Abbey Dore, Herefordshire

The monks and the birds

Near the border of England and Wales, deep in Herefordshire’s Golden Valley (the valley of the River Dore), among high hedges and garrulous rookeries, within sight of the Black Mountains with their evocatively named heights (Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob), and close to one of my routes to the book-lovers’ haven of Hay on Wye, lies the sandstone Dore Abbey, home of the royal arms in my previous post. It’s the kind of quiet spot the Cistercians favoured, away from the distractions of the world and the city, where they could farm in peace (they were among the most successful sheep farmers in the Middle Ages), and build their monasteries and their communities.

Most of Britain’s greatest Cistercian abbeys, such as Yorkshire’s Fountains and Rievaulx, Gloucestershire’s Hailes, and Tintern in the valley of the Wye, are ruins now, but at Dore Abbey, part of the building – the choir, transept, and crossing of the original church – remains in service for parish worship. In the monks’ time, where there are trees in the left-hand part of my photograph above there was a long nave, and its disappearance accounts for the unusual shape of the church. As we look at this fragment, though, with its continuous background noise of cawing rooks, the tall pointed lancet windows give an idea of the building’s strong but simple Gothic architecture.

 
It is even more impressive inside. Repeated lancet windows, pointed arches, and piers with multiple shafts line the choir. Light pours in from the splayed upper windows, creating patterns of light where the arches are deeply moulded. There is a minimum of carved ornament (the austere Cistercians eschewed the sort of rich foliate carving that covered other Gothic churches of the time)  but a strong sense of linear pattern. The arches and mouldings create a clear sense of the kind of space the monks wanted – and it is a rare treat to find it all surviving as an interior, roofed and used and protected from the elements and enhanced with fine furnishings from the 17th-century restoration. And so quiet too, in little known southwestern Herefordshire, in a corner where now the rooks must far outnumber the human population but the lucky few who are left can enjoy a place of peace and a setting for contemplation.

Abbey Dore, Herefordshire

The king's arms

As Britain is celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, I thought it might be appropriate to share an example of the royal arms from an English Parish church. Royal arms have been displayed in English churces for centuries, but especially since Henry VIII assumed leadership of the Church of England in 1534. The composition of the arms has changed over the years, with the comings and goings of different monarchs and ruling houses, and during the Commonwealth (1649–60) royal arms were removed, to be replaced later. The result is that English churches display arms from many different periods, with the 18th and 19th centuries well represented.

Sometimes a coat of arms from before the Commonwealth escaped the hands of Cromwell’s supporters – or was replaced when the monarchy was restored. An example of one of these Stuart coats of arms is in the wonderful gothic church at Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, a building that began as a Cistercian abbey 1147. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the building and land passed to the Scudamore family, who dismantled many of the abbey buildings and sold off the stone. In the 1630s, John Viscount Scudamore restored the abbey as a parish church, and amongst his gifts to the building was a magnificent classical screen topped with this coat of arms, which is that of Charles I. The characterful lion and unicorn are surrounded by vigorous carved wooden scrolls in the style of the time. The detached tail of the lion is a poignant touch: I think of it as an accidental symbol of interrupted Stuart rule.

Brackley, Northamptonshire

Brought to book

Here’s a warts-and-all photograph of one of my favourite buildings in Brackley, a Northamptonshire town that some of you will know as (I think) the market town in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. I’m attracted to this house for various reasons. First of all for the charming, if pulled-about, mid-18th century front. It’s all very restrained – the brick pilasters running up each edge of the facade are easy to miss; the pale bands beneath the windows are plain and simple; the off-centre doorway is modest. It’s not grand Georgian architecture, but the kind of satisfying facade that was put up by the dozen in the 18th century. And you notice I say ‘facade’. This is another example of the effect I noticed in Aylesbury a couple of posts ago: a Georgian brick front applied to an earlier house – in this case, a 17th-century building of rubble masonry.

There’s another reason I always stop here when I visit Brackley. This building is now a bookshop, and apparently a thriving one. This weekend it was also hosting a plant sale in the front garden, hence the unusually busy scene behind the railings. Inside it was calmer but there were customers browsing the mix of new and secondhand books, and buying too. As both new and used bookshops fold under the combined pressure of Amazon and ABE, perhaps more High Street stores should adopt the practice, still quite unusual in Britain, of selling both old and new books. Here at the Old Hall Bookshop, with its ample shelves of art, architecture, topography, and literature (and many more subjects: those are just the shelves that interest me), it certainly works for me.

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

River works

If you’re familiar with the map of England you’ll know how the country’s largest river, the Severn, curves its way through Gloucestershire, its most dramatic set of bends almost forming an oxbow lake about eight miles below Gloucester. Inside the neck of land enclosed by these bends is the village of Arlingham, and if you go through Arlingham you find Passage Road, a mile of narrow, low-lying roadway, bounded on either side by meadows and ditches, running arrow-straight towards the river. At the point where the road ends is the Old Passage, an early 19th-century house, now a very good seafood restaurant. The exterior of the building is painted a curious colour on the borders of blue and green, which either blends into the surrounding landscape or stands out brightly, according to the light and the time of day.

The large windows of the Old Passage look out across the Severn to the small town of Newnham on the opposite bank. This was once the site of a ford across the river. These days on the Ordnance Survey map about half the width of the river at this point is marked as “Mud and Sand”, but I wouldn’t want to try and walk across this dangerous river with its huge tidal range (I’ve written more about the Severn and its banks here). The building’s large windows also make for a light interior, good for displaying pictures and on Sunday I was there for the private view of the art exhibition “earth.wind.water.sky” – an inspiring collection of prints, paintings, photographs, and other works hanging on the walls of the restaurant. The exhibition, which includes many works that portray the river or take inspiration from its water, light, and atmosphere, runs to the end of the month and is well worth a visit for anyone in striking distance.

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Putting up a good front

This is an example of something that happened a lot in the 18th century. There was a substantial building in St Mary’s Square, Aylesbury, overlooking the churchyard. It was probably a house although later the building became a public house, the Derby Arms. In the Georgian period its owners were followers of fashion, but they didn’t have the money, or the inclination, to rebuild their house in the latest style, with a symmetrical front in two-tone brickwork, sash windows, and a panelled door set in a classical door case topped by a triangular pediment. So they did what lots of middle-class townspeople did: added a facade with all these features and more to the front of their existing house.

Seen directly from the street the building looks like a Georgian house and the details – the door case with its Ionic capitals, the windows with ‘aprons’ beneath the sills, the shaped head of the central window, the deep cornice at the top – are impressive. Only the top floor, where there are only three windows instead of five, with brick panels instead of windows at either end, looks slightly odd. And viewing the building from the side, we see why: the upper level of the facade hides a pitched roof, leaving no space for windows at either end of the top floor.

If there had been a neighbouring house, as there is on the far side of the Derby Arms, the contrast between the facade and the rest of the house would be virtually invisible from the street. Maybe there was such a house once. But now there’s just a garden wall, and this episode in the building’s history is clear to see.

Woolwich, London

Big sheds

In the early 1900s London’s transport was starting to turn to electricity for its power. The early underground trains had been hauled by steam locomotives, but few people liked the clouds of steam and sooty smuts that plagued the station platforms and the need for ventilation meant that underground lines had to be built near to the surface. Using electric power meant that deeper lines could be constructed, beneath parts of the city where sub-surface lines were impossible to build. So as the underground (and the tram network) began to hook up to electricity, power stations were required, and one was built in Greenwich.

The Greenwich Power Station was originally fitted with four large steam engines driving alternators. The engines were huge and so required the vast big-windowed sheds that can still be seen poking up above the urban low-rise of Greenwich and Woolwich. The building was put up in two phases, in 1902 and 1910, and the design was the work of the London Country Council architect’s department – they must have been proud of the pair of enormous Diocletian windows that light the cavernous engine rooms.

When the 1910 phase of building was completed, turbines – the latest generating technology – were installed in the new part of the building, and eventually the steam engines were removed and more turbines were installed. There are still turbines in the power station, and the equipment is kept in working order and occasionally run as the power station stands by as a back-up facility for the Underground.

Compared to some power stations, such as Bristol’s Tramways GeneratingStation, this is a plain and simple building, but imposing nonetheless. The chimneys and windows can hold their own against the background of the towers of Docklands. The Power Station has a small tower of its own, the small octagonal turret on the right of my photograph, but no source I have found can explain what it is for.

Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire

Pump and circumstance*

Sights like this bring back memories of a time when filling up did not involve a major hit on the credit card account and when, with relatively few cars on the road, thoughts of environmental costs were limited mostly to the effects of exhaust fumes on the air quality in big cities. A time, too, when the roads were quiet enough for the pumps to be right on the street, like these. There was no forecourt – you just pulled up and the supply line was long enough to reach your vehicle. These two pumps are on the main street in the centre of Great Missenden, not far from the museum devoted to the life and works of the village’s most famous resident, Roald Dahl. Apparently the Red Pump Garage features in one of Dahl’s books. The bright red pumps very much look the part and presumably their survival is at least in part a tribute to the celebrated author. The notice on the door says they have been “Out of fuel” since eight gallons cost more than a litre. In other words, the place has been closed for years – but it is still a repository of memories.

*Not my joke, alas. This line has already been used as the title of a book on gas stations and by manufacturers of ballet shoes.