Farndon, Cheshire

In black and white

There are countless timber-framed black and white buildings in Cheshire, some of them late-medieval, some much later. This one, The Raven in Farndon, is said on some websites to have been ‘originally built’ in the 16th century, but the excellent Farndon history website points out that the earliest documentary evidence for the pub is in 1785 and that it does not appear at all on a map of 1735. It’s likely to have 18th-century origins, then, but the present building is clearly late-19th century. Its ‘timber frame’ is actually decorative, being attached to solid walls of brick. People will say it’s a fake, but it’s a very engaging fake, with its pattern of cusps on the three sections between the upper windows (and elsewhere on the building) and its jazzy diagonal timbers in the gable.

My favourite part, though, is the sign. The pattern of plasterwork scrolls and straight lines around the name panel suggests similar patterns in Jacobean ceilings and above 17th-century fireplaces. The stylised raven, though is something else, the plasterer’s or architect’s own idea of conjuring up the eponymous bird in a simplified but graphic form. In its stylised, almost cartoon-like quality, t’s unlike anything I can remember in an inn sign, though my readers might know similar examples. It’s clear, simple, and effective, and it’s odd with such a distinctive sign that after a refurbishment in the late-20th century, the building should have had its name changed to The Farndon. Now it The Raven again, and its sign, not to mention its half-timbered design, look the business.

Farndon, Cheshire

Small mercy

‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ my mother would say, keeping her spirits up in the face of what was sometimes a hard life. Perhaps she learned such maxims in the succession of small nonconformist chapels that she attended in her youth, where the architecture – sober, dignified, but often a bit dull – could match the sermons preached within. But now and then a sermon could take off into more exciting realms of eloquence or even passion, and that’s the case too with the architecture of chapels, which can afford much more than sober appreciation.

So it is, I feel, with this example in Farndon. Its name is Chapel House and it was built in the mid-17th century as a house – for a minister, presumably – with a chapel room at the rear. Nowadays it’s a house pure and simple, but the design of its facade is neither entirely pure nor merely simple. What caught my eye of course was that curly gable, with its mixture of concave and convex curves, straight lines and steps. On the east coast of Lincolnshire this sort of thing would elicit comments about trade with the Low Countries influencing the local architecture. Here in Cheshire, there’s not that direct contact, but news travelled, as did pattern books, and someone in Farndon liked this style as much as I do.* The addition of a circular window in the attic, a dentil course across the middle, and an assertive round-headed doorway, and you have a composition that turns heads in a street of small houses. If you want a label for the style of this kind of building, it’s artisan mannerism, a fashion in which builders took motifs from more pretentious buildings (especially ones in places like Haarlem, Antwerp, and French chateaux) that they knew from pattern books and reproduced them, usually in brick.

Villages like Farndon have more spectacular buildings than this – a church, a striking pub, and a medieval bridge across the river that divides England and Wales are the kind of structures that guidebooks will direct the visitor towards. But small mercies like this building are things that also make me thankful.

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* Maybe more than one person. There’s at least one other similar gable in this village.

Chaddesley Corbett, Worcestershire

Polite but pragmatic

The buildings that attract me are sometimes the ones that don’t quite obey all the rules. Here, for example, is an example of an early-18th century house with many of the standard features of Georgian domestic architecture: sash windows, symmetrically arranged, brickwork with stone quoins, keystones and sills, a canopy over the door supported on scrolled brackets. The central ‘blind’ window may have been blocked at some point in its history or may simply have always been like that – blind windows are not unusual in this kind of architecture, because they look more interesting than blank stretches of wall and keep up the rhythm of rectangles across the facade.

What’s not quite from the pattern-book of ‘polite’ 18th-century architecture is the roof line and the ‘extra’ upper window. More standard would be a very low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, the whole facade ending roughly at the level of the top of the quoins. However, here a higher-pitched roof leaves attic space beneath, and the attic is lit by the central window. This lonely sash window, with an expanse of blank brickwork and sloping parapets on either side, looks odd, but fulfils a practical purpose – the extra accommodation squeezed into the roof space.

The side elevation displays another oddity – the lintel of another doorway, subsequently blocked, is visible between the ground-floor windows. The removal of the doorway is clearly an alteration – and whether the surviving lintel looks awkward or charming is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I like it, for its charm and for the way it reveals a stage in the building’s history. The whole house, I think, is a pleasant-looking building, with a seasoning of quirkiness that makes it, to this viewer at least, all the more appetising.

Reading, Berkshire

 

Tea and biscuits

Walking around the centre of Reading, I was struck by the occasional architectural gem that survives among a crowd of tawdry modern shop fronts. One particular pleasure was this glorious facade of brick and terracotta, the W. I. Palmer Memorial Building in West Street. It is named for William Isaac Palmer, who became one of the partners in the firm of Huntley and Palmer in 1857, a company that was soon to be the world’s largest manufacturer of biscuits. Biscuits (along with the town’s two other principal industries, beer and bulbs*) brought many jobs and much wealth to Reading. W. I. Palmer became personally very rich, and spent some of his money on civic and philanthropic projects, from helping to fund the new Town Hall and library to his enthusiastic support of the temperance movement.

The Palmers were Quakers and although Quaker beliefs do not forbid alcohol, its followers in general either do not drink or do so very moderately. William Isaac Palmer was a leader of the Reading Temperance Society for much of the second half of the 19th century (he died in 1893) and this meeting place for the movement was rebuilt in 1880s and 1890s and dedicated to his memory. The architect of these improvements and embellishments was F. W. Albury, a local man who was elected Fellow of the RIBA in 1875, when one of his proposers was Alfred Waterhouse, himself a great exponent of this kind of terracotta decoration. Much of the terracotta on this building – moulded into the forms of leaves, classical columns, and inscriptions – was made to Albury’s specifications by Royal Doulton in London.

The temperance movement was successful in steering many away from ‘strong drink’ in the Victorian period and later, but by the 1950s was much more concerned with educating people about the dangers of alcohol. In Reading, the society also sold non-alcoholic drinks and started the Temperance Building Society to provide home loans. Eventually the society moved to different premises and the upper floors of the W. I. Palmer hall were converted to apartments. From the outside at least, it must make a splendid building to come home to.

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* The horticultural kind, cultivated by Sutton’s Seeds.

Terracotta name plaque, W. I. Palmer Memorial Hall, Reading

Totnes, Devon

The attractions of Gothic

Again and again I feel drawn to houses with Gothic elements in their design – pointed windows, filigree tracery, battlements, and so on. Why should this be? Partly it's simply the delicacy of these designs – they seem have a fragility that’s wonderfully at odds with solid walls of bricks and mortar; Horace Walpole called his Georgian Gothic house Strawberry Hill a ‘paper house’, so fragile did it seem. Partly the attraction is that this aesthetic of pointed doors and windows is so different from the norm, which is all about straight lines, rectangles, box-like forms and sash windows.

The majority of these delicate Gothic houses date to the Georgian or Regency periods, from the 1740s to the 1830s. There are plenty of later examples too, but they tend to have a heavier, less filigree feel to them. Their inspiration, of course, comes from the Middle Ages, where we see Gothic most often in parish churches and cathedrals. The domestic architecture of the medieval period is now much rarer. Most small houses were rebuilt long ago, those that survive often altered beyond recognition. Medieval houses that do survive are frequently much plainer than churches, with square not pointed windows, although there are exceptions, like the wonderful Gothic hall of Stokesay Castle in Shropshire.

The truth is, of course, that Georgian Gothic houses aren’t really based on medieval houses at all – they take their inspiration from church architecture (from its dazzling variety of window tracery, for example) and from a refined and repurposed idea of what Gothic architecture can be: Gothic, if you like, seen through Georgian spectacles.

The small spectacle that results in this house in Totnes is delightful. The tall proportions, the ornate ground-floor bay window, the upper bays with their matching glazing bars, the battlements, even the cream finish of the walls, all elegant and pleasantly different from what surrounds it, as the array of sash windows on the building to the left shows. It’s also a welcome corrective to the current conception of Gothic as dark, gloom-laden, and possessed with death. Gothic can be light and bright and lively, and none the worse for it.

Bath, Somerset

Water is best

I go to Bath quite often and almost always, when I’m there, I admire the Georgian architecture that has made the place famous, but also look out for buildings and details that are either not Georgian or otherwise not typical of the city. Recently, walking along Walcot Street, the Resident Wise Woman and I spotted this small marvel. It’s a drinking fountain that once supplied water for humans and, via the trough to the right, for animals too, appropriately enough since it once served the city’s cattle market. Water, of course, was the thing that made Bath famous before the Georgian period, when the healing spa brought the Romans here. “Water is best” as it says on the walls of the Pump Room,* extolling the life-giving liquid.

Water once came to Walcot Street not in a classical pump room or a Roman bath, but via this Victorian fountain. It’s a Victorian creation, erected in 1860 by one Major Charles Davis, who was appointed city architect and surveyor a couple of years later.† By the look of it he’d been studying the work of John Ruskin, whose books, especially The Stones of Venice, are illustrated with the author’s beautiful drawings showing just this kind of architectural detail. What Ruskin admired in the architecture of Venice (especially its Gothic architecture) was the combination of craftsmanship and visual beauty. He drew arches sometimes with patterns carved into the surface of the stone, as in the outer arch here; sometimes with a zigzag pattern in two colours, as in the drinking fountain’s lower arch; often with shafts (miniature columns) in different materials, also as here. In 1860, bright, shining, and new, the arch would have gleamed, catching the eye with this combination of varied geology and delicate carving. The sound of running water would have added to the appeal.

It’s a shame that the fountain has seen better days – the weeds in the trough seem well established (was it once used as a planter?) and, because the structure is on the side of the road where there are no shops, few people walk along this bit of pavement to notice. Looking it up online, I found an article about restoring the fountain, but I’m not sure the date of this. I hope some cleaning and conservation work is possible, even if the fountain can no longer be connected to a water supply. Though the trickle of water would be an added attraction too.

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* This motto is actually in ancient Greek, as it’s a quotation from the poet Pindar, put there, I believe, by temperance campaigners to encourage people to choose water over intoxicating liquors.

† Davis did a lot of work in the city, from the redevelopment of the Roman Baths to the building of the Empire Hotel. He would have needed to cultivate versatility to produce these diverse works, and the tiny project of designing the drinking fountain shows another string to his bow – Ruskinian Venetian design to add to his classical works in the Baths and the more generic Gothic and Norman that he needed for his church restorations.

Nailsworth, Gloucestershire

 

Sign of which times?

It’s always worth looking out for old signs on shops – not just the sign bearing the shop name or owner’s name, but also signs that advertise goods once sold there. There are still quite a few Hovis bread signs on buildings that are no longer bakers, and during years of blogging I’ve posted signs advertising goods such as Kodak film, Ariel motorcycles, Ty-Phoo tea and Ever-Ready batteries. Walking along the main street in Nailsworth a little while ago, another example caught me eye – this Cadbury’s chocolate sign above the door of a hairdresser’s.

I was particularly struck by this sign because it seems a cut above the usual stick-on plastic ones: separate letters clearly delineated in what looks to me a rather Art Deco (i.e. 1920s or 1930s) letter form, from a time before the familiar Cadbury’s script logo (with its curly ‘C’ and artfully joined ‘db’) appeared in around 1951. In the sign in my photograph, the word ‘chocolate’, with its capitals that diminish in size, also feels true to the 1920s. Looking online, I could find only few versions of this design among the many different Cadbury’s logos and packs that appear when you Google this subject. Online sources give dates as varied as 1906 and 1920. Whatever the exact date, I think this sign in Nailsworth is rather unusual. I wonder if any of my readers know of others like it still in their original setting?