Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Fancy work

I’m always on the look-out for interesting shop fronts, not least because everyone else seems to ignore them. This lettering is found on the lovely late-19th century frontage of a jeweller’s on Tewkesbury High Street. Pevsner (excellent on the timber-framed buildings and much else on this street) does not include it. But it caught my eye for the signs alone, and I was still more impressed when I realised that this front retains the grooves to take its old wooden shutters, which are still put up at night to cover the windows.

With an eye on history and style, the shop, now Buttwell and Jones, has kept the old ‘Buttwell & Sons’ signage. The gilded lettering on its green glass background (more beautiful if anything for being worn) has satisfying, full-looped letters with lots of character. Plenty of variation between the width of the strokes, neat loops on the w and o, and a distinctive small s at the end all contribute to the effect. Only the ampersand seems a bit squashed and mean.

Up above, against a gold background glinting like an engine-turned cigarette case, are the ornate capital letters of the word ‘JEWELLER’. These letters are a feast of knobbly serifs, curving strokes, and dots. You’d not want too much of this, but, placed where it is, it gives just the right impression of fancy work that the original proprietor no doubt wanted to convey, back at the turn of the 20th century. How pleasing that the sign, and the business it advertises, is still there.

Deddington, Oxfordshire

Survival and change

The parish church in the middle of Deddington, built of toffee-coloured stone like much of the town, is a mixture of periods, with notable details from the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 17th centuries. The 17th-century parts include the north porch, an example of the survival of a kind of Gothic into the period when much English architecture was turning Classical. The old antiquarians used to call this style ‘debased’, because it was a kind of mongrel mixture of traditional late-medieval Gothic with other elements that owed something to the new classicism – and the Gothic elements weren’t always very orthodox. The more current designation, ‘Gothic survival’, doesn’t do it justice either. Gothic has done more than survived: it has changed, sometimes in very interesting ways.

My photograph, of the roof of the north porch, shows, I think, some of this interest. The basic form is a shallow dome, but if this sounds like a classical kind of roof, there’s nothing classical about the details. The dome is finished with a network of ribs a bit like those in a fan vault – but forming a circle, not a fan. It’s almost like a rose window, with the glazed parts filled in with stone and the central part finished with the ubiquitous quatrefoil. By adding a trefoil at each corner, the circle is squared. The whole design is a telling example of the coming together of tradition and innovation, and the sort of quiet architectural surprise which keeps me visiting parish churches.

Lawn Road, London

Flats and curves

In 1934 the Lawn Road flats, designed by Wells Coates for the Isokon Company, were completed. They were the fruit of the joint vision of their architect and Jack Pritchard, who worked for the plywood manufacturer Venesta and had got to know Coates a few years before because they shared an interest in the use of plywood in furniture and building construction.

The block was very different from anything else built at the time. Coates and Pritchard conceived it as accommodation for young single professionals – the kind of people who in the 1930s normally expected to rent a room in ‘digs’. Most of the flats in the block were therefore very small, consisting of a living room with bed space, a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and small dressing room where there were wardrobes and cupboards for clothes. Fitted furniture helped make these small spaces both agreeable and efficient. As well as these ‘minimal flats’ there were also some larger ones with room for two people.

Just as remarkable as these interiors were the structure and exterior of the block. Made of reinforced concrete finished in white with the palest hint of pink, the block is quite unlike the neo-Georgian norm for flats at the time. The sculptural access balconies dominate the side of the block visible from Lawn Road, defining the building’s shape from curving corner at one end to protruding staircase tower at the other. As well as looking good, the balconies work structurally too – an underground tunnel under the front of the site restricted the footprint of the foundations, so cantilevering out the balconies made practical sense.

Embodying a ‘modern’ way of life in an up-to-the-minute design, the Lawn Road flats gained a lot of publicity. Coates hoped that they would be copied, providing much needed compact accommodation in many other places. This seems not to have happened, perhaps because developers could make more money in other ways. And the Lawn Road flats themselves seem to have attracted more upmarket residents than the architect envisaged – Agatha Christie and Adrian Stokes had flats there, the block attracted architects and designers including, for a while, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, and a surprising number of the residents were once involved in the world of espionage.* Nowadays, under the auspices of Notting Hill Home Ownership, the block has been restored and its flats are mostly home to key workers who are closer to the constituency that Coates originally imagined.

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*There’s more on this building and its inhabitants in David Burke, The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists (Boydell Press, 2014).

Ripple, Worcestershire

A trough, but for what, or whom? or, Odd things in churches (6)

In the church porch at Ripple stands this curious shallow stone trough. When I first saw it I didn’t know quite what to make of it and at first took it as something displaced from a garden. Before I could wonder which plants might look good in it, though, I caught sight of a nearby label, which says that the trough is ‘traditionally’ said to have been used as a container for food for lepers or others with infectious diseases. The idea was that the trough would be placed by the roadside, away from houses, at a point where those with leprosy could come and collect food left by the charitable. Later, when it fell out of use, the trough was moved to the church for preservation.

I don’t know how much store to set by this tradition. I’ve not come across anything quite like this before, though there’s a tendency to explain certain architectural features of churches (leper squints, leper windows, and so on) by linking them to the needs of those whose infectious condition prevented them from entering the church building. I’m not sure how much actual evidence there is for these connections. Meanwhile, the stone trough of Ripple is doing sterling service as an umbrella sand. Here’s to versatility.

Clifton, Bristol

Beyond the pissoir

Prompted by my recent posts of an iron gents in Bath and a splendid pissoir in Bristol, a commenter mentioned the half-timbered public convenience at Clifton, and, as I was in the city briefly the other day, I took a walk across the greenery to find it. Here it is, huddled against the cliff by the Avon Gorge, a few yards from the suspension bridge that makes Clifton famous. 

‘A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln cathedral is a piece of architecture,’ wrote the great Dr Pevsner, defining the boundaries of his field. A public lavatory, by implication, might well fall into the mere ‘building’ category, but this one has enough marks of the designer’s effort to make it, surely, a piece of architecture. Read into this piece of architecture what you will: civic upmanship, a style verging on the rustic to fit into the green surroundings, a solid stone base to harmonize with the cliffs behind, a winning combination of grandeur and domesticity, a chance for the carpenter to show off with all those brackets and gables, generous eaves to shelter the passer-by during rain. However you look at it, the city that could produce both the suspension bridge just along the road and the grand Regency terraces of Clifton a few hundred yards away clearly thought it could do something memorable when putting up a building with an altogether humbler, though no less useful, function. The denizens of Clifton should be flushed with pride.

Wells, Somerset

More light

In Wells, turning my back, for a moment, on the magnificent west front of the Cathedral, and remembering Jonathan Meades’s characterization of another cathedral close (the one at Salisbury) as a complete three-dimensional history of architecture, I focused on the more modest houses on Wells’s Cathedral Green.

My eyes came to rest on this, one of a varied row on the Green’s south side. The first thing to catch my attention was the doorway, with its beautiful late-18th century fanlight and door surround with open pediment and Doric uprights. The fanlight, it is said, was brought from Dublin and the surround was put together from various fragments, including some bits that began life in a convent. All this high-class bricolage points to the fact that, for all its sash windows and fancy entrance, this is actually a 17th-century house that was altered in the 18th and 20th centuries.

The proportions – with low ground floor and the whole building sitting lower down the the green in front of it – are another hint to the building’s age: not for this house the standard narrow sash windows, three panes wide and four deep, that are usual in the Georgian houses of cities such as Bath. Here we have glorious big windows with 20 panes each on the ground floor and 16 panes on the floor above. Their size is no doubt testimony to earlier 17th-century openings – and to the fact that this is a north-facing house with an interior that needs plenty of light. Perhaps these generous windows help to make the house as pleasant inside as, set off with the elegant railings, gate, and iron overthrow, it is from without.

Cheltenham, Gloucetsershire

Spooks, revisited: A question of attribution

A brief addendum to an earlier post.

Regular readers might be interested to know that the artist known as Banksy has confirmed that he did indeed paint the graffito in Cheltenham, about which I blogged in a post during April when the attribution was still unconfirmed. This piece of wall art, on either side of a telephone box in Cheltenham's Fairview Road, alludes to the town's role as the home of GCHQ, the British government's 'listening post'. It has created a stir locally, and more widely, and it provoked both specific comments and personal memories in my earlier post. Bansky's confirmation of the attribution is noted in a question-and-answer session on his own website and in the local media.