Sapperton, Gloucestershire

350-up

Last week brought the news that the Churches Conservation Trust has taken on its 350th church. The Trust is an excellent charity that takes over and looks after church buildings that can no longer be maintained by their local parishes. The churches are all of outstanding architectural and/or historical interest and the Trust opens them to the public and sells guidebooks and provides other information about them – but the buildings are still churches and occasional services are still held in them. I’ve noticed, and praised, their work before on this blog and I am just one of a legion of enthusiasts and supporters.

The 350th church on the Trust’s list is St Kenelm’s, Sapperton, Gloucestershire.* It’s a beauty – for its exterior, with its lovely little spire (far from the norm in this county, where most churches have towers) and its lovely setting, and for its contents. It is a medieval church, but one much altered in the Georgian period with the addition of a number of large round-headed clear-glazed windows, which flood light into the nave.

Jacobean pew ends, Sapperton


Inside are two outstanding monuments – a 17th-century one to Sir Henry and Lady Poole and an 18th-century one to Sir Robert Atykyns, the first historian of the county of Gloucestershire. The place would be worth a visit for these two monuments alone, but what sets the church apart still more is the woodwork – the most extraordinary set of Jacobean pew-ends, together with a gallery front, a big wall of oak panelling, and other pieces. This rich 17th-century carpentry came from nearby Sapperton Manor and was given to the church by the 1st Earl Bathurst† when the house was demolished in 1730. It’s secular woodwork that has been repurposed, then, and the pew ends certainly look secular in origin – each one bears a vigorously carved supporter figure bearing on the head a capital: a sort of Jacobean version of a caryatid or Atlas figure. The males have satyric beards and the few females bare breasts and necklaces, so they might have been even more at home in the dinging room of the manor house. But these figures have plenty of character – the chiselled beards and almond eyes, the little locks of hair – so that, stylised as they are, they’re an asset to the place. The modest capitals don’t really conform to the standard classical orders: they could be Ionic with a bit of extra foliage, or cut-down Corinthian. But they’re fun too and the whole lot make the church very special. You’d have to go a long way to find any pew ends quite like these.

All credit to the CCT for taking on this memorable church. No doubt they have lifted a heavy financial burden from the small parish in so doing. As usual, we owe them our applause and whatever other support we can give.¶

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* Sapperton church’s page on the CCT website is here.

† The Bathurst who was the recipient of Pope’s famous poetical epistle, and who created the great park next to his house at Cirencester, a stone’s throw from Sapperton.

¶ I've posted about quite a few CCT churches over the years, but there are a couple of my particular favourites here and here.

Stamford, Lincolnshire

A view of a town

I have recently been watching an old television series called Six English Towns, written and presented by the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor. This was a formative series for me when it first came out in the 1970s – it must have been one of the first things that made me look closely at the buildings around me.* It’s wonderful that these old programmes are available again, and I intended to say more about them.

Clifton-Taylor covers some of my favourite towns, and a lot of the buildings he describes are still there. Stamford in Lincolnshire is a particular favourite: a limestone town of extraordinary grace, once on the busy A1 road but now bypassed – and still bustling and thriving in spite of now standing to one side of this arterial north-south route.

Clifton-Taylor says a lot about stone, and a lot about the Georgian houses and other buildings in Stamford built of this material. One thing he noticed was the number of variations on the carved keystones above windows: the town really is an exhibition of the art of the keystone carver. Looking through my own photographs, one example struck me in particular: Stamford’s Town Hall, a building of the 1770s.

At first glance, this building, with its rows of sash windows, its rusticated ground floor, its low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, could be a grand Georgian town house. But the coat of arms at the top gives it away. The architect isn’t known fort certain but it may have been Henry Tatam, a local cabinet-maker who also designed buildings. The window surrounds (detail at the top of this post) don’t protrude very much, although the lasts-afternoon sun that shone when I took my photograph does its best to catch the surface variations on the facade. The sun also catches the decoration around the upper windows – the pattern of rosettes and linear forms that give these windows their elegant character. This pattern is taken up in both the keystones and the cornice, giving the decorative scheme its character – a sense of unity or repetitiveness, as you wish. The walls themselves, with their very tightly jointed stonework of the kind common in Stamford, set all this off well.

Clifton-Taylor mentions this building in his film, and shows many others, often just as interesting. His programmes are good old-fashioned TV† – no gimmicks, just a man talking about what he likes for half an hour in an informative way – and well worth watching. 

Alec Clifton-Taylor, Six English Towns: Stamford

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*There were a further two series, so he covered 18 towns in all, and he brought out books to accompany each series too.

†Very much of their time, these programmes show a middle-class, rather schoolmasterly Englishman unglamorously talking to camera – and showing off the buildings he discusses with relevant, informative footage. The sort of thing that’s sneered at too often as paternalistic, like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (another formative series for me). One shouldn’t let prejudice get in the way of their genuine insights.

Jackfield, Shropshire

Green men…and other colours

As autumn approaches and the country houses and other attractions that many of my readers like to visit get ready to close their doors for the winter and cover the furniture in dust sheets, what else is there to get us out and about, and stimulate the optic nerve? Plenty of museums stay open all winter, and one of my favourites is the Jackfield Tile Museum, a rich collection of architectural ceramics near Ironbridge (it’s one of the cluster of Ironbridge Museums).* This is not just a Mecca for the tile aficionado. There’s plenty to interest anyone who’s interested in how British design has developed in the 19th and 20th centuries – Gothic revival, art nouveau, modernist, mid-century modern – all the expected movements are here, exemplified in colourful ceramics, many of them so lovingly decorated that they repay a really good look. Not only that, the museum does a good job of explaining how tiles are made and decorated, with video sequences showing encaustic tile making, tube lining, and so on, and, better still, the working Craven Dunill factory is next door, and open to visitors at certain times.

I’ve posted before a couple of my favourite exhibits from Jackfield, some panels from W H Smith shopfronts of the interwar period. Now here’s another winner: a group of silk-screen printed tiles designed by John Piper and made by the Fulham Pottery in 1983. They depict the four seasons but, as the museum’s caption puts it, ‘There is some debate as to which tile depicts which season.’ §

People who like Piper will know that the artist had a fascination with the image of what he called the foliate head – a figure derived from the green man, though Piper’s versions are sometimes female, with foliage emerging from the mouth. This of course is an ancient idea: you can find green men in medieval churches everywhere and the figure of Jack in the Green, who turns up with some Morris sides, their dances marking the turning of the seasons, is clearly a member of the same family. Piper liked such ancient traditions,† applying to them his 20th-century technique which here comprises a combination of bold splashes of colour and flowing, painterly lines. I like this interplay between patches of colour and lines, and I like too the way Piper draws the different mouths of the four heads. I keep thinking of Matisse when I look at these tiles – both the cut-outs, so effectively shown at Tate Modern not long ago, and also the earlier fauvist paintings with their mix of strong colour and bold lines. But whereas Matisse worked on a big scale, Piper has managed to use this sort of boldness on tiles just a few inches across. His designs work well at this size. They’re a little more homely than the French master’s work, true. But looking at the mouth of the final tile, bottom right, Piper has not quite tamed the wild beast.

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*Details and opening times of the museum can be found here.

§I have my own ideas about this, but I’ll let readers decide for themselves how they want to interpret the images.

†’Foliate heads’ also appear on Piper designs for wallpaper and lampshades, and the artist also produced foliate head prints.

Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

The art of seeing

My recent post about the wonderful mosaic floors in the National Gallery prompted a couple of people to say to me that, having spent years telling people about the discoveries they can make by looking up, I am now telling them to look down as well. How true. But there’s a bigger message, best summed up in the instruction: ‘Be inquisitive’. It was a point I first heard made years ago by that fine natural history writer Richard Mabey, who was talking about being inquisitive about the natural world; his books, especially classics like Weeds and The Unofficial Countryside, exemplify this virtue, teaching us to look at familiar plants in unfamiliar ways, and at unlikely places in open-minded ways.*

So. Be inquisitive. Go around the back, poke about in corners, talk to people in pubs, walk up unlikely alleys…and you’ll find unexpected interest and delight. In Shipston-on-Stour the other day I was reminded of this as I passed an alleyway I’d glanced up on previous occasions. The building at the end is a former Baptist chapel.With Y-tracery windows and attractive banded masonry around the window heads, it’s a good if unobtrusive example of what a local builder could do in the mid-19th century. I was pleased to see that the chapel is mentioned in the newly revised edition of the Pevsner Buildings of England volume on Warwickshire† (it wasn’t in the first edition) – and the new book supplies a date for the building: 1866. It’s a quiet corner worth a few moments of anyone’s time.

As I left the alleyway, though, I spotted something I’d never noticed before: next to some wiring, an old painted sign warning us of the consequences of smoking or ‘otherwise committing a nuisance in this entry’. The once-familiar street sign ‘Commit no nuisance’ was a command, aimed particularly at men leaving the pub and answering the call of nature in the street rather than holding out until the proper place is reached. Such signs are not common now, so I was pleased to find this one, put up by the chapel trustees maybe 100 years ago. The Pevsner book doesn’t mention it – its business is with architecture after all – but it’s a nice example of the rewards of keeping the eyes open, of being inquisitive, even in familiar places. 

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*The Unofficial Countryside, which explores the animal and plant life of such apparently unpromising places as docks, canals, railways, factories, and waste land, originally appeared in 1973. I bought it a few years after it came out and it taught me as much about looking as any architecture book. There’s a good reprint available from Little Toller Books.

† I hope to review this excellent addition to the Pevsner series later in the year.

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

At the Co-op

The things you see going shopping… I’ve noticed before some of the creative ways that various Co-ops have had with their store fronts, especially wonderful tiled ones from the 1930s. But now and then I come across one of an even earlier vintage, often showing what strikes me often about early shopfronts – that they were built to last in a way alien to most shopfitters and store owners.

Here’s an example of what I mean: the Co-op in the middle of Chipping Norton. Down at ground level, you’d hardly notice it. You just see a restrained version of the current local Co-op signage – plus the signs of other shops that occupy the rest of the building. But look up: an almost pristine stone-faced facade of 1890. No expense was spared, by the look of things. The whole front is done out in a kind of Renaissance revival, and when I say ‘Renaissance revival’ I don’t just mean symmetry, a couple of Ionic pilasters and some ball finials. This frontage has all that, but more: a lively frieze running along the top (beneath the balustraded parapet), a triangular pediment full of scrollwork and carved cherubs, another cherub balancing at the top of the pediment. Whoever did the sculpture put a lot of effort in – there are animal heads placed here and there in the frieze, and the cherubs, worn now, look well made. True, the lettering in the roundel saying ‘CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETY LIMITED’ is lacklustre, but you can hardly see it from pavement level anyway.

A purist might well say that the decoration on this frontage is rather a hotchpotch – cherubs among reeds sitting on scrollwork…date stone and cherubs and triangles and swags all crowded together. But that hotchpotch is quite close to the spirit of the English Renaissance decoration of the 1500s and 1600s that this building is referencing. It always was a bit of a mash-up, but a charming and lively one for all that. They liked this sort of thing in the Elizabethan period, they liked it in the 1890s, and I like it too.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

More light!

Along the Suffolk coast I noticed them, but they are everywhere in coastal towns in England: houses with bay windows and balconies. The balconies are an obvious asset: a place to sit and enjoy the view if your energy, and the weather, discourage you from making it all the way to the beach. Here at Aldeburgh, on houses only a few yards from the shore, there seems little excuse for them – but people like their own private sitting space, so why not?

The bay windows, of course, need no excuse. They add another dimension to a room and, above all, they let in extra light. And in England, where the sky is often cloudy, we need as much light as we can get. In this location they’re especially effective, and bay windows have been popular in seaside towns since the Regency period – and pretty popular in other places too.* The coast hereabouts runs roughly north-south, meaning that these houses have a view roughly eastwards. That makes them wonderfully sunny in the morning. But with simple flush windows they’d be a bit dingy the rest of the time. The canted bay windows catch the sun as it moves round to the south through the middle of the day admitting more light. You can see where the light is coming from in my picture, taken at around 2 pm on a summer’s day.

Add a nice coat of plaster to protect the walls from salt spray and a pastel shade of paint to cheer everything up and you have as good a coastal house as you could want. Just the thing to contemplate before turning one’s gaze eastwards on the endless blue of the sea and sky.

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* Actually some Tudor buildings, especially grand houses, have them, but they became widely used in the Regency period.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Revisiting: Cheltenham’s Masonic Hall

The way I organise my life means that I’m quite often out of the country in September at the time of Heritage Open Days, the weekend when the owners of many historic buildings normally closed to the public throw open their doors and let the rest of us inside. This year has been different, and I’ve been taking the opportunity to take a close look at some of the buildings I’m familiar with as an outsider. One such is the Masonic Hall in Cheltenham, a building with a truly grand exterior combining Roman arches with partly sloping walls in the ancient Egyptian style, that regular readers of this blog may recall from an earlier post.

By any standards this is an impressive building. Its architect, George Allen Underwood, had been a pupil of Sir John Soane, and it shows – the classical proportions, the rhythm of niches, columns, and surfaces on this virtually windowless structure, the monumental effect, would have impressed the master. Back in the 1820s, when it was new, the building would have looked even better against a backdrop of trees and greenery – although very close to the town centre it was not hemmed in by shops and houses then.

Cheltenham Masonic Hall: Lodge Room

Inside, it is impressive too, but in a different way. Underwood was himself a freemason, so clearly understood what was needed, and delivered. Downstairs, the Dining Room is panelled in dark wood, lightened with painted Gothic arches – it originally had a roof painted to resemble a tent of the Knights Templar, but this has long gone. Upstairs is the Lodge Room, a more ceremonial space, with its elegant furniture (outstanding Chippendale, some of it), boards with lists of Masters of the various lodges, and forest of masonic symbols.

Cheltenham Masonic Hall: balcony railings
The decorative scheme is a winning combination of Regency classicism and Masonic symbolism. Classical anthemion ornament frames a blue ceiling starred liked the heavens.† The balcony ironwork combines the heart motif, common in Regency Cheltenham, with the square and compasses. Ionic columns are enriched with red paint and gilding and topped with terrestrial and celestial globes. One of the most amazing things about this building is the way it mixes styles like this. That everything works in harmony owes much to the skill of the architect – and, he would no doubt have said, to the fact that freemasonry and the arts of building have much in common anyway. And the winning blend of styles is something one can only truly appreciate by seeing the building’s interior. So I’m very grateful to Cheltenham’s masons for allowing us in, to marvel and admire.§

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† Various parallels have been noticed for these ceiling stars, from designs of the great Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel to the stars on the underside of the canopy (called ‘the heavens’) in the Shakespearean theatre.

§ A note on the photograph. One of my photographs, inevitably in the circumstances, shows other visitors to the building. If you recognise yourself here and would rather not have your likeness online, please contact me using the comment button below, and I’ll remove the picture.