Wells, Somerset

Usually when I’m writing posts for this blog, I like to give you a bit of historical information – a date, an architect’s name, a few details that fill in the background. Sometimes my search for such enlightenment draws a blank, but mysteries can be interesting to share.

Take this sign in Wells. It tells us quite a lot, naming two members of the same family, a male mason and a female dealer in tea, coffee, tobacco, pepper, and snuff. There’s no date, but the style of the lettering is similar to signs I’ve seen from the late-17th and early-18th centuries. Snuff, introduced to England in 1660, became popular here in the 18th century, by which time tea-drinking was also well established. So my guess would be that this is an 18th-century sign.

Presumably the symbol after Richard’s name is his mason’s mark. I associate masons’ marks with the Middle Ages, but they were certainly used in later centuries too.

There is no indication either of the relationship between Sarah and Richard. Sister and brother? Widowed mother and son, perhaps? Maybe someone out there knows and would like to share their knowledge. Meanwhile hats off to whoever it was who preserved this inscription, an enduring trace of two forgotten lives.

Wells, Somerset

Wells Cathedral was begun towards the end of the 12th century and its builders, as was usual in the Middle Ages, began at the east end with the choir and then worked their way westwards. By the 1220s they had got to the west front, one of the most striking fronts of any cathedral, consisting of a vast stone screen of niches, in which were set hundreds of statues of saints, bishops, Biblical figures, and others.

In most English churches the medieval sculptures were destroyed during the period of puritanical iconoclasm in the 17th century. But for some reason many of those at Wells were spared, and more than 300 remain, although in almost 800 years the elements have eroded some of them badly. What is more this screen of sculptures, which covers the entire western wall of the cathedral, also extends around on either side to cover part of the north and south walls. The whole makes up England’s greatest collection of statuary from the early Gothic phase of the 13th century.

Most visitors, deterred by eye strain, vertigo, or impatience to get inside the cathedral, don’t spend very long looking at each statue, especially those around the sides. So here are a pair of knights that stand high up on the north side. One has his head covered in a kind of proto-balaclava helmet of mail. His neighbour wears on his head a great helm with eye slits and breathing holes.

Their heads fit neatly into their intricate trefoil-headed niches, which are beautifully carved even though unregarded except by those with enthusiasm for such things, preferably backed up with binoculars or a telephoto lens. A bird's-eye view would be best, though birds are clearly apt to look at a Gothic niche in terms of its suitability for a nesting site.Thanks to Zoë Brooks, her sharp eyes, and her zoom lens, for the pictures.

Hastings, East Sussex

The orthodox story goes something like this. Technologies such as the production of cheap steel and the first safety elevators (pioneered by Elisha Graves Otis in 1852), combined with the effects of the devastating city fire in Chicago in 1871, stimulated the demand for tall buildings that were quick to build. The skyscraper was born, and this kind of tall, functional, frame-structured office building now dominates land-strapped cities everywhere.

But here’s a different story. In 1834 the first groynes were built on the coast at Hastings, bringing about a movement of shingle that created a small new beach near the Old Town. Fishermen who needed somewhere to store their nets colonized this beach, but their numbers were so great and the area of shingle so small that they each had an area only eight feet or so square to build on. Their solution was to build upwards, using a wooden framework structure to create these netshops, tall and black and functional. They have been a unique part of the waterfront at Hastings ever since.

So remember how elevator-inventor Otis, steel man Bessemer, and Chicago architects like William Le Baron Jenney invented the tall office building. But remember also how the fishermen of Hastings invented their own, very British, kind of skyscraper, as right for the job as the Empire State or the Seagram Building are for theirs – and rather better than Canary Wharf.

With thanks to Marcus Weeks and Ann Kramer for reintroducing me to the netshops and to their marvellous town.

Geoffrey Fletcher

THANK YOU (2)
A recent post on I Like alerted me to the documentary film The London Nobody Knows, in which James Mason guides us through some of the less regarded parts of 1960s London – abandoned theatres, street markets, pubs, vacant lots, public toilets (‘All men are equal in the eyes of a lavatory attendant’), Salvation Army hostels, and, finally, the dark corners occupied by the capital’s meths-drinking rough sleepers. It’s an evocative and moving film, which takes us on a journey, not just a geographical journey across London but also a journey from a warm nostalgia for old music halls to a hard-hitting account of life ‘down among the meths men’.Down Among The Meths Men is the title of one of the books by the writer and illustrator Geoffrey Fletcher on which the film is based. Geoffrey Fletcher (1923–2004) drew prolifically, training at the Slade and winning a scholarship of the British School in Rome. He illustrated many books written by other writers, wrote and illustrated a column in the Daily Telegraph through the 1960s and beyond, and gathered many of his drawings and descriptions into a series of books about neglected aspects of the capital. Books such as The London Nobody Knows, London’s River, Pearly Kingdom, London Overlooked and, most harrowingly, Down Among The Meths Men provide a unique view of bits of London – pubs, shops, markets, wharves, churchyards, catacombs – many of which are no longer there.

These books are all illustrated with Fletcher’s drawings, which look like rapid sketches done on the spot, but which manage to carry in their calligraphic scribbles and high-speed shading the essence of the people and places they portray. The books that contain these drawings form an absorbing guide to what has gone from the capital over the last 40 years. More than this, they are an exercise in how to see, in grubbing around in corners, in looking up, in exploring alleys, in gaining the confidence of knowledgeable locals, in walking, looking, and thinking at the same time.
What Fletcher thought about and drew included the small things – beer pumps, street lights, urinals, railings, gravestones - as well as the grand ones. He celebrated alleys and back streets and unfashionable areas of London. He saw that neglected or overlooked things are important, that buildings are interesting because of the people who built them and use them, and that the more you look the more you see. For continual revelations about London, thank you Geoffrey Fletcher.

Dungeness, Kent

Around 6,000 acres of shingle, drifts of gorse, sea kale, dock, and yellow horned poppy, scatterings of tin and wooden huts and dwellings (some made out of old railway carriages), two lighthouses, and a pair of nuclear power stations – this is the peculiar mix that is Dungeness, a triangle of windswept land sticking out into the English Channel, east of Rye. Fishing – and, since 1965, fission – have been its industries, and its buildings have long seemed as plain and provisional as the shifting shingle.

In 1986 the film-maker Derek Jarman came to Dungeness and bought Prospect Cottage. He set about making a garden amongst the pebbles, an assemblage of plants, stones, driftwood, scrap iron, and other evocative odds and ends that seem very much at one with the setting. 22 years on, the garden is thriving and well cared-for by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, who still lives here. It’s a place of pilgrimage for those who love Jarman’s films, who remember his bravery during his long final illness, or who simply like remarkable gardens. The house itself is a typical weather-boarded Dungeness bungalow and is around 100 years old. Not everyone notices the lines from ‘The Sunne Rising’, by the great 17th-century poet John Donne, set in wooden letters on an end wall of the house: ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windows and through curtaines call on us?’ In the poem, Donne chides the sun for interrupting his time with his loved one, and jokes with typical audacity that his bed and its two occupants make up the entire cosmos anyway. It’s a resonant choice for Jarman, an artist who lived for the light that exposes films, who must have relished Dungeness’s big horizons and vast skies, and who, faced with the prospect of losing his sight, was able to envision a new set of opportunities for a blind film-maker. How typical too that he should have recognized the special character of this neglected corner of England.

Petworth, Sussex

Petworth is a fascinating West Sussex town, a tight knot of narrow streets and tile-hung buildings set around a market place, hard by the entrance to the local mansion, Petworth House. The solid Classical Town Hall was one of the gifts of the house’s owner, the third Earl of Egremont, to the town. It was built in 1793 and isn’t especially remarkable until you come across this extraordinary bust in its oval niche on the North side.

The bust is a bit of a mystery. It depicts King William III and, from its subject and style, must date from much earlier than the Town Hall itself. The diaphanous cloth, flowing wig, and sideways turn of the head mark this sculpture as baroque, the rich, ornate, and decorative artistic style in vogue during William’s reign (1689–1702). Look at that drapery – it’s stone spun almost as fine as silk and seems to have very little means of support. The artist who carved this was a virtuoso with the chisel.

No one knows who made this bust of England’s Dutch king but its preservation in the town probably owes something to Egremont, who was famous for many things, including his many mistresses (he was known as ‘my lord seraglio’), his agricultural innovations, his philanthropy, and, above all, for his large art collection and patronage of many artists. British art owes Egremont a lot, most notably for supporting the painter Turner. The survival of this arresting piece of public art may well be something else to thank him for.

Paddington Street, London

This is a former Church Institute and Club just off Marylebone High Street. The inscription above the entrance is a bit ambiguous – did the building accommodate the Church of the Good Shepherd as well as the club? The Good Shepherd himself is certainly there above the door.

The inscription gives the building’s date as 1898. and the slightly mixed-up Tudorish style is typical of the time. On either side of the panel containing the inscription are little attached columns with Ionic capitals and restless shafts that change width every few inches (if you click on the picture you can see these these more clearly). This is the kind of bizarre detail the Tudors loved (before English architecture became more chastely Classical under the influence of Palladianism) and that the late-Victorians loved to imitate. The Victorian builders added their own touches too, varying the glowing red brick with bands of paler terracotta.

But for all the weirdness of the detailing, buildings like this are eminently practical. Big windows and generous interior spaces mean a structure like this is unlikely to be short of users, ensuring its survival in all its red and stripy glory.