Tamworth, Staffordshire

Uncommon markets (1)

I’ve posted at least once before about my liking for traditional English town halls – the kind that form a central landmark in a town, often with a space for a market beneath and a wooden turret or cupola on top. This is one of my favourites, and it provides a stunning centrepiece to the town of Tamworth. I admire its chequered brickwork, its simple Tuscan arches under which the market was once held, and the collection of engaging details on this end wall. I suppose if I were being critical I’d say that the generous round-headed windows and the triangular pediment with its enormous dentils are enough – the design doesn’t exactly need all the bits in the middle – the clock (a later addition), the plaque, the heraldry. But, cluttered as they are, they add to the charm of this building and to the information it imparts.

The plaque, for example, tells us that the town hall was built by Thomas Guy, no less, the founder of Guy’s Hospital in London. Guy, whose mother came from Tamworth, made his money as a publisher and bookseller in London. He made some generous gifts – to St Thomas’s Hospital, to Guy’s itself, and to Tamworth, where he built almshouses as well as the town hall. The coat of arms relates to Guy too, and also appears on Guy’s hospital in London.

In spite of his benefactions, Guy had a reputation for being mean. Perhaps that’s partly to do with his reaction in 1708, when he was unseated as Tamworth’s MP. In response he excluded Tamworth residents from his almshouses, restricting them to people from the nearby area and to his own relations. But at least by then the people of Tamworth had their town hall. He couldn’t take that away from them.

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Bazza, at the blog To Discover Ice, has a post about the Guildhall at Thaxted, which is the timber-framed 16th-century grandparent, as it were, of the Tamworth town hall and other buildings of its ilk.

Inglesham, Wiltshire

More layers

I recently did a couple of posts called ‘Layers of history’ about places constructed on prehistoric sites. As more than one reader said, this whole blog is really about layers of history – and they could have gone further and said that virtually every building that’s not spick and span new is an example of historical layering, so great is our passion for altering and adapting buildings, furnishing them and leaving our stamp on them. The tiny church at Inglesham in Wiltshire is one of the most layered of them all. A largely 13th-century structure, based probably on a late-Saxon original, it contains a Saxon carving of the Madonna and Child, windows from the 14th and 15th centuries, timber screens of the 15th and 16th centuries, 17th-century pews and pulpit, and a range of wall paintings representing every century from the 13th to the 19th.

Nave and aisle: 13th-century pier, 15th-century screen, Jacobean pews

But that prosaic list tells not half the story. This isolated church – it has just a couple of houses for company down a lane that leads nowhere else – has an atmosphere of quiet and calm like few others, testimony to the care that has been lavished on its fragile fabric and furnishings, especially over the last century or so. That it has survived is largely due to William Morris, who lived at Kelmscott not far away, loved this place, and knew the Victorian rector, Oswald Birchall. Birchall wrote to Morris saying that he had no money to carry out the necessary repairs to the church, and neither had the parishioners. Morris put Birchall in touch with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, who both supervised the restoration in the 1880s and 1890s and, in an unusual move, also raised money for it. Morris too contributed money, anonymously, to keep the work going. And so the repairs were carried out with the greatest care and respect for the building, under SPAB principles – nothing old was destroyed if it could be repaired, new work was not disguised, new additions were made to fit the old fabric (not the other way round), and so on.

As a result of Morris’s commitment, this wonderful church survives, with both its historical layers and its ancient peace. On my last visit to Inglesham I was enjoying the building in solitude when the door opened and a party of half a dozen visitors came in. Frankly, my heart sank. No more contemplative silence, I thought. How wrong could I be? Each of the visitors approached the chancel, bowed towards the altar, and made the sign of the cross, before inspecting the building in awed reverence. After a while, one of them came up to me. ‘They are from Warsaw,’ he explained, in good but accented English. ‘They have been to the Tower of London and Windsor, so I had to bring them here. To show them this unbroken link with the Middle Ages, even with the Saxons.’ An unbroken link with the layers of history. And one of the best. How true.

Chancel: Fragment of 13th-century reredos, painting of various dates

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Note A commenter has pointed out that conservation work is now (20 August 2010) underway on some of the wall paintings at Inglesham. This means that there is a lot of scaffolding in the church and the opening times are restricted.

This church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, which looks after churches of historical and architectural interest that are no longer needed for worship. They deserve our support.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Line and light

One sunny afternoon in 1904 the artist F L Griggs came to the small town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, paused in the main street, and began to draw. Griggs, who had settled in Chipping Camden the previous year, was getting to know the Cotswolds well because he was doing the illustrations for the book Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds, one of a series on British counties and regions. The book was to be published by Macmillan in time for Christmas 1905. With his newly acquired local knowledge, Griggs no doubt came prepared for the strong shadow cast across this street, which runs basically east-west, although with such a concatenation of curves that its limestone houses, bonded together in a continuous terrace running towards the 15th-century church, are all higgledy-piggledy.

At this stage in his career as an illustrator, Griggs used ink, and he employed thousands of fine lines to depict the play of shadow on cobbles and limestone, and a much more sparing, almost hesitant line for the houses and church tower bathed in sunshine, so that they seem to shimmer in the light. Using this painstaking way of working, Griggs could sometimes delineate buildings with startling precision – in some of his other drawings, virtually every stone is outlined, every warp in the timbers of a weatherboarded barn. This illustration is slightly looser but still meticulous and wonderfully conveys a sense of place – and as it virtually depicts the view from my front door, I can say this with confidence. This remarkable collection of houses – of various dates between the 16th and 20th centuries, and many containing within them fragments of still older buildings – not to mention the play of sun and shadow, have been caught well.

But Griggs’s way of working also caused him problems. He drew very slowly, and his publishers got frustrated, eventually bringing out the book with fewer illustrations than planned, and reducing the artist’s fee by ten per cent. So for future books in the Highways and Byways series, Griggs used pencil, in which he could work faster in a slightly looser, though still detailed, style. He was a good draftsman with the pencil, but something was lost, and I’m pleased that when he came to this street in Winchcombe – a street that has changed little since 1904 apart from the replacement of cobbles with asphalt and the arrival of a large number of cars – he was still using his painstaking pen.

Green Street, London

An entrancing entrance

The late-19th century saw a lot of building activity in the Grosvenor Estate, that chunk of Mayfair owned by the Duke of Westminster. Green Street was one place where a number of new houses were built. The low numbers on the northern side of the street consists mainly of a run of brick houses that were speculatively built, but this particular house was a bespoke design. It was originally for the Hon St John Brodrick, but according to the Survey of London, Brodrick decided he couldn’t afford the house, so it passed to other owners who kept Brodrick’s choice of architects, Balfour and Turner.

Eustace Balfour and Thackeray Turner were from very different backgrounds. Balfour was Scottish and was the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated nephew of the former Prime Minister the Marquis of Salisbury and brother to a future PM, A J Balfour. As such he could talk to the aristocratic owners of the Grosvenor Estate, for whom his firm worked as surveyors, or almost equal social terms. Turner was a grammar-school boy from Wiltshire with a passion for old churches; he was a friend of Arts and Crafts luminary W J Lethaby. In spite of their different backgrounds, Balfour and Turner seem to have got on, going into partnership in the early 1880s and continuing until Balfour’s death in 1911. They shared an interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, a commitment to the work of the SPAB, and an ability to create work with considerable visual flair. They were kept busy in such Mayfair streets as Brook Street, Grosvenor Street, Green Street, and Balfour Street.

This house stands out both for its overall design, with its stone oriels, and the fine details. Loveliest of these details is the carving by the door, which Pevsner describes as a tree of life. It is probably by Laurence Turner, the sculptor brother of Thackeray Turner. It’s a wonderful urban alternative to the rural fashion for roses around the door.

St Pancras, London

Why Sir John hangs on to his hat

This blog is now three years old this month, so bear with me while I reflect about how I blog, and why. A regular reader, noticing that most of my photographs are of exteriors, recently asked me how often I manage to look inside the buildings I post about. The answer is sometimes, but not that often, and the reason lies in how I blog.

I had to decide at the beginning how I’d approach this blog. It would be possible to do lots of research, contact building owners in advance, and hope some would oblige with guided tours, information, and, in an ideal world, tea on the lawn. But, interesting and nutritious as all this would be, it would also take a lot of time, and, like most people, I have many calls on my time. So I decided on a different approach. I travel around – on business, for pleasure, or on the lookout for interesting buildings. When a building, often one I didn’t know about before, catches my eye, I take photographs of it, do some research, and see where this leads. If it turns out to be interesting, I write a post. So, in general, I look from the outside, though I take advantage of buildings that are open anyway, like many of England’s parish churches, and step inside.

This way of working reflects my interests, which are as much to do with the history, quality, and atmosphere of place, with townscape, with local distinctiveness, and so on, as with architecture. And the buildings turned up by my serendipitous methods reflect my interests too, which extend to barns and breweries as well as castles and cathedrals. When I wrote The English Buildings Book I described these preoccupations by referring to the great Nikolaus Pevsner. At the beginning of his book An Outline of European Architecture, Pevsner defines his subject by example: ‘A bicycle shed is a building,’ he says. ‘Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.’ So in calling our book The English Buildings Book, Peter Ashley and I were saying that we wanted to include all types and conditions of buildings – and both Lincoln Cathedral and a bicycle shed make their appearance in its pages. The English Buildings blog works along similar lines.

There’s another consequence of working in this way that has, I’d argue, wider significance – that one can find out a lot about buildings without privileged access, and that this way of looking at buildings is open to anyone who can use their eyes. Sir John Betjeman knew this. When extolling the pleasures of ‘church crawling’ he insisted that you need only two things: a map (in England it has to be an Ordnance Survey map) and ‘an eye’. Keep looking, look around you, above all look up, and you will be rewarded – and that is surely why Sir John is looking up, a practised hand keeping a firm grip on his headgear as he does so, in the statue by Martin Jennings at St Pancras Station.

A lifetime of looking at buildings and writing about them made Betjeman very well informed, of course. But he insisted that a knowledge of architectural styles was less important than observation. The eye comes first, and all of us who have eyes to see can use them in the way Betjeman intended. Doing so makes every journey one of fascination and I hope some of the fascination comes through in this blog.

Norwich

Colour and light

Here’s a rare survival. Victorian shop windows could be a riot of colour and lettering, and examples like Smith’s umbrella shop in London, subject of an earlier post, hold the attention of anyone interested in the history of lettering or retailing. This Norwich shop is different. Instead of the lettering, what remains to catch our eye here is some of the old stained glass. Victorian shop designers were aware that there was a ‘dead’ area of the window at the top. Goods displayed too high would not be noticed, so how did one use this upper area of the window? One solution was to divide it off with a horizontal glazing bar (called a transom) and glaze the upper section (known as the transom light) with stained glass. So it could glitter with colour, and catch the eye in a different way.

The Victorians used stained glass a lot – not just in churches, where we’re used to seeing it, but also in domestic front doors, in schools, and in shop windows, where it must have glowed beautifully at night. Much of this glass has vanished as features have been replaced and facades made over. What remains might not be the best of the Victorian glazier’s art (that usually was reserved for churches) it’s good to see this example still pleasing the eye. Pleasing it rather more, perhaps, than the rather routine display of stickers and notices in the main part of the window.

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Apologies to readers who saw a discarded version of an older post, which was here, briefly, in error. Those wishing to read this post, about a house in Stratford, can find it here.

Charterhouse Street, London

Fox and anchor and peacock and…

Here is one other example of the buildings adorned with interesting lettering seen on the Routemaster bus tour mentioned in the previous post. This is the Fox and Anchor pub near Smithfield Market, a façade in which architecture, decoration, and lettering are united to create one of the most remarkable examples of London Art Nouveau. The unity comes largely from the use of Doulton tiles specially designed by W J Neatby.

William James Neatby is famous for his work for Doulton’s architectural ceramics department in the late-Victorian period. His best known decorative schemes were done in the 1890s and the first few years of the 20th century. Stylized foliage, elegant figures, and curvaceous lettering flow around his buildings in a framework of ceramic mouldings and shafts. At their best, they unite architecture and decoration in an exciting and uplifting way.

Neatby’s career-path was interesting and unusual. From age 15, he trained as an architect, working as an articled pupil in a practice in Yorkshire before starting as an architect in and around Whitby. When he was 23 he changed direction, going to work for Burmantoft’s in Leeds as a designer of ceramic tiles and after six years there he went in 1890 to Doulton’s in Lambeth as their head of architectural ceramics. At both Burmantoft’s and Doulton’s Neatby delved deeply into the art and craft of ceramics, developing new processes and creating stunning designs. He created decorative schemes for many prominent buildings – his interiors include the Meat Hall in Harrods and the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, while the Everard’s factory in Bristol and the Royal Arcade, Norwich, are among his best exterior schemes.

Even a small building like the Fox and Anchor could benefit from the full Neatby treatment. The fox and anchor of the pub’s name are painted on to the tiles in the gable. Further down there are grotesques like the gargoyles of Notre Dame, a beautiful frieze of peacocks, and ornate Art Nouveau lettering. Grinning heads peep out from keystones above windows. The narrow interior also looks atmospheric and full of period details. But the lettering tour was moving swiftly on to the joys of Edmund Martin, tripe dressers, whose stylish 1930s lettering was partly hidden behind a builder’s hoarding, so I did not have time to sample the interior or its wares. I must return.


Fox & Anchor, detail showing lettering, peacock, and grotesque