Paddy

Christmas books: 1

For the next ten days or so, the English Buildings blog becomes a book blog, as I look back at a few of the books I've enjoyed this year, potential Christmas presents, perhaps. I've chosen books relevant in some way to the main concerns of this blog – buildings, history, places – and, to begin with, a biography of one of the greatest writers about places of the last hundred years or so.

Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Published by John Murray

Left as an infant to grow up with strangers, expelled from various schools, cast adrift and footloose in London, walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople aged 18–19, slept in barns and castles, fell in love with Rumanian princess, joined Greek cavalry charge, kidnapped German general in occupied Crete, won DSO, travelled in Greece, settled in Greece with Joan Rayner, wrote award-winning travel books, lauded as best travel writer of his generation, swam the Hellespont aged 69, died aged 96 after a triumphant life lived on his own terms.

Something along those outlines represented what most of us knew of the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, universally) – that, and what mattered: his two stellar books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli, and his luminous account of his walk to Constantinople in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two parts of a projected trilogy, the third part of which never appeared. The baroque prose, the breadth of learning, the delight in and knowledge of languages, the sense of place, the understanding of people: all were in a class of their own.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Artemis Cooper has filled in the outline and fleshed out the life behind the works. It must have been a challenging task, given that Paddy has said so much about his life in his own books. His bejewelled prose is a tough act to follow. But she has done well, building up the details, throwing light on some of the obfuscations, and maintaining a pace that makes the book compulsively readable. Her biography gives us: a clearer account of Paddy's infant life with his surrogate parents in Northamptonshire than the brief one in A Time of Gifts, plenty of detail about his wartime service and life, a moving description of his reunion with Princess Balasha after war and the corrosive effects of communism had kept them apart for decades, quite a bit on his colourful love life, and plenty of detail about the gestation – both painstaking and painful – of his books.

I have enjoyed discovering that my hero had his faults, which were the ones, mostly, that I'd suspected – a certain thoughtlessness sometimes (amidst much true consideration for others), a know-all quality, an occasional tendency to tweak the facts about his travels (though not the essential facts: it did all happen). Oh, and a troublesome capacity to keep publishers waiting. Every fan of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water knew about this. Where was the sequel? Years went past, and decades: still nothing. Paddy was "working on it", it was "almost ready", and so on.

Artemis Cooper deals rather briefly with the last part of Paddy's life. Even for someone as energetic as Paddy, the pace of life does slow as one reaches one's 70s, 80s, and 90s, so this brevity is forgivable and understandable – yet, was there really no more to say than some 40 pages on the last four decades of his life? However she does address the important question of the "missing" third instalment of the great walk. Briefly, back in the 1960s Paddy had drafted an account of the last part of the journey, but he remained unsatisfied with it, unable to recast it into a form that he felt good enough. His feeling that he could not live up to the quality of the first two books depressed him, and there were deep clouds over his last years. That enviable life was perhaps not so idyllic after all. Artemis Cooper has set this on the historical record, where it belongs. She also holds out hope that an edited version of Book Three of the journey will be out in about a year. She deserves our thanks for that, and for an enjoyable and generous biography.

Leicester

Letter set (1)

Little things can make a big difference. When it comes to architecture, one of those little things is the quality of the lettering used in signs, inscriptions, date stones, and the rest. Here's an example that caught my eye: the name and date stone on a chapel in the centre of Leicester. To harmonize with the classicism of the building the person who cut this inscription used what Alan Bartram, authority on lettering on buildings, calls the English letter. What he means is a letter form in which there is quite a big difference between the thick and thin strokes and in which the change from thick to thin in, for example, the curving bowl of the C here, or the P, can be quite sudden. On the whole the thick strokes are verticals. The serifs (the tiny protrusions at the ends of the main strokes) are generally bracketed, in other words the main stroke flows into them. But in this particular example the bracketing is quite subtle in some of the letters.

You can find English letters all over Bath, where they are used for the street names, which are carved directly into the stone walls. Elsewhere they pop up in all kinds of places, and are often, as here, to be found when you look up. They vary quite a bit in style –some have less heavy thick strokes than these. Many have fuller serifs. But if the letters are well proportioned and evenly spaced, they are all satisfying. Especially in the sun.

Stanway, Gloucestershire

The iceman's cousin

This is a brief pendant to the previous post about a terrace in Bath and its keystones carved in the form of icemen. A correspondent pointed out that the exuberant carved decoration on the Bath terrace might well be an expression of impatience with the austere classicism of much Georgian architecture, an exercise in lightening up and putting on the frills. I think that rings true. Here is another bit of ornament in a non-classical, but equally unexpected, context.

On a recent Cotswold walk a friend and I crossed a field on a downhill stretch towards a familiar road and missed the proper footpath by a couple of hundred yards, arriving roughly where we wanted to be but by a different, unofficial route. As we did so, we passed a tiny stone building of unknown purpose. The only remarkable thing about it was this rather fine date stone, complete with a mask that is surely, if I'm right in seeing icicles in the beard, a distant modern cousin of the Bath icemen. Whoever he is, he was a pleasant surprise.

Bath, Somerset

The icemen
You know how it is. The road you drive along often is the one you don't look at properly. Whenever I visit Bath I drive into town along London Road, registering various architectural highlights (a Georgian terrace here, a shop front with stained glass there), but not stopping to look properly. So the other day, encouraged by a picture in Michael Forsyth's Bath in the Pevsner City Guides series, I decided to stop outside Grosvenor Place, one of the terraces that runs alongside London Road, and have a look. I'm glad I did.

Architect-builder John Eveleigh started Grosvenor Place in 1791. The idea was to have a swanky central section containing a hotel, with houses on either side. Eveleigh was making a lot of money on speculative building schemes of this kind in Bath, and this site, fronting one of the city's pleasure gardens, seemed like a winner. But in 1793 there was a financial crisis. England and France started a war, the cost of credit rocketed, and Eveleigh, like many of Bath's other builders, found himself in money trouble. He was soon bankrupt, his share in the project was sold, and work on the terrace was halted when it was half done. The project was only completed years later.

Grosvenor Place, carved plaques

Some of the decoration on the building was never finished – three of the oval panels on the facade, for example, were left uncarved. But even so, the central portion of the terrace is extraordinary. It's an extravaganza with giant columns adorned with garlands (towards the bottom of each column is a plain stone band: presumably  this too was meant to be carved into a garland, another job left undone). There are seven columns, a very unclassical odd number which means that the central column is right above the doorway. All very unorthodox and eye-catching.

Grosvenor Place, the iceman cometh...

Among the details I especially like are the little masks on the keystones above some of the windows. Their faces are made of icicles, a motif that Eveleigh also used on another Bath building, Somerset Place. These chilly faces are in marked contrast to the richer carving of the rest of this centrepiece, as if casting a cold eye on all the frivolity around them. Financial crisis? Yes, we know what you mean…

Haydon Bridge, Northumberland

Postcards from England: 4. Towers of strength

The archetypal fortified dwelling in northern England and the Scottish borders is the tower house. They can take various forms, from small buildings, often called pele towers, that were usually used as refuges and occupied only in times of trouble, to large towers, with lots of rooms and several floors and often turrets at the corners. All these tower houses were built to cope with a tough way of life, in which border territory might change hands and raiders could descend at any moment from either side of the border. You needed thick walls, a good look out, and weapons at the ready. One of the best of these relics of medieval border life  is Langley Castle in Northumberland, one of the larger, aristocrat examples of the type, the subject of my postcard this month.

Langley Castle was built in around 1350, probably by Sir Thomas de Lucy. It has a four-storey central block and 5-storey towers. There is an impressive array of windows. Some of the larger ones were added in about 1900, some, mainly the smaller ones, are 14th century. Fireplaces and doorways from the 14th century adorn the interior. The battlements at the top of the building are mostly from the restoration of the late-19th century, a labour of love by a local historian, Cadwallader Bates, and his wife, Josephine. This work was still relatively recent when my postcard was produced – the card was mailed in January 1906.† Since then, the castle has found a new life as a hotel.

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† My card was sent from Haydon Bridge to Harrogate, to tell someone that "Mr P and Miss H" would arrive at 4.45 pm, an example of the way people in the early-20th century used postcards for short messages, rather as we might send an email today.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Treasure trove

In a recent post I hinted that I would add something more about Rickards, the ironmonger's shop in Ludlow that i visited at the beginning of the month. There has been an ironmonger's business on this site for more than 200 years. In the late-18th century the tenant was Edward Egginton, ironmonger, and there was still an Egginton there in 1861. But later in the 1860s, one James Rickards, and soon afterwards his son, Heber Rickards, owned the building.  Heber became successful in the business and a prominent citizen of Ludlow, and the business stayed in his family for over 80 years.

 Rickards of Ludlow: business name in Victorian gilded lettering over the door

Name mosaic, possibly from interwar period, in doorway floor

The premises is a fascinating architectural hotchpotch that bears the imprint of several generations. The two shop fronts, with their narrow glazing bars, look 19th century – the one on the left is probably early-19th century, The gilded lettering over one door may well date from the time of Heber Rickards, while a doorway mosaic may brave been added between the two World Wars. The lettering on the fascia seems to owe something to the Festival of Britain style and I would guess that it dates form the 1950s.

Interior: 19th-century drawers and 20th-century advertisements

As if those details were not riches enough, the interior is a revelation. Rows of wooden draws run along the back walls of both shops. One set of drawers may well date back to the beginning of the 19th century, before the first Rickards took over the business; the other set may date form the time of the Rickards' arrival in the mid-1860s. The array of old advertising posters and cards stuck on these drawers, promoting mothaks, turpentine, and devices to improve your television signal, is a small treasure trove of the history of advertising. The business's 19th-century cash desk, protected by a tiny sliding glass window, is also intact in the middle of the shop.

In short, this place is a marvel – both as a monument to the history of the high street and as a living business serving the people of Ludlow and the surrounding area with everything from kettles to balls of string, bars of beeswax to watering cans. If to me the shop represents a rich slice of history, to local people it must be an invaluable resource, a lifeline even. We owe thanks to the people who, through the thick and thin and economic ups and downs, keep it going.

Covent Garden, London

Every day except Christmas

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I crossed the piazza of Covent Garden every day on my way to and from my desk in the office of a publishing company. Now and then I paused to admire the main market building, the market house designed by Charles Fowler and built in 1828–30, still largely intact but with roofs (glass and slate supported on iron columns) added in the later 19th century. The rows of Tuscan columns and the corner pavilions with their lower storey picked out with banded rustication, defined the outside and are visible in my photograph of the east end of the market house.

By the time I began work in this part of London, the market was already beginning its second life as a tourist attraction, the original raison d'être of the place, the wholesale selling of fruit and vegetables, having been moved to a site at Vauxhall. But I'm old enough to remember the vegetable market at Covent Garden with its nocturnal life, its lippy porters, its pubs open in the mornings when this was unknown elsewhere in England, its surrounding labyrinth of lanes and alleys in which opera-goers heading for the "other" Covent Garden would occasionally get lost.

I was reminded of all this the other night by a chance online viewing of Lindsay Anderson's documentary Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which chronicles in black and white a day in the life of the market. It is all beautifully shot and composed, from the midnight loading of lorries in Kent, to the organised chaos of the arrival of trucks (apples from the Vale of Evesham, flowers from Lincolnshire, mushrooms from the southeast, and so on) in the crowded streets around the market; from the stallholders' careful arrangement of their stock to their moment of relaxation in a nearby café (this place also inhabited by nocturnal "characters" who seem to have sidled in from another, edgier, world); from the first sale to the removal of vegetables and fruit on precariously loaded barrows and packed vans.

Much of what I saw was familiar, from chance late-night crossings of the market years ago and, perhaps, from an earlier viewing of the film itself. But this is where memory starts to play tricks. I hold in my mind a memory of a documentary about the market set to the music of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata, structured around the piece's three movements (fast-slow-fast, mirroring the market's phases of frenetic activity punctuated by an interlude of calm). But there is no such music in Lindsay Anderson's film. Could there have been another documentary covering a day in the life of Covent Garden? Or have I confused Anderson's film with another, on a different subject, but using Beethoven's music? Or have I imagined the whole thing? Googling has not given me an answer. I continue to rack my brains.

Detail, corner pavilion, Covent Garden market, west end