Northampton

You could be forgiven for thinking that this has become the Scottish Buildings blog. But now and then a bit of Scottish-baronial-influenced architecture rears its turrets and pointed roofs south of the border. And the associations are immediate – even if you miss the Scottishness of a place like this, how can it fail to remind you of castles and fortresses? How can it not make you think of medieval banquets and chaps tearing around in iron suits? Even though, of course, no real medieval castle ever had windows the size of this one.Quite why Alexander Anderson, the architect of this 1919 Memorial Hall in a back street in Northampton chose this style, I don’t know. Round turrets, stepped gables, conical roofs, and rock-faced masonry certainly make their mark here. Anderson was a locally based architect and must have been well aware of the pressures of working in a town with its fair share of striking buildings – including several interesting churches and a Town Hall covered with outstanding relief carvings. In such eminent company, this one definitely and defiantly stands out.

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.

Salisbury, Wiltshire

LETTERS FROM SALISBURY (2)
These carved letters are from a building that began life as the city’s hospital in 1767. The building was designed by John Wood the Younger, son of the great architect of Bath, in the form of a single big brick block, topped with battlements and bookended with side towers containing services such as water tanks and privies.

The inscription proclaims proudly ‘GENERAL INFIRMARY SUPPORTED BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTION’ and by setting it in a band of stone the architect made sure it stood out from the surrounding brickwork. The incised lettering is reminiscent of the Georgian street signs that Wood would have seen on the stone-clad houses of Bath.

The infirmary’s exterior is dominated by rows of big sash windows. Plenty of fresh air was said in the 18th century to be good for the sick, and architects and doctors alike saw the generous provision of windows as essential in hospital buildings. No doubt these windows also make for light interiors in the apartments to which the building has been converted.

Salisbury, Wiltshire

LETTERS FROM SALISBURY (1)
Walking around Salisbury recently I decided to avert my eyes from the cathedral for once and have a close look at the magnificent buildings that surround it. But before I got to the cathedral close, something else began to strike me. This city has several interesting examples of old lettering on buildings. Inspired by the recent talk about Antonioni’s film Blow-Up over at Unmitigated England I thought I’d see what would happen if I blew up one or two of my pictures of these signs.

Well, no murders, thankfully, or lurking gunmen, but some rather less sensational details. This is an old newspaper office and printing works, probably dating to the 1870s or 1880s, home to two titles proud of their steam printing press. Although the green eyeshades have long been hung up and the presses moved to some Wiltshire Wapping, the names of two indigenous papers remain, reminders of a time when the local press was the source of regional and national news for almost everyone.
Look more closely and you can see how deeply cut these letters – and their frame – are. In spite of the fact that several generations’-worth of white paint have blurred their edges somewhat, they still stand out in the sun. The frame of the sign rests on little metal lugs, suggesting that it’s structurally separate from the façade. And yet the crack that’s snaking it’s way down the front goes though the sign too, so the connection is clearly quite close. So my blow-up reveals, if not some threat to human life, a bit of wall trouble, at least. Watch out as you pass...

Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire

I remember when I first stumbled across this place. Passing a knot of stone outbuildings and rounding a sharp bend, there was a high brick wall pierced with mullioned windows. As we continued a little further and pulled up by the side of the lane, this beautiful front was revealed across a lawn. We had found Canons Ashby.

All those years ago, the house looked neglected and sad. Walls were bowing. I think I remember weeds sprouting from the fabric here and there. We poked around a bit and a local woman appeared from a nearby cottage. We learned that Canons Ashby was the ancestral home of the Drydens (the poet’s family), who had lived here since the 17th century, but who now lived in Africa. As the sun warmed the Northamptonshire stone and and brought out colours ranging from raspberry to apricot in the brickwork, the place looked magical. Inside, we were told, nothing much had changed for 250 years. And all this history looked as if it would soon turn into another ruin, another lost country house.

That it did not do so was mostly due to Gervase Jackson-Stops, architectural advisor to the National Trust and a great scholar of and friend of country houses. Jackson-Stops not only fought to save the place, but also pioneered an arrangement under which government money was used to endow a house given to the National Trust – the first time the Trust had accepted a building with this source of endowment.

The place has blossomed since it was taken under the National Trust’s wing in 1981. The dry rot is gone, the structure has been strengthened, and conservators working for the Trust discovered enchanting 16th-century murals under layers of paint, to add to delights ranging from elaborate plaster ceilings to the vast kitchen, which, until 1938 contained the only tap (cold, of course) in the house. The library even houses a signed copy of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson, one of the fathers of the English novel. Apparently he wrote the book at Canons Ashby: another literary link. It’s heartening to know that the fragile beauty of this place has been saved.

Sherborne, Gloucestershire

Limestone is one of the most versatile of England’s traditional materials. It runs in a band from Lyme Bay in Dorset to a point north of Filey in Yorkshire, a belt of stone that has given us some of our most memorable buildings – the terraces of Bath, the cottages of the Cotswolds, the church spires of Northamptonshire. Where I live in the Cotswolds nearly everything in some buildings is made of oolitic limestone - roofs, walls, window frames, floors, pavements. For centuries, Cotswolders came into the world to the sound of water boiling in a stone fireplace, and left it to be buried in a grave marked with a headstone made of the same oolite.

Everyone who has been to the Gloucestershire Cotswolds has seen houses like this – stone walls, stone roofs, dormer windows, and probably a stone garden wall and roses around the door too. The one I show above is in a village full of them. But if you look closely at it you’ll see something slightly unusual.

The doorway of this cottage has a rounded top with zigzag carving around it and the semi-circular stone above the door is carved with crosses. In other words, this house has a church doorway – and that zigzag carving reveals that it’s a Norman church doorway dating to the 12th century. What’s more, Pevsner informs us that there’s another Norman doorway around the back. If there had been one doorway, I'd have guessed that it had been moved to the site from somewhere else. But a pair of church doorways suggested to me when I first saw this house that the building began life as a place of worship before being converted (perhaps in the 19th century) for residential use – there’s another, still functioning, parish church in the village. Now a reader with a connection to the village (to whom many thanks for the information) has put me right. Apparently the foundations of a former church are still visible in the field opposite: the doorways were moved across the road.

Here in the Cotswolds we’re apt to get a bit blasé about our stone buildings. They’re everywhere and it’s easy to let them become part of the background, ignoring their details, their colour, and their beauty. Surprises like this one remind us to keep our eyes open. And as we look, to prepare to be amazed.

Lyndhurst, Hampshire

There are a lot of red brick buildings in Lyndhurst, and they glow a rich orangey colour in the afternoon sun. One of the more striking ones, the Stag Hotel, was built, on the site of an old coaching inn, in 1907 – it’s hard not to miss this as the date is emblazoned both over the entrance archway and on this bow window. The building has many features of the typical pub of the time – leaded-light windows, etched glass, ornate details – but they combine with the warm brick and clay tiles to create an air more of good taste than of brash pubbishness.

Talking of taste, this window seems to show that whoever designed the building wanted to pay homage to recent architectural fashions. The numerals show the influence of Art Nouveau, the curvaceous decorative style that was sweeping Paris metro stations and big houses in Belgium but which made less impact in England. And those hearts: they seem to be an allusion to the work of the great Arts and Crafts architect C F A Voysey. Voysey often used heart motifs – on wallpaper, key escutcheons, and other details – and the architect of the Stag no doubt learned from Voysey’s flair in other areas too: the Arts and Crafts master was good at bow-windows, for example.

It’s this mixture of elements and styles – Edwardian pub, Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts – that makes this building a show-stopper. And that makes it catch the eye as you pause and look around you when caught in one of Lyndhurst’s notorious traffic jams. Even gridlock can have its compensations.