Great Witley, Worcestershire

I enjoy it when my explorations of buildings coincide with things I’m doing in other parts of my life. At the moment, I’m writing a book about mythology, so I was pleased to visit Witley Court in Worcestershire, with its fountain based on the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda.

Perseus has recently killed the Gorgon Medusa, and is flying through the sky on the winged horse Pegasus when he sees Andromeda chained to a rock. She’s been left there because her mother, Cassiopeia, has insulted some sea nymphs by saying that she, Cassiopeia, is more beautiful than them. Poseidon, god of the sea, is angered by this insult, so sends a sea monster to ravage the coast of Ethiopia, where Cassiopiea lives, and the beast will only be satisfied with the flesh of Andromeda. In the fountain sculpture, Perseus is about to dispatch the monster, before carrying off Andromeda and marrying her.

Witley Court itself is a fascinating building, now an evocative ruin. It began as a Jacobean country house, but was massively extended in both the Regency and Victorian periods to become one of the largest houses in the country. It was the famous scene of lavish house parties hosted by the owners, the Earl of Dudley, until the house was gutted in a fire in 1937. The ruin has now been stabilized and, courtesy of English Heritage, one can walk through the empty shells of rooms open to the skies, admiring fragments of wall decoration (a lot of it in carton pierre, which is rather like papier mâché) and meditating on charred timbers and lost glory.

Uffington, Oxfordshire*

Chalk, pale and friable, seems an unlikely building material, but it’s the local stone on the Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset Downs, on the Chilterns, on the North and South Downs, in parts of Cambridgeshire, and on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. In many of these areas you can find traditional buildings constructed of blocks of chalk. Builders liked this material because it is easy to shape, but they had to use it wisely if it was to last.

The village of Uffington is famous for the chalk figure of a horse, cut into the turf of the nearby hillside and best viewed from the air. The place has a number of old chalk buildings too, notably this schoolhouse, which dates form the Jacobean period as wears its 400 years well. Like many chalk buildings it stands on a base of stronger stone. It’s interesting to contrast the quality of the masonry of the upper and lower portions of the building. The tougher stone is rougher of surface and laid in irregular, rubble-like pieces. The chalk has been cut into larger blocks laid in regular courses, neatly jointed. This soft stone was much easier to cut finely and joint precisely, and masons no doubt liked the neat finish they could achieve with it.

A cottage in the same village shows the traditional roof for a chalk building – thick thatch with a generous overhang. The stone base and thatch covering give the house, in the old phrase, ‘a good hat and a good pair of shoes’, so relatively little rain gets to the chalk in between. Well constructed and cared for, this house has lasted for centuries in spite of the soft and yielding material of its walls.

*Postscript: To me, Uffington is still in Berkshire, and it is to be found in the Berkshire volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England series, which still adheres to the old county boundaries, praise be.

The Map That Came to Life

On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child. Written by H. J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted. It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them. Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way. The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us.

In some ways the world of The Map That Came to Life does not exist today. These two children set off on a walk across unfamiliar country with only their map for guidance. They talk to strangers – who give them fascinating nuggets of local information rather than luring them into dark corners. Their dog spends most of its time off its lead, rivers and lakes hold no terrors for them, and, of course, this being 1948, they are not much troubled by traffic.

It’s different in other ways too. The villages through which they pass are well provided with the kind of facilities – shops, pubs, Post Offices, a forge – that we mourn the passing of today. Interesting antiquities, such as a ruined abbey and a castle, abound, giving me an excuse for including the book in a blog about English Buildings. If truth be told, all these ancient and modern details are probably rather thick on the ground even for 1948, because their purpose after all is to show us as many map symbols coming to life as can be reasonably encompassed in 32 pages.And not just the symbols, but what’s behind them. Joanna and John learn about ruined buildings, tumuli, tithe barns, and ancient churches. They listen to bird song and discover what kinds of trees grow beside rivers. They find out the relationship between contours and man-made features like railway lines and viaducts. And by helping to alert some farm workers to a fire in a wood, they learn about one potential danger in the countryside.

Sadly, this book would not be published today. For one thing, it’s very specifically British in its content, and publishers nowadays cry out for books that will work in an international market. For another, it’s not an outwardly exciting book – its information about the past contains no pillaging Vikings, no bombs, none of the opportunistic stink and goo of ‘Horrible History’. Yet in its quiet way it conveys a different kind of excitement – the excitement of finding things out, of being inquisitive about the environment, of thinking about what you see. And that is one of the best kinds of excitement there is.

Brockhampton-by-Ross, Herefordshire

Hidden among the green hills and evergreens of rural Herefordshire is All Saints, Brockhampton, the perfect Arts and Crafts church, built in the first years of the 20th century to the designs of W. R. Lethaby, the architect about whom I enthused in the previous post. Although it’s constructed mainly of local sandstone and looks perfectly at home in its quiet corner of Herefordshire, this church is quite unlike anything else you’ll find locally – or anywhere else.

It’s outstanding in several ways – the resourceful use of materials (timber and thatch as well as stone), the pleasing balance of masses (the two towers, the porch and transept), the careful fit of building and site. More than this, there’s an artful combination of simplicity (the pointed entrance arch, the rectangular window openings on either side of it, the plain thatch of the nave roof) with decoration (the more ornate windows of the tower, transept and chancel, and the decorated chancel thatch). The decoration, in other words, emphasizes the eastern end of the church, the most sacred space where the high altar is placed. Inside, once we’ve got over the pleasant surprise of the sweeping vault (concrete with stone ribs), there’s a similar effect. Looking down the simple nave, one sees the choir beyond, flooded with light from the tower windows above, and beyond it the chancel. This is a holy of holies, but it’s made special not by being screened off from the rest of the building, as a medieval church would have been, but by being beautifully furnished with tapestries, altar hangings, and carvings. It’s lit by a lovely three-light window with a charming Star-of-David-shaped opening above.

The story of the Arts and Crafts movement is a two-fold one. On the one hand there’s the traditionalism – the respect for craftsmanship, the interest in ancient forms, the love of the imagery of nature. On the other hand, there’s the sense in which Lethaby and his peers were pioneering modern design, with bold forms like this church’s vault, and touches like the light fittings that hang from the ceiling. These two sides of the Arts and Crafts movement sometimes seem at odds, but at Brockhampton they fit beautifully together to make a building that’s both fascinating and moving.Detail, font, Brockhampton

Colmore Row, Birmingham

William Richard Lethaby is one of my architectural heroes. Born in Devon in 1857 he served his apprenticeship locally before working for Richard Norman Shaw, one of the most versatile and influential late-Victorian architects. Through Shaw, he met William Morris and joined Morris’s circle, becoming an early member of the SPAB. He was committed to craftsmanship, the tactful treatment of old buildings, and to old-fashioned quality – what he called ‘Good honest building’. As a result he had a significant influence on the Arts and Crafts movement.

He had another side, yearning for a quality of efficiency in building that has led some to see him as a precursor of Le Corbusier and the modernists. ‘A house should be as efficient as a bicycle,’ he said. These two sides of Lethaby come together in interesting ways. His stunning church at Brockhampton-by-Ross, Herefordshire (subject of a post on this blog soon, I hope) has stone walls, thatched roofs – and a concrete vault. And the building illustrated here, one of Birmingham’s finest, is a happy marriage of craftsmanlike detail and rather modern lines. It was built as the offices of the Eagle Insurance Company, though nowadays, in keeping with these sybaritic times, it’s a coffee house. I love the big window, making a bold statement on Colmore Row, and the decorated parapet, which still has its emblematic eagle. The door on the left is simply stunning, a piece of beaten metalwork under a curving stone canopy that must have given Lethaby particular pleasure.
So why isn’t England full of landmark buildings by this fine architect? The rigours of life on site don’t seem to have suited Lethaby that well. Bad experiences managing the construction of the church at Brockhampton caused him major problems – he acted as master builder as well as architect and when things did not go smoothly Lethaby suffered both financial loss and severe mental strain. It was his last building.

But Lethaby had at least three other creative lives. At Westminster Abbey, where he was surveyor to the fabric, he had the chance to put into practice his ideas about restoration. He was also a pioneering educator, founder of the Central School of Art and Design in London and, from 1901, first Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art. Third, he worked in architectural history and theory, publishing on medieval art, on the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (to get inside of which he apparently had to disguise himself as a woman, the building being closed to western men at the time), and on Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth. That rather odd title perhaps sums up his mixture of interests: like the really great modern artists, he could be very old and very new at once. Hats off to William Richard Lethaby.

Ludlow, Shropshire

The Venetian window, also known as the serliana, after the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio, was an invention of the Italians that first appeared in English buildings in the 17th century. This kind of window has three lights, the central one being wider than the other two and arched, to give a pleasing symmetrical design. Such a window often formed a centrepiece to a façade. There would usually be just one, in the middle of the main storey, generally the first floor where the grand reception rooms were. A Venetian window gave a sense of balance, focus, and sophistication to the front of many a Stuart and Georgian house.

On a really large country house front, with side wings, an architect might include three Venetian windows. It wasn’t quite the done thing to have a whole façade-full of them, as here in Ludlow. But whoever lived here clearly couldn’t have enough of them. Or perhaps they were trying to set some sort of record. And why not, for once? The interiors must be beautifully light and the exterior has that sense of difference, that disregard for the norm, that makes some English buildings stand out.

Wigmore, Herefordshire

I grew up visiting castles. As a child I loved their otherness, and got as good at identifying shell keeps and barbicans as imagining Sir Nigel and Ivanhoe rampaging around inside. Like old churches, medieval castles were a rapid and accessible escape route into the rich parallel world of history.

Ancient as they were, the castles of my youth had, for the most part, a particular quality that wasn’t much to do with their medieval origins. They were nearly all in the care of the Ministry of Public Building and Works. You found them by following official governmental signs. Once there, you found your way round using smaller signs and a guidebook, bound in blue and, if you were lucky, equipped with a fold-out map stuck into the back of the booklet. You unfolded this rather beautifully drawn map, and tried to work out where you were while it tried to blow away in the wind or invert itself like a flimsy umbrella. And it was quite easy to see where you were going because everything was so cared for. Lawns were manicured, paths were well laid, walls were pointed.

I’m very grateful to the Ministry of Public Building and Works, later the Department of the Environment, later English Heritage, for looking after our castles in this way, and for giving me enjoyment and education in equal measure. But wasn’t it all a bit too kempt? And how much did those lawns and concrete paths have to do with medieval history? There is another way: welcome to Wigmore Castle.

The fragmentary 12th-century ruins of Wigmore Castle are on a hill overlooking the Welsh-English border. When conservators looked at how best to preserve these isolated towers, arches, and bits of wall a few years ago, they decided to stabilize the masonry but not to clean up the growths of plant and bush that have invaded the place over the last few centuries. So an expert in nature conservation worked alongside those in building conservation.

The result is wonderful. Coming here you get a sense that you’re exploring as walls and towers loom out of the undergrowth. And my foraging wife found ripe blackberries for us to eat while I admired the masonry. Be warned: with its steep steps and muddy paths this isn’t a place for people who are unsteady on their legs. But if you can put up with the rough terrain, it’s a good place to come to witness the flowering of a ruin.