Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

New light on old streets

In the late-19th century, many towns were starting to turn on the electricity for the first time. Where gas light had been, electric lighting became increasingly common, and soon, as we known, electricity was powering much more than lighting. With electricity came special buildings: power stations and small urban utility buildings. In the 1890s, with virtually every style available to the designer, architects had to decide what these new buildings were going to look like. They tried all sorts: arched polychrome brickwork, grand neo-classicism…you name it.

The Borough Surveyor in Cheltenham, Joseph Hall, chose something completely different for the Central Electricity Lighting Station of 1894–5: a brickwork design evoking a Renaissance palace, with a big arched central doorway, small windows above, and an upper storey (added later) with a row of terracotta columns and a patterned brick cornice. It’s a striking little building, sticking out alike from the town’s stucco-covered houses and the Victorian Jacobean revival stonework of the nearby library. But looking closely at the upper brickwork (photograph below), the effect is achieved quite simply, with a few different standard pieces used to create the patterns of dentil courses and arches.

The building lost its original role some time ago and is now part of a hotel, the Strozzi Palace, whose name pays tribute to its architecture. In truth the Lighting Station is only slightly like the 15th-century Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, which has a large arched central doorway and a dominating cornice, combined with a very different stone facade and rows of windows. In spite of the differences though, it does share something of the same spirit, as if throwing a different light on Cheltenham’s architecture, as its bright electric lamps would throw a new light of a different kind on the town.

Detail of upper arches and brickwork

Bath, Somerset

A view of some rooms

I have just enjoyed immensely the current exhibition at the Victoria Galley, Bath. It is called A Room of Their Own: Lost Bloomsbury Interiors 1914–30, and looks at the stunning interior designs of members of the Bloomsbury group,* especially the work of the Omega Workshops and in particular designs by Bloomsbury Group members Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry.† Only at Charleston in Sussex, the country house of Bell and Grant, and a favourite meeting point of the other members of the group, do such interiors survive. So the exhibition draws together paintings, screens, lamps, painted furniture, ceramics, and other decorative items from various public and private collections, arranging some of them in groups to recreate several long-vanished interiors.

One of the most effective of these room sets (they’re actually partial rooms, arranged where two walls meet to create the effect of a domestic corner) is what one might call an ‘early Omega Workshop’ room (above), inspired by an illustration in Roger Fry’s The Artist as Decorator. Strongly coloured abstract panels on the walls, a fireplace dressed with white vases, a beautiful decorated dining table (its worn surface an angular labyrinth of stripes), and some Omega Egyptian chairs are the main elements. Nearby is a glorious ‘Lily Pond’ screen by Duncan Grant, which, the caption tells us, was made by dripping ‘puddles’ of paint on to its surface to create a vibrant composition of black, green, and pink – a technique prefiguring Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings decades later.

Another room, a music room, shows the more muted colours and figurative art of the later period, with a screen by Vanessa Bell depicting musicians. A further room (below), again subtly pastel in palette, evokes a dining room designed for Dorothy Wellesley in 1929, with paintings of classical nudes and bathers, a fireplace with arched and round decorations like a modernist take on Adam, and an octagonal dining table decorated with a huge flower-like pattern.

Between this small group of room sets are displayed striking designs, fans, and pieces of furniture such as Roger Fry’s luxurious marquetry cabinet featuring a pair of giraffes in different inlaid woods. The whole show (in one large room of the gallery) gives not just an admirable impression of the lost interiors but also a sense of how the designs of the Omega Workshop developed and of the input of its notable contributors – both the three I’ve mentioned and other artists, notably Carrington, whose work on show includes a stand-out portrait and some stunning painted furniture. Above all, this exhibition provides a glimpse of how the Bloomsbury Group’s ideas about modern art and literature were not just for the study: they lived their ideas in a setting that vibrates with colour, freshness, and joy.

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*For the Bloomsbury Group and its contributions to the arts, start here.

†The Omega Workshops, of which the three artists were directors, designed murals, painted furniture, textiles, and other products, as well as decorating whole rooms. The company was founded in 1913 and closed in 1919, but for Fry, Bell, and Grant, the ethos lived on and Bloomsbury artists continued to produce objects in the Omega tradition for years afterwards. Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the Bloomsbury Group’s most prominent painters and the sister of the writer Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant (1885–1978) was a painter of portraits and landscapes and a designer of textiles and pottery, and also a theatre designer. Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a prominent critic as well as an artist, wrote influential essays on art, and was responsible for introducing Post-Impressionism to Britain.

Idlicote, Warwickshire

Masculine, feminine…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for dovecotes – useful and often picturesque buildings from centuries gone by. Dovecotes often have an usual shape – round or octagonal, for example. Such shapes can be functional as well as picturesque because inside there’s a ladder on a central rotating column that you can push around to reach the hundreds of nest holes inside.

The octagonal dovecote at Idlicote, visible from the gateway to the nearby big house, is especially attractive because it’s tall, so makes a strong impact, and because it has some charming faux-Gothic features: curvy ogee-headed windows, and imitation arrow slits, as if it’s left over from some ancient fortification. It isn’t of course. The first record of a dovecote here dates to 1681, well after the castle age, and experts now think that most of the current fabric is from the 1760s and that Sanderson Miller was probably the designer. The Gothic features sit well with his flair for this style and Miller was a local man who worked a lot in Warwickshire, so this seems to fit.*

Sanderson Miller liked creating an impression of medieval castle architecture with towers and battlements, evoking what Horace Walpole called ‘the rust of the Barons’ Wars’: a hint of the tough, masculine stuff of which castles were made. But he also had a love of the more filigree, feminine side of Gothic – bigger windows, ogee arches. To a purist, these two aspects of the Gothic style sit uncomfortably together, but Miller and his clients had no such qualms. For them, structures like this dovecote seemed to sum up the Middle Ages. For us, they sum up the particular vision of a Georgian architect who was at home in the Warwickshire countryside, as is this charming building.†  

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*I’m indebted for this information to the new edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Warwickshire, which in turn cites William Hawkes, editor of The Diaries of Sanderson Miller of Radway (2005). This new Pevsner volume is full of such nuggets of fact and attribution, and when I’ve absorbed more of them I’ll review the book in my next batch of reviews, later in the summer.

†I wrote about how dovecotes were used in an earlier post, here.

Nottingham

Architectural travel

In a city full of outstanding buildings, this one, small but expressive, stands out as far as most. My photograph shows the upper floors of a shop in Long Row (it was a travel agent’s when I was there a while back), and, in a context of flat fronts and plain colours, it combines contrasting materials, contrasting shapes, and planes going this way and that. The first things I noticed were the turrets protruding out and sticking up on either side. But there’s so much more – the stylish roof, the elaborate first floor bay window, the bands of stone among the brick.

So where is this building of around 1900, latterly a travel agency, taking us? Mostly, I think, to the French Renaissance. The steeply pitched hipped roof with its central dormer (framed by classical pilasters) is certainly a French feature, so are the turrets with their conical tops, and so are some of the details on the big window – those chevrons that combine to make diamond patterns, the ornate details above the second-floor windows, and so on. 

There was a fashion for this sort of thing at the turn of the century, part of the increasing variety of styles on which late-Victorian and Edwardian architects felt able to draw upon, from Byzantine revival to Art Nouveau. But this is a particularly English version of the French style, and very much of its time. The brickwork is very English (and looks very well done too), those square panes of glass are of their time, and the central part of the bay window, with its integral arch, is out of the school of Norman Shaw (a shame about the replacement window frames, but at least they follow the pattern of square panes).

Nottingham is a city of wonderful brickwork (those fine industrial buildings, some even with curving walls) and of restless architectural innovation (the work of Watson Fothergill especially). This small building can share city space with them and not fail to shine too.

Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire

Signs that shine

The Worcestershire town of Upton-on-Severn has quite a few old shop fronts, and a point has been made recently of preserving a number of these – and even revealing the signs of old businesses, long gone but still essential and picturesque bits of the place’s history. So although this former brach of the Worcester New Co-operative Society is a Co-op no more, its sign still shines above its frontage. These gilded letters on a black background are typical of the kind of thing shopkeepers were using in the late-19th and early-20th century to advertise their businesses, and the way the lettering has been managed to get everything into the available space is typical in its ingenuity too. The letterform is quite narrow (that was probably the standard style for this company) but extra economy of space has been achieved with the diagonal words, which are visually effective and give the sign a feeling of dynamism and verve. Even the abbreviation of Society to ‘Socy’, with its superscript Y and little dot, has been handled with some flair.

Beneath the sign the rest of the frontage is quite plain, with big windows and central lobby. Even this has been designed and made with care – look at the fluted pilaster on the left, and the little turned capitals atop the slender shafts. The main job of the shop front, though, is to show off the goods – whether the hams and cheeses of yore or the lampshades and vases of today – and to draw us in through that set-back central doorway. And whether we enter or pass by, both the goods and that glittering sign are bound to make an impression on the retina.

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There’s another post on a shop sign in this town here.

Brimpsfield, Gloucestershire

Grow your own arches

The other night I gave a talk in the Cotswold village of Brimpsfield and, arriving early as I often do, had time for a short walk around before I was due to set up my projector and get on my hind legs to speak. Beautiful as is the stone architecture of the place, I was particularly struck by the series of arches through which the path to the church runs. These arches are not made of stone or any other masonry, but out of yew trees, pairs of them artfully clipped into large rectangles with openings in the middle to accommodate the path.

I’m a great admirer of churchyard yew trees, have posted about one particularly ancient specimen before, and can think of few better ways to approach a church than through these arches. They provide not only wonderful greenery, but also green shade (it was a very hot day) and, as you look back westwards towards the setting sun, a backlit rim of pale green around the edge of each opening. In truth, the yews looked as if they needed clipping, but the slightly fuzzy edges only added to their charm.* On a quiet summer’s evening they seemed just right.

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*The jasmine round my own front door needs trimming, so I have such tasks on my conscience.

Great Brington, Northamptonshire

On high

My affection for thatched buildings, for English pubs, and for those three-dimensional pub signs that sometimes mark hostelries such as the White Hart at Hingham or the White Lion at Upton-on-Severn comes together here. The Althorp Coaching Inn is an attractive stone building with a thatched roof where I had an enjoyable lunch recently. Walking back along the village street a bit later I noticed this charming thatched stag over the porch. He’s a cousin, clearly, of the animals that thatchers mount on roof ridges. People treat these as personal signatures, bits of local distinctiveness, marks of ownership, or just admirable whimsy.* But here at Great Brington, the stag is not on top of the thatched part of the roof at all, but surmounts the tiled section above the entrance. He’s not a name sign either – the pub is known as the Althorp Coaching Inn, and also bears the name Fox and Hounds, written in smaller letters like a subtitle on the main pub sign. Not apparently relevant then, but admirable anyway, and a memorable bit of British folk art.

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*See my earlier post, Brush with the lore, which cites Dorothy Hartley’s excellent old book, Made in England (1939); Hartley’s researches threw up these varied explanations.