Shrewsbury, Shropshire

The daily round

Many people know about the abbey at Shrewsbury because it features in the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, and is the home of the eponymous monk. But apart from the church, itself much truncated after the dissolution, little remains of the buildings of Cadfael’s monastery. The church is surrounded by roads, one of which slices its way through the site of the cloister, where the domestic buildings of the monks would have been sited.

This is one tantalizing fragment that has survived. It is a pulpit, and was originally part of the monks’ dining hall or refectory. Monks were expected to eat in silence, the only sound in the refectory being the voice of one brother, who would climb the stairs to the pulpit and read to the others as they ate. The lives of the saints were favoured for mealtime readings.

The ornate pulpit was built in the early-14th century. It is vaulted inside and carefully designed with broad openings, so that the reader could be heard, and small carvings to inspire those who looked up towards it. Cadfael, however, had he really existed, would not have known this delicate piece of stonework – he was a monk of the 12th century. He would probably have known a much plainer, round-arched pulpit, but the regular ritual of readings, like the continuous round of liturgy in the church, would have been the same.

Whitecross Street, London

Peabody's buildings

In the last four decades of the 19th century, London faced a housing crisis. The working poor were tied to central London because that was where the jobs were. But even a room or small flat in a central area cost a large proportion of the weekly wage – perhaps more than one third of the income of a family trying to manage on a pound a week. And such a room provided often cramped, ill-maintained, and unsanitary accommodation. Landlords were more interested in the bottom line than in helping tenants, and there were sometimes middlemen, leaseholders who had to make a profit for themselves before passing on the remainder of the rent to the ground landlord. Slums abounded, disease was rife, discomfort the norm.

Before the Cheap Trains Act of 1883 brought down fares, moving to the suburbs, where rents were lower, was out of the question for most whose sole chance of employment was in central London. A few managed by renting a house slightly bigger than they needed and subletting one or two rooms to help pay the rent (some of my own ancestors got by in this way). But even this solution required an income somewhat higher than rock-bottom. So the poor mostly clung on in rookeries of rooms and flats, subdivided houses, and depressing back-to-backs.

A few visionaries looked for ways to improve things. Some started ethical property companies, promising investors a lower return than a slum landlord would expect, and providing decent, modern housing. Still more radical was the British-resident American banker and philanthropist George Peabody, who founded the Peabody Trust in the early 1860s to build and manage housing for the poor.

The Peabody Trust built apartments in multi-storey blocks, designed to offer clean, decent accommodation mostly in one- two- and three-roomed units. They had built just over 5,000 dwellings by 1887, including this block in the Whitecross Street area, one of a number of such buildings south of Old Street and north of the Barbican.

Peabody’s flats were much needed and much appreciated. With their multiple bedrooms, not to mention WCs and laundry rooms, they were much better than the usual rented dwellings of the time. There were plenty of takers, who probably found more space, better hygiene, and lighter rooms than they had had before. It wasn’t all good news, though. Not everyone could afford the rents and many of the poor who were displaced to build the blocks did not find accommodation there. But the flats fulfilled a need, offering decent housing at high density in the centre of town.

From today’s perspective, the flats, with their austere rows of windows and high walls relieved only with a little striped brickwork look somewhat forbidding. Inside, the one example I’ve been in seemed very cramped by modern standards. They compare well with many a 1960s or 1970s flat, though, and they are still fulfilling a need. Today Peabody manages around 20,000 homes in London, making it possible for some 50,000 people to live near the centre of the capital.

Old St Pancras Churchyard, London

Soane box

Round the back of the refurbished and extended St Pancras station lies a secluded garden made up of the Old St Giles' burial ground and the churchyard of St Pancras, a quiet spot shaded by plane trees. Apart from two men sweeping leaves I had the place to myself, and I was certainly the only person there interested in making a pilgrimage to this small but oddly influential English building, the mausoleum of the great architect Sir John Soane and his family.

It's a typical Soane structure in its very personal Classicism, its handling of spaces and layers, its shallow dome, and its symbolism. His wife having died in 1815, Soane conceived this building in the following year. It is a series of layers. Innermost is a large chunk of Carrara marble; this is roofed by a small marble structure consisting of four Ionic columns and a canopy; this in turn is covered by a larger structure in Portland stone with a shallow dome; the whole is surrounded by a low wall. The dome's finial is a pine cone (a Classical symbol of renewal) surrounded by a snake swallowing its tail (symbolizing eternity).

The monument is a fascinating bringing-outdoors of several of Soane's interior obsessions – domes, narrow spaces, those segmental slivers beneath the dome, the symbolic language, and so on. It's arresting, seems simple until you examine the careful and complex art with which it's put together, is completely non-Christian, and very typical of its architect's vision. Soane, though, deeply in mourning for his wife and troubled by domestic arrangements and disputes over her effects, found it hard to visit the monument once it was up.

Architectural pilgrims, however, have no such qualms. No doubt one of the most admiring was Giles Gilbert Scott, whose classic design for the red telephone box seems to have been heavily influenced by the monument. How odd that this rarified and personal design should have inspired the creation of something so universal, that the language of mourning should be translated into a symbol of communication. Such are the anxieties of architectural influence, and such are their satisfactions.

Calmsden, Gloucestershire

Six of the best

This row of houses in a Cotswold hamlet is, like most traditional buildings on the Cotswolds, built of local oolitic limestone. Classicists among you will recognise in the word ‘oolitic’ Greek words for ‘egg’ and ‘stone’. Oolitic limestone (or oolite for short) is made up of millions of tiny round, egg-like fragments, each of which consists of a roughly spherical build-up of calcium carbonate around a core. It makes one of the most beautiful of English building stones and buildings in this material grace towns and villages running in a belt right across the country from Dorset to Lincolnshire.

As with most Cotswold cottages, limestone makes up almost the whole structure: there are limestone walls, limestone ‘slates’ on the roof, and little limestone-roofed dormer windows. But two distinctive features make this row of probably early-19th century cottages stand out. The first is the hexagon-pattern glazing. Although unusual this is seen on several buildings in this and the neighbouring village and is presumably the ‘house style’ of a local estate. The other feature is the little white porches. Many cottages have small wooden porches protecting the front door. But these have elegant curved roofs made, of all materials, of corrugated iron. Limestone and corrugated iron: an unusual combination, but it works.

Abthorpe, Northamptonshire

The long view

To build is to be optimistic. You are investing time, money, and effort in an unknown future. To build during a time of war entails an extra dose of optimism, of bravery even. Relatively few major buildings (big houses, churches, and so on) were put up during the English Civil War, and those that were are still pointed out and cherished.

Hats off, then (tall, Puritan hats or saucy feathered Cavalier titfers) to Northamptonshire spinster Jane Leeson, who built a school for the children of her village of Abthorpe in 1642, as the first phase of the Civil War began. She nailed her colours to the mast, placing this inscription on the front of the building:

1642 FEARE GOD
HONOVR YE KING
IANE LEESON HATH BVILDED THIS HOVSE FOR A FREE SCHOOLE FOR EVER

That round and optimistic declaration was placed smack in the middle of the facade beneath the dormer window. Here it remains, although it's not in the middle any more because the right-hand portion of the building, with its big gable, is a later, harmonious, addition.

The lovely two-tone stripes of local stone have worn well so far, justifying Miss Leeson’s confidence, the warm, toffee-coloured marlstone and paler oolite combining well as in so many villages of southern Northamptonshire. The stone-mullioned windows too help make this building an adornment to its end of the village. The building is not a school any more, but, used as a village hall, its service to the community continues.

Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

More light!

Here’s the Round Tower lighthouse at Burnham, or what’s left of it, for all that remains is the tower’s truncated stump, attached to the white building on the left, which faces on to the sea front.

Apparently the light had humble origins. A fisherman lived in a cottage somewhere near this spot in the mid-18th century, and his wife got into the habit of lighting a candle and leaving it at one of the windows to guide her husband home. Later the light was placed in the nearby church tower, so that it could be seen from further out at sea. Finally the curate of the church built the round tower – next to the churchyard, as can be seen in the photograph – so that the light was clearer still.

Even in its original tall form it wasn’t that high, and in 1832 it was replaced by the subsequent lights, so that shipping might be guided more reliably home, either to Burnham itself, or on up the River Parrett to the port of Bridgwater.

Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

Attention all shipping

I normally leave this kind of thing to Peter Ashley, over at the excellent Unmitigated England, a fine photographer of lighthouses as of much else. He would not have parked at the far end of the sea front, leaving himself with a twenty-minute walk across a deserted beach in a stiff wind blowing tons of dry sand in a landward direction. A few hundredweight of this sand lodged itself in my nostrils and ears, more of it sandblasting my face and probably my camera lens too.

But in the end, buffeted and battered, I made it to the Low Light, Burnham’s sea-shore lighthouse on poles. This unusual structure was built in 1832. It was the third lighthouse in the town, replacing the Round Tower slightly inland, which now survives at half its original height, and complementing the High Light, a more conventional pillar lighthouse not far away.

On its nine timber posts it has held up very well, surviving both the Round Tower and the High Light, which blinked its last in 1993. The staircase is a recent replacement in galvanized steel. It takes the same form as the original wooden stair, but has openwork treads so that the load of water pressure on the structure is not so great at high tide. A light is still displayed through the window at the side of the Low Light, so it remains useful to shipping as well as a notable landmark for those walkers who are rash enough to brave the Burnham breeze.