Local speciality

Stoke pots, Nottingham lace, Luton hats. In years gone by, many English towns became specialist centres of manufacturing. Whatever else they might produce, even big cities like Birmingham (famous for its small metal goods, from jewellery to boxes) or Sheffield (steel and cutlery), became widely known for particular industries. Witney in Oxfordshire looks at first glance like a typical small rural town with its Corn Exchange. But what made Witney well known all over the country was its woollen blankets. In the winter, Witney kept you warm at night. A short walk from the town centre the buildings of Early’s blanket mill still exist, and nearer still to the heart of the town is the Blanket Hall, built in 1720 as the headquarters of the Company of Witney Blanket Weavers. Inside was a room where the weavers came to have their products weighed and measured, to ensure that their work was up to standard; there was also a room for meetings and facilities for catering for blanket makers’ feasts.

The architecture of the Blanket Hall is early Georgian with a baroque flavour. This is not the full-blown baroque that we see at Vanbrugh buildings such as Blenheim Palace (not far away), but a small-town version with curved (segmental) window heads, pronounced but plain window surrounds, a pediment that is broken at the bottom to accommodate the clock, and a skyline punctuated with ball finials. The frontage is built of good ashlar but the side just visible in my photograph is of rougher stone, because most people won’t notice.

The architect is said to have been William Townsend (or Townesend) of Oxford. Townsend was a member of a family of master masons and builders who worked in Oxford in the late-17th and 18th centuries, working on numerous colleges and other buildings. They formed a locally important building dynasty comparable to the Smiths of Warwick, the Patys of Bristol and the Bastards of Blandford Forum. William Townsend was primarily a mason, and probably worked in tandem with an architect on his larger buildings, but here he may have taken sole responsibility. The baroque front that he created in Witney is in a style I’ve seen a number of times in small Oxfordshire towns – Chipping Norton, for example, has some examples. It makes a grand enough impression to stand out next to the rural-looking buildings on either side, but is not so ornate as to be showy. The blanket-makers, one feels, were happy to display substantial wealth, but not in a way that’s too grandiloquent or boastful. Fit for purpose, reassuring, does the job well: like the blankets, in fact.

 

Caring

It took me many visits to the Oxfordshire town of Chipping Norton before I came across the former hall of the Oddfellows, a philanthropic association that dates back in documented records to the 18th century and which still exists, in various forms, across the world. When I saw it, I was immediately struck by the street front with its segmental curved doorway, the shaped gable above, and especially the carved lettering and coat of arms. Somebody took pains to make the public face of this small hall special, and Pevsner tells me that the architects were a Birmingham firm called Hipkiss and Stephens. The building dates from 1910–11.

I could find little else about the history of the hall and was content to admire the way the lettering’s base line follows the curve of the doorway and how the coat of arms likewise fits the shape of the gable above. Another source of admiration is the carving of this relief, especially the images of care and what I take to be Christian charity that stand on either side of the arms. The stone and the Arts and Crafts idiom of these details sit well with the hall’s home in a small Oxfordshire town.

Web research led me in one other interesting direction. According to the excellent website Cinema Treasures, the Oddfellows in Chipping Norton were showing movies from about 1910, and by 1919 this hall was renamed the Picture House. It remained a cinema until it closed in May 1950, before reopening as the Norton Hall. It is now used by a private company offering post-production and media facilities and looks to have been the subject of a sensitive, caring conversion to meet the needs of the business. One feature of the conversion is that the current occupant’s signage does not mask or overshadow the old Oddfellow’s carved sign and arms, so there’s no barrier to the sort of architectural appreciation that I – and my readers – enjoy.

More scrolls

I want to share one more stone detail from the Somerset town of Radstock, to add to the one in my previous post. It’s the name stone for the Victoria Hall, obviously, and the building bears the date 1897. That was the 60th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and the hall’s name apparently marks this milestone in the life of a queen who held, until the current queen surpassed it, the record for the country’s longest reigning monarch.

The building’s name plaque shown in my picture is one of a couple of carved plaques surrounded by small scrolls that adorn the front of the hall. The other gives the date and notes the commemoration of the queen. From all this, one would be forgiven for thinking this a hall of 1897. But beware of dates on buildings. They’re not all quite what they seem. This is in fact a building of 1866, which was enlarged in 1897. It was originally a Working Men’s Institute – a place, then, where men could attend informative and enlightening lectures, and where they would find other beneficial facilities, probably including a reading room.* However, in 1902 the hall’s function changed, when it became council offices, and it has now found another life as a community arts centre.
The building looks well made and solid, with some pleasant touches – the round-headed windows and the ornate gables, for example. The central gable boasts a pair of large scrolls, and scrolls, too, make their appearance as a decorative motif in the frame of the name plaque. The lettering is also decorative. It has not, it is true, broken out into the outré and curvaceous style of Art Nouveau lettering,† but it has its moments – especially the capital V, with its curving left-hand stroke, splaying to a forked termination at the top and its right-hand stroke, straighter but ending with a long flourish. That flourish is also interrupted by a tiny indentation about one third of the way along the top,§ so that the whole stroke looks like a raised leg with the foot enclosed in a tight-fitting shoe. Not so Victorian, then, after all.

- - - - -

* For more on institutes, see a post I did long ago on a building in Banbury.

† There is an example of full-blown Art Nouveau lettering here.

§ My apologies if the small picture makes this detail difficult to see. I promise you, it’s there, and not a product of my imagination!

Bursting from the shadows

In 1818 Cheltenham architect George Allen Underwood was elected to his local Masonic Lodge. Two years later, work began on the Lodge's new hall, near the centre of the town, and Underwood was the designer. Underwood was a pupil of John Soane, and Soane would have been impressed, I think, with this building – the confident niches, the mix of carving and stretches of plain wall, the way it looks massive although it's not much bigger than a couple of three-storey houses, the fact that the facade manages to work even though it has virtually no windows. The way it stands there like a rock amongst the pale stuccoed facades and delicate iron balconies that its neighbours present to the world is also remarkable. I have been admiring this exterior for years, and others agree: "probably the finest of the early purpose-built Masonic halls," says Pevsner, and John Russell in his Shakespeare's Country calls it a masterpiece of occasional architecture.

One day, not the day on which I took this picture showing the building bursting out of the shadow that envelops its lower portion, but on another occasion when the light was more even, I loitered across the road for a while, admiring the building and watching the passers-by. There were quite a lot of people walking past because a couple of hundred yards to the right is a large car park and a couple of hundred yards the other way is the centre of the town. Not one person appeared to pay any attention to the building at all. Of course these were probably busy men and women with work to go to or shopping to do. But is was still interesting that a building that is so assertive, a design that is very much in the Regency style but has little of the delicacy or gentility of much of Regency Cheltenham, a structure that would, I'd have thought, divide opinion quite strongly, inspired hardly a glance. Presumably none of those passers-by reads this blog.

 
There’s a magnificent hall at Stokesay Castle in Shropshire, but Stokesay isn’t a true castle – it’s a fortified manor house. What did the hall of a full-blown castle look like? One answer is found at Oakham where the castle’s hall has survived while the rest of the castle has disappeared. This hall is a magnificent aisled building, probably constructed in the 1180s or thereabouts, a spacious interior with two sets of four round arches separating the aisles from the central space. One can imagine Walkelin de Ferrers, the lord who held the castle in the late-12th century, presiding over banquets and meeting dignitaries in this large room, which, with its decorated arches and carved capitals is the last word in the domestic design of the period.

 
The hall is also witness to an odd tradition. For centuries the Lord of the Manor of Oakham has required any visiting peer of the realm (or member of the royal family, they being members of the peerage too) to donate a horseshoe when first visiting the town. No one knows how this curious custom began, but it may have its origins in a pun on the name Ferrers (fer being the French word for iron, hence a farrier, one who shoes horses). The oldest horseshoe on the walls was given by King Edward IV in c. 1470, and the most recent come from current members of the royal family, such as the Prince of Wales. Odd as the ranks of overgrown ceremonial horseshoes look, there’s something fitting about this ancient building being the home of such a venerable and whacky custom.

Stokesay Castle (1): A Gothic room

Stokesay Castle is one of my favourite buildings, and has been since when I first visited it, long ago when I was a teenager, in the pouring rain. I’m pleased to say the weather was much better for my most recent visit, and the bright light inspired me to take some photographs not just of the exterior of the building but also of a couple of the interiors.

As many of you will know, Stokesay Castle is not a castle at all, but a fortified manor house. Although has a crenellated tower and a defensive moat, it lacks the strong fortifications and tiny windows of a true castle and would not have withstood a full-blown siege. Stokesay was built in the 1280s and 1290s by Laurence of Ludlow, a wool merchant who had done so well that he had become one of the richest men in England. He built this house to give him a degree of security and to act as a status symbol. Slightly showy, but not vast enough to make the aristocracy jealous, this house was built to show that the Ludlow family had arrived.

Remarkably, much of Laurence’s house of the 13th century, including the chunky polygonal south tower, the solar block, and the hall with its linked north tower, survives. In the picture above of the south tower and hall, only the big buttresses and the outer stairway up to the solar are later additions. The big Gothic windows light the most important medieval room: the hall.


Here, beneath this glorious roof – many of its original timbers are still in place – Laurence and his family would have gathered for meals with their household of maybe 25 people. Laurence and his family and their guests would have sat at the high table at the far end of the room; the rest of the household would have used two long tables placed at right-angles to it, running along the length of the hall. Their food was prepared in a kitchen nearby (no longer standing) and wine and beer came up from a buttery on a lower floor, just off the hall.

This room would have been the social centre of the house, heated by a hearth in the middle of the floor that was the symbol of commensality and hospitality as well as the literal source of heat and light. For several centuries the hall was loud with conversation and, probably, music, and alive with the comings and goings of servants. But the bustle is long gone. The house has not been lived in for some 200 years, although it was kept in good repair by benevolent Victorian owners who lived in a more modern house not far away. They ensured the survival of this spacious hall, lit by its two rows of tall Gothic windows, its roof is supported by great cruck timbers tied together by pairs of horizontal collars and curving braces. This structure creates a beautiful space and even in its emptiness, the hall at Stokesay is one of the most evocative rooms in England.

* * *

Having been cared for by the Allcroft family from 1869 to 1986, Stokesay has since been under the guardianship of English Heritage.

Smoke-filled rooms

Today many people would say that the most important room in their house was the kitchen – the place where food is cooked and, often, eaten; where the family gathers; where it is always warm. For many, the kitchen is the social centre and heart of the house. In some houses it’s an economic centre, too – I’ve known business people who hold meetings in their kitchens, and a farmhouse kitchen can be the chosen meeting place for the farmer’s family, the farm workers – and often anyone who happens to be passing.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to discover that many medieval houses didn’t have a kitchen as such. Outside the grandest of houses (and specialized buildings such as monasteries and colleges), most people lived in one, all-purpose room. This open space, known as the hall, was kitchen, dining room, office, workroom, and bedroom rolled into one. There was a central hearth for heating and cooking, and trestle tables at which to eat. Come night-time, the tables were taken down or pushed aside, and people lay down to sleep on mattresses on the floor. More prosperous households managed a private room (the solar) for the head of the household and his wife, but much of the life of the household still revolved around the communal hall.

With its central hearth, the medieval hall was the archetypal smoke-filled room – there was no chimney so the smoke from the fire had to find its way through a hole in the roof high above everyone’s heads. People seem to have got used to the smoke, no doubt learning to control it by opening and closing the room’s doors to create the right kind of draught.

In a few houses, where food was produced on a large scale, there was another smoke-filled room, a separate kitchen reserved just for cooking. These dedicated kitchens were not very common, and few survive today. This is the one at the manor house at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, and it probably survives because the family decamped for another village in the 18th century, demolishing much of their old house but leaving some of it in place but unmodernized.

The kitchen was probably first built in the 14th century, and reroofed and given new windows in the 15th. Inside, fires were made against one wall, where spits turned to roast meat; there are also three ovens. As with the more common medieval halls, there was no chimney – the smoke rose to the ceiling where it exited through holes beneath the roof. Above all this is a cat’s cradle of timbers supporting the octagonal pointed roof, the whole thing topped off with a griffin made of lead.

The servants at Stanton Harcourt no doubt got used to the smoke, but it surprised one famous guest, the poet Alexander Pope, who stayed at Stanton Harcourt in 1717–18 while translating the Iliad. With Classical mythology very much on his mind, Pope compared the kitchen to Vulcan’s forge or the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. A dark cave of creation, then, closer to Homer’s world than Pope’s, and miraculously preserved into our own.

Alternative settlements (3)

‘Funny lot up at Whiteway. Sandal-wearing. Nude sunbathing. Vegetarianism. Beans.’ That’s how the buttoned-up inhabitants of Cheltenham used to refer to the people of the Whiteway Colony, up on the hills towards Stroud, in the 1960s, when I was young. Of course, as we know, the link between ‘alternative lifestyles’ and a kind of sandal-wearing crankiness can be traced in the utopian settlements of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Jonathan Meades (hurrah!), for one, has had great fun with it. And some of the early Whiteway residents did speak Esperanto and dress like ancient Greeks. But for all this, the people of Whiteway were probably far nearer to the ideal of the ‘hard-working families’ beloved of our politicians today than to this kind of oddness. But their story is unusual, to say the least.

Whiteway was founded in 1898 by anarchist followers of Tolstoy who broke away from another Tolstoyan community in Purleigh, Essex. Early colonists included refugees, conscientious objectors, and thoughtful craftsmen who wanted to work cooperatively rather than competitively. Having bought the land, they ceremonially burned the title deeds on the end of a pitchfork, declared common ownership, and set about constructing rough-and-ready shack-like houses for themselves. They built this ‘colony hall’, too, and a bakery, and workshops, and other buildings, mostly of wood like something out of the Wild West. And they had a good shot at living self-sufficiently, without money.

It was a noble, if idealistic, effort. Nellie Shaw, whose charming 1935 Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds I read in Oxford’s Bodleian library 30 years ago when I should have been attending to Shakespearian drama, said that while their feet were in the potato trenches, ‘our heads were up with the stars’. But if the ideal of self-sufficient isolation in the end proved impossible to sustain, the communal life went on, surviving the jibes of the 1960s (the 1960s! who were they to talk?) and continuing, after a fashion, long afterwards.

I’ve not been up to Whiteway for ages, hence the photograph from an old book, but some of the original bungalows still survive (variously modified and extended), and the old colony hall (with its new roof), although the bakery, famed for its good bread, is I think no longer baking. Here’s to the continuation of such endeavours. And pass me another helping of cauliflower bake.