Bredon, Worcestershire

Added extra

Bredon is in South Worcestershire. The low-lying apple-growing country of Evesham is not far away, but neither are the Cotswold uplands – Bredon Hill is a Cotswold outlier, and shares the limestone geology of the main Cotswold range. It’s not surprising, then, that the Reed Almshouses in Bredon combine the brick of the vale (seen in the walls round the back and the chimneys) with a Cotswold stone front to the courtyard. This stone front, with its mullioned windows, dormers, and shallow arched doorways could be on the Cotswolds – and, with those arches could date from the Tudor period, although in fact it’s a building of the 1690s.

But what’s that small freestanding building with the big brick chimney and the interesting little louvre at the top? It had me scratching my head: it doesn’t look like extra flats or houses, it’s too elaborate for a shed, and has too many windows for a dovecote. It turns out to be a laundry, built in 1871, by Bodley and Garner, no less, when they restored the almshouses. George Frederick Bodley was one of the greatest Victorian architects, known especially for fine Gothic Revival churches. He had a long working life, a lot of it in partnership with Thomas Garner. They designed churches, buildings in Oxford and Cambridge, and country houses. but clearly did not spurn smaller jobs.

I don’t know if the laundry is still used for its original function, but it’s an attractive and practical addition, a tribute to the almshouse authorities, who seem to have wanted to provide the residents with convenient facilities as well as a pleasing environment. A nice example of a small structure acting as a memorable focus – both to the building it serves and to the street as a whole.

Ilminster, Somerset

Stone and glass…and paintwork

Just out of the town centre of Ilminster is one of the few hints that’s there’s a big house close by: a pair of hexagonal gate lodges next to some stone gate piers. My photograph shows the right-hand lodge, which was catching the sun, warming up its local limestone walls and bringing out their slight orangey tinge here and there.

This is a building of the early-19th century, and guards one of the drives to Dillington House, a building originally of the 16th and 17th centuries that was hugely altered by Sir James Pennethorne in 1837. Dillington now hosts educational courses on all sorts of enticing subjects – as it happens I was teaching one of these courses last week, which is how I came to be here.

The lodges may well be of the same date as the Pennethorne remodelling of the main house. They are in the simplified Gothic style of the time – pointed openings, Y-shaped tracery to the windows, small battlements on top – that does very nicely for a small gate lodge. Buildings like this quite often came in odd shapes – circular, octagonal, or hexagonal – to catch the eye, to catch the sun, and perhaps sometimes because the design allowed the person inside to have a view in more than one direction, so that they could keep an eye on comings and goings.

However there’s an added twist to this building. The windows have the patterned glazing bars so popular in estate buildings in this period, but the window immediately above the door is a false one. There’s no glass there at all, just a stone impression of a window, to be decorative, with the glazing bars painted on to the masonry. A bit of trickery to remind us, I think, that this little lodge is as much as anything else a bit of architectural fun.

Coventry, Warwickshire

Set in concrete

Egged on by my reading of the recent Historic England book on Coventry,* I wanted to use my visit to the city to have a look at something I’d missed before, the concrete mural (actually an entire structural wall playing the additional role of public sculpture) outside the former Three Tuns pub in the city centre. I came away glad I’d done so, and full of admiration for its creator, the sculptor William Mitchell.

Mitchell was in the forefront of finding new ways of casting concrete for sculptures, including the use of polystyrene and polyurethane moulds. He worked widely and closely with architects, notably in new town developments such as Harlow, for the London County Council, and on new buildings in places such as the Barbican in London. For this mural in Coventry, Mitchell employed polystyrene sheet cut with hot wire set against the shuttering before the concrete was poured. The concrete incorporates pebble aggregate and was cast in one piece, with rectangular spaces left for the window openings.

The forms Mitchell created in the Coventry mural (made in 1966) are bold and abstract – and I think they work well as a succession of engaging abstract forms. But they also suggest all kinds of possible visual interpretations. People have seen in them the sun and its rays, mechanical components such as gear wheels, or bits of a city viewed from above. The mural’s listing refers to the sculpture as an example of Mitchell’s Aztec style and it certainly does have a Meso-American feel to it, although I don’t know whether the artist saw it in those terms.

Looking at it took me back to an evening years ago at an exhibition of mostly abstract paintings by an artist friend. Standing next to me was a middle-aged woman with a small girl, perhaps her granddaughter or niece. Together they were imagining the trees, rivers, and animals that they could imagine in these works of art. I quickly dismissed from my mind any thought that this was a rather naive way of looking at abstract painting – these things were there sure enough, if one applied a little thought to them. I feel rather the same about these William Mitchell murals – you can look at them on more than one level, and that’s a sign the artist is on to something, especially when it’s public art, and bound to be seen by anyone and everyone.

I know some people look down on work like this, done in concrete, a substance that they find dull and grey. If there were a hierarchy of sculptural materials,† concrete would be near the bottom, well below marble, bronze, and wood. And it’s true that a concrete work, in strong relief like this one, ideally needs some strong light to set off the forms with defining shadows. As it is, the front of the pub is in a shady spot, though perhaps the sun would have moved around later in the day to give it some welcome sideways illumination. But there’s still something to see here, and something, I’d say, to celebrate – the artful arrangement of shapes, the way the linear quality of the relief encourages your eye to follow the design across the wall, the texture of the material. I’m glad this relief is listed and unlikely to go the way of so many other William Mitchell pieces,¶ cut down and chucked away, because nobody wants to look at concrete art.§

*Jeremy and Caroline Gould, Coventry: The Making of a Modern City 1939–73
Published by Historic England; see my review here.

†I’ve mentioned this idea of hierarchy in terms of building materials a few times in blog posts; the notion won’t go away.

¶Mitchell continued to make concrete works into the 1970s, and helped develop a special formula, called Faircrete, that would hold relief patterns drawn into it while also setting very hard. However, by the mid-1970s British architects had turned away from his style and he worked increasingly abroad. The 1990s saw him involved with various projects for Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed.

§Those still not convinced might prefer to look at my recent post about a Georgian building in Coventry, here.

Pancras Road, London

Iron classic

This small structure is a drinking fountain, just opposite St Pancras Old Church Gardens, where I visited the mausoleum of Sir John Soane many moons ago. It’s the sort of street furniture that’s easy to miss and it’s hardly big enough to be a building. But it’s certainly architectural: a quintet of slender classical columns set on a drum and supporting a shallow dome topped with a putto (a cherub if you like) holding an urn.

This little bit of classical elegance was donated to the church in 1877 by William Thornton, Church Warden. It was one of the many bits of Victorian architecture made of cast iron, this time by Andrew Handyside of Derby, a company who produced everything you could make from iron, from railway components to ornamental vases.

Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, Athens

The design, incidentally, is based on one of the go-to structures for architects who wanted to base their buildings on the ruins of Athens: the 4th-century BC Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.* It’s by no means an exact copy – Lysicrates’ monument has a square base, and is filled in behind the columns. But the proportions, the encircling group of columns and the shallow dome are all there in both structures. It’s close enough for classicists to nod, or to shake their heads depending on how purist they are. Athenian classicism in cast iron: a very Victorian mix of ancient and modern, and of art and industry.

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*Choragic, from choregos, one who paid for and trained the dance-chorus in ancient Greek drama; Lysicrates was a patron of musical performances.

Coventry, Warwickshire

The air of antiquity

Walking around Coventry looking at the areas of the city centre rebuilt after the bombing of World War II (most of the city centre, that is), I was drawn now and then to what was left of the old city. Close to the cathedral, this early-18th century house facade was one thing that caught my eye, as how could it not? There must have been quite a few of these in the city before the Luftwaffe got to work. Now there’s just this one and a couple of others – the only houses of this scale and date left in the centre. And not even this is what it seems. Only the facade is original: what’s behind is a rebuild of 1953.

In my opinion the frontage was certainly worth preserving. The generous windows, Ionic pilasters, and ornate doorway with its Gibbs surround constitute the image of the 18th-century civilised house. The ironwork of the railings, gate, and overthrow are very impressive too. David Wells, the man who built it in c 1721, must have been proud of it. Wells was a wine cooper (a producer of barrels) and his business is commemorated in the vine leaves in the ironwork where the railings join the gateposts. The facade isn’t a perfect design – the attic is rather plain and lumpen. But whoever built it knew his classical orders, and had looked at the work of the great 18th-century architect James Gibbs.*

Wells was interested in history – he was Coventry’s first member of the Society of Antiquaries, and called his house The Priory. There seems not to have been an actual priory on the site, but it’s very close both to the Cathedral and to Holy Trinity church. Antiquity clings to the place. Even more so now that it’s a rare enclave of the Georgian period in a largely 20th-century city.   

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*The architect is not known, but the master builder and architect Francis Smith of Warwick liked the Gibbs hallmark of that door surround with alternating protruding quoins and the Coventry house resembles some of Smith’s work. However, Andor Gomme, the authority on Smith, thinks this house was not by him.

The whole frontage, including the attic

Coningsby, Lincolnshire

About time

I must have been only about 7 or 8 years old when I first saw the tower of Coningsby church. My father pointed through the windscreen as we approached the village, telling me that I had to take a look at this clock: there was something unusual about it. I noticed at once its extra-large size. At about 16 feet across it was easily the biggest clock face I’d seen. But it seemed to be telling the wrong time. It took me a minute to work out that it has just one hand, an hour hand, so half past nine in the photograph above looks at first glance like twelve minutes to four.

With a really big clock face a single hand doesn’t work badly. When you look closely, you can see that the face is marked in quarters of an hour, with a red diamond at each half hour, so with practice you can read the time to within a few minutes. And to make a face like this you don’t need any complicated metalwork or carpentry – it’s just painted on to the stone of the wall: a good sign-writer could do it. The mechanism of the clock must be simpler too – and is apparently 17th century so has stood the test of time. Hats off to the clock-maker…and to the people who climb 35 steps to the winding mechanism every day to wind the clock and keep it going. Time well spent.

Erith, London

After the stink

Among our greatest heroes should be Joseph Bazalgette and the other Victorian engineers and builders who created London’s network of underground sewers. The scandal of Victorian London’s inadequate open sewers (poor disposal, contaminated drinking water, cholera, typhoid, and appalling smells) was finally confronted in 1858, the year of the ‘Great Stink’, when the odour from the Thames was so great it penetrated the nostrils of the powers that sit in the Houses of Parliament.

Joseph Bazalgette’s enormous and far-sighted engineering project put an end to this. Miles of pipes and brick-vaulted tunnels stretch beneath the capital, removing the effluent to a vast reservoir (49 Olympic swimming pools’ worth, in language appropriate to August 2016), which was then emptied into the Thames at high tide, to be flushed out to sea. Most of those pipes and tunnels are still use today.

The pumping work was done at steam-powered pumping stations, one of which was the Crossness Pumping Station on the Erith Marshes in the Borough of Bexley. This South-East London engineering marvel was opened in 1865 and was used until 1956, when a new sewage-treatment works was installed. But the building has survived, thanks to its extraordinary architecture, grant-aid from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the hard work of volunteers and restorers. The original pumping engines are there too (they have 52-ton flywheels and may be the largest remaining ones of their type in the world).*

It’s the architecture that gets me going, of course. The white Gault brick exterior is impressive, but the inside, a riot of multi-coloured ironwork, is what’s special. This is the sort of iron extravaganza that raises the same sort of cloud of journalistic clichés as the great London railway termini: it’s a cathedral of cloaca, a palace of poo, a temple of…

Enough of that. It’s an irrepressibly Victorian building, its walls and windows drawing on the Romanesque revival (semi-circular arches, artfully arranged in groups), on Gothic (foliate ornament, pointed motifs in the balcony railings), and on the sheer power of engineering. In other words it represents that coming-together of ancient and modern that the Victorians liked so much – as in the railway stations again. But there’s something else. They built this stuff to last. We’re still the beneficiaries of their thoroughness, of their glorious over-engineering, every time we flush a lavatory in Lambeth or load the dishwasher in Dagenham. Think of that, as you admire the iron curlicues, which have lasted too, thanks to the engineers’ skill and the restorers’ art.

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* Visiting times are limited at the moment. They’re on the web here, where there is also much more information about the building, its engines, and its restoration.

Photograph  I nearly always use my own photographs on this blog, but this time the image above is copyright © Christine Matthews and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.