Wells, Somerset

 
Slightly foxed

At the weekend I was teaching a course about architectural ornament and the participants were amused and, I think, charmed by a number of variations on the classical orders that I showed them. I wanted to demonstrate that the orders weren’t necessarily regarded by masons, carvers, and builders as a set of hard-and-fast rules. They could be starting points on which the craftsman played variations. A particular hit was a Corinthian capital with a bird fluttering among its acanthus leaves in Birmingham. It reminded me that there are capitals featuring animal heads on a building in the High Street at Wells. They occur on the Bath stone facade of a bank of about 1880. But what kind of capitals are they? And what are the animals?

The official listing text for the building describes the capitals as “quasi-Ionic”; the text doesn’t mention the animals at all, not concerning itself with such trivialities. The Ionic element is the spirals, although there are also some acanthus leaves lurking at the back, so it might just as well be “quasi-Corinthian” I suppose. The beast is an oddity: the Resident Wise Woman suggested an attempted fox, observing that the ears seem to be turning into a leaves. A mythical beast? Or just a poorly carved one? No matter. It’s a bit of fun however you look at it.

Victoria Street, London

On reflection

Among the rampant office blocks and stores of Victoria Street stands the Albert, a pub of 1862 built in solid yellow brick with dressings in red brick, trimmings in stucco, and a big, decisive cornice. It belonged, apparently, to the Artillery Brewery, which was just across the road and built in a similar style. In the late sun of an autumn afternoon, its brickwork glows.

The pub exterior has its fair share of the kind of decorative elaboration the Victorian pubs and their owners went in for, and the aspect of this that particularly caught my eye was the engraved glass. It's said to be original and is a cut above a lot of pub glass, which bears arabesques and curlicues of a fairly standard and formulaic nature. At the Albert we have trails of foliage, flowers, fruit, and some wonderful birds. I particularly liked the one above, though I'm not sure what species it is or whether the image is at all ornithologically accurate. My main efforts on the sunny afternoon when I passed were in trying to photograph it without including too many reflections. It's difficult, on a bright day, but I offer my efforts anyway, because I think the glass is good, if the photography is not.

And in a way, the reflections are part of the point. A pub is a social building, that wants both to include you in its image, but also to stop you looking in, to give the drinkers inside some seclusion from the street. What's more, the reflections also include some of the pub's other decorative touches. There's a mirror image of some of the ornate ironwork in my photograph below and you can see the iron "Albert" sign, shadows of iron scrolls, the reflection of the building across the road, and glimpses of some interior lights. It might be a confusing picture, but even in the sun and even with all these reflections, the decoration of the glass still shines.

Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

Great minds…

The other night I was giving a talk about the history of the high street in Britain, illustrated with pictures of shops and shop fronts down the ages. After the talk, which was in Gloucestershire close to the border with Worcestershire, a member of the audience asked me if I’d seen the recently revealed old sign above a shop in Upton on Severn, not far away. She liked it, and thought I would too. As it happened, just a few weeks earlier, I had seen it and admired it. Great minds think alike.

The shop is now Sweet Daisy, an “old-fashioned” confectionery shop, with rows of jars containing sweet things. But the proprietors, or the owners of the building if they are different, have done a fine thing, and left the rather good old sign of a long-gone firm, the London Meat Company, exposed, it having been covered up for years as other businesses had occupied the building. The bold gold capital letters of the old Meat Company are an asset to the street. The sign still looks good surrounded by the bright red of the shop front, even if they’re not perhaps as bright and shiny as they were in their heyday. Which was when? I’d imagine the early-20th century, although the letters could be Victorian. The strips of green tiles with stylized flowers on them look Art Nouveau,* so perhaps the shop front and sign were done around 1900. Whatever its age, thank you Sweet Daisy for leaving the sign visible. No doubt its helps draw in the curious and paradoxically encourages the purchase of barley sugar, sherbet pips, humbugs, rhubarb and custard, Scottish tablet, and so on and on…

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*Which I omitted to photograph in close-up. Next time I’m passing…

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

The English pig

Going back a few years from my previous post and we reach around 1910 and the golden age for English tiled shopfronts, when the architectural ceramicists were still being influenced by the swirls and curls of the Art Nouveau style, and before World War I banished jollity. Welcome, then, to the premises of Jesse Smith, butcher of Cirencester, a company that has hung on to a lovely Edwardian shopfront and interior, one with tiles that beautifully celebrate the pig and what a butcher can do with it.

 It begins before we even get inside the shop, with a pig portrait in one door reveal and, low down in another (above: almost obscured by some barbecuing equipment last time I passed) a legend in curvaceous Art Nouveau lettering designed to make the pig fancier’s mouth water: Pickled tongues. The design on the right of this image, with its sinuous lines and mysterious semicircles (Do they evoke stylised flowers or seed heads?) would not look out of place in Vienna. The Secession comes to the Cotswolds for a short break.

Inside, porcine eyes follow you round the room as you contemplate cuts of pork and home-made pies. Around and above them swirl the arabesques so typical of Art Nouveau design, scrolls of foliage and tendrils that curl this way and that, describing those two-way “whiplash” curves that turn-of-the-century designers so loved. Was there ever a pig so jaunty as the specimen to the right of the interior wall in my top photograph, with nose upturned, one ear up and one ear down? It’s a characterful beast, but the one on the left (and enlarged in my photograph above) seems to me a more convincing specimen of pigginess: this is an animal, after all, that’s built to look down towards the ground and rootle.

As I come out clutching my pork pie, I reflect that I know few better architectural celebrations of the English pig. But I also reflect that the French know a thing or two too. Wasn’t Paris a cradle of Art Nouveau? And don’t they say that Tout est bon dans le cochon?

Great Malvern, Worestershire

Postcards from England

I’m fascinated by the way in which shop designers used tiles to make a colourful splash on street frontages, a type of decoration that enlivened many a shop front from the Victorian period until well into the 1930s. One of my favourite examples of this is on the front of a branch of W H Smith in Malvern, and one of its tile panels came to mind the other day when, in my previous post, I used the phrase ‘postcards from England’ to describe my blogging activities. This is a building I’ve posted before but one of its tile panels* is so beautiful, and, I think, so mysterious, that’s worth sharing once more.

This panel, set into a narrow reveal to one side of the shop window and so very easy to miss, advertises postcards – clearly, in a much visited spa town like Malvern, postcards were an important thing to stock. The view it depicts is a bit of fantasy architecture by moonlight. A medieval stone bridge leads across a river towards a gatehouse in what looks like a town wall. In the background is a looming tower, that seems to exist in a space that’s separate from the rest of the picture. Or not quite. In the foreground, the corner of this tower seems to grow out of the bridge, but in the background it appears to be behind the city wall. It’s also drawn, to seems to me, to a much larger scale than the bridge or gatehouse.

None of this matters very much, because the image, with its varied shades of blue and purple and its eery moonlight is a lovely confection that seems to invite us into a world of night-time mystery and make-believe. It certainly draws you in, although a postcard with a run-of-mill photographic view on it might be a bit of a come down after seeing it.

The other wonderful thing about the tile panel of course is that (together with another opposite it advertising maps) is still there. It must have been installed in the 1920s or 1930s and it takes us back to a time when shop fronts were designed for a life of decades rather than a year or two, when businesses weren’t expected to reinvent themselves every six months, but traded on their history and reputation. My readers can decide for themselves whether or not the change to a less long-term outlook is a good thing. But I’m glad at least that the old ways produced bits of occasional art like this.
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*Made by Carter's of Poole, as one of my fastest-off-the-mark readers has reminded me.

Ham Yard, London

            Image courtesy John Nassari

Amara Interior Blog Awards

Last night I went to a very congenial awards ceremony at Ham Yard, the new, luxurious, and appealingly tardis-like hotel not far from Shaftesbury Avenue on the edge of Soho in central London. The nice people at Amara had told me a while back that this blog had been nominated for one of its Interior Blog Awards and, to my great surprise, it got on to the shortlist for the Best Architecture Blog. So it was, I thought, as a shortlister that I went along to the ceremony, to admire the interior, take advantage of the fine double-height bar (I'm propping it up in the picture above, but you have to be quite sharp-eyed to spot me), and give the winners of the various categories the applause they deserve.

So after some chatting, nibbling, and vertical drinking, we were summoned into the theatre (What has this hotel not got? A bowling alley? Wrong: it has one of those as well) for the award-giving. And imagine how my ghast was flabbered when the first award to be announced was in the Architecture category, and the winner was English Buildings. I staggered to the stage to pick up my award (a bit of modern design in its own right) and returned to my seat to take pleasure in the applause and clap in genuine enthusiasm the other 12 or so category winners.

The various civilized aspects of the event included meeting other bloggers and their representatives, chatting to some of the fine people who did the judging, and giving and receiving various congratulations. Another civilized thing was that I did not have to make a speech. That meant that I couldn't make public my thanks to those involved in making this event happen and bringing us all together – the people from Amara, the judges, the award sponsors (including G P & J Baker, sponsors of my award), and... I could go on, but I won't. Thank you all. Brevity is the soul of this blog: a picture, a couple of paragraphs with some personal observation and comment, then I move on. I sometimes think of my posts as Postcards from England. This one is more like a thank-you letter. A short one, but none the worse for that.

Fleet Street, London

Getting your message across

I’m in the process of preparing a course about architectural ornament, and looking through my photographs to find examples of ways in which 20th-century architects turned against the modernist call in the 1920s for architecture that should be functional and devoid, or largely devoid, of the decorative elements that had so preoccupied their predecessors. There are numerous ways in which they made this turn, of course, one of them being the increasing use of ancient Egyptian design as a source: think various cinema facades and factories of the late-1920s and 1930s. To make this point in the past I’ve often used a personal favourite – the old Carreras tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent, with its Egyptian columns and wonderful black cats. Here’s another example, the former Telegraph building in Fleet Street.

The Telegraph building was designed for the newspaper of that name by Elcock and Sutcliffe with Thomas Tait and built in 1927–8. It has a very bold, ultra-imposing facade with a row of giant fluted columns topped by carved Egyptian capitals. Bands of abstract carved ornament run along cornices and over window lintels. The whole thing is designed to make a big mark, to overwhelm the passer-by.  And so it does – look at the way it dwarfs the pedestrians in front of it.

Further decorative touches make a big difference. The clock, itself enormous, lends colour to this stony frontage. Its design is full of the diamonds, jagged edges, chevrons, and radiating, sunburst-like motifs that Art Deco artists loved. The relief above the doorway, by, Alfred Oakley, is another such feature. With its sun-rays, compass rose, Britain at the centre of its hemisphere, and the two caduceus-bearing messenger figures racing out across the empire with news, it symbolises the newspaper’s business of communication, and sets it, and Britain, at a pivotal place in the world that would not have seemed inappropriate in 1927. On the bright day I passed by, some rather dramatic shadows were obscuring some of the detail of this carving, but it’s strong enough to make its point without the direct light of the Art Deco lamp above it.*

As ever, God (or the Devil, if you wish) is in the details. If this gigantic facade does seem over the top, the carving and that jewel-box of a clock give it different accents, and make one pause to look closely. Which is one of the things good architectural ornament can do so well.

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*As so often, the excellent Ornamental Passions blog has more about the carving on this building, with more photographs.