Sezincote, Gloucestershire

Nabobbery

Walkers of the Heart of England Way going south through Gloucestershire leave Bourton on the Hill confident that their path is well named. The stone houses of Bourton, the rolling terrain, the sound of English birdsong, and even the smell of English cowpats: it’s all there. A few fields along the way, the farming landscape changes subtly. The pasture is punctuated with mature trees, giving the sense that we are entering the park of a big house. And beyond a small wood, there it is on the crest of a rise: a most surprising and un-English country house – Sezincote.

Sezincote was built for Charles Cockerell, who inherited the estate in 1798 on the death of his elder brother, John. Both were nabobs, men who had made their money in India, and Charles asked another of his brothers, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, to build him a house in the Indian style. The plump central onion dome shows instantly what they were about, but there are many other telling details lifted from Indian Islamic buildings – the little corner turrets with their own tiny onion domes, the bracketed cornice that runs around the building, the chimneys on either side of the main dome, the flattened central arch, the ornate windows on the little pavilion on the far right (there are similar ones on the curved greenhouse wing just visible on the left). Even the stone has what is said to be an authentically Indian orangey tinge (specially stained, according to some authorities).

This astonishing house was begun in 1805, and in 1807 the Prince Regent came to visit. No doubt his stay at Sezincote partly accounts for the prince’s enthusiasm for the Indian style, which John Nash adopted for the remodelling of the prince’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1815. Brighton’s Pavilion, so outré with its cluster of domes and intricate fretwork, so famous because of its owner’s character and colourful life, is now far better known than Sezincote. Which is good in a way because the nabob’s house* still has the power to surprise us and to remind us that here in the heart of England there are still things that pull us up short with an architectural jolt and remind us of the multifarious cultural and economic links that make up British history.

*This building is celebrated as "the nabob's house" in John Betjeman's autobiographical poem Summoned By Bells.

The London Nobody Knows

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an interesting short programme tonight by Dan Cruickshank, in which the writer and broadcaster celebrates the work of Geoffrey Fletcher, author and illustrator of such as books as The London Nobody Knows. Fletcher's books, published between 40 and 50 years ago, explored and vividly evoked unregarded bits of London – pubs, markets, public lavatories, hostels, and other dark but lively corners – many of which have vanished now. Cruickshank visited some of the survivors (including a Deptford pie and mash shop, Wilton’s Music Hall, and Ridley Street Market) and talked to Iain Sinclair about Fletcher and his need to go “off-beat”. The short programme is worth catching on BBC’s iPlayer where it will be for about a week. In addition, my earlier post about Fletcher is here.

Trafalgar Square, London, and beyond

A new view (2)

Having taken in the view of St Martin in the Fields described in the previous post, I turned through 90 degrees and saw in the distance the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, the structure popularly known, after the great bell it contains, as Big Ben. A touch on the zoom ring and there was another photograph of a familiar building from a new viewpoint.*

The clock tower is of course the most famous part of maybe our most famous building. The Houses of Parliament, built after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1834, took decades to complete. The basic design was by Charles Barry, but Barry enlisted the aid of A W N Pugin as a specialist in the Gothic style, and Pugin became more and more involved in the design to the extent that it became as much his own as Barry’s. Burning the candle at both ends, Pugin poured out drawings of decorative details of all kinds, creating the glorious interior of the House of Lords, designing wallpapers, mouldings, carvings, and furniture, and bringing Barry’s scheme to full Gothic life. The clock tower seems to have been completely designed by Pugin, who based its distinctive shape and refined details on a tower he did for Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.

By 1852, Pugin, sick with what was to be his final illness, was still overworked with drawings for Barry. His biographer, Rosemary Hill, quotes an extraordinary letter, which veers from lucidity to incoherence, in which Pugin describes his overwork: “I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful & I am the whole mechanism of the clock.”† He meant to write that he was to design the mechanism of the clock, but his slip seems apposite – Pugin was doing drawings at a relentless and mechanical pace, although the content, full of artful touches, was far from mechanical.

A few months after his frantic letter, Pugin was dead. He never lived to see the tower that would become his most celebrated work. We take it for granted now and see it everywhere, reproduced on news programmes, sketched in the background to political cartoons. But glimpsing it from the National Gallery steps made me see it anew: its artful vertical lines, its distinctive roof, the way the tower swells slightly to emphasizes the clock, the manner in which the gilded details catch the light of the sun. My new view of the tower revealed something else too: the structure’s lightness of touch in contrast with the grey ventilation towers of Portcullis House, the 2001 parliamentary office building across the road from the tower. It rises above them as a medieval church spire might against a background of dark, Satanic mills.

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*In spite of the marked difference in the cloud cover, this photograph was taken just a few seconds after the one in the previous post. England’s skies are ever varied, ever changing.

†Rosemary Hill’s book, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) is one of the best and most enjoyable architect-biographies of recent years.

St Martin's Lane and Trafalgar Square, London

A new view (1)

For many years I worked in London’s Covent Garden, and day after day I passed Trafalgar Square and the Georgian church of St Martin in the Fields on my way to and from the office. I’d always admired St Martin’s, which is one of the most influential churches in the history of English architecture. It was created in the 1720s by James Gibbs, who in his design tackled headlong the question of how to build a church with both a columned classical portico and a steeple. These two elements, the one Greek or Roman, the other English, didn’t rightly belong together, and Gibbs combined them by simply sticking one behind and above the other. It ought not to work, having a tower emerging out of the top of a Roman portico like this, but it does, somehow, or we are so used to St Martin’s, and the many churches built in imitation of it, that we don’t see any incongruity any more. And the whole thing is now a London landmark, its steeple – with its square tower and octagonal spire and its marvellous rhythm of arches and circles – dominating its corner of the great square.

Having admired this church for years, I’d never photographed it, partly because there seemed to be no adequate viewpoint. Too near, and you can’t get it in the frame; farther away and you end up with a picture full of red buses and dashing pedestrians. Then the other week I was coming out of the National Gallery and at the top of the gallery steps spotted this view, which encompasses the whole façade without letting the buses spoil one’s view of the architecture. Finally I appreciate the National Gallery for something other than the paintings.

Duntisbourne Rouse, Gloucestershire

On the green hill

It's not far from the A417 (formerly the Roman Ermin Street) that roars its way between Gloucester and Cirencester, but you could be in another world. You drive along a remote lane past dry-stone walls and sloping sheep pastures. Here and there a still narrower lane branches off to a farm or a couple of houses, but there is little hint of a community that might support a church, indeed little hint of a church, if you miss the discreet sign and gateway. But for those who see the sign and stop, there’s something very special. A path of grass, the quietest of approaches, leads down to the church, and as you gasp at the tiny tower, you realise that the land slopes steeply away towards one of the streams that cuts its way into the limestone hereabouts. You make a sharp right turn after the second gate at the end of the grass path, and take in the way this little building clings to the slope.


The walls have fragments of herringbone masonry – the angled arrangement of stones favoured by the Saxons – suggesting that this building was put up before the Norman conquest. The minute round-headed window in the chancel may well be Saxon, whereas the two slightly larger, taller lancets to the right of the porch were cut into the existing wall in the 13th century. The Saxon builders took advantage of the slope to build a tiny barrel-vaulted crypt beneath the chancel, and a later generation, probably in the 12th century, decorated the walls of that chancel with a simple pattern resembling masonry blocks, semicircular arches, and stylized flowers.


The porch and tiny tower are later though. The tower actually bears an inscription telling us that it was built in 1587 by a mason called John Haden. It’s unusual for a church of this date to bear the name of its mason, and this is a far cry from the grander architect-designed “signed” buildings of later centuries. Part of the satisfaction of this place, indeed, comes form its very modesty and simplicity. And continuity. The idea that people have been coming hear for maybe 900 years to worship on the slope of the green hill, or to contemplate the cutting of stone and the passing of time.

Fin de Siècle round-up

I have produced another in my series of round-up pages, telling briefly the story of architecture at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth, illustrated with links to posts on this blog. This round-up of architecture in England between 1880 and 1918 covers the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and the collection of revivalist styles fashionable in this period, including 'Queen Anne'. It also draws together a number of posts on the architectural decoration of the era, covering buildings from shops to pubs, offices to public libraries. To read this overview of late-Victorian and Edwardian building, or just to catch up on some past posts, you can access this page from the PAGES menu in the right-hand column, or from here.

Greycoat Place, London

Architectural pyrotechnics

Nowadays, fire stations are often seen as utilitarian buildings and most of us don’t give them a second glance. But in the Edwardian era, when the idea of purpose-built fire stations across the capital was still quite new, they could be built to stand out. A number were built in the early years of the 20th century when the architect to the London Country Council was William Edward Riley, son of a fireworks manufacturer. Riley got the LCC job in 1899 and stayed until his retirement 20 years later. He had a busy time, building slum-clearance housing schemes, continuing a programme of school building, and providing the capital with utility buildings such as fire stations.

The most famous of these is the fine Arts and Crafts inspired one at Euston, but here’s another good one, the Westminster Fire Brigade Station in Greycoat Place. The brickwork of the upper floors with its stripy stone dressings, sash windows, pilasters, and tall chimneys, is typical of the revivalist style called “Queen Anne”, a kind of loose imitation of a way of building popular in around 1700. But Riley placed this above a lower storey of granite, treated with banded rustication and big key stones above the openings. Details like the semicircular window to the side elevation and smaller round window on the front façade add to the interest.

This is a mix of styles and features that, although we could call it “Queen Anne”, defies classification. Architectural historians often resort to the term “Free Style” for this and other Edwardian mélanges. There’s certainly a freedom about the mix of styles and materials, and the various sizes and shapes of windows and doorways, all of which belie the stolidity of the classical granite and the sober but elegant lettering of the fire station’s name. But what we call it hardly matters. It’s a monumental building with some telling touches – a cracking display from the fireworks-maker’s son.