Lyme Regis, Dorset

 Which former glory?

Finding myself in Lyme Regis recently, I decided to try to find Belmont, a house that was familiar to me as the home first of Eleanor Coade, manufacturer of Coade Stone (a successful artificial material used widely for casting architectural ornaments and statues) and later of the novelist John Fowles, author of such major works as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. I found the house easily enough, but when I got there I found that the Landmark Trust, who have owned the building for the past few years, had the builders in, making it difficult to photograph it and preventing access.

Belmont, entrance front detail showing Coade Stone blocks, keystones, and banding

Looking at the entrance front, Belmont is a detached house built some time before 1784 with a symmetrical classical front. What is outstanding about this front is the decoration. The blocks and keystones around the door and windows, the horizontal band running across at first floor level, and the frieze are all made of Eleanor Coade's artificial stone. The heads of Neptune and Amphitrite in the keystones and the decorative horizontal band are quite delicately detailed; the blocks around the windows are mostly formed to give a rough surface effect usually known as vermiculation. A few of these (the impost blocks) bear reliefs of sea creatures, reminding us that this is a house near the sea – a maritime villa in the language of the 18th century. Around the back are later additions, including an observatory tower, presumably giving the inhabitants stunning views from this already elevated site (the house is not called Belmont for nothing) over the sea.

As part of their restoration, the Landmark Trust have received permission to demolish the later additions at the back of the house, returning the building to its 18th-century form and preserving the observatory as a free-standing tower. There will be a permanent exhibition about the history of the house and its owners in the stables, while the main building will be conserved and let for holidays like the rest of the Landmark Trust's impressive collection of historic properties. Belmont will therefore get back some of its integrity as a Georgian villa, while losing a slice of its history. This plan has proved controversial, but there's a decision here that has to be made by many people working on old buildings. The media talk airily of bring a building 'back to its former glory', but this phrase begs the question, 'Which former glory?' The gem of a villa lived in by Mrs Coade? The rambling 19th century house of residents such as Dr Bangay, who lived in the house in the 1880s and 1890s? Or the much loved home of John Fowles? And how can one best address the issues of how the building will be used while repairing and conserving the fabric?

The changes to the house, planned after much research, have gone through the planning process but the campaign for funding is still ongoing. The Landmark Trust website contains information on the history of the house and the Trust's appeal for funds; an article here outlines some of the controversy surrounding the project; another article describes proposals to incorporate a centre for young writers into the building, though it's not clear how this squares with the Trust's stated aim for holiday accommodation and a museum. Meanwhile, as discussions continue and passers-by like me stand at the gate and squint at the ornate front of Belmont, the fundraising continues.

Guiting Power, Gloucestershire

It's not just about the architecture

I live just a few miles away from this small Baptist chapel in the Gloucestershire village of Guiting Power, and pass it quite often. For me, it's one of those landmark buildings – the ones that provoke a nod of recognition as we travel around on our regular routes, buildings that remind us that we're nearly home, or ones that are just reassuring because they're still there.

This is a simple building, but the first few times I passed it, I seemed to notice something different about it each time – the coursed rubble masonry, the large quoins, the neat bands of stone around the windows, and so on. Stopping and looking more closely, I saw at once that this is hardly great architecture. The large side windows certainly do their job – their clear glass must make for an interior with plenty of natural light, perfect for reading Bible and hymn book. The masonry bands that surround these windows might be a bit shallow and narrow, their keystones rather small and overshadowed by the roof overhang, but this is the kind of architectural restraint that's appropriate, I'd say, for a nonconformist chapel.

The entrance front, though, looks odd. The usual pattern here would be to have two further large, round-headed windows, one on either side of the doorway. Instead, there's a rather small and mean-looking Venetian window above the door. The reason for this curious arrangement is that the chapel contains an upper seating gallery at this end, with its floor just above the arch of the doorway. Tall windows would not work, as the gallery floor would bisect them. Hence the smaller window placed above the doorway.

A building like this, then, is a collection of compromises. On one level it shows a Cotswold builder of the early-19th century wrestling with the architectural conventions of the time and not always winning. On another, it reveals a happy set of answers to the question of how to produce a well-lit building with enough accommodation for the worshippers in a restrained style that respects the local villagescape. The date stone above the Venetian window reads '1835' and the chapel has been little altered since then. The design seems to have worked. 

Wantage, Berkshire

Not too novel

In a quiet side street in Wantage, this shop front has insinuated itself into a terrace of 19th century red brick. If you'd told me that there was as Art Deco frontage in this red-brick street, with white paint, a black panel, and the rest, I might have imagined an intrusion. But the Wantage Novel Library is well mannered and far from intrusive, thanks to the discreet geometrical patterns of its glazing and, above all the lettering.

It was the lettering that caught my eye. Its proportions (the narrow L, B, and E), the small serifs, and the careful spacing suggest the influence of ancient Roman capitals – inscriptions on monuments such as Trajan's Column or various triumphal arches. Not that this is a direct imitation of a Roman script, of course – how could it be when it relies so much on the letter W, for which the Romans had no use? But the spirit is there, and the forms of these letters are subtly different from many English architectural letters, which can be wonderfully classical but tend to be broader in proportion.

A sign like this must have been the perfect prelude to the literary delights of the Wantage Novel Library, which was presumably a commercial subscription library of a sort no longer common in this age of peering at Kindles and prodding at iPads. Though this is hardly a triumphal arch or a monumental column, the letters do the building proud.

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There is much information on architectural lettering, together with examples of Roman lettering and photographs of modern architectural letters in all their variety in Nicolete Gray, Lettering on Buildings (The Architectural Press, London, 1960)

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A note on English county names An observant reader has pointed out that Wantage is in Oxfordshire, not Berkshire. This seems a good time to point out that I normally use the traditional, pre-1970s county boundaries, which put the town in Berkshire. I do so because I'm attached to these old ways of delineating our local areas and the rich history that they represent. I also find the old counties useful because the invaluable series of architectural guides known as The Buildings of England, started by Nikolaus Pevsner and continued, revised, and expanded since his death, also use these boundaries. (I also have to say, though, that the building in this post, The Wantage Novel Library, is not, so far as I can see, included in the excellent Berkshire volume [edited by Geoffrey Tyack, Simon Bradley, and Nikolaus Pevsner] of The Buildings of England.)

Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire

Headstop

Many church windows have a hood mould, a projecting, arch-shaped moulding around the head of the window, to throw off water. Medieval masons liked to carve decorative terminals to these mouldings, often in the form of heads. These carved terminals or headstops are easy to miss, but even on modest buildings they can be highly decorative, like this king on a 15th-century window at the little Cotswold church at Wyck Rissington. The details – the curly hair, the beard, the pointed metalwork of the crown – have been protected from the weather by an overhanging roof.

I don't think there is anything about this carving to identify it as a particular king, but if to modern eyes a member of the royal family seems an odd presence on a church wall, one should remember that kings and queens were all over medieval churches. They recall not only Biblical monarchs such as David and saintly rulers such as Edmund, but also all the others who, anointed during their coronations, held a position sanctioned by the church and had as much right to be portrayed as all the other figures (and monsters) who populate church carvings from the Middle Ages.

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

On the road to recovery

There will be celebrations today in Shrewsbury, with the announcement that one of its major buildings, which has been 'at risk' for years, has been allocated a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Ditherington Flax Mill (also known as the Flax Mill Maltings) looks set for a fresh start.

This is an enormous building and was made still larger when it was converted to a maltings. The original part, the flax mill on the left built in the 1790s, contains some 30,000 square feet of factory floor ranged over five storeys. But the key thing is not the size, but the structure. It's held up by a framework of iron – not just iron columns, but iron horizontal beams and tie rods too – and this makes it the world's first fully metal-framed building.

The mill was designed by wine merchant, textile manufacturer, surveyor and engineer Charles Bage. Bage's interest in the use of iron in building wasn't surprising – the first iron bridge at Coalbrookdale was not far away, there was an iron foundry in Shrewsbury, and he was a friend of civil engineers such as Thomas Telford and William Strutt of Derby, a builder of mills who had already employed iron columns in his structures but hadn't gone the whole hog and used iron beams as well. Bage made that extra step to a full metal frame.

The advantages of this kind of building were clear – modular construction, minimal interruption of the floor space by the slender columns, and resistance to fire. The fire-resistant quality of a building made of an iron frame supporting brick walls and arches was especially attractive to mill owners, although this building was not truly fireproof – the metal would have buckled at high temperatures. Bage used cast iron and, although later engineers would later prefer wrought iron, and then steel, for structural frameworks, he had made a beginning, one which would make possible the rise of the skyscraper, and all that has entailed.

I'm pleased that this landmark building, one of countless historical industrial buildings that has lain unused because of the substantial repair and conservation costs, is now a big step further on the road to a secure future.

Flax Mill, interior showing iron columns and brick-arched ceiling
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There is more about the Flax Mill here.

Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire

Show-stopper

This surprising structure, Henley's Imperial Hotel and its flanking shops, is meant to make travellers pause in amazement. It stands near the entrance to the town's railway station and, although not directly linked to the station as many such hotels were, was no doubt intended to attract people using the railway. Its heady mixture of timbered gables, bay windows, oriels, balustraded balconies, and tall brick chimneys, was put together by the architect William Theobalds in around 1897.

Theobalds had no doubt absorbed the influence of Richard Norman Shaw, who liked to give his houses timbered gables and tall chimneys and made this kind of domestic Tudorish revival popular. But Shaw knew as well as anyone that this kind of building drew on a variety of sources. As Shaw said modestly, 'If I could get myself to believe that my half-timbered work and tall chimneys were in any way my own, I should sit up on my hind legs and purr away like our tom cat John, but common honesty compels me to own that they are simply indifferent copies of old work.'

Theobalds added to the mix, using wooden-framed windows where Shaw preferred mullioned ones, adding an ornate finial to make the skyline interesting, fitting natty bargeboards, and cladding the piers on either side of the entrance in granite. The shop fronts that curve away from the main central block are unusual too, with their large, arched main windows and row of little square windows above. The whole row, the big hotel gable with its flanking smaller gables, makes a confident impression that reflects Henley's status in the late-19th century as Thames-side resort and is still dazzling in the sun.

Bretforton, Worcestrshire

Brush with the lore

Peacocks, lambs, ducks, foxes: thatchers often like to top off their roofs with an animal finial. I’ve been noticing these flourishes for years, and, having seen flocks of pheasants in one village and congregations of ducks in another, I’d wondered idly, without really thinking about it, whether these were craftsmen’s ‘signatures’, rather as people used to say that the ornate patterns cut in the straw just below the roof ridge ‘belonged’ to the individual thatcher, and were his way of making his mark.

For her 1939 book Made in England, for which she trawled deeply among local tradition and lore, Dorothy Hartley asked about the significance of these figures and was given various answers. Some of her interlocutors said that the ornament identified the thatcher; some that it related to the owner of the house (or of the haystack, because stacks were also thatched and sometimes topped with animal figures). Another interviewee replied gnomically: 'Corn bird steals no corn and frits off corn buntin'.' A kind of scarecrow, then. I know someone who keeps a life-size model of a heron next to his fish pond for a similar reason. Nowadays, on a roof that's already covered with wire mesh to stop birds removing the straw, a fox or peacock is likely to be there because thatcher and owner think it will look good, or amusing, or catch the eye of bystanders. You can even buy straw animals online to add to your roof. Long live traditional crafts…