Meetings with remarkable buildings
Crossing point The Palladian Bridge in the park at Stowe was built in 1739 by the first Viscount Cobham, around the time that many of the numerous other garden structures – temples, pavilions, statues and monuments – were erected there. Its design was probably by the great classical architect James Gibbs and he based it closely on the similar bridge at Wilton House, Wiltshire, which went up just…
Wellsprings of Liberty When I catch myself taking our water supply for granted in the face of countless communities in other parts of the world who do not have the benefit of a reliable supply of clean water, I think back to my childhood. In the village in Lincolnshire where I was born, my mother had to go to the village pump every day to collect the water we needed to drink, wash and clean. And…
In the wind I’ve featured a number of windmills on this blog, because they fascinate me as ingenious structures in which a distinctive architectural form is well adapted to do the job it needs to do – housing heavy machinery such as large rotating millstones and supporting a set of sails that harness the power of the wind. There needs to be a means of pointing the sails in the right direction, so…
Changing roles To the traveller along the Lower Icknield Way, north of Tring, the village of Marsworth seems unimpressive, somewhere to pass by quickly perhaps, on the way to Dunstable. But it’s more interesting than that, because the village is set at a junction of the Grand Union (formerly Grand Junction) Canal, and was once an important transport hub. Nearby are the large Tring Reservoirs,…
Wooden leg, or, Odd things in churches (19) How odd to find the effigy of a medieval leg leaning against one of the piers in the aisle of Hereford cathedral. It’s the leg of Sir Richard Pembridge, a knight from the county, who died in 1375 having fought at the battles of Crecy and Poitiers. He was made a Knight of the Garter by Edward III and his tomb, which was made of alabaster, included his…
Wood, coal and iron The Forest of Dean, the area of ancient Gloucestershire woodland between the Rivers Severn and Wye, is a place of extraordinary natural beauty. Ancient trees, including oak, beech, sweet chestnut, birch, holly and various conifers, abound, while parts of the forest are rich in wild flowers and fungi. What surprises many visitors is that the region also has a rich industrial…
Mermaids revisited One morning recently the Resident Wise Woman and I, finding ourselves in the middle of nowhere in northern Herefordshire, realised we were not far from Ludlow. Lunchtime was looming so we decided to make our way there for refreshment. It was a no-brainer to pay a visit to St Laurence’s church, one of the largest and best in the country bordering Wales, while we were there. We’d…
Who did that? Many people see graffiti as a modern phenomenon. It’s the young, you’ll hear, who do it – they have too much time on their hands, they have no respect, they should do something useful, and so on. Against that, others will put forward the graffiti of artists such as Banksy, who make social and political points by painting on buildings – this is graffiti that means something, that…
From the far shore Enjoying an aimless stroll across Hereford a few weeks ago, I decided to cross the bridge over the Wye in St Martin’s Street and turn left along a path that ran along the south bank of the river. I thought that doing this might give me a good view of the cathedral tower and wondered if another bridge would bring me back on to the opposite bank and into the city centre. Having…
A kind of cocktail Walking along Weymouth Street the other week, a number of houses caught my eye, not least this one which in spite of visual obstructions such as cars revealed itself as cramming a lot of architectural incident into a relatively small expanse of facade. It’s a house of 1908 in that style, or rather amalgamation of styles known as ‘Queen Anne’. ‘Queen Anne’ has very little to do…
On celebrating your heritage I live in Gloucestershire, so Gloucester is my county town and one of the two big towns near me. Whenever I go there these days I try to take a minute to walk around the bak of Northgate Street to look at the concrete mural on the old Sainsbury’s building, which is currently empty pending redevelopment as apartments. I have always liked this mural and I hope plans to…
Beasts, chevrons, and scrolls I apologise to any readers who have been frustrated at my previous post, which illustrates a notable Norman church but discusses the flowers in the churchyard. If that’s a little perverse for an architecture blog, I’d argue that a building’s context is often as important as the building itself. However, as St Mary’s, Kirkburn, is a Norman churches with some memorable…
Green thoughts Churchyards. I’ve been in a lot of them in my time and mostly I can concur with the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s First Love , ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’ I’ve known churchyards where grass grew knee-high, and others mown to within a millimetre of their lives;…
Underneath the arches I break off my succession of posts about buildings in London and Liverpool to report that I found myself in Amersham the other week, having coffee with friends from the Czech Republic (as you do), and making brief observations of the local buildings before delivering said friends to Heathrow in time for their flight back to Prague. One building that we couldn’t miss was the…
A moment of confusion Standing in St James’s church, Somerton* recently, I was amazed, Why was this not more famous: a 14th-century reredos consisting of a depiction of the Last Supper, with intact figures of Jesus and the apostles in a row of niches. The architecture of the niches is exactly right and the carving has that element of wear that is testimony to the age of the piece. This is as rare…
Liverpudlian Goth-ish St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s…
Liverpudlian Gothic There are still a large number of good 19th-century commercial buildings in central Liverpool, and some of them are highly decorative, as if to emphasise the prosperity of the city in this period. Some of these structures are enormous, but even relatively small ones can be visually exciting, and Gothic, a style primarily but by no means exclusively associated with churches,…
Second among equals The Vines* is in many ways similar to Liverpool’s magnificent Philharmonic Dining Rooms – it was built for the same brewery, Robert Cain & Sons, and designed by the same architect, local man Walter Thomas. It has a similarly dazzling exterior, although the Vines is baroque, rather than the Philharmonic’s freestyle. The corner site is a gift to a pub architect, and Thomas…
Listed When visiting a city I don’t know very well, I make lists of major buildings that I want to see, but once I arrive I’m constantly on the lookout for unexpected delights – the assorted unregarded shopfronts, pubs, sheds and shelters, many of which make up the subject matter for blog posts. In Liverpool, I made a bee-line for two pubs that can hardly be described as ‘unregarded’ – they’re…
The red and the grey An 1840s complex of vast warehouses and numerous smaller structures around the water, the Royal Albert Dock is the masterpiece of engineer Jesse Hartley. Hartley designed it to be fireproof – the warehouses are constructed entirely of brick, stone and metal – there’s no structural timber, apart from over 5,000 beech piles sunk in the damp soil beneath on which the vast…
Stand-out structure Not far from the Albert Dock, whose gatemen’s shelters were featured in my previous post , stands Wapping Dock, and alongside this dock is an even more extraordinary small building. It’s slightly later (c. 1856) than the Albert Dock shelters, and stands by the site of the Wapping Dock’s entrance gates. It’s variously described in Joseph Sharples’ Pevsner City Guide to Liverpool…
Small structure, giant stones On a visit to Liverpool recently, I was very taken with the docks, the Royal Albert Dock in particular. Its imposing and innovative structure deserves at least one post of its own, but before I get there, a post or two about some of the smaller dock buildings, no less meticulously designed and built than the vast warehouses nearby. My first example is one of three…
The pub on the corner Corner sites are favourites for any business that relies on walk-in trade – shops of course, but also pubs. I passed this glowing example on a recent walk from New Bond Street to a meandering, roughly northwestward drift along Marylebone Lane. Every so often the narrow lane opens out at a crossroads or junction and here, at the corner with Bentinck Street was an ideal inn…
Free style A stroll through the gallery and couture retail area around New Bond Street throws up various architectural delights. Here’s just one example spotted on a London visit the other day, sticking out elegantly and self-consciously between a couple of more sober buildings. A neat group of stone-mullioned windows is caught between a large flattened arch that embraces both ground and first…
Show of strength Framlingham Castle looks very impressive as you approach it from the town. Today the entrance is along a path bounded by hedges, across a small 16th century bridge over a defensive ditch, and through the gatehouse. The main defensive element is the stout curtain wall, punctuated by 13 rectangular towers. Inside, built against the walls were the main accommodation buildings…