Launceston, Cornwall

Almost perfect…

It’s almost a perfect Georgian town house, the sort of residence that a prominent citizen of a provincial town might build. The citizen in this case was Coryndon Carpenter, attorney, twice mayor of Launceston and Constable of Launceston castle, a member of a prominent local family, and his house is at once conveniently central, tucked away from the busy shopping area, and near one of the gates to the castle. In form it’s the classic 1760s detached house with hipped slate roof, red brick walls with prominent quoins and a centre portion breaking forward under a pediment adorned with urns. The basement, which would have contained service rooms, is distinguished from the two main floors by being rendered in stucco, which is rusticated (formed with grooves to give the impression of blocks of masonry) – a common term for such rusticated basements where the servants worked was ‘the rustic’.

But Coryndon Carpenter’s house is a cut above the already impressive Georgian norm. There’s a carved figure at the centre point of the pediment, looking out over the town. I don’t know who it’s supposed to be: ‘a Grecian style figure’ says the listing description, laconically. The round window in the pediment, the gate piers with their eagles and iron gates and railings are additional stand-out features. The central porch is a later addition, classical, rusticated, and columned, so as to be in the overall style of the rest of the house but failing somehow to look anything more than an added extra.

Even so, this is a delightful building (it’s now in fact a hotel) and if not quite perfect is near enough to please all but the Georgian ultra-purist. The people who compiled the official listing for this protected building gave it a prestigious II* grade, confirming its importance. Long may it be cherished.

Hull, East Yorkshire

 

Names and textures, 2

Now for a sign that contrasts with the one in my previous post and makes a good excuse to look at one of my favourite street names. Yes, The Land of Green Ginger is the name of a street, a narrow one off Silver Street in the centre of Hull. There are various theories about the origin of this curious name. Some say that it is a corruption of ‘Lindegroen jonger’, referencing a junior member of the Dutch Lindegreen family, who lived in Hull in the early-19th century. Others suggest it derives from ‘Landgrave Granger’, because the Landgrave family nearby. I am always suspicious of derivations that are said to be ‘corruptions’ of ‘difficult’ words and prefer the simpler explanation that, in this great shipping and trading city (a cosmopolitan place where ‘unusual’ names must have been common), valuable spices like ginger were sold nearby.

The sign itself is an elegant one that uses a serif letterform which fills the name plate so that there’s very little free space around the words. Such is the clarity of the letters, though, that the sign doesn’t look crowded and is perfectly legible. The size of the sign has been well specified to sit comfortably on its strip of masonry. The dark background of the name plate and the thickness of the material mean it stands proud slightly as is easy to spot.

But what an extraordinary wall it’s set on. This building was designed in 1907 by Dunn and Watson for the National Provincial Bank. Built in 1907, its Portland stone walls are finished with an effect called banded rustication – the masonry is arranged in bands that have deep grooves between them, giving a striking stripey look in full sun. But this rustication goes further than most. Many of the bands are pulvinated – in other words they have a convex curved profile. The gaps between the bands are very deep and there are concave mouldings within each band; the ends of the bands are carefully chamfered or curved. A lot of trouble has been taken with this masonry, including the way the bands turn to embrace the keystone above the window. Another striking feature is the Celtic knot design on the square block above the keystone. Once more in Hull, name and texture, surprising for different reasons, sit well together.

Clifton, Bristol

Classicism, but not as we know it

‘You can park on Clifton Down,’ I was told. ‘Walk down the Promenade and Litfield Place: you’ll like some of the buildings along the way.’ Even so, I was not quite prepared for the sheer size and grandiloquence of some of the 19th-century houses in this part of Clifton. They were built for the most part for merchants, who were dripping with wealth from transatlantic trade, much of it involving slavery, and who wanted sizeable houses close to some greenery, well away from the bustle of Bristol’s city centre and docks, but near enough for convenience. There are views, too, from Clifton’s heights towards the city or the countryside.

Some of these houses are from the first third of the 19th century, like Trafalgar House, which was built in the 1830s with an enormous ‘statement’ two-storey portico. The ground floor level has a lower ceiling and shorter windows thatn the enormous sashes of the floor above, and the masonry of the portico at the bottom is treated with banded rustication. This is in line with the use of ground floors as service rooms, whereas the floor above contained the large, grand rooms, where the owner received guests in the most magnificent of surroundings. So rusticated masonry on the ground floor acts as a kind of class-marker, and this floor (or the basement where there was one) was often known as the ‘rustic’ in the 18th century. The columns on the upper part of the portico are in the plainest of all classical orders, the Tuscan, indicating a sober quality somewhat belied by the statue of the cartoon character Gromit, from the Wallace and Grommit films by Bristol’s animation company Aardman, on the balcony.

But the portico is neither entirely serious nor wholly orthodox. Whoever designed it adorned the lower level with a row of three arches, an unusual touch, which gives the architecture a sense of relaxation and unorthodoxy it otherwise would not possess. The building’s architect is unknown – suggestions include Charles Dyer, who designed other houses nearby, and Charles Underwood, who started in Cheltenham as a builder before moving to Bristol to practise as an architect. Whoever it was created a striking effect that must have pleased the house’s original owners, and pleased me as I passed by the other evening.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

A touch of the baroque, 2

My second photograph from Rousham shows a doorway in the stable block* near the house. The stable block has a central pediment under which is a tall, narrow round-headed arch; blind windows and minimal capitals abound, giving the whole facade a heavy appearance that is relieved to a certain extent by an octagonal turret capped with an ogee cupola. The smaller doorways like the one in my picture have Gibbs surrounds – alternating long and short blocks with the long ones protruding – plus heavy lintels with prominent keystones.

Gibbs surrounds can look very refined on Georgian townhouses in London or Stamford, where they will have smoothly finished blocks. Here the effect is more rustic, because of the roughness of the stone, the simple plank door, and the plain window above. That, perhaps, is not inappropriate for a service building of a great house, and other evidence of good upkeep (such as the pristine paintwork here) makes me feel sure that the estate is keeping an eye on the stonework – this place is as well looked after as the very fancy chickens and cockerels that cluck and crow in the yard. In all it’s not, I’d say, a bad sight to greet the eye as one drives under the adjacent arch to park and emerges, ticket in hand, to enjoy a masterpiece of English landscape gardening.

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* It’s ‘almost certainly by Kent’, Pevsner opines.

Bewdley, Worcestershire

Hard cell

Being stuck at home made me think of this place. It’s a rather impressive lock-up, built at one end of the late-18th century Shambles (market) building in the centre of Bewdley. There are actually three cells, one of which is oriented differently and so not visible in my photograph. The whole complex is now part of Bewdley Museum. As is common with lock-ups of the period, the structure is strong and windowless, with brick walls and – a touch which relates the little building to larger-scale prison architecture – stone door surrounds with heavily rusticated blocks.

Those blocks seem to speak of high security, but their symbolism goes beyond this, I think. Their hint of urban grandeur – with the implication that the town had spent more than the minimum on its small prison – speaks of a place that was said to have had quite a bit of use for a lock-up. In the 19th century, Bewdley apparently had some 30 pubs – a large number in what was then a small town – and a resultant persistent problem with drunkenness. It could be, then, that the main use for these cells was to bang up drunks behind the heavy studded iron-bound wooden doors until they sobered up and dried out.

The doors are in fact replacements, but they give a good idea what the lock-up would have been like (the originals are displayed in the museum too), as do the spartan cell interiors. These have a masonry platform on which was the occupant’s bed, plus a ceramic tiled floor, a tiny fireplace, and not much else. It’s very basic, but then 18th-century prisons usually were. The prevailing view of the architecture and the inmates was no doubt that this was ‘as good as they deserve’. Other times, other ways.

Somerset House, London

Taking pains

Quite often I find myself in or near Somerset House in the centre of London – partly because work sometimes takes me to the Strand, partly because I’m a regular visitor to the Courtauld Gallery, both for its stellar permanent collection and for its often excellent temporary exhibitions. You get into the gallery through a door inside the vast building’s entrance archway, but I often take a minute to walk around the vast courtyard while I’m there, marvelling at the building’s size, proportions, and plethora of architectural sculpture. It’s easy to take for granted Somerset House’s 18th-century classicism and vast size now, but back in the 18th century this was an innovative building: London’s first office block and a formidable feat of organisation in bringing together several diverse bodies of scholarship and government – the Royal Academy, the Navy Board, the Stamp Office, for example, and accommodating them within what looks like a classical palace. This year, however, the Courtauld Gallery (which occupies just a small part of the complex) is closed for redevelopment* and I’ve not been in the Strand entrance – my most recent encounter with Somerset House happened to be at the back, when I was walking along the Thames embankment.

As you move along the pavement on this river side, it’s hard to take in the facade because it’s enormous – some 800 feet long. It’s also part of a major engineering project. The architect, William Chambers, had to cope with the fact that there is a 40-foot drop between the Strand frontage and the river shore. So he had to construct the embankment to allow for this and support the southern part of the building. From the pavement, you see a succession of massive stone walls, much of the masonry heavily rusticated, some of it vermiculated, and punctuated with arches, niches, and occasional pieces of carving on keystones.

What struck me as I took all this in was not just the sheer scale, but also the meticulous craftsmanship. A close-up of an arch and a neighbouring bit of wall, above, might demonstrate what I mean. For a start, the sheer effort in cutting by hand all that vermiculation on the stone blocks. Admirers of the brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Centre sing the praises of the concrete, in which many of the surfaces have been bush-hammered to give it a textured finish. True enough, this takes care and skill, and the effect is admirable. But look at this detail of Somerset House – square yard upon square yard of hand-cut vermiculation: it represents skill and effort in abundance. So does the moulding of the arch and the precise cutting of its blocks. But look still more closely (clicking on the image should help) and one can see that the surfaces of these apparently flat pieces of stone have been expertly and finely tooled so that their surfaces are actually made up of a series of precise parallel lines, the work of who knows how many skilled man-hours. A similar affect is even visible on the bevelled edges of the vermiculated blocks.

I’ve recently been reading Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling, and looking back at one of his previous books, The Craftsman, which focuses on the kinds of skills involved in this kind of work and highlights the importance of doing things well.† There’s lasting value, and also pleasure, in taking pains to get it right. It’s easy enough for admirers of Somerset House to praise the architect who brought it into being: Chambers certainly deserves admiration for his design. But spare a thought – spare more than one thought – for the masons and carpenters and sculptors and plasterers who brought it into being. In these days when developers are content to put up a host of poorly designed, ill-finished and no doubt ephemeral blocks along the banks of the Thames in order to make a fast buck, it’s worth lingering here and reflecting on the effort this building took and the way it has lasted.¶

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* A small selection of master works from the permanent collection is currently on display in the National Gallery and remains there until April 2020; some are also on loan to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Reopening is not expected until some time in 2020.

† Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling, Allen Lane, 2018; The Craftsman, Allen Lane, 2008

¶ The photograph is slightly high resolution than usual, because I hope that will help readers to see the surface of the flat stones clearly. I have also increased the contrast a bit, to bring out this effect. Clicking on the image, as usual, will enlarge it.

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Turning again

In 1853, when in France Baron Haussmann was becoming Prefect of the Seine and beginning to plan his transformation of Paris, countless smaller transformation were underway in towns and cities all over the place, not a few of them to do with providing more spacious and up to date premises for businesses and offices. This bank in Aylesbury is a case in point. Long established as the Bucks & Oxon Union Bank it got a smart classical building in 1853 with rusticated ground floor with arches window recesses and bigger, pediment-topped windows upstairs.

And that's all very impressive, but what made me pause was the way the architect treated the corner, especially as I've been thinking about corners after posting the unusual house in Bishop's Stortford the other day. Whereas the Bishop's Stortford building turns the corner with a tight curve of brickwork, this bank takes the junction at an angle, and with extraordinary banded rustication – masonry laid with exaggerated horizontal joints – all the way up the wall to the cornice. Those upper bands of stone seem to break the conventions that the rest of the building adheres to, not least of which is that you rusticate the lower floor and leave the upper levels plain.

There are plenty of examples of rustication on upper floors – especially running up pilasters or filling the space above a central portico. But this narrow strip above the doorway does seem rather in your face, perhaps because there's nothing on the wall except the banded masonry – no windows, no columns or pilasters, just these lines of stone, ruled out like a ledger, on which various inscriptions have been cut: a sort of vertical timeline that mercifully leaves rather little space for the sign of the current proprietors. A corner that is ruled off, as it were.