Bishops Castle, Shropshire

Shop prop

This photograph was taken through a shop window in the small town of Bishops Castle in Shropshire. It’s a detail that opens up a whole aspect of shop design that most people don’t notice: how to hold up the building’s structure when almost the whole of the ground floor is glazed. Back in the Georgian period and before, shop windows were relatively small, and this wasn’t such a big problem. In the Regency period, windows got larger, and shops with rows of Classical columns became fashionable, creating a facade that looked a bit like an ancient Greek temple (there’s a detail of such a row of columns on a shop in Oxford here).

By the mid-Victorian period, however, shopkeepers were going for still larger windows, so that the shop front became made up of little but glass and glazing bars. And so it became the thing to prop up the front of the building with columns on the inside, just far enough from the glass to allow the window display to overlap them and make them disappear. Since the columns weren’t meant to be noticed, they are often quite plain, and these days end up being painted white, so that they blend quietly into any window display.

It’s the top of one these internal columns that is the subject of my photograph. But as you can see, the people who made this example weren’t content with a plain column. On the contrary, it’s very ornate, with a spiral band running up the body of the column and a decorative capital at the top. The capital isn’t from the standard range of Classical design (it’s not Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian) but is made up of a combination of standard motifs – scrolls, stylised leaves, a fleur de lys – combined together to created a design that a Victorian builder might simply have labelled ‘fancy’. ‘We could do a plain column, sir, but for a stylish shop like yours, I’d recommend the fancy.’ And with the client’s approval, the builder would order up a set of fancy columns from an iron foundry and the shopkeeper would be proud to have the latest thing in elegant shopfitting.

Such columns were not uncommon. I have seen similar, but not identical ones in the Kirkgate Market in Leeds, propping up the roofs of cast-iron stalls. Kirkgate Market was put up in 1901–1904, and I’d not be surprised if this column was of a similar date. It was still propping up the shop a couple of years ago, when I passed by and took my picture through the window, much to the surprise of the other pedestrians on the street, who, no doubt, had not seen this bit of architect’s or ironworker’s fancy.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Hurrah for Jesse Boot!

When searching among my Ludlow pictures a couple of days ago, I came across this one, the mark of one of the most familiar names on the UK High Street. Jesse Boot was an exemplary businessmen of the 19th century. In an age of quack medicine and dodgy ingredients, he sought to sell only pharmaceuticals that were made of pure ingredients and that had the effect that was claimed for them. In a period when it was common for bosses not to care about staff conditions and wellbeing, he made these things a priority. At a time when many were driven (as when are people not?) to accumulate a huge fortune and use it for selfish ends, he gave away vast sums on education and workers’ welfare. He worked hard, and drove himself so hard that he risked seriously damaging his health – but was saved by a forced holiday…on which he managed to meet Florence, the love of his life, who became equally influential in the business they built together.

Among the many things, it is said, that Jesse did was to design his company’s logo, the distinctive wordmark with ‘Boot’s’ in a flowing script, usually enclosed in an oval. That symbol, dating from 1883, is recognised all over the country. Like any good logo, it has been used everywhere, from invoices to shop signs, advertisements to paper bags. Here it is below the window of a Boot’s premises in Ludlow, made, for a change, in mosaic. This method was often used to attach the shop name indelibly to an entrance, on the ground in front of the door. Here it works just as well on the narrow strip (the stall riser, in archi-speak) beneath the window. Making a sign of such durable materials, and ones needing a craftsman and plenty of time to produce, is a testimony to the way companies like Boot’s took a long view of their business. A shop with a sign like this was not going to be here today but gone tomorrow. Nor was it gong to reinvent itself every five minutes, in the way businesses have wanted to do more recently. Boot’s developed, to be sure, but it was still Boot’s. And to millions of shoppers, sick and healthy alike, that spoke volumes.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Building out of the box

No apologies in these travel-restricted times for going back to my archive once again to look at another place I’ve posted about a few times before: Ludlow, a small town with enough food shops and decent restaurants to satisfy the hungriest of visitors, and about 500 listed buildings as well. This time it’s the Angel, a building on Broad Street (where virtually every building is listed and quite a few, like this one, are timber-framed magpie structures from the 17th century or thereabouts. This one is 17th century too. It is basically a wooden box-framed building and has plenty of carved and enriched bits of old timber in it to interest even the most casual building-fancier.

But in many ways the stand-out feature is among the later modifications. The facade boasts a number of 18th- and 19th-century sash windows that would make any purist of early timber-framed buildings wince. Strictly, a building like this should have casement windows, not sashes.* But if my head questioned their presence here, my heart was won over by the two first-floor oriel windows, semi-circular and resting on rather Georgian-looking moulded bases, topped with leaded roofs, and sporting sets of sash windows that are curved to fit the rounded shape.

Adding features like this must have taken a lot of effort and skill – attaching the weighty structure to the timber frame, forming the bases, and doing the joinery to make the curved sashes. The result was a front that looked perhaps a little incongruous, but spoke of the owner’s awareness of current fashion, and of a desire to make the interior lighter and perhaps more airy. I’ll settle for that.†

- - - - -

* Sash windows came in during the late-17th century, but this would be a precocious provincial building if it had them installed originally.

† The building has had various uses over the years. I think it is currently a restaurant, although an online search also reveals a hairdressers at the same address. One hopes that these businesses will survive the current troubled times.

Louth, Lincolnshire

Indoors, outdoors

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that one of the pleasures of blogging is receiving additional information about the buildings in my posts. Here is a case in point. When I posted a picture of these almshouses in Louth, back in 2014, I mentioned that a great aunt of mine had lived in one of them at the end of her life. So these are buildings I recall seeing as a small boy, before I knew anything about their architect – the prolific Fowler of Louth, lover of the Gothic style, restorer of churches, and builder of hospitals and schools as well as houses. In my post, I expressed the hope that these tiny Bede Houses (they’re apartments, really) had by now been modernised, as the accommodation they offered was very basic. 

Not so long ago, a reader found this post and left a comment, telling me that his aunt had been a warden for the Bede Houses in the late-1970s and that the accommodation was indeed modernised at around that time. A major part of this was the provision of modern bathrooms, in most cases added in an extension at the back of the building, and also by the removal of one dwelling to give room for some bathrooms that wouldn’t fit in the extension. It’s great to learn that the charm of the Victorian buildings has been preserved while also giving the occupants much better facilities. I have friends who are trustees of almshouses in another old building, and I know how difficult it can be to modernise while maintaining architectural integrity and character. 

Another thing I recall from visits to my great aunt long ago, was that in the summer, quite a bit of the life of the occupants was lived outdoors. There were benches in the courtyard, and plenty of space for those who wanted to get some fresh air and chat to their neighbours. It is good too, looking at my photographs, that there still seem to be pleasant flowerbeds as well as space for sitting and exercise. Here’s hoping that it won’t be too long before outdoor socialising will be possible once more.

Eye-opener

Readings and rereadings (3): John Betjeman, First and Last Loves

Since the lockdown began and I’ve been indulging myself by rereading some favourite books, I’ve been intending to reread something by John Betjeman. His work means a lot to me – especially his prose (I like some of the poems a lot too, but not all of them), particularly because he was one of the authors who first stimulated my interest in architecture. Years ago, the introduction to his Collins Guide to English Parish Churches helped me towards both an appreciation of church architecture and to a basic understanding of the history of church buildings – how the way they’re used has effected their fabric and furnishings. Later, his book on railway stations introduced me to another branch of architecture, and his essays on Victorian architects opened up still greater vistas. All of these subjects, and more, were also illuminated by Betjeman’s numerous television programmes, films that let him use his good nose for places – their character, landscape, history, and people.

A book that’s rich with the taste of all these preoccupations is First and Last Loves, a collection of essays that Betjeman had written in the 1930s and 1940s and gathered together in 1952. In many ways, it represents, in just 244 pages, the essence of Betjeman. Three essays on churches (Blisland in Cornwall, Mildenhall in Wiiltshire, and St Mark’s Swindon) are highly evocative, describing the setting, history, and furnishings of these churches as well as their architecture. There are also pieces that do something similar for Victorian architecture, nonconformist chapels, and London railway stations. When he’s writing about railway architecture, for example, we learn a lot about the stations’ histories, but Betjeman also conjures up a picture of the kind of people that typically use each one – from the army men and high-ranking civil servants travelling from Waterloo to the lower ranks of the civil service on the Metropolitan line to Rickmansworth or Northwood.

An old favourite of mine is the piece called ‘Antiquarian Prejudice’, in which the author makes fun of the blinkered views of antiquarians who will only take something seriously if it’s old, and take many old things (such as aumbries and piscinas in churches) much too seriously. Some of this is written with great wit.* But there’s also a seriousness behind it – if we don’t use our eyes and realise the aesthetic value of things, they’ll be gone, and all we’ll have will be supercinemas, dull office blocks, concrete lampposts, and telegraph wires – and everywhere will look the same as everywhere else.† Already, he notes in another piece, we’re losing piers, bandstands, music halls, and other undervalued bits of popular architecture so that only funfairs remain of this kind of thing.

Best of all are the essays that describe favourite places. These places can be large towns, such as Cheltenham or Aberdeen, or smaller settlements, especially but not only seaside ones: Lyndhurst or Port Isaac, Sidmouth or Highworth. These pieces are full of classic Betjeman perceptions: the sadness of closed amusement parks out of season; the manifold scents of the New Forest (you can smell the place before you can see it); the ‘tangible’ climate of Sidmouth and its glorious flowers; the colours of Cornish slate; the vital importance of exploring every alley in Highworth (and everywhere else). This stuff is full of pure joy, and packed with personal reminiscence: of seeing St Endellion’s church and realising it looks like a crouched hare; of the different routes into Padstow; of unrequited love in Weymouth; and of New Forest ponies invading the quiet streets of Lyndhurst (one wonders whether they are back there again now).

This is not nostalgia, even if it’s sometimes expressed with a certain wistfulness. Betjeman was aware, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, of a sense of urgency: he had to write about these things, now, because tomorrow might be too late: developers with wrecking balls might be moving in. To say that he dislikes planners with no sense of place, or people who knock down good historic buildings for no reason except to make money, or antiquarians who won’t look, is an understatement. He loathes them, exuding a quality that I think of as ‘regulated hatred’.¶ Hatred of this kind is sometimes necessary. But it is nothing without its obverse quality, love, and when Betjeman is using his own eyes and writing about places he loves – about Port Isaac or Highworth, say, he’s revelatory, and makes one want to get out and open one’s own eyes. One day, soon, I hope.

- - - - -

* Betjeman’s talk of blinkered professor-doctors has been taken as a swipe at his friend and occasional rival, Nikolaus Pevsner. There is something in that, but I think Betjeman might also be thinking of the dons who sent him down from Oxford without a degree.

† There are odd and haunting pre-echoes of Ian Nairn here.

¶ I have appropriated this term from the literary critic D. W. Harding, who used it in an article called ‘Regulated Hatred: an Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’. 

Balham Hill, London

Light exercise

Sometimes I deliberately get off at the wrong tube station. But it’s not what you think. I’m neither covering up my geographical incompetence with the cloak of deliberation, nor am I on a ruthless quest for exercise. I get off and walk because you never know what you might see on the way. So one fine day, en route to visit friends who live near Balham underground station, I get off at Clapham South instead, and schlep my bag southwards, along Balham Hill.

I’ve not gone far before this hoves into view. ‘Of course,’ I think. ‘I’ve seen this in books. Books about cinema architecture.’ It’s the former Balham Odeon,* was designed by the Odeon’s house architect, George Coles, and opened in 1938 with the film Blondes for Danger. If the title of that film is very much of its time, so is the architecture of the cinema: large and tiled, with curved corners and a rather chunky tower. It’s Art Deco, but not the highly ornate Deco of some examples, certainly not with any hint of the historicising decoration of cinemas like the one in Essex Road or the extraordinary interior of the Granada, Tooting, which was the nearest big cinema to this one. The Balham Odeon is just huge, 1930s-modern, and rather lumpish.§

But to think of it simply as a lump is to miss its point. It was designed to be seen at its best at night, when film-goers would turn up to be greeted by bands of neon stretching horizontally along the facade and vertically up the tower. The name ODEON was lit up in neon too and the lights make the building look much less lumpen than it seems by day. Its hilly location and illuminated tower meant that it could be seen for miles too – an effective if brazen advertisement for the cinematic joys within.† There are, I know, people who will think that its night-time illumination is insufficient excuse for the daytime appearance of this building. I have a certain sympathy for this opinion, but I offer the after-dark view as a reminder that things are not always, 24/7, what they seem. And that there is more than one way to look at a building.

Balham Odeon at night. Photograph © English Heritage

- - - - -

* The name of Oscar Deutsch’s company, Odeon, derives from an ancient Greek word for theatre. It was only after the company had adopted it that a clever member of the firm’s publicity department realised that its letters could provide the initials of a catchy slogan: Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.

§ And encumbered with telecommunications equipment. Only connect.

† There are no longer neon lights and the building’s front of house, in normal times, is given over to the useful business of selling wine; there are apartments to the rear.

Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

Aide memoire

Going through my photographs to pull out some to share, I came across the first digital photograph I took, or at any rate the first I thought at all fit to preserve. As you will see straight away, it’s far from an ideal picture, an ‘over the wall’ job, showing what can be seen of a building on private land from a public road. The building in question is the orangery at Frampton Court, Gloucestershire, and when I took the picture it was to jog my memory to go back on one of the occasions when the grounds of Frampton Court are open and it’s possible to see the this building – and the impressive architecture of the main house – clearly. Years later, I’ve still not made this visit, so the image above remains my only photograph of the orangery. Carpe diem.

Over the wall we see the building from the side, almost end-on but at a slight angle. Viewed from the front, it’s symmetrical and consists of a pair of matching octagons with ogee windows all round, joined in the middle and complemented by a central octagonal turret. In my picture the two matching octagons and turret can be seen, the turret topped by a tiny cupola. Pinnacles and crenellations crown the skyline, ogee-topped windows with glazing in a pattern of hexagons and diamonds dominate the walls. Indeed the walls, made of very high quality ashlar, are minimal, so many and so large are the windows. The stonework is finely detailed, with lovely curvy hoodmoulds. If you click on the picture, it might just be possible to make out tripartite ‘skirts’ beneath the window sills, carved in very shallow relief.

Reference books tell us that this building’s exquisite Gothick* architecture dates from the late 1740s and may be the work of William Halfpenny, who drew heavily on drawings in Gothic Architecture Improved (1747) by Batty Langley.§ This filigree architecture is in marked contrast to the Baroque and Palladian cocktail of the main house. It must make a wonderful garden feature – and is likewise enchanting if tantalizing when viewed, as in my photograph, over the garden wall. A future visit will be something to look forward to…

- - - - -

* I use the 18th-century faux-archaic spelling for this fanciful 18th-century version of Gothic architecture.

§ Halfpenny was probably based mainly in Richmond, Surrey, or London, but spent some time in Bristol. He was both an architect and the author of numerous architectural pattern books that showed a strong interest in the Gothick style as well as in Chinoiserie. William Halfpenny, Batty Langley: mid-18th century building could be both architecturally and onomastically lively!