Catford, London

Far from ordinary

‘The glory of the ordinary’ was one reader’s comment on this blog and its subject matter, especially the parts of it that concern themselves with shacks, corrugated iron barns, battered factories, and other unregarded delights. But I didn’t always pay attention to this kind of architectural ordinariness – extraordinary buildings, from English cathedrals to Italian palazzi, once seemed more worthwhile, and years ago, when I lived not far from southeast London’s Excalibur prefab estate, I didn’t look at the place very closely, pausing only to be amused by the Arthurian street names (Ector Road, Pelinore Road) and to notice the similarities between the prefabs that lined these streets and the ones I remembered not far from where I lived as a child. There had always been prefabs around, ‘war prefabs’ as my parents and their friends called them, built en masse to relieve the housing shortage (and to give the suddenly underemployed aircraft industry something to do) after World War II.

Back in the 1960s, when I was a boy, the thing that my parents said about these prefabs were that they were meant to be temporary dwellings, with a life of ten years or so, and that the little houses had done well to last twice that time already. Now, 60 or more years after their construction, there are very few of these prefabs left: most have been demolished to make way for more modern housing, often at a higher density to take advantage of today’s high city land values.

So prefabs are no longer ordinary. The Excalibur Estate is now the only surviving prefab estate left, and is itself threatened with demolition. English Heritage have listed a handful of the prefabs (and the estate’s curious prefabricated church), but the council want to pull down the other 180 prefabs and replace them with a larger number of more modern dwellings. My feelings about this are mixed. On the one hand, London needs more good social housing and the prefabs would prove costly to preserve. On the other, the prefabs are a unique bit of social and architectural history. The residents, when polled, voted for demolition and redevelopment, by a narrow margin of 56 to 44 per cent.

The estate was built in 1945–6, and consists of prefabricated Uni-Seco bungalows, which have a timber frame supporting panels of asbestos cement. There are metal-framed windows and roofs with a very gentle pitch that look flat. The Uni-Seco was one of 13 different types of prefab built in Britain in the 1940s under the government’s Temporary Housing Programme, which eventually saw some 150,000 prefabs built to help relieve the housing shortage. More would have been built, but the prefabs (whether in wood, aluminium, concrete, or asbestos cement – there were examples of all these forms of construction) were actually quite costly to produce, so traditional, permanent, brick-built houses eventually prevailed.

Most residents liked their prefabs, not least because they came with modern features such as fully equipped bathrooms,  indoor lavatories, and fitted kitchens with hot and cold water and something that most British houses lacked in 1948: a refrigerator. This was the kind of specification that many Brits could only dream of in the post-war period and the buildings, with their almost-flat roofs, white walls, and large windows, looked modern too. If they cared about such things, the original tenants might have reflected that at last their were getting a bit of the modern design that had been such a hit in Europe. But the generous gardens were probably just as important to them.

And there, for now, they stand, their chivalric street names (actually a continuation of a theme used to name streets in a neighbouring estate) evoking both post-war patriotism and 21st-century defiance. In this age of austerity, these far-from ordinary little buildings are worth a thought and, it seems to me, some admiration too.

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With thanks to Caroline, of the excellent blog Caroline’s Miscellany, for the pictures. Her own piece on the Excalibur Estate is well worth reading.

There is an ongoing project to record the history of prefabs here.

The best books on prefabs are Greg Stevenson, Palaces for the People (Batsford, 2003) and Brenda Vale, Prefabs: A History of the UK Temporary Housing Programme (E & F N Spon, 1995)

Great Wishford, Wiltshire

Hands to the pump, or, Odd things in churches (3)

One of the oldest fire engines in Britain is kept in St Giles Church Great Wishford. The churchwardens bought the fire engine from engineer Richard Newsham in 1728. It was a horse-drawn appliance and the pumps inside were hand operated and could shift about 65 gallons of water per minute – you needed a team of ten or so people working the pump handles to achieve this. The machine was quite costly – the churchwardens paid £33 and 3 shillings for it, a considerable sum in the 1720s – but it must have been worth it at a time when there was no organized fire service, timber buildings made fires a frequent hazard, and the system of fire insurance that evolved in the 18th century only covered those who paid the premium. Even in the Victorian period, and well into the 20th century, the fire engine was still apparently used in the village.

I don't think the fire engine was originally kept in the church, although in a way it would have made sense to keep it there  – everyone would have known where it was and access would have been easy. And in the 18th century people were a lot less precious about using a church in this way than they were in later periods. Nowadays, we half expect to find relics and curiosities of former ages in our churches, but even bearing this in mind, coming across this shining red monster is quite a surprise.

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The photograph is © Copyright Miss Steel and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

Curves

Almshouses. There are little rows of them all over England, the result mostly of acts of local charity that have helped house the poor, the needy, and the old for hundreds of years. Their architecture ranges from the simple to the ornate and often has a touch of the Gothic about it, with pointed, ecclesiological arches over windows and doorways reminding one perhaps of the houses’ origins in Christian charity, and sometimes alluding to their antiquity – some almshouse charities go back hundreds of years, to the medieval period. Sometimes, these Gothic touches are probably just there to make the buildings stand out, to indicate that these little buildings are different from the run of the mill of houses built by local landlords or developers.

These almshouses in Much Wenlock probably date from around 1800 and their touch of Gothic is provided by the distinctive double-curved ogee arches above the windows and doors. Ogees first became fashionable in the 14th century, as part of the ornate kind of Gothic architecture that the Victorians called Decorated Gothic. But there’s nothing else Decorated Gothic about these houses. They’re rather plain brick buildings and the simple wooden doors and white-framed windows don’t make any concessions to the curved arches above them – the doors and windows are resolutely rectangular and the gaps between them and the arches are filled with plain white plastered panels. Oddly enough, the white panels catch the eye and make the arches more obvious. They’re like signs or reminders that tell us that these are almshouses, and they’re that little bit different, and proud of it too.

Oxford

Changes

Although I must have walked past this building hundreds of times when I lived in Oxford, I never paid it much attention. In those days my mind was on other things and the building didn’t have the blue plaque that it has today, pointing out to passers by that the ‘Oxford Playhouse began here 1923–1938 in the former Big Game Museum built in 1906’.

Big Game Museum?

The Big Game Museum was the brainchild of one Charles Victor Alexander Peel, an old Etonian for whom reducing the wildlife population of Africa seems to have been something of an obsession. Peel was convinced that big game hunting was an excellent activity for a young man, combining adventure with science (the opportunity to discover, record, and collect species) and ‘sport’. He promoted his enthusiasm in several books that chronicled his expeditions in Africa and beyond. Titles such as Somaliland and The Length of Africa: Being an Account of a Journey from Cape Town to Alexandria and Sport in Kenya Colony and On a Collection of Insects and Arachnids Made in 1895 and 1897 in Somaliland and The Polar Bear Hunt give a flavour of what drove him. By the early 1900s he had amassed so many pelts and mounted skeletons that he conceived the idea of housing them in a museum. This building on Oxford’s Woodstock Road was the result.

The big upper windows must have provided a light space in which to display the specimens. Their white frames and scrolling brackets at either end of each large window, together with the scroll patterns in the walls below them, give the building a restrained Arts and Crafts flavour, as do the brick buttresses and the porch. The strip windows lower down are also very much of their time, although presumably the window frames are replacements. From roof finials to brickwork, the building gives the impression of fitness for purpose.

But the purpose was to change. In the early 1920s, Peel moved to Devon. He offered his collection to Oxford City, but they declined. The animals ended up in Exeter, where they still form the core of the natural history collection of Exeter Museum. In 1923 the Oxford building became a theatre, where J B Fagan directed the Oxford Players. Fagan’s productions were admired, and he brought notable actors, including the young John Gielgud, to his theatre, but found it difficult to make the venture pay. In the end he left Oxford for Hollywood. Fagan’s successors were no more successful financially, but the building on Woodstock Road remained a theatre until 1938, when the Playhouse moved to its current site in Beaumont Street.

In addition to being a museum and a theatre, the building has had several other uses, probably the oddest being a miniature golf course. Today it houses the Oxford University Language Centre, which offers courses and resources to those learning languages in Oxford. The Centre has been here since 1992, so its occupation represents one of the longest chapters in the history of this building. How adaptable this robust structure has proved.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

On their heads be it

I did a post long ago about Cheltenham’s caryatids, describing how their elegant presence on the town’s most striking row of shops was due to the inspiration of a pair of architects, one of whom was highly inventive, and a pair of sculptors, one of whom was very successful but also impecunious. I was reminded of these 1840s figures again the other day, in part by my encounter with some very different carved figures on a London building, and in part by my rereading of an old book, Osbert Lancaster’s Classical Landscape With Figures. Osbert Lancaster was best known as a cartoonist, the man who quietly changed the face of English political humour with his long daily succession of ‘Pocket Cartoons’ in the Daily Express. But his greatest passions were for architecture and travel, and he turned out a series of books on these subjects. All his books were illustrated with his own witty drawings, and some, such as Pillar To Post, named and defined entire architectural styles (Stockbroker Tudor, Bypass Variegated) that hadn’t been recognised before.

In Classical Landscape With Figures, Lancaster presents ‘Greece as it appears to-day’, in other words in 1947, an account enlivened by a picturesque mix of figures in the foreground and ruins, both Classical and Byzantine, in the middle distance. There are a number of passages in the book that make me laugh, and one contains the author’s thoughts on the caryatid, a Greek invention that he pokes some fun at. I must warn my readers that he does so in language that is hardly politically correct – but this is 1947, and his tongue is in his cheek:

To [the Greeks], more than to any other people, it would, one would have thought, have been obvious that to employ a naturalistic three-dimensional rendering of the human form as an architectural unit was to invite disaster. When the Baroque architect of the seventeenth century, whose aims were anyhow completely different, flanked a doorway with a pair of groaning Atlases he had expressionist justification; the over-life-size figures with exaggeratedly bulging muscles do at least emphasise, as they were intended to do, the weight and mass of the architrave or balcony which they supposedly support. But here these elegant flower-maidens simper as unconcernedly as if they had never been called upon to balance two and a half tons of Pentelic marble on their pretty little heads.

Well, perhaps he had a point: maybe there is something slightly odd about the combination of these figures with the structural work they are called on to do. Here in Cheltenham, however, the work of the caryatids, each one separating a pair of shop fronts and each apparently supporting a highly decorative frieze above, is more decorative than structural. And visitors to Cheltenham need not fear. Their decorative presence is entirely appropriate in this street of elegant shops. These were once amongst the most exclusive outlets in town, in an area where early-closing day was Saturday – the point being, I suppose that the locals were so leisured that they could shop on any day they chose and didn’t have to wait to the weekend to dash around buying stuff. If things here aren’t quite as exclusive or leisured today, these delightful figures still do the business.

Mildenhall, Wiltshire

Two hundred years on

Dedicated church crawlers will have guessed when I did my previous post about the barn at Mildenhall that I was making for the parish church of St John the Baptist, a short distance along the same lane. This is a medieval building with a charming stone exterior that does nothing to prepare one for what is inside – a set of fittings of 1816 that is by any standards a remarkable survival.

The church boasts a full set of box pews, a tall pulpit and reading desk with backboards and canopies, and wooden panelling to dado level around the walls. Above the chancel arch are the painted royal arms of George III. That's appropriate as George was still nominally king when the church was refitted in 1816, although the Regency of his son, begun because of the king's illness, was underway by this time. The style of the fittings is Georgian, in that hybrid of classical and Gothic that is typical of this kind of work of the period, and if one didn't know the date, one might easily suppose that they were a couple of decades earlier.

In the chancel there are more fittings of 1816. As well as choir stalls and more panelling, there are boards inscribed with the Lord's Prayer and the Commandments, these boards rising to an ornate ogee-carved centrepiece behind the altar. At the west end of the church there is also a matching organ gallery. 

Fittings like these were not the kind of thing that the Victorians generally liked. Increasingly as the 19th century went on, the Anglican church focused on ritual in an appropriate setting – a setting that was more correctly Gothic than what we see at Mildenhall. As a result, items such as inscribed panels and Georgian box pews were frequently removed and replaced with fittings more obviously Gothic and more in accordance with Victorian views of beauty and holiness. Churches like Mildenhall, with their different, more Georgian (and more word-based) beauty, are therefore rare.

It's fair to say that something was lost when fittings like this were removed. There is something practical about the preaching facilities, the texts, the neat seating. It's also attractive, and winningly domestic – it's God's house, if not even God's drawing room. As the light poured through the largely clear glass windows on the morning I was there, it was easy to see how well it all works.

Mildenhall, Wiltshire

On high

Mildenhall (which I'm told is pronounced 'Minal') is roughly east of Marlborough in Wiltshire. The local stone is chalk, and in this area there's a variety of traditional building materials, including brick, flint, and wood, as well as chalk itself. There are quite a few large barns with wooden weatherboarded walls and thatched roofs, but this substantial barn (now clearly converted for some other use) has one of the biggest corrugated iron roofs I've seen recently dwarfing its boarded walls. The corduroy texture of the corrugated iron is if anything emphasized by the material's variegated colour, which seems to be a mixture of black paint and pale areas where the paint has flaked away.

This is such a big roof that the overused word 'awesome' came into my mind as I stared at it. It is clearly made up of three rows of sheets, but I'm not sure how long the sheets are – 8 or 10 feet each, perhaps. Whatever the precise size, it's a lot of corrugated iron to set beside the brick, white-walled, and thatched cottages that stand nearby. But I think it works.

I've been a fan of this kind of use of non-traditional materials in rural settings ever since moving to the Cotswolds. Here the traditional roofing material is honey-coloured Cotswold stone, but many farm buildings have grey slate roofs. I've grown used to listening to pundits bemoaning the fact that farmers dare to roof their buildings with slates, but I'm not convinced that every roof has to look the same or that everything has to be built in stone. I'm even happy to see a bit of rusty wriggly tin now and again on a Cotswold farm.

I feel the same about roofs like this one in Wiltshire. It's practical and effective and it sits rather well above the weatherboarding and behind the white-barked trees and green shrubs that surround it. It has terrific texture too. If corrugated iron is often thought of as a lowly material, a roof like this raises it to fresh heights.