Woodworkers

If you read one of those books about traditional English crafts by authors such as Dorothy Hartley or James Fox, you’ll probably find a section about the chair-makers of the Chilterns.* Some of these craftsmen were based in the local woodlands, where they made entire chairs. Others specialised in producing turned chair legs using a hand-operated pole lathe. They worked next to the trees that provided their raw material, and the chair legs they made would be sold to a wooden-chair manufacturer. Buckinghamshire was a centre of furniture-making and towns such as High Wycombe were famous for their wooden chairs, particularly Windsor chairs. Chair-makers like James Elliott and Son added hand-turned chair legs to wooden seats and other components to produce comfortable, elegant chairs that were popular and long-lasting. James Elliott and Son built their factory in High Wycombe in 1887 and ran their business there until 1974, making Windsor chairs there for the whole period except for the two World Wars, when they branched out into aeroplane wings (World War I) and furniture for the Royal Navy (World War II).

When their factory came to the end of its working life, the building was taken apart and rebuilt at the Chiltern Open Air Museum. Brick on the ground floor, wooden boards over a timber frame above, the building is roofed in slate. Its two floors are connected by exterior staircases that free up the space inside and provide an easy way of manoeuvring unwieldy chairs and raw materials in and out of the building. There are large windows, so the factory is very light inside, creating good conditions for the meticulous work of assembling chairs that workers and owners could be proud of. Today, a collection of chairs, other wooden products, and wood-workers’ tools are displayed inside.

Looking very neat in its shiny green paintwork, the furniture factory is an asset to the museum, preserving a building linked to an important industry in the area. It’s also one of a number of wooden buildings in the museum – Buckinghamshire is not rich in good building stone, so pavilions, workshops, houses, barns and all kinds of other farm buildings were often made by constructing a timber frame and cladding it with boards. The museum has several of these, and the furniture factory is one of the most striking.

Perennial

There are some buildings I never tire of looking at, and some of these I have blogged about more than once. One of my favourites is the abbey church of St Mary, Tewkesbury, a large building that just keeps on giving, with its Norman and Gothic architecture, its wealth of carvings and its impressive monuments. There’s even some outstanding 20th-century stained glass, to bring the story of the church almost up to date. One of the best features is the large central tower, which has been called the best Norman tower in Britain.

The tower probably dates to the mid-12th century, at the end of the long campaign of building that brought the huge abbey church into existence. The abbey’s founder, Robert FitzHamon (a relative of William the Conqueror) initiated the building process in the late 11th or very early 12th century, but died in 1107. The church was consecrated in the early 1120s, but the structure was unlikely to have been complete by this date.* The architecture of this period is chunky, with thick walls, round-headed windows and doors, and enormous cylindrical columns. But there was also much carved decoration, as one can see on the outside walls of the tower.

The lower part of the tower is very plain, but very little of this would have been visible when the original, steeply pitched roofs were in place – the position of these is clear from the remains of old masonry that trace the old inverted-V-shaped lines of the roofs. Above this level, things get very ornate indeed. There are three horizontal bands of ornament. The upper band has tall arches (some with louvred bell openings, some blind), with sides and tops carved in a chevron or zig-zag pattern. Beneath these is a narrower band completed covered in arches that intersect, producing a geometric pattern of light and shade. Further down again is another band, this time with tall, carved arches, displaying a different pattern of bell openings from the one above. All of this is the work of 12th-century masons, apart from the battlements and corner pinnacles, which are later.

There was once a spire, made of wood covered with lead, on top of this tower, but this fell down in 1559. Even without the spire, the tower is a magnificent piece of architecture, drawing the eye as one approaches from the west (the approximate viewpoint of my photograph), making a striking landmark from across the fields to the north, or providing a pleasant distraction as one glimpses the top above the shops and houses that cluster nearby. It could so easily not be here today. The abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 16th century, but the locals bought the church from the king in 1542, and it has served as the town’s parish church ever since.† It still gives much pleasure, not just to worshippers, but also to those who attend concerts there, and to anyone who, as I do, savours its magnificent medieval architecture. 

Crockets

The architectural feature known as the crocket is something that is often viewed from afar. If you don’t know what a crocket is and can’t reach for a convenient copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, I’ll do that for you. ‘A decorative hook-like spur of stone carved in various leaf-shapes and projecting at regular intervals from the angles of spires, pinnacles, gables, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture.’* That’s how Penguin’s exemplary reference book defines a crocket, although in the vernacular, as it were, I might say, ’The knobbly bits that stick out of the edges of church spires’, and you’d get the idea.

The crockets on church spires are by definition far from the ground and it’s difficult to see their details. When you get your eye in, however, it’s quite often possible to spot crockets near to ground level, as is the case on the pinnacle in my photograph, which adorns a tomb recess in the church at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. Close-up, you can see that a well carved crocket is far from being a simple ‘knobbly bit’: it’s a flowing, organic-looking decoration that must have demanded considerable skill on the part of the carver. Great precision and a combination of delicacy and strength were required to carve the 20-odd crockets on this pinnacle and the matching finial on the top. To make the whole thing yet more intricate, the lower part of the pinnacle takes the form of a narrow, straight-sided arch, beautifully formed and set off with pairs of human heads that peer at us from the late-14th or 15th century.†  

There was a lot of this sort of thing about from the mid-14th century onwards, as English architecture entered the phase known to historians as Decorated Gothic. Much of it has been lost to the effects of iconoclasm and time – in particular, anything with an image of a human was likely to face the wrath of 17th-century Puritans and be defaced or simply lopped off. This makes the small heads on this example particularly precious survivals. Since much medieval stone carving was also painted in bright colours, there may have been another loss. However, light from the nearby stained-glass window has supplied a hint of colour, bringing a glow to a small marvel of the carver’s art.

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* John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penguin Books (5th edition, 1999)