believe something has been lost through the decline of print media, and the local press especially – local newspapers once provided a valuable service for local communities.

Something similar could be said for a host of local small businesses. I was reminded of this the other day when passing through Leominster once more and noticing another piece of etched glass, this time on a shop in the High Street, once the premises of E. V. Gunnell, wine merchant. What a lovely design. The lettering is stylish, with exaggerated variations in the stroke widths and some sharp, pointed serifs. I’d guess it’s very late 19th century. The name sits within a panel with sides that curve outwards towards the edges of the glass, looping around the border of the pane in a triangular form. Standard, stylized foliage forms contribute more decoration above and below the name. There would be nothing exceptional about any of this in the late-Victorian period. The glazier would show the client a catalogue of samples with fancy lettering, foliate ornament, and so on, and would order the glass from a specialist manufacture, who would produce it to the required dimensions. But it shows a tendency to take pains with architectural detail and craftsmanship that’s in short supply on the High Street today.

It’s not just about design and craftsmanship, though. The supply of wines, spirits, and ales was once a local affair. The wine merchant was someone you’d get to know, and who would get to know their customers and their likes and dislikes. A shop like this would be as important a part of the local High Street as the butcher, baker, and grocer. Not many businesses like this survive these days. The selling of wine has become the preserve of supermarkets and, increasingly, of online wine merchants. On the face of it, wine seems an unlikely product to buy online. It’s stored in fragile bottles and the bottles and their contents are heavy, making packing a challenge and shipping costly. But it has caught on, both because of the huge potential range of stock and the economies of scale that come from buying and storing in bulk. And so, local wine merchants go the way of so many other small retail businesses, from fishmongers to ironmongers.

Like so many of us, I am part of this problem. I shop in supermarkets, and buy things online. I’ve even bought wine online from time to time. But part of me looks at this door and laments the disappearance of these local connections. Mr Gunnell – his name turns out to have been Edward – cared enough about presenting his goods and his business effectively to commission this lovely door glazing. What a shame we can’t see the rest of his shop front, with his name at the top and a tempting display in the window to entice us to sample his wines, spirits, ales and porters – for such, according to Kelly’s Directory, was the range of his stock.. A glance at the 1879 directory for Herefordshire reveals he lived in the town and served as one of its aldermen. He was part of the community. But hope is not lost. There is still a wine merchant in Leominster’s High Street. We should buy things locally when we can if we value such local assets.

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Have you got the scrolls?

Pevsner’s Dorset volume says that the old Greyhound Inn, in the centre of Blandford Forum, takes façade decoration to ‘Bavarian extremes’. Although there’s a hint of Saxon (or even Lutheran) hauteur about that comment, he doesn’t mean that the gloriously named John and William Bastard, architect-builders of Blandford who reconstructed the town after the fire of 1731, had been at the beer when they conceived this building, but that the decoration is less restrained than the norm in this town and more like the ornate baroque pastel and white facades of Central Europe.

English Georgian architecture can come over as rather plain, getting its effect not from decorative curlicues but from order, proportion, and restrained classicism. We think of Georgian building in terms of simple brick walls and rows of sash windows, relieved by the occasional pilaster, stretch of rustication, or fancy fanlight, and given form, in the best examples, by craftsmanship of the highest quality – meticulous brickwork, fine carpentry, and so on.

The facade of the Greyhound seems indeed to come from a different world. The decoration around the triangular pediment is from the top drawer, an encrustation of classical details. The Corinthian capitals below it, too, are exceptionally ornate and full of delicate fronds and curves. And then there’s that central window: the big plain keystone at the top and the protruding ‘ears’ at the upper corners are the kind of things seen on many a Georgian window. But the generous scrolls up the sides, the lavish moulding around the sides and top, and the fancy-shaped apron below the sill set this window apart. Even better is the small face in the middle of the apron. Is it a drunken satyr, bearing grapes and welcoming us to the inn? That’s the answer, then: it was wine that the builders were drinking that day.