Corsham, Wiltshire

Being busy together

Bees and their hives have been powerful symbols for thousands of years – probably ever since human beings first observed communities of bees working together and first tasted the honey they produced. As well as standing for sweetness (think of the madrigal "Sweet honey-sucking bees" by John Wilbye and "the bag of the bee", icon of sweetness in "Her Triumph", Ben Jonson's most mellifluous lyric) they're also symbolic of industry, especially industry that involves working together. And that's why bees and hives have been powerfully symbolic of the Co-operative movement ever since it was founded in the 19th century.

So I wasn't surprised to find out that this plaque showing an old-fashioned bee skep, high above a shop window in Corsham, was put there by the local Co-op when they built their shop here in 1906. Whoever carved the plaque thoughtfully included some flowers for the bees too. A century on, there's still a Co-op in Corsham, but on a different site. However the concern for bees continues with   "Plan Bee", the Co-op's campaign to support much-needed pollinators in our gardens, market gardens, and fields. From this Arts and Crafts influenced plaque to Plan Bee, advertised on my pot of breakfast honey, the link between natural and commercial cooperation is still vital.

Bromsgrove, Worcestershire

Knocks and scrapes

Before we leave behind the subject of the red telephone box – admirably preserved and given a new use by the Henry Moore Foundation, as noted in the previous post – here's another red box picture from a few weeks ago. As more and more of these boxes disappear under the rising tide of mobile phones, it is more and more unusual to see the little groups of telephone boxes that used to be common in British towns and cities. One place where these boxes are preserved is at the excellent Avoncroft Museum, near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. As well as a fine collection of rescued and relocated old buildings from the Midlands, Avoncroft is home to the National Telephone Kiosk Collection. Here are four K6 boxes, gathered together in the museum's phone box area.

It's good to see them well looked after (so many roadside boxes look rather dishevelled these days), their paintwork shining and red. When Scott designed the original K2 box, the slightly taller predecessor of these 1935 K6s, he intended them to be painted silver outside and "greeny-blue" inside, but it's hard now to imagine them any other colour than red.*

The vehicle is a Morris Minor Van of the type used by telephone engineers in the 1950s and for years afterwards. The Royal Mail used similar vans painted red, but the telephone engineers' vans were green and had black rubber front wings. According to the Morris Minor Owners' Club, Royal Mail red vans were allocated to specific drivers, who were trusted to look after "their" vehicles. The green engineers' vans were driven by many different drivers, who, it is said, were thought less likely to be careful with their transport. Hence the rubber wings, which were proof against at least some knocks and scrapes.

I'm pleased that at least a few red telephone boxes, and this van, are being protected from knocks and scrapes by the good people at Avoncroft.

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* Unless you come from Hull in Yorskshire, where the telephone boxes were installed by the local council and painted cream.

Perry Green, Hertfordshire

Red Cube

There were plenty of telephones in Hoglands, the Hertfordshire house of the sculptor Henry Moore. They were symbolic, perhaps, of Moore's central position in the art world for much of the 20th century and testimony to the fact that everyone from Kenneth Clark to Helmut Schmidt wanted to keep in touch with him. If the house phones were busy, Moore could pop out of the front door, cross the road, and use the public telephone box on the village green.

The K6 box was decommissioned in 2009 and in 2012 became the art gallery Red Cube* (regular readers may remember another post box gallery in Settle, Yorkshire). The gallery is a joint project of  Much Hadham Parish Council and the Henry Moore Foundation, which is based at Hoglands and opens the house, Moore's studios, and the surrounding grounds to visitors. Red Cube was opened earlier this year. It makes an agreeable stop on the short walk from Hoglands to the Hoops Inn, another building owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

I think Henry Moore would have approved of all this. The gallery is a way of offering a small exhibition space to visitors, staff of the Foundation, clients from the Drawing Room (part of St Elizabeth's Centre, a national centre of expertise for epilepsy) and others. It helps to preserve a small landmark on the village green. And it enables people to engage with Moore's art in an active way – hats off to those who come and draw.

* The gallery's name wittily alludes to the name of London's famous White Cube gallery (Red Cube is also the title of a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi)

For more about the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, go here.

For more about Red Cube, go here.

Burford, Oxfordshire

Fragments

I sometimes feel sorry for archaeologists. They can spend months digging for a couple of potsherds and a post hole, and then face the task of fitting this sparse and fragmentary evidence into some kind of pattern. I know that archaeology is about much more than digging. But even so, when it comes to material evidence, architectural historians have it better: enormous structures that can be read like books, even when there is no documentary evidence, for literal reading, to back up the stories told by the stones.

But sometimes it's not so simple. Medieval buildings can be as complex and enigmatic as any excavation. And as for their decoration – battered by time, alteration, and iconoclasm, it can be as challenging to reconstruct as buried foundations or shattered pottery. Medieval stained glass is a case in point. So much of it has gone, thanks to neglect and decay and the activities of image-smashing vandals. In many churches, there are just a few fragments of ancient glazing, like this one in a window in the large and beautiful medieval church at Burford.

So what can we make of this tantalising panel of medieval stained-glass bits and pieces? Staring at the central figure, I was struck by the hat. Wasn't that a pilgrim's hat? Yes, or more specifically, it's the hat of St James the Greater, with his cockle-shell badge, the disciple of Jesus who, having ended up in Spain made medieval Compostela the greatest place of pilgrimage after Rome itself. The bearded head of St James must have figured in many medieval windows, and here just his head has survived. Perhaps that's the top end of his staff, just to the right of his head.

Most of the other fragments on either side of St James and immediately above him are images of bits of architecture – niches, pinnacles, and spires. Their ornate crocketed tops mark them as late-medieval, and they're typical of the use of architectural motifs in so much late-medieval art. W R Lethaby, the great Arts and Crafts architect, writer, and teacher, expressed this use of architectural forms charmingly in his book Medieval Art:

The folk had fallen in love with building, and loved that their goldsmiths' work, and ivories, their seals, and even the pierced patterns of their shoes should be like little buildings, little tabernacles, little 'Paul's windows'.

'Paul's windows' refers to the rose windows in Old St Paul's Cathedral, London, and the reference to the pierced patterns of shoes recalls a description of a snappy dresser in Chaucer's Miller's Tale, 'With Paule's windows carven on his shoes'. Reliquaries, boxes, furniture, yes, even shoes, were made to look like little buildings in the 15th century. And figures in churches, whether carved in three dimensions or painted in windows, were frequently set in a context of decorative architectural detail. How wonderful that some of this detail should have survived here, flanking the venerable, curly-bearded, beady-eyed face of St James, the saint who inspired men to go on pilgrimages.

Letchworth, Hertfordshire

Postcards from England: 1. Old and new

In five years of blogging I've visited and passed by many buildings, and shared a good number of them with my readers. But there are lots, including many that I visited in the distant past, of which I have no photographs in my digital archive to share with my readers. I do, however, have a small collection of old postcards of some of these buildings so, to vary further the architectural menu, I'm presenting some of these in an occasional series called Postcards from England. This is the first. 

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My postcard shows part of the Spirella corset factory, built among lawns and trees in the garden city of Letchworth between 1912 and 1920. The tall, hipped-roofed parts of the building shown in the picture reveal a strong Arts and Crafts influence in the design – white window frames and brick walls that would almost fit in in Bedford Park, and grids of square glass that seem to hint at more modern architecture. In fact the factory's architect, Cecil Hignett, who had earlier worked alongside garden-city planners Parker and Unwin, was at once sensitive to the Arts and Crafts heritage of Letchworth and alert to the possibilities of the new – behind the brick walls is a structure of reinforced concrete.

Inside were light, airy workspaces in which Spirella's employees cut and sewed in comfort. William Wallace Kincaid, boss of the company, wanted to give his corsetières the best of working environments, because he was convinced that if they were happy they would also be efficient. "The Factory of Beauty", he called the building – implying both that it was a beautiful place and that his workers were producing garments that would enhance the beauty of their owners-to-be. Old-fashioned paternalistic values and an old-fashioned view of beauty, perhaps, but producing architecture that is worthy of more than a passing glance.

Although the factory is no longer used for its intended purpose, the building has survived. Since a restoration in the 1990s it houses office space and public facilities such as a café and a gym. Whatever one's views of corsetry (and I know enough about my readers to realise that their views will be very diverse indeed), one can only be thankful that this wonderful building is still standing, and looking as beautiful as it did when the photograph in my postcard* was taken.

*Don't forget that you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

A house and its garden

I first saw Rousham when I was a teenager, and I can remember being somehow surprised by the house. There seemed to be something hard and uncompromising about it, and I wasn't quite sure why I reacted in this way. Looking again at Rousham's 17th-century south front the other day, I think I was reacting not to the stone walls, the pale colour of which warms up beautifully in the sun, but to the windows. What I didn't know back then was that these were originally glazed with small octagonal panes, which were replaced with much larger sheets of plate glass during a 19th-century restoration project. Rousham is a house dating from the 1630s and, apart from the plate-glass windows, one other alteration is visible in my photograph of the south front. About 100 years after the house was built, William Kent was employed to redesign the gardens. Kent also made some changes to the house, including adding the crenellations that top the walls – if you look closely at the picture you can see a slight change in the colour of the stonework towards the top.

So today the front of the house reveals a 17th-century building that has changed with the times, and which still looks impressive in its green frame of trees. And at Rousham, the trees are very much the point. This place is rightly famous for William Kent's work in its garden, an arcadian landscape of conifers and hardwoods, paths and glades by the River Cherwell, punctuated by temples, a grotto, classical statues, cascades, and streams. I've posted about this remarkable garden before. It is one of the best places in Britain to go to savour the atmosphere and architecture of the Georgian landscape garden. From the Venus Vale to the serpentine rill, from statues of Bacchus to the Dying Gaul, it is an enchanting garden, all set against a background of varied greens, displaying real a lightness of touch. Curving paths and distant vistas lead the visitor through a series of spaces, and often, as one contemplates a temple or a statue, there is the sudden realization that, in a gap between trees, another view is beckoning. In Arcadia indeed.

Rousham: behind the statue a triangle of light leads the eye towards another glade.

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire

Right stuff, White Stuff

“Ah, I know what that will be,” I thought to myself, looking up above a shop called White Stuff in the main street in Bishop’s Stortford. I was thinking that the building must have been a pub called the White Hart – a common pub name after all – and that I was looking at its former sign. Big 3-D signs like this are uncommon, but they do exist, and I was pleased to find another.

How wrong could I be? This magnificent beast is in fact the emblem of a volunteer regiment, the First Hertfordshire Light Horse. It was made in 1862 for the regiment’s barracks, but a few years later (some sources says in 1868, others 1872) the regiment disbanded. Major William Holland rescued the stag and had it mounted above the window of a shop he owned, where it stayed until the shop was pulled down in 1983.

Then the hart was restored and installed on this shop in 1986, where it has been ever since. It’s seriously large, this stag – it towers over the adjacent sash window, which must be well over 4 feet tall – and its shaggy coat is vigorously rendered. It’s an asset to the streetscape, a reminder of a bit of 19th-century history, and an object lesson in the way some features survive, as if truly alive and kicking, against all the odds.