Don't mock Tudor

Christmas books: 4

The fourth of my Christmas handful of books actually came out last year, but it struck me as so relevant to the concerns of the English Buildings blog that it easily earned its place here. It is about what for many is the quintessential English building style: Tudoresque...

Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home
Published by Reaktion

Tudoresque – shorthand for the architectural style typified by black and white walls and prominent gables – is something of a national obsession in Britain, and a symbol of our culture. But its modern incarnation, mock Tudor, is decried for the fakery of stuck-on beams and imitation leaded lights. So why are we so preoccupied by it – whether we're in love with it or, like many design professionals and architects, scornful of its suburban manifestations? This is among the questions that Andrew Balantyne and Andrew Law (professors respectively of architecture and town planning) seek to answer in this lively book. They trace the style's 16th-century roots, its various reincarnations – during the vague for the "Picturesque" in around 1800, as a revivalist style (influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement) in the late-19th century, and as mock-Tudor suburban architecture in the 1920s and later.

Fascinatingly, Ballantyne and Law also trace the style's meanings for its revivers – those values that it has seemed to embody and that have been attractive to lovers of Tudoresque down the ages. It turns out that these meanings are far from simple. On the one hand, there is the Tudor style as a symbol of paternalistic old values: of manor houses, aristocrats who look after their patch and their servants, benevolent industrialists housing their workers. This is one-nation Tudorism, if you like, with a lavish portion of the roast beef of old England. From another point of view, it's the style of self-reliance,  of the lower middle class making ends meet, of squatters putting up a timber-framed house on common ground overnight and claiming the right to live there, of the Elizabethan ideal of a cottage with four acres of land, of suburban owner-occupiers.

Ballantyne and Law tease out these meanings carefully, showing that if such subtexts are no longer directly relevant (few people build and squat nowadays) they are still there somewhere in our unconscious, and they contribute the way in which we see things. If Tudoresque cottages appealed to the creators of the Picturesque landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries, symbolizing patriotism, they also embody values of tradition and Britishness to many dwellers in modern half-timbered homes.  The authors also look at the vogue for Tudoresque in other countries, where it is seen in part as a symbol of Britishness and British values, whether in the swanky abodes of early-20th century US industrialists or in smaller Manhattan apartment blocks, which occasionally resemble Tudor skyscrapers.

Tudoresque pulls all these threads together well. It encompasses real timber-framed buildings and faux-Tudor houses with boards nailed on to brick walls, and shows that what they have in common is more than skin-deep. It made me think more deeply about why people built these houses the way they did, about the gulf that sometimes opens up between architects and home-owners, and about what makes Britain British.

Making and mourning

Christmas books: 3

The next of my handful of Christmas books is the biography of a little known amateur architect who was responsible for the design of one of the most extraordinary buildings of the 19th century. When I learned that Jenny Uglow – author of excellent biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and others – was tackling this subject I was eager to get my hands on the book. My eagerness was justified…

Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone
Published by Faber and Faber

The Pinecone is a biography of Sarah Losh, heiress in a prominent family in the northwest of England, and creator of the church of St Mary in the village of Wreay, south of Carlisle, one of the most extraordinary buildings of the 19th century. Sarah Losh is interesting for all kinds of reasons – for her local philanthropy, for her connections with many of the luminaries of the 19th century from the poet Wordsworth to the engineer George Stephenson, for her role as a woman architect in a man's world. and for the visionary design of her church, a building that has been puzzling people ever since it was built in the 1840s.

Jenny Uglow tells this story with intelligence and verve. She is sometimes hampered by the fact that most of her subject's papers have been destroyed – never mind the creation of a remarkable building, Uglow's biographical task occasionally seems to be like making bricks without straw. But she is helped by being able to look at Losh through her links with others. So we see Losh hearing poems read by Wordsworth and Coleridge before publication, paying calls in Carlisle and in Newcastle, where her family were prominent manufacturers, learning from her radical uncle James (friend of William Godwin), and interacting with her beloved sister Katharine, whose early death cast such a shadow over her life. For this is also one of the great sibling-bond stories, joining William Wordsworth and Dorothy, Jane Austen and Cassandra, William Herschel and Caroline.

Above all there is her church. St Mary's Wreay looks more like a work of the Arts and Crafts period of the1880s than a building of the 1840s. But not even the Arts and Crafts produced a structure quite like this, covered with carvings that are far outside the usual church orbit – a tortoise gargoyle, a crocodile, a dragon, lotus buds, gourds, and pinecones (the latter symbolic variously of creation, reproduction, enlightenment, the spirit of man, and the expansion of consciousness). There are carved angels, it is true, but you have to look hard to find much traditional Christian imagery. It is as if Sarah Losh, having daringly entered the male preserve of architecture, looked at the whole business from a different viewpoint, that of a kind of pan-religious perspective, where all faiths are as one.

By describing Sarah's church in such detail, Jenny Uglow also describes her somewhat elusive subject, Sarah herself and her concerns. The church is an act of making and also an act of mourning (for Sarah's parents and sister and other family members); it is both a gathering together of diverse religious symbols and a very specific act of benevolence to the village of Wreay itself, to which Sarah also contributed a school and numerous hand-outs in times of need; it is both a display of traditional craftsmanship and an artistic bolt out of the blue. Uglow's book nails all this – but does not lose sight of the oddity of the place or the elusiveness of its creator.

Not boring

 Christmas books: 2

This next in my series of December books is the work of a writer and broadcaster I've admired for years. I watch out for his pieces in the press, which are not infrequent, although a book by him is a rare event. The man in the dark suit: Jonathan Meades...

Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls
Published by Unbound

It's not like London buses. You wait for years for a book by Jonathan Meades and then just one arrives. Museum Without Walls.† It's a collection of pieces – essays, TV scripts – some of which the dedicated follower will have encountered before. A grab-bag then,  containing 54 bits of journalism and six  scripts. What unifies them is a preoccupation with places, which Meades calls the "greatest free show on earth". Peel off the jacket of this book and you will see embossed into the cloth of the binding a guiding maxim: "There is no such thing as a boring place." The book richly embodies this notion. A grab-bag? It's the commodious valise of a thoroughgoing topophile.

They're not the usual guidebook places and they are not, for the most part, the places seen or valued by architects. A lot of what interests Meades lies at what some writers call "marginal" places and spaces: asbestos dumps, collapsing Nissen huts, stretches of tidal mud, flaking Portakabins, allotments, "a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit". To many of course this kind of thing is far from marginal, it's just marginal to "heritage", to architectural commentary, to curatorial neatness. Such places need a keen eye to notice them and a bracing prose style to conjure them up in our mind's eye, our mind's nose, and the rest. Like Iain Sinclair (and like Richard Mabey in such books as The Unofficial Countryside) Meades has what it takes.

A lot of the familiar Meades themes are here: the centrifugal quality of London, the similarities between the 1860s and 1960s, the ignorance of the countryside that lies behind the Picturesque movement and the corrosive effect of that movement, the deleterious consequences of our love affair with the suburbs, the delusions of the religious, the scandal of regeneration disguised as atrocious government-funded sub-architecture, the tiresomeness of lowest-common-denominator postmodernism ("oafish pediments"), the blinkers through which we see building materials (why is stone better than concrete or corrugated iron?), the delusive hierarchy of building types (why are churches better than factories or sheds?), the glories of shacks and bricolage, the fascination of terrain vague, and so on. And all of this is described, discussed and dissected in prose that is assertive, bracing, in-your-face, logophilic, and sometimes very funny. There are also some tender passages in which Meades writes about his boyhood – First Love, First Shack – and places that played a special part in his young life – pub car parks near Evesham, the confluence of the Wiltshire Avon and the Nadder, Salisbury, Portsmouth, the New Forest, a valley that the young Meades identified as the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Many of Meades's interests are interests of my own – Victorian rogue-architects such as Samuel Sanders Teulon, the beauties of Birmingham and Bristol, corrugated iron, the work and sad decline of that great architectural writer Ian Nairn. But there is persuasive writing about unfamiliar territory too – Buenos Aires, the architecture of Rodney Gordon. Fascinating places and spaces and true to the maxim on the cover: never boring. I learned plenty while enjoying myself reading this book, and I think many others will too.§

* * *

†Is this title derived from The Voices of Silence, the vast theory of art by French writer and politician André Malraux, which has a section called "Museum Without Walls"? Maybe. It's a long time since I read Malraux, but "Museum Without Walls" is his term for the illustrated art book, and he shows (amongst other things – Malraux's is a long and complex and, some would say, windy book) how it liberated us from the confines of the art museum, allowing us to put art in new contexts and to see it free from the blinkers of convention. Meades, on television and in his journalism, does something similar. But to write about buildings and call your collection Museum Without Walls is of course to play both on words and on walls.

§Museum Without Walls is published by Unbound, the crowd-funded publisher. I must declare an interest in that I was a member of the large crowd who helped fund the publication.

Paddy

Christmas books: 1

For the next ten days or so, the English Buildings blog becomes a book blog, as I look back at a few of the books I've enjoyed this year, potential Christmas presents, perhaps. I've chosen books relevant in some way to the main concerns of this blog – buildings, history, places – and, to begin with, a biography of one of the greatest writers about places of the last hundred years or so.

Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Published by John Murray

Left as an infant to grow up with strangers, expelled from various schools, cast adrift and footloose in London, walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople aged 18–19, slept in barns and castles, fell in love with Rumanian princess, joined Greek cavalry charge, kidnapped German general in occupied Crete, won DSO, travelled in Greece, settled in Greece with Joan Rayner, wrote award-winning travel books, lauded as best travel writer of his generation, swam the Hellespont aged 69, died aged 96 after a triumphant life lived on his own terms.

Something along those outlines represented what most of us knew of the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, universally) – that, and what mattered: his two stellar books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli, and his luminous account of his walk to Constantinople in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two parts of a projected trilogy, the third part of which never appeared. The baroque prose, the breadth of learning, the delight in and knowledge of languages, the sense of place, the understanding of people: all were in a class of their own.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Artemis Cooper has filled in the outline and fleshed out the life behind the works. It must have been a challenging task, given that Paddy has said so much about his life in his own books. His bejewelled prose is a tough act to follow. But she has done well, building up the details, throwing light on some of the obfuscations, and maintaining a pace that makes the book compulsively readable. Her biography gives us: a clearer account of Paddy's infant life with his surrogate parents in Northamptonshire than the brief one in A Time of Gifts, plenty of detail about his wartime service and life, a moving description of his reunion with Princess Balasha after war and the corrosive effects of communism had kept them apart for decades, quite a bit on his colourful love life, and plenty of detail about the gestation – both painstaking and painful – of his books.

I have enjoyed discovering that my hero had his faults, which were the ones, mostly, that I'd suspected – a certain thoughtlessness sometimes (amidst much true consideration for others), a know-all quality, an occasional tendency to tweak the facts about his travels (though not the essential facts: it did all happen). Oh, and a troublesome capacity to keep publishers waiting. Every fan of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water knew about this. Where was the sequel? Years went past, and decades: still nothing. Paddy was "working on it", it was "almost ready", and so on.

Artemis Cooper deals rather briefly with the last part of Paddy's life. Even for someone as energetic as Paddy, the pace of life does slow as one reaches one's 70s, 80s, and 90s, so this brevity is forgivable and understandable – yet, was there really no more to say than some 40 pages on the last four decades of his life? However she does address the important question of the "missing" third instalment of the great walk. Briefly, back in the 1960s Paddy had drafted an account of the last part of the journey, but he remained unsatisfied with it, unable to recast it into a form that he felt good enough. His feeling that he could not live up to the quality of the first two books depressed him, and there were deep clouds over his last years. That enviable life was perhaps not so idyllic after all. Artemis Cooper has set this on the historical record, where it belongs. She also holds out hope that an edited version of Book Three of the journey will be out in about a year. She deserves our thanks for that, and for an enjoyable and generous biography.

Leicester

Letter set (1)

Little things can make a big difference. When it comes to architecture, one of those little things is the quality of the lettering used in signs, inscriptions, date stones, and the rest. Here's an example that caught my eye: the name and date stone on a chapel in the centre of Leicester. To harmonize with the classicism of the building the person who cut this inscription used what Alan Bartram, authority on lettering on buildings, calls the English letter. What he means is a letter form in which there is quite a big difference between the thick and thin strokes and in which the change from thick to thin in, for example, the curving bowl of the C here, or the P, can be quite sudden. On the whole the thick strokes are verticals. The serifs (the tiny protrusions at the ends of the main strokes) are generally bracketed, in other words the main stroke flows into them. But in this particular example the bracketing is quite subtle in some of the letters.

You can find English letters all over Bath, where they are used for the street names, which are carved directly into the stone walls. Elsewhere they pop up in all kinds of places, and are often, as here, to be found when you look up. They vary quite a bit in style –some have less heavy thick strokes than these. Many have fuller serifs. But if the letters are well proportioned and evenly spaced, they are all satisfying. Especially in the sun.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The iceman's cousin

This is a brief pendant to the previous post about a terrace in Bath and its keystones carved in the form of icemen. A correspondent pointed out that the exuberant carved decoration on the Bath terrace might well be an expression of impatience with the austere classicism of much Georgian architecture, an exercise in lightening up and putting on the frills. I think that rings true. Here is another bit of ornament in a non-classical, but equally unexpected, context.

On a recent Cotswold walk a friend and I crossed a field on a downhill stretch towards a familiar road and missed the proper footpath by a couple of hundred yards, arriving roughly where we wanted to be but by a different, unofficial route. As we did so, we passed a tiny stone building of unknown purpose. The only remarkable thing about it was this rather fine date stone, complete with a mask that is surely, if I'm right in seeing icicles in the beard, a distant modern cousin of the Bath icemen. Whoever he is, he was a pleasant surprise.

Bath, Somerset

The icemen
You know how it is. The road you drive along often is the one you don't look at properly. Whenever I visit Bath I drive into town along London Road, registering various architectural highlights (a Georgian terrace here, a shop front with stained glass there), but not stopping to look properly. So the other day, encouraged by a picture in Michael Forsyth's Bath in the Pevsner City Guides series, I decided to stop outside Grosvenor Place, one of the terraces that runs alongside London Road, and have a look. I'm glad I did.

Architect-builder John Eveleigh started Grosvenor Place in 1791. The idea was to have a swanky central section containing a hotel, with houses on either side. Eveleigh was making a lot of money on speculative building schemes of this kind in Bath, and this site, fronting one of the city's pleasure gardens, seemed like a winner. But in 1793 there was a financial crisis. England and France started a war, the cost of credit rocketed, and Eveleigh, like many of Bath's other builders, found himself in money trouble. He was soon bankrupt, his share in the project was sold, and work on the terrace was halted when it was half done. The project was only completed years later.

Grosvenor Place, carved plaques

Some of the decoration on the building was never finished – three of the oval panels on the facade, for example, were left uncarved. But even so, the central portion of the terrace is extraordinary. It's an extravaganza with giant columns adorned with garlands (towards the bottom of each column is a plain stone band: presumably  this too was meant to be carved into a garland, another job left undone). There are seven columns, a very unclassical odd number which means that the central column is right above the doorway. All very unorthodox and eye-catching.

Grosvenor Place, the iceman cometh...

Among the details I especially like are the little masks on the keystones above some of the windows. Their faces are made of icicles, a motif that Eveleigh also used on another Bath building, Somerset Place. These chilly faces are in marked contrast to the richer carving of the rest of this centrepiece, as if casting a cold eye on all the frivolity around them. Financial crisis? Yes, we know what you mean…