Public utility

My last post about Kidderminster for now shows a Victorian drinking fountain against the background of one of the town’s carpet buildings. That background structure was built as the offices for H. R. Willis’s Worcester Cross carpet factory in 1879. Birmingham man J. G. Bland was the architect and he chose a plain red brick that looks sober in comparison with some of the town’s polychrome brick structures, albeit given interest by a very large central window and some curvy Flemish gables; behind was the usual single-storey north-light shed for the carpet looms. Willis’s business did not flourish and the building was sold to another Kidderminster manufacturer and carpet production continued there until the beginning of the 1970s.

In contrast to the big red-brick offices is the small stone Gothic drinking fountain, which was given by John Brinton, one of the town’s most successful manufacturers and donor of Brinton Park in the town. In 1876, when the fountain was built, supplies of clean drinking water were still not always reliable and generally in private hands. Then, as now, people complained that water companies were more interested in profit than in the public good and in 1876, cholera epidemics were recent history and germ theory only recently established. People everywhere welcomed reliable sources of clean water. Architect J. T. Meredith gave the fountain enough height, with its tall, spire-like roof, to make it into a landmark, and a touch of colour comes from the red granite shafts that support its pointed arches. Quatrefoils, small ornate gables, and Gothic arches abound. A detail shows the bands of ball-flower ornament, a motif drawn straight from English 14th-century Gothic, together with one of a series of grotesques that cling to the eaves.

All this rich detail, together with the clock faces on four of the eight sides, make this into a delightful little building that was once truly useful too. Now we’re less in need of public clocks and drinking fountains (although many are dissatisfied with our current water companies’ management of their pipe networks, supply, and changing regime). But a structure that affords a bit of beauty in a Midlands town that’s not universally beautiful cannot be altogether bad.

Self-help

The Northamptonshire village of Long Buckby still bears evidence of its part in the Northamptonshire shoe-making trade (at least one small factory building is still visible). During the shoe business’s 19th-century heyday, the place was also a centre of radicalism and religious nonconformity – the Chartist movement was strong here and there were three chapels as well as an Anglican parish church. Long Buckby was also home to Northamptonshire’s first cooperative society, which started in 1858. Part of its 1910 shop survives on a corner in the middle of the village, marked by this handsome sign. The clock, the specially made lettering and the frame with its scrolled brackets and curved top, are now by far the best part of a building sporting replacement windows and modern signs advertising the current occupants.

Although the British cooperative movement began in the late-18th century, cooperatives really took off after 1844. This was when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers established the key principles of their cooperative organization.* So Long Buckby’s Self-Assistance Industrial Society was one of many that were started in the 20 years after the one in Rochdale.

Cooperatives’ main business was usually buying and selling goods following fair trade principles and distributing the profits to the members of the organization. Cooperatives could also offer other services, from banking to housing schemes. The Long Bucky society was one of many such coops that also operated a cinema, showing films to people who, in the days before mass car ownership, found it difficult to travel to a larger town with a purpose-built cinema. Although the showing of movies stopped there long ago, and the building that was once a shop and cinema now houses a gym, there is still a coop in the village operating on similar principles. The sign at the corner is a lasting reminder that such enterprises have a long history. It shows too that though we may be better now at many things than we were in 1910, our sign provision is often far less good than it used to be.

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* For more about the Rochdale Pioneers, follow this link.

 

Clock and bull story

Like my previous post, this is another Victorian shop facade that caught my eye on a rainy day in Bedford not long ago. Actually it was the clock and its accompanying bull that attracted me first. ‘A fancy job,’ I thought to myself. ‘I wonder if the shop below belonged to a jeweller.’ Jewellers often combined their craft with that of clockmaker and would put a clock on their premises as a way of showing off their wares while also attracting attention. The building did indeed house a jeweller, and was built in 1878. The style is unlike that of Adkin’s building in my previous – Venetian Gothic has been replaced by a version of what became known as Queen Anne – red bricks, terracotta decorative panels, and a lot of fancywork using special bricks to form pilasters, pediments, keystones and other details. The gable is still elaborate, but this time in a classical way, in contrast to the Gothic form of Adkin’s building. There was once a figure of Father Time in the niche above the clock, but he seems to have been overtaken by the very time he represented, and is no more.

As for the clock, it certainly worked for me in that it attracted my attention. The fancy gilded decoration. and the iron scrolls around the edge of the case do the business, as does the golden bull. What is he doing there? Was the building later home to a butcher? Well, the occupant’s name was John Bull, so this imposing creature is a rebus, a symbol of the family name, not an indication that this address was once home to a butcher (although, as it happens, it was). Pevsner tells us that he is a replacement. So someone has been caring for this elaborate bit of street decoration, although not to the extent of getting the clock to show the right time. Accuracy in timekeeping was of course a major concern to clockmakers like John Bull. Apparently there was once a vertical pole set behind the clock, with a ball set near the top of it. At precisely 10.00 am every morning, the ball slid down the pole, striking a bell in the process. The mechanism was activated by an electrical signal from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, thus providing guaranteed accurate time, from which locals could set their watches. Alas on the day I took this photograph, the clock did not display the correct time, but maybe this lapse has by now been rectified.

Spread generously

‘What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?’ reads Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss.’ It’s a fictional slogan, apparently, this jingle that he spots in his newspaper, although the product itself was a real one. Companies like Plumtree’s, Prince’s, and Shippam’s made large amounts of money making preserved and potted meat and fish products – everything from Galantine of Wild Boar’s Head with Pistachio Kernels to humble fish and meat pastes. Shippam’s was started by Charles Shippam, a grocer who set up shop in Chichester and added pastes and spreads to the usual grocer’s range of butter, cheese, eggs and bacon. Shippam’s began in the 18th century in West Gate, Chichester, but by 1851 they were in new premises in East Street (their factory was behind this building), which is the very site where the sign in my photograph still hangs.*

The sign is in a tradition of shop signs that lasted through much of the 20th century, consisting of the business name combined with a clock. It was a canny advertising move – if you looked up to check the time, you were reminded of Shippam’s brand and you might even pop in a pick up a jar of your favourite meat paste. A number of familiar UK companies have used clocks as signs – Marks and Spencer were particularly fond of them. The fact that clocks like this also protrude from the wall helps customers pick out the shop from a distance too. And what’s that hanging down from the base of the clock? Yes, it’s a chicken’s wishbone, or a sculpture one of one, hugely magnified. Shippam’s processed thousands of chickens and kept the wishbones, prized as a symbol of good luck, for any customer or passer-by to collect. A little bit of fun along with your meat-paste sandwiches. And well, you never know…

When I was growing up in the 1960s, Shippam’s meat pastes were a familiar feature of the table. British people liked to spread them on their sandwiches and in those days many people took sandwiches to work to eat at lunchtime – there were far fewer of those handy sandwich bars that became a feature of working life for so many in the 1970s and 1980s. Meat pastes were inexpensive, easy to spread, and kept well in their air-tight jars. The latter quality also made them especially appealing in the age before every home had a refrigerator. But changing fashions brought changes to Shippam’s fortunes: a succession of takeovers led eventually to a move of production to different premises. The brand at least remains, even if not everyone feels that it brings the domestic bliss attributed by Joyce to its rival Plumtree’s.

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* For more on the company’s history, see Chichester’s Novium Museum website, here.

Past times

Here in the UK as the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne is being marked, I thought perhaps, as I do like a public clock, it was time to post this timepiece commemorating a past jubilee. Nowadays public clocks are almost superfluous – we all carry time around with us, displayed on watches,* mobile phones, and so on, and rarely have to look up to find out what time it is when we’re walking along the street. But such features as Victorian or early-20th century clocks, if of little practical use to most people, can be something that makes an old building special, and they can be highly informative about past times and values.

So here’s a clock of 1897, on the Tolsey, a former market building, in the Gloucestershire town of Wotton-under-Edge. The clock was installed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. Its clear faces with Roman numerals are looking good after a restoration in 2015, and the gilded scrolls, fleurs de lys, and dates, not to mention the portrait of the queen herself and the flags with which the clock is surmounted, are still standing proud and catching the eye.

In its symbols, traditional face, and use of gilding, this clock is as typical of its era as an angular, monochrome timepiece would be of the Art Deco period, or a smart watch is today. It’s unlikely that a rash of clocks will appear on our streets to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. But I hope those who are keen to mark such events can think of something as beautiful, useful and well made as this clock was when it was bolted on to the brick upper wall of the Tolsey in 1897.

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* Men’s pocket watches were first mass produced in the second quarter of the 19th century; wrist watches, at first worn almost exclusively by women, were produced in quantity at around the same time or slightly later. Widespread wrist watch-wearing by men began in the military and became generally common after World War I.

‘Not in stone temples made with hands’  

At this time of year, as we approach Christmas and wonder this of all years how we cope with it, there’s usually the chance to listen to a variety of Christmas music, not just the endless advertising sound track of tunes such as ‘White Christmas’ (it first caught my ears on television in October this year, just after mince pies were spotted in a prominent place in the cake aisle of a local supermarket) but also the abundance of special music in English churches. This is the time of year when the organist makes sure the pedal light and foot heater are working, brushes the hoar frost off the altos and gets out music that’s been at the bottom of the heap for almost a year. Britain has a strong choral tradition, and some of the cathedral and large church choirs are amazingly good. And then there are the professional groups who make recordings, tour the world (when they can), and elicit enthusiastic and sometimes awed responses wherever people sing. There’s a choral sound – born of musicianship, pin-sharp precision, and clarity of pronunciation – that’s summed up in words like ‘purity’ or simply ‘Englishness’. Perhaps it’s the sound we think of when we think of the English (or indeed Scottish) choral masters like Tallis, Byrd or Gibbons.

A favourite of mine is Orlando Gibbons, who in a short life produced some of the masterpieces of English music for keyboard, as well as a lot of superlative vocal music. Much of his music was small-scale – wonderful short keyboard pieces and madrigals (including one of my favourites, ‘The Silver Swan’), but he also wrote some terrific church music, much of it no doubt sung in the Chapel Royal in London, where the composer worked. He was born in Oxford, and was baptized on Christmas Day 1585 at St Martin’s church, Oxford. Only the tower of St Martin’s now stands, at Carfax, the crossroads right in the middle of the city, where the clock in the photograph tells the hours. This is a modern clock in a surround designed by Victorian architect Thomas Jackson. But Gibbons might well have seen some figures, the two ‘quarter boys’ who banged the bells that mark the hours. Even today’s quarter boys are not the originals, which are now safely preserved in the city museum, but accurate replicas.

Such is the march of time, of which Gibbons, as a musician, was no doubt well aware. I want to link to a YouTube video of one of his anthems, a piece I know in this recording by the wonderfully named English group Red Byrd, who combine musical precision and verve with their best shot at ‘historically informed’ pronunciation of English. I find this anthem, ‘Glorious and powerful God’, a joy – spirited, uplifting, and (in this performance anyway) slightly earthy and not quite up there in the remote heavens, as some religious music can be. Not typical either, then, of that ultra-pure ‘English’ choral sound, but the reprise of the words ‘Arise O Lord’, especially, makes me want to stand up and cheer.

As if all that weren’t enough, the words (Who wrote them? Gibbons himself? I wish I knew.) use an architectural metaphor. The text expresses that difficult concept, the presence of Jesus on earth, in this way. Christ does not does not dwell ‘in stone temples made with hands’ but ‘in the flesh hearts of the sons of men’, a vivid way of getting at the idea of God made flesh, and of expressing his continued presence in our hearts. Whatever your belief system, however you react to this, may your heart be light this season, and may it be warmed by Gibbons’s music.

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What shall we do at quarter to two…

Although I’ve passed it dozens of times, I’ve never photographed the front of the Post Office in Great Malvern. That’s surprising in a way, because it’s a memorable neo-Georgian building, mostly of brick, with a big hipped roof and a central section with three large stone semicircular arches that breaks forward on the ground floor. The contrast between the grand arches – two with windows, one with the doorway – of the central section and the modest remainder of the building makes it all look a bit awkward. But there’s something civic and satisfying about it nonetheless, as there often is with the many neo-Georgian Post Offices built in the 1930s.

As I was passing a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that, even if the front was too cluttered with cars to make a photograph worthwhile, I could at least take a detail of an arch or two. Above the doorway, the classical lettering (not the usual Post Office letterform, but still effective), the big keystone with date and royal monogram, the ironwork, even the little clock all work together. Maybe the clock is too small – I’d guess there was one with a slightly larger face there originally. Maybe the lettering would be clearer with a broader stroke width. But it’s all better than the plastic signage – or, worse, a Post Office stuck in a corner of a high street shop – that we get today. And look at the window arches: little reliefs of Mercury to signify in another way the building’s purpose and to delight the eye.

A quick web search yielded a decent photograph of the whole building. There are still cars outside, true, but the photographer struck lucky with the middle one. It’s a Morgan, a beautiful hand-made English sports car with a classic design. And it was made in Malvern, in a factory that still produces cars with a similar traditional design – it’s the car to see in this town. Meanwhile, as I sit indoors (where I am too often these days) I offer my thanks to the Post Office for its part in keeping the mail coming. This year, mail deliveries have been bringing a rich and strange assortment of goods – from printer paper to teabags, secondhand books to cleaning products – to our door. Such deliveries are just as much a lifeline now as when this Post Office was built in 1935.

Photograph below of Great Malvern Post Office by Bob Embleton CC BY-SA 2.0

A refreshing if cold winter morning walking around the great stone circle at Avebury brought many pleasures, as it always does. The site was empty enough for us to take in the stones as individual objects, their chipped and pitted surfaces periodically lit up by the sun, and one could also enjoy the great sweeping arcs of the stones and earthworks – we were reminded yet again how much sheer work must have gone into the shifting of earth with wooden or antler shovels thousands of years ago.

Avebury also brings incidental pleasures. This is the Alexander Keiller Museum, named for and founded by the man who excavated in and around Avebury in the 1930s (funding the work with money that came from his family’s business making jam and marmalade). The museum is housed in a building that started out as the stables for nearby Avebury Manor, a structure variously dated to the 17th and 18th centuries. Like a lot of Avebury, it is built of the same hard sarsen stone as the standing stones themselves – tough stuff that’s generally used in large blocks, cutting it without modern machinery being extremely heavy work. The largest blocks here are the single stones used as lintels for the doors and windows.

The chunky look of the stone walls is beautifully offset by the treatment of this end gable, which metamorphoses into a clock tower and ends in a delicate hexagonal bell turret. I don’t know how long the carpentry work of the turret has been there, but its turned shafts and rounded arches certainly don’t look out of place on a 17th-century building, and whoever renewed them has produced something in what feels to me a fitting style. The clock face has gilded numerals and central sun rays that seem to belong in an earlier era too. It seems right, the horses having vacated the building, that it found a new and continuing use housing relics and records of Avebury’s history and excavation.* 

Small-scale Leeds (1): Time for shopping

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and…

Having started a short series on clocks, I couldn’t end before sharing this one, the veritable grandfather of all shop clocks, on Baker’s Jeweller’s in Gloucester. It’s as if the ‘Practical Watchmaker’ of the shop sign had had enough of making miniature timepieces and decided to take his one chance to make something really big. As well as an ornate round clock face (above the figures and not included in my picture), he created a series of five figures, representing each of the four countries of the United Kingdom plus Old Father Time himself, who stands in the centre. These figures strike their bells at each quarter. They are usually known in the trade as ‘jacks’, although this masculine term seems inappropriate for the Welshwoman and the Irishwoman. Are the women ‘jills’? Whatever we call them, I call them impressive.

The person who carved them – someone who specialised in those highlanders outside tobacconists,* perhaps – went to town on this set. The details of the dress, the musical instruments (that harp, especially), and the characterful faces are all done with verve. Father Time has a magnificent Shavian beard and what look like well carved wings (though it’s hard to see them in the gloom); his scythe is at the ready behind his right shoulder, and he also has a symbolic hourglass. The hourglass, of course, is not strictly necessary with all the hard work that’s being done by Edwardian clockwork.

These figures have stood in their niche at the front of Baker’s shop, right in the middle of the city, since 1904. Their position in the niche means that as one approaches, they’re not all immediately visible, and discovering them up there is a process of steady revelation as one walks along the street. The arch also means that quite often the figures are in shadow, but the bright colours help them to stand out and their bell-ringing display still inspires amazement from tourists as it joins Gloucester’s other bells, ringing out from the cathedral and some of the city’s other medieval churches, across the shops and offices of the modern city.

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* I did a post about a fine tobacconist's highlander here.

An exercise in style

As a pendant to my previous post on a clock in Bridgwater, here’s another outstanding Art Deco clock. It’s in the centre of Gloucester and it’s something I’ve meant to post for ages. If you look at this next to the Bridgwater clock, a few similarities of design are obvious – the stepped shape of the case and the cross-braces on the bracket in particular. But whereas the Bridgwater clock has just the one step at each corner, this one has five. It also has some seriously twentieth century lettering: all sans serif, but with the shop name, Avant Garde, treated to striking graphic variations – a sloping vertical arrangement on the edge of the clock case, and a shrinking/expanding visual effect on the front. I remember that dual shrinking/expanding effect used quite widely when I was a boy – which was in the early 1960s, though I suspect that the examples I was looking at, on signs and bus destination blinds among other places, were survivors from the 1950s or even 1940s. All this tricksy lettering certainly gets our attention, and it’s complemented by a very clear clock dial. It’s altogether an effective advertisement for the no doubt stylish stylists who plied their scissors beneath.

Still pressed for time…

So how about a couple of posts about clocks on buildings? Like my previous couple of posts at this time of frantic activity, this one is a kind of reprise. I’ve used the picture before, but I’ve written a bit more about it this time…

The gift of time is one that has been made architecturally for centuries. Church clocks and sundials were the first widely available public timepieces. They were a guide to the canonical hours at a time when clocks were a scarce luxury and most people did their basic timekeeping by looking at the sun. In the 19th and 20th centuries, commercial companies continued the tradition started by church and civic clocks. So a clock on a shop could be both a public service and an advertisement, something more compelling and commanding of attention than a mere owner’s name sign.

Jewellers and clockmakers were of course well placed to put clocks on their shops. Many of these clocks survive on shop fronts, even when the original jewellers who placed them there have gone. This example is from a multiple jeweller, H. Samuel. It’s very much an Art Deco design: the square clock face, the stepped form of the case, the style of the lettering, and the cross-bracing on the bracket all have the look of that decorative style that was prevalent in the 1930s and that lasted in places into the post-war period. The Roman numerals are more old-fashioned, but it wasn’t unusual for otherwise rather modern-looking Art Deco clocks to have such figures on the dial – and here they are given a modern twist by being distorted so that they follow the line of the pointing hands.

My British readers will be familiar with the company name on the clock. H. Samuel is a ubiquitous high-street multiple jeweller: hundreds of towns have a branch of Samuel’s. If many people know the name, though, few will know what the ‘H’ stood for. Not Henry or Herbert or Hugh – but Harriet. Harriet Samuel took over the business of her father-in-law Moses Samuel in 1862. Perhaps she used the initial in those time of prejudice to disguise the fact that her business was run by a woman. Whether or not that’s the case (and apparently she was sometimes referred as ‘Mr H. Samuel’ in Victorian newspapers), the business throve and countless people who have not been in a jewellers for years have cause to be grateful for a free time check courtesy of H. Samuel.

About time

The other day someone asked me if I was on Instagram. I had to admit that I was not. I’d tried Twitter and thought about Instagram, but blogging seemed to be the platform for me. But the question suggested to me that perhaps it was about time I was on Instagram, and prompted me to have another go. I now have an Instagram account, @philipbuildings .

It will not be a torrent of images, but my initial plan is to post more often than I blog, and offer a selection of things I’ve seen, mostly but not exclusively architectural. I’ll probably include more pictures of places and buildings near where I live – I have done blog posts about quite a few local buildings over the years, but as my blog is called English Buildings, I try not to have to much of a local bias. This is not meant to replace blogging for me. For now at least, I intend to carry on here in my usual way. But do have a look at my Instagram and feel free to follow, like, and share.

The clock in the picture, by the way, is in Bridgwater, and is an elegant Art Deco object that reminds me how often shops were adorned with timepieces in the 1930s and the following decades. It marks a branch of the jeweller’s H. Samuel. The H. Samuel chain was begun in 1862, when Harriet Samuel took over her father-in-law’s clock-making business. It’s a familiar name on British High Streets, although now owned by a larger global retail group. Many people who are familiar with H. Samuel’s stores do not realise that they are named after a woman, an unusual example of the acknowledgement of the major female role in early retailing.

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Follow Philip Wilkinson on Instagram @philipbuildings

A new view (2)

Having taken in the view of St Martin in the Fields described in the previous post, I turned through 90 degrees and saw in the distance the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, the structure popularly known, after the great bell it contains, as Big Ben. A touch on the zoom ring and there was another photograph of a familiar building from a new viewpoint.*

The clock tower is of course the most famous part of maybe our most famous building. The Houses of Parliament, built after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1834, took decades to complete. The basic design was by Charles Barry, but Barry enlisted the aid of A W N Pugin as a specialist in the Gothic style, and Pugin became more and more involved in the design to the extent that it became as much his own as Barry’s. Burning the candle at both ends, Pugin poured out drawings of decorative details of all kinds, creating the glorious interior of the House of Lords, designing wallpapers, mouldings, carvings, and furniture, and bringing Barry’s scheme to full Gothic life. The clock tower seems to have been completely designed by Pugin, who based its distinctive shape and refined details on a tower he did for Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.

By 1852, Pugin, sick with what was to be his final illness, was still overworked with drawings for Barry. His biographer, Rosemary Hill, quotes an extraordinary letter, which veers from lucidity to incoherence, in which Pugin describes his overwork: “I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful & I am the whole mechanism of the clock.”† He meant to write that he was to design the mechanism of the clock, but his slip seems apposite – Pugin was doing drawings at a relentless and mechanical pace, although the content, full of artful touches, was far from mechanical.

A few months after his frantic letter, Pugin was dead. He never lived to see the tower that would become his most celebrated work. We take it for granted now and see it everywhere, reproduced on news programmes, sketched in the background to political cartoons. But glimpsing it from the National Gallery steps made me see it anew: its artful vertical lines, its distinctive roof, the way the tower swells slightly to emphasizes the clock, the manner in which the gilded details catch the light of the sun. My new view of the tower revealed something else too: the structure’s lightness of touch in contrast with the grey ventilation towers of Portcullis House, the 2001 parliamentary office building across the road from the tower. It rises above them as a medieval church spire might against a background of dark, Satanic mills.

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*In spite of the marked difference in the cloud cover, this photograph was taken just a few seconds after the one in the previous post. England’s skies are ever varied, ever changing.

†Rosemary Hill’s book, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) is one of the best and most enjoyable architect-biographies of recent years.

Times of change

Another white van goes past, and then a car, and as the traffic clears and I raise the camera to my eye a steady procession of pedestrians crosses between me and the building. I lower the camera again and wait. It’s not that I necessarily object to including people in my pictures – there are always people in a busy market place on a Saturday, after all. But not everyone wants to be photographed, and not everyone wants to appear on the web, so I lower the camera.

Perhaps I should just take a photograph of the clock turret and leave it at that. I’m an admirer of the wooden clock towers that often appear on traditional market halls and town halls. Architecture books seem to say little about them – they’re seen, I think, as minor carpentry-stuff, rarely attributable to a specific craftsman or designer, and fit more for the fancier of clocks than for the serious business of architectural history. However, I like their variety and their usefulness and I’m pleased to spot this one. I’ve already assumed, without looking very hard, that the red-brick building that it’s topping is the town’s market hall. Another gap in the traffic, and I look more closely. The building bears a sign saying ‘Fire Station’. ‘Wrong again!’ I think.

But not entirely. This was indeed the site of Leighton’s market hall, and for centuries there was a market building here with an arched lower section for stalls and an upper room used for courts and meetings. The structure was rebuilt in 1851 in brick along similar lines and that, substantially, is the building that still exists. Except that in the early-20th century it was converted for use as a fire station, with a big arched opening for whatever appliances there were to come and go.

The upper part of the building – the big window, the pinnacles, the decent brickwork in a sort of honest simplified Gothic, the clock turret that caught my eye – is very much as it was in the Victorian period. The lower part was remodelled for the fire service with the addition of the big arch and the neat stone plaque. It continued as a fire station until 1963 and has since had other uses. It’s a restaurant now, and is not the first garage-style building with generous floor space to make this transition.

Buildings (like pop stars, political parties, magazines, and the rest) seem to need to reinvent themselves from time to time in order to survive. Buildings are often made redundant because their original user needs more modern premises, or goes bust, or relocates. At this point, many buildings remain empty and decaying until the land they stand on is worth more than the bricks and mortar, and they get pulled down. Unless, that is, someone comes along with some lateral thoughts about how the structure can be used. That’s where the reinvention comes in, and here in Leighton Buzzard instead of firemen sliding down slippery poles there is pasta sliding off forks. And we can all enjoy this Leighton landmark standing proud among the clutter and the crowds. Tortellini, anyone?

April foolery

This clock was designed by Michael N. Oxenham and made by Robert Race. It was put up to commemorate the Millennium and I prefer it to some of the more grandiose and overblown structures that were erected at that time. It makes a pleasant distraction on the front of a timber-framed building, now a gallery, in the square in the Herefordshire town of Bromyard, a place full of interest, to which I hope to return. Meanwhile I shall savour this unusual way of making a mark and marking the time.

Marking time

I have a fondness for the old town halls of the 17th and 18th centuries. They form visual climaxes to so many high streets and market places and they combine civic pride and usefulness in a way that seems just right. The typical layout is an open, arched ground floor where you can have a market, a big upper room for meetings, and a cupola on top, often with a clock.

The clock is important. Back when the Town Hall at Brackley was built (by the Duke of Bridgewater, in 1706) not many people had watches or clocks of their own. So they relied on the church clock or a town hall timepiece like this one to tell the hours. The church wasn’t always visible from the main street, so to give a town a clock, right in the centre where everyone gathered to meet, buy, sell, and gossip, was a real gift to a town.

Such a gift needed to be visible and town hall builders started adding these cupolas, perfect little bits of carpenter’s Classicism, to show them off. The cupola at Brackley is one of my favourites. Everything about this ornate little structure – the fancy weathervane, the neat dome on its eight Classical arches, the cube containing the clock with its white corner brackets – shows that the builders took special care and gave the job the time it deserved.

Henry James, Rye’s most famous resident, was an American novelist in exile who observed his countrymen and his English neighbours with acuity and who set down his observations in increasingly convoluted prose. In one of his essays he hinted that his adopted town, clustered around a church on a rocky outcrop, was like ‘a miniature Mont-Saint-Michel’. Well, Rye is not quite as dramatic as the looming island monastery of Brittany, and perhaps James was giving in to his love of elaboration – and to the tendency, so frequent once in writing about England, to compare the country’s beauties to more famous places in France or Italy. But James was right to draw attention to the way Rye dominates the neighbouring marshes from its rock, and the church and tower act as a focus for the town’s upward-looking form.

So, to celebrate the church, here is a picture of the clock at the top of the tower. The figures are the ‘Quarter Boys’, plump gilded putti who strike their bells on the quarters. This ornate timepiece is in a way typical of the town, many of whose buildings boast that extra flourish that lifts them beyond the ordinary – a balcony with white-painted railings, perhaps, an ornate bay window, or a carefully patterned bit of tile-hanging. It’s also, I hope, typical of this blog, which for about a year now has tried to showcase some of the telling details I’ve encountered on English buildings.