Cambridge Avenue, London

Practical Gothic

Corrugated iron churches are usually quite small. Often serving small isolated communities or providing temporary accommodation before a more permanent building was erected, they are usually simple and modest – straight walls, rectangular windows, no tower or spire. In the 19th century, you could buy them in kit form from several manufacturers, who would quote a price based on the size of the congregation and deliver all the parts to your local railway station. Refinements, such as pointed Gothic windows and bell turrets, were available at extra cost.

The large corrugated iron church in Kilburn, northwest London, is different. It's elaborate and unusually large for a "tin church". It has a big footprint, gothic windows and doorway, and a substantial tower. Inside, iron columns hold up the roof. That tower even has what looks like the base of a splay-footed spire. This is not your off-the-shelf mission hall or tin chapel, but, I'd guess, a building specially created for the location. Boulton and Paul of Norwich, one of the largest manufacturers of corrugated iron buildings, advertised "Special Designs prepared to suit any situation or requirements". This was no doubt the sort of thing they had in mind.

So what were the situation and requirements? When this church was built in 1863, J L Pearson's magnificent St Augustine's, Kilburn, was being planned nearby, a town church on a grand scale that would be one of the landmarks of the Gothic revival. Like so many corrugated iron churches, the one in Cambridge Avenue was a temporary building, put up, according to my online reading, as a stop-gap building until St Augustine's was ready.

Remarkably, the building has lasted not ten years but 150. Its survival into the 21st century is due at least in part to the Sea Cadets, as it has been a Sea Cadet base – a training ship, indeed – for several decades. Because the church is currently in need of repair, the cadets are occupying another building now while money is raised to do the necessary work. One hopes they succeed, so that this hardworking, practical bit of corrugated iron Gothic can have a new lease of life.

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With thanks to Joe Treasure for telling me about this church and providing the photograph.

Brigg, Lincolnshire

Dying gladiator, dying Gaul

Looking back over some pictures the other day, I came across my photographs of the garden at Rousham in Oxfordshire and in particular the image of the statue of the Dying Gaul, sometimes known as the Dying Gladiator. This reminded me that, years ago, I'd seen a pub in Brigg, Lincolnshire, called The Dying Gladiator, and I began to wonder whether the building and its remarkable sign were still there. They are. The sign, sculpted by William Clark in 1863, shows a moustachioed Gaulish warrior in his last minutes.

The sign in Brigg is based on previous sculptures of the figure, which date back to a classical statue of a similar figure from about AD 230, now on display in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. This ancient marble statue shows a man who is collapsing on top of his shield, and is naked except for the torc around his neck, as some Gaulish and Celtic warriors were said to be when they went into battle, "trusting only in the protection that nature gives," as Diodorus Siculus says. The nakedness and torc mark out the statue in Rome as a warrior, but up to the middle of the 19th century, people thought he was a gladiator. Lord Byron saw him, and described him, "butcher'd to make a Roman holiday" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The Roman statue was copied many times. Small copies were sold to travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries, those grand tourists who were on the lookout for artistic souvenirs to take back home. Bigwigs commissioned further copies for their gardens, like the one in the beautiful garden at Rousham that inspired these musings. Even Louis XIV had a copy. No doubt these owners of copies of the subject were remembering the strong carving of the sculpture in Rome; some were giving talented carver-copyists the chance to shine; all were appreciating the powerful emotions inherent in the subject – a man who faces death bravely, who "Consents to death, but conquers agony" as Lord Byron put it. Many would also admire the toughness of the Celt, the man from a small nation who stands up to the Roman war machine with nothing to protect him but his wits and his strength.

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Photograph by David Wright, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.
The photograph is from Wikimedia Commons and is dated 2008. I think the statue may have been cleaned and restored since then.
There is information about The Dying Gladiator pub, Brigg, here.

Oxford

 
A dramatic entrance

I must have passed St Mary's, the university church of Oxford, hundreds of times, but this porch still calls attention to itself as loudly as it did the first time I saw it. With its curly barley-sugar columns, its scrollwork, broken pediment, and statuary, this porch of 1637 is as baroque as anything in English architecture. Built on to the side of the mainly late-medieval church, it doesn't blend in, as we are so often told that alterations to old buildings should. It sticks out. And with reason.

The porch was the gift of Morgan Owen, a Welshman who had studied at Jesus College, Oxford, before eventually becoming chaplain to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud was famously a high churchman, with views on doctrine and ritual that took the Anglican church close to Catholicism – too close for many of his Puritan opponents, some of whom were tortured for their beliefs, some of whom left England for America.  

It was not surprising that a Laudian like Owen should commission a highly ornate piece of architecture such as this porch, its facade focused on a statue of the Virgin and Child above the entrance arch. Had the 17th century's violent disagreements about religion and government not escalated into Civil War a few years later, there might well have been more church buildings like this in England. As it was, the war slowed building projects down or brought them to a stop, and what came afterwards was far more restrained.

So this porch, with its restlessly twisting columns, its intricate upper portion, its dramatically intercutting surfaces, and its striking play of light and shade, remains unique in England. Oxford, royalist during the Civil War and with an enduring high church element in its heterodox Anglicanism, kept the porch, though, and it survives, in spite of bullet holes, made by Cromwell's troops, in the statue of the Virgin. But English buildings were never quite as wholeheartedly baroque again.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Cotswold character

As my British readers will know, Spring is late here this year. There is snow in the hills around the town where I live, and the wintry weather makes journeys to explore buildings less frequent. So here is a carving from my local church here in Winchcombe, which I can photograph by walking a couple of hundred yards up the road (or by standing in my garden).

The church of St Peter, Winchcombe, was built in the 15th century, and is one of those spacious, late-Gothic buildings that on the Cotswolds are often referred to as "wool churches", because the money to build them came from the region's rich wool merchants. The origin of this church is slightly different, though, in that funds for it were provided by the local lord, Ralph Boteler, first Baron Sudeley, who had been a soldier involved in England's campaigns in France and a holder of high office at the English court.

The grotesque carvings high on the outer walls of the church are among the most vigorous to have survived anywhere in England. There are various theories about their subjects, though there is little hard evidence about who they portray. Their presence on the walls of a church is testimony to the close relationship between the grotesque and the sublime in medieval art and thought – and to the sense of humour that links us to our forbears.

Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire

Castle-cathedral-church

Even after years of looking at architecture, buildings are still surprising me and pulling me up short. This little eye-catcher of a church near the A30 east of Shaftesbury is a case in point. Seen through the eye corner, the towers and battlements suggest a castle, but as soon as you look closely, it's obvious that this is a church – and one built in a very specific way to imitate a Norman cathedral on a small scale.

The church was built in around 1839, when a neighbouring building proved too small for a growing population. The architect, William Walker, designed it in this neo-Norman style, with round-headed doorway and tall, narrow windows, which was rather unusual in this period. I've seen it suggested that a local bigwig, a Mr Graves of nearby Charlton House, contributed a lot of the money required for the building, and maybe he had a say in the design. Whoever's idea it was, it's unusual and arresting. Small parish churches don't have two towers, do they? This one does. They usually have the entrance on the south. But this one's main doorway is at the west end. They don't normally have a west front. This one does. Neither do they usually have the rather forbidding, military-looking aspect of this building, with its very narrow windows and battlements. Even now, some time after taking the photograph, the unusual effect of this church makes me pause.

Newbury, Berkshire

Hub

"Corn exchange": a phrase that I remember puzzling me as a child. What did they do in there, swap wheat  for barley? Exchange bad jokes and puns? At some point, someone put me right, and much later I came across Adrian Bell's book Corduroy, his account of leaving the literary and artistic world of London and learning to farm in Suffolk in the 1920s, with its description of farmers and merchants bargaining in the local corn exchange. A market for farmers, then (not a farmers' market), and the hub of many an English country town. 

And in many of these towns, the corn exchange is still an imposing building in the centre or on the market place. This one is in the middle of Newbury and is built in Italianate style, with tall arched windows and big classical pilasters. The design was by J S Dodd and the building was put up in 1861–2; it has no doubt been impressing everyone from passers-by to rookie farmers ever since. The details are quite interesting – the name of the building in thin but pleasant lettering (in what lettering experts call, with no disrespect to the form, grotesque capitals) and a roundel with a relief of a castle, its three stylized towers a version of the castle on the Newbury coat of arms.

Now that farmers no longer need to gather together to haggle and sell their crops, corn exchanges need to find new uses to survive. Many have become the venues for other kinds of markets. This one is an arts centre. I'm not sure what Adrian Bell would have thought about this. Perhaps the Londoner, turned farmer, turned writer would have smiled wryly.

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If the name of Adrian Bell sounds familiar, it may be because of his charming books about farming and the English countryside. Corduroy is a good place to start: a gentle, beautifully observed story of the author's induction into farming life and of how he learns his profound respect for the hard work and deep knowledge of the farmer whose eye for a pig, he discovers, is "as subtle as an artist's". Its sequels are Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. The name may also be familiar because at least two of Bell's children have made a useful mark in the world – they are the politician and journalist Martin Bell and the translator Anthea Bell (whose English versions of the Asterix books have amused generations and whose more literary translations, of books such as W G Sebald's transcendent Austerlitz, are superb).

Cambridge

Curves

Shopfronts are not the most obvious items in the cornucopia that is the architecture of Cambridge, but here is one that pulled me up short as I walked around the town in the rain last week. My first response to this building in Market Street was a question: could this really be an original art nouveau frontage? The glorious collection of curves described by its carved woodwork certainly seemed to point that way and I guessed that it was late art nouveau, a survival from perhaps the early 1920s. When I got home and looked it up, I found that the building's official listing put it at c 1910, whereas Kathryn A Morrison in her excellent English Shops and Shopping dates it to c 1923, when the front was made for Stetchworth Dairies.

The front repays a close look. The woodwork above the door is a stunning collection of stylized foliage and multiple curves that turn back on themselves in a way that we're now more used to seeing in Paris or Brussels than in England and the flowers and stems in the glass echo these curves beautifully. The door and the wooden panels on either side take up the theme of curves too, as does the extraordinary metalwork.

The building must have made a remarkable diary. The front seems to have been designed to catch the eye more effectively than the display of eggs, cream, butter, and cheese in the window. If it's not perhaps as effective in its new role fronting a gift shop (it seems to cry out for a more sensitive sign than the one currently in place), at least it is in use, a curvaceous and exotic reminder of the skill with which which shops were designed and fitted out in the days when frontages like this were made to last.