Church side, market side

On the street called North Church Side, hard by Hull’s impressive medieval Minster, is the city’s Edwardian Market Hall. The building houses a market behind the row of ground-floor arches while the upper floor was designed to accommodate a corn exchange and a venue for concerts. In adopting this multi-purpose structure, the building is in the line of countless much older market buildings with an open market below and a meeting room or council chamber above. This Hull example also has a landmark tower – market proprietors and stallholders like towers that guide customers to the goods on offer. This tower, with its open upper section, concave curved cornice, cupola, and tiny lantern, has a baroque feel to it.

However, the main market building leaves the Edwardian baroque behind. Here the architect called on an array of motifs – the large windows with iron balconies, carved panels and cartouches, an area of banded stone and brick, a parapet with a segmental dip in each bay, and above all a doorway with an extraordinarily tall and etiolated keystone (see my photograph below), which, listed like this, suggest a mish-mash but which come together to make a satisfying whole. The person responsible for the design was Joseph Henry HIrst, a prominent local architect who could do grandiose baroque when required (his design for Hull City Hall is an example), but could also produce quaint half-timbered work (as at Carnegie Library, Hull).

The sort of mish-mash he devised for the market is usually referred to as ‘Edwardian Free Style’. It’s not as over the top as full-blown Edwardian baroque can be, not as restrained as the Jacobean revival that’s sometimes used for large buildings of the period. It has an unbuttoned quality that combines with the practical, usable market space to produce a good working building, something a great mercantile city could be and still can be proud of. A century ago, it must have buzzed with business; when we were there it still seemed well used.Hull, Market Hall, doorway, serene in spite of notices and barriers

 

A web of wood

Having posted about Dunster’s charming and well preserved dovecote the other week, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the most prominent building in the centre of the village, the striking octagonal Yarn Market. This is, probably, everyone’s favourite building in Dunster. Thousands who have paused here for a moment have taken a photograph of this structure and, with a passing thought that it’s not like any other building* and very much unlike most of the old market buildings that survive (rectangular structures open below and with rooms above) have moved on.

Some will know that it’s a 17th-century building, showing that the wool trade hereabouts continued well beyond the Middle Ages. In fact, it’s an indication of a change in trading conditions. Dunster had been a port with a hinterland stretching across Exmoor, but the sea retreated and a new trading base was established here in the middle of the village. The Yarn Market’s presence is an indication of a significant amount of business and merchants’ need for shelter and security. Its striking shape shows that those 17th-century traders liked the idea of creating a building that could be easily identified and could form something of a landmark.

Anyone who goes inside can see that the octagonal roof required a network of rafters, braces and struts (photograph below); together with the posts that hold up the whole building and the lantern on trhe top, most of the structure is made of wood. The central stone column is a key support, and the whole structure is made more complicated by the generous roof overhang and the dormer windows, necessary to let more light into the space below. This wonderful building gives us an uncommon chance to look inside a roof structure of its period – most roof frameworks are hidden from the public by ceilings, after all. The pleasure I get from it is akin to the pleasure I’ve got from occasional views up into the interiors of church spires. These webs of woodwork required skill, ingenuity and a surprising amount of timber. Hats off to the carpenters who built them, and built them to last.

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*Although there is at least one later homage to the Yarn Market, at the Cadbury’s model suburb of Bournville.Dunster, Yarn Market, central column and roof timbers

Wool and stone and dancing light

They would not have called it a trading hub in the 1770s, when it was built, but the Piece Hall in Halifax was just that: a place where hundreds of textile makers could come from the surrounding countryside to sell pieces* of cloth. Its construction was a huge collaborative effort by the small business people who had to raise the money for the building and it gave each of them a small part of a market that’s constructed on the grandest scale. We don’t know the architect of this remarkable structure, but whoever it was incorporated 315 individual rooms, each for a single manufacturer and each with its own door on to one of the open arcades that run around the upper floors of the quadrangle. The ground within the courtyard – all 66,000 square feet of it – was paved to provide a magnificent gathering space, a benefit to the city as a whole as well as an asset for the manufacturers.

From its opening on New Year’s Day 1779, hundreds of cloth-makers came to the Piece Hall and it became a key market for the West Yorkshire wool trade for almost a hundred years. However by the middle of the 19th century the textile business was changing, with the opening of more and more large mechanised mills. The new mills produced cloth on such a vast scale that a room in the Piece Hall was no use to their owners – and in any case, it was worthwhile to the buyers to travel direct to the mills. So by the 1870s, the Piece Hall was no longer needed for its original purpose. For the next century it was home to a food market, until in the 1970s this in turn was in decline, and the building was converted for mixed use. More recently, a thorough conservation programme has taken place, so that the beautiful stonemasonry and the paving of the courtyard look well and, one hopes, good for another couple of centuries. It is now, in modern parlance, a cultural hub, housing cafés, bars and shops, and forming an outdoor venue for music, other entertainments, and seasonal markets. 

Standing in the centre of the courtyard today, or looking out from under one of the arches to the opposite range of arcades, the structure is almost too big to take in. Its impact in 1779 must have been enormous – classical architecture on an almost Roman scale in a town of small houses and workshops. Walking along an arcade and looking at the continuous rhythm of the rusticated columns, windows and doors makes the place feel more knowable, more human in scale. But there’s still a sense of how vast it is as the columns and their shadows stretch to a distant vanishing point. And then the sun and stone combine to make patterns of light and shade that raise everything to another aesthetic level. This sense of small elements coming together to make something vast, and also creating dancing patterns of stone and light that visually transcend mere scale seems to me to be of the essence of this building. And of art in general, one might say.

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* A piece was a standard 30-yard length of cloth, woven on a hand loom.

Looking up in Halifax

Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale in the late-Victorian period. I was particularly struck by a number of streets such as Southgate and Market Street. The clue is in the latter name – this is a block that contains the town’s covered Borough Market. From the streets (especially the two streets I’ve named) the architecture is very imposing, punctuated as it is with turrets, big semicircular windows, tiny windows topped with pediments, variations on the classical orders, and arches with rusticated stone blocks. There’s more than a touch of French Renaissance about all this, but it’s pumped-up French Renaissance, and Nikolaus Pevsner, in the first edition of his Buildings of England volume on West Yorkshire, was rather snooty about it: ‘in an undisciplined French Renaissance style,’ he noted.

And yet Pevsner was a greater invoker of the Zeitgeist. He often praised architecture than reflected the moods and manners of its time and this building surely reflects the confidence and flamboyance of the era in which it was built. When you get inside the market, though, the place lacks the size and theatricality of, say, the great arcades in Leeds. Everything is on a smaller scale, but there’s still an impressive iron and glass roof, with a dome in the middle, which does a good job of getting light into the market, bounded as it is on all four sides by the French Renaissance shops. Those who look up see clear glass (5850 square metres of it), fan-shaped windows with iron tracery, the octagonal dome itself, and a small forest of iron columns holding everything up. This is where the discipline is in this building – the discipline of good engineering that makes everything fit together in a neat and well balanced way and where the Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty) are very much in evidence. The local architects, Leeming and Leeming, did a good job in the 1890s, and their building has stood the test of time: it still seems well used.*

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* There’s more on the history of the market here.

Lincolnshire Tuscan

‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is plain and empty and about as simple as you can get, with a ‘dentil course’, widely spaced, either made up of the ends of supporting timbers or suggesting their presence.

Why such plain Tuscan architecture for a library? Not, I thought, in some kind of tribute to great Tuscan poets (Dante and Petrarch, for example). But when I researched the building, I found that it didn’t start life as a library at all. What you can see in the photograph was originally the entrance to a market and shambles,* built to designs by local architect William Daniel Legg† in 1804–8 and converted to make the front of a library in 1906. Those windows and the walls that surround them are additions of the latter phase.

So the Tuscan portico was no doubt a simple and relatively inexpensive choice to create a strong statement at the market entrance – an entrance that’s easy to see from a distance among the shops that surround it. It stands out, while providing a generous central span to allow not only people but also goods to pass in and out with ease.There’s no fancy ornament to get damaged by barrows or carts, just good plain building. It’s a landmark on the street. And now it’s a library, its stand-out design is still valuable in what I’m sure is a much valued community asset.

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* A shambles, in this sense, is a row of stalls selling meat, or a row of butchers’ shops often built on the site of former market stalls.

† Casewick Hall, the stables of Panton Hall, and Vale House in Stamford itself are among Legg’s Lincolnshire works. He also designed some gate lodges for Burghley House near Stamford.

Continuity and change

If there’s one building in the Cotswold town of Tetbury that is impossible to miss, it’s the Market House, all seven bays of it, with its upper walls of cream-washed stone, its rows of deliciously plump Tuscan columns, its large clocks, and its bell turret. It was originally built in 1655 as a market for wool and yarn, the main products of the Cotswold Hills in those days, as for centuries before. The building has changed somewhat over the years. It was enlarged in the 18th century and some of the building’s more ornamental features actually date from a remodelling in the early-19th century. The triangular pediments with their clock faces, the hipped roof, and the bell turret all date to 1816–17. At some stage the Market House also acquired the metal dolphins that are displayed on brackets all the way along each of the long walls. These creatures come from the town’s coat of arms and making a pleasant decorative feature that baffles some visitors.

So a building that looks as if it has been here, virtually unchanged, for about 370 years has actually been altered as needs and fashions have changed, reflecting different needs and the wish to make the structure more up to date, or more prestigious. Over the years and at different times it has housed council meetings, law courts, a lock-up for criminals, markets of various kinds, and the town’s fire engine. And its life goes on. Goods are still sold in the sheltered area behind the columns – when I took this photograph, it was rugs and baskets being sold – and the building is hired out for markets, events, and parties. It’s still an important asset to the town, then, though perhaps not as crucial to its economy as in Tetbury’s 17th and 18th-century heyday. If the town today is as much about tourism and shopping as it is about agriculture, the Market Hall still provides a handsome focus for these activities.

A bit of a shambles

To begin with, I hardly glanced at the small low terrace of tiny shops, most of them seemingly unoccupied, that runs along the northern side of the market place in Cromford. Big stone blocks filling in the gaps between low doors and rather small windows, plus a space above that seemed rather too large for a shop sign, all below a hipped roof of slate. Even so, the design of this unregarded building seemed un usual, and I wondered… Then I saw a brief account of these buildings and gave them another glance, because I learned that they’re actually – in origin at least – Georgian. This is a tiny Georgian shambles, in other words a row of small shops running near or along the edge of a market place, usually originally occupied by people such as butchers.* They came about when market traders, needing more permanent premises than a temporary stall, built shops either on the site of their old pitch or nearby.

These must have arrived in Cromford during the heyday of Arkwright’s mill, when the town was growing and there would have been a ready market for food such as meat that could not be grown or raised at home. Sadly, they have now seen better days. Nearly every window is different from its neighbours, suggesting that most are replacements.§ Likewise the doors, some of which are boarded up or even, like the one in the foreground of my photograph, replaced with masonry. My picture is not very good – I had to shoot at a an angle to avoid a row of parked cars and vans that would have virtually hidden the shops from view. But it gives one an idea of what’s here†…and perhaps of the potential that could be unlocked if the building were restored.

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* Usually butchers, although fishing ports sometimes have ‘fish shambles’, and Dublin has a Fishamble Street on the site of a former fish market. 

Well marketed

Looking up the dates of Joseph Chamberlain for a recent post that mentioned Birmingham, I noticed that the great Liberal mayor expressed the policy that the city should be, amongst other things, properly ‘marketed’.* Any town should have a proper market, whether it’s a big city like Birmingham or a small place such as Somerton in Somerset. This stone town is fortunate, in that its early builders left a generous area for a market place in the centre, an irregularly shaped space that has housed, in its time the town hall (the building that forms the backdrop in my photograph above), a couple of inns, and this butter cross.

There has been a butter cross – a shelter where dealers in dairy produce can find shelter from the rain and, importantly the sun – at least since 1390, but this striking octagonal one was put up in 1673. Like much of the old town centre, it is built of local grey lias stone, with some elements in Ham stone. Rather than the pantiles that are so common here, the building has a stone roof, supported by a central stone pier, topped with a ball finial, and edged with battlements.

Rainwater is channelled behind the battlements and drains away through eight gargoyles, one at each corner. These are similar to the grotesque carvings one sees on medieval churches, and they’re a small testimony to the old tradition of craftsmanship that produced stone masons who could also carve. You’d not call this round-arches structure a Gothic building, but the skills developed by medieval masons survive, not just ion the walls and roof but also in this ability to carve.† These masons assured that Somerton is indeed well marketed.

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* He was referring not to marketing and PR but to civic facilities – his list of requirements was that the city should be ‘parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas & watered and “improved” .’

† And the tradition continues. Anyone who thinks such skills have died should visit a masons’ yard at one of the nine English cathedrals that still possess one, or read, for example, The Stone Mason: A History of Building Britain by Andrew Ziminski.

 

Small-scale Leeds (3): Start small, build big

In 1884, Michael Marks, who had arrived shortly before as a refugee from the Russian Partition of Poland, opened a ‘penny bazaar’ in the Kirkgate Market in Leeds. In a penny bazaar, every item cost the same: Marks’ slogan was ‘Don’t ask the price. It’s a penny.’ Ten years later he went into partnership with Thomas Spencer, a former clerk for the wholesaler Isaac Dewhirst, who had supplied Marks with goods (and helped him with his English) when he started out in business. Marks and Spencer soon expanded their business and by 1904 had taken on their first shop. One of the great retailing names had arrived on Britain’s high streets.

Today’s Marks & Spencer in Kirkgate Market, looks similar to the original penny bazaar, but the Victorian version may have been rather larger. When I was there it was closed, but be assured, this is a functioning shop, and it seemed to have gifts and confectionery for sale inside. In that respect it’s like neither the original bazaar (which offered anything Marks could sell for a penny – hair pins, dyes, black lead…) nor the typical contemporary M&S store, with its specialisms in clothing and food. But it’s interesting that the business commemorates its humble origins, and the shiny paint, gilt capitals and bold lettering suggest they are proud of the man who arrived as a refugee and made a fortune and built something amounting to a national institution.

Shadows abound

A long time ago I absorbed the idea that photographs with a lot of shadow were a bad thing. The idea was, I suppose, that the shadow obscured the subject and there wasn’t much point in a photograph in which half of the frame was a vaguely legible black hole. There’s something in that, but it’s not the whole story.

For one thing, shadows exist. A photograph with a lot of shadow can be an accurate reproduction of reality, and there’s something honest about that. I was reminded of this fact when looking through my images the other day and coming across this one of the Market House in Ross-on-Wye, built in around 1650 at the top of the hill occupied by the town’s centre. You can imagine me walking along the street, struck (yet again) by the beauty of the pink-tinged Herefordshire sandstone and the way in which the sun’s rays illuminate and warm the side wall of the Market House. As I paused to look, I became aware too how the light and shadow threw the stonework into relief so that I could really appreciate its appearance: the worn stones of the arches and the pier holding them; the coursed but rather rough blocks of the middle parts of the wall; the smoother ashlar blocks further up – clearly the gables and roof were renewed at some point. Then you can imagine me leaning against the shop to my left and waiting for a gap in the traffic and for a moment when most of the passing shoppers were enveloped in shadow.

Later there world be time to admire the clock tower, which Pevsner says is probably early-18th century. Maybe that is when the roof was altered too. Or was the change made as early as 1671, when the building was said to have been ‘newly erected’. Relevant to this period is the stone roundel, between the two windows, which has a portrait of Charles II on it. This sculpture was recut in 1959, but presumably goes back to the king’s reign (1660–1685). It’s a drawback of my contrasty picture that you can’t see the details in this carved roundel, but I went back later and took another one, as a reminder that you can see things in more than one way.

On the move (2): The King’s Board

My second example* of a building on the move is a small building known as the King’s Board, which now stands in Hillfield Gardens in Gloucester. You can just see it from the road as you pass the gardens and when I’d driven past previously I’d taken it for some elaborate garden seat or gazebo built by the owners of Hillfield House, Gloucester’s grandest Victorian house and now occupied, I think, by offices – an effective and unusual garden feature, indeed, which it still is.

However this little building did not begin life as a gazebo. Originally it was in the centre of the city and looked quite different, because the arches, which now make up the sides of a polygon, were once arranged in a straight line along the front of a rectangular building. This rectangular building can be seen in Kip’s engraving (c. 1710) of Gloucester and had been in Westgate Street (one of the city’s four main streets named for points of the compass). It had been a butter market and was reputed to have been given to the city by Richard II. By Kip’s time the roof had been altered to house a water cistern but by 1750 it had been taken down and relocated. After several more relocations, including a spell in the grounds of Tibberton Court, northwest of Gloucester) it was moved yet again to its current site in 1937. It’s not known for sure at which of these moves it was remodelled as a polygon rather than a rectangle.

No doubt its polygonal form, the fact that it once had a cross on the roof, and the religious relief carvings it bears fuelled the tradition that it began life as a preaching cross, though the rectangular layout shown in the 1710 engraving – and the fact that archaeology has confirmed this – put paid to that theory. Medieval markets often bore crosses and religious imagery too. The sculptures are charming. They cover the story of Christ’s Passion, including the entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Resurrection, and other subjects. Although partly restored and even so highly worn, they preserve plenty of detail – the crenellated walls of the city, the monkey, St Peter’s keys, for example are all visible in the image of the entry into Jerusalem in my lower picture. The King’s Board is still highly effective in offering interest and shelter, some 80 years after it was re-erected here.


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*Following my post about Carfax Conduit, in Oxfordshire, here.

Hats on

These recent weeks of hot weather have seen me more often than not wearing a hat when out and about. The media have been full of advice about covering up and I’ve also seen statistics about the great temperature difference in the shade. I don’t need statistics, though – in sun this hot I instinctively make for shadows, overhangs, arcades, and other refuges, like this lovely timber-framed market house or Butter Market, built in c. 1668 in Newent. It has one big room upstairs and a ground-floor open-sided space for a market: the same layout as many others in English and Welsh towns. The timber work on the end in the sun is quite plain, but the side facing the street has a winning combination of diagonal and curved braces, together with curvy bargeboards to please the eye. The weather vane – in the form of a running fox – is an added touch of charm that catches the sun.

The space for the market has quite a low ceiling – there are about ten feet of headroom – and if not a forest at least a grove of thick supporting posts. The effect of standing inside it reminded me of a description by Ian Nairn of another market house, the one in Llanidloes. Nairn described the even lower space in the market house there as ‘a very personal possessed space: it is not so much a question of walking in but of putting it on like a hat.’ In Newent I tried on the building myself for a minute, before walking out again into the sunshine. The fit was not bad at all.

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§ See Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Towns (updated edition, Notting Hill Editions, 2013)

Uncommon market

An occasional recurring theme of this blog is my memories of places and how buildings and places themselves trigger memories. I alluded to this when I wrote a post about London’s Covent Garden Market a couple of years ago. The Covent Garden area has played a major part in my life. I worked for a publisher in Covent Garden for two stints in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the beginning of the first period, the Resident Wise Woman also worked nearby. It was also sometimes a place to stay on in the evening – I remember it for various meals, summer vertical drinking sessions outside the Lamb and Flag, opera performances, and plays in the Donmar Warehouse Theatre.

Before I worked round there I remember seeing a television film about the area and the market. In my memory, this film of the 1970s was in black and white and was structured around a day in the life of the market. I didn’t remember much else about it, except that it featured evocative shots of market and streets, and of market people and traffic in abundance…and that the background music was Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata, the three movements (fast–slow–fast) of which reflected the changing pace of life throughout 24 mostly hectic hours.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I might be able to find this film on the internet. So I googled it, and found Lindsay Anderson’s marvellous 1950s documentary Every Day Except Christmas (1957), which covers a day in the life of the market in beautifully lit black and white cinematography. But it wasn’t the film I’d remembered. There was no Beethoven music, and Anderson’s film was made in the 1950s (I’d associated my memory with the imminent closure of the fruit and vegetable market in the 1970s), and it was different in other ways I couldn’t pin down. Could there have been another film? I couldn’t find it.

The other day I looked again. And there, among various links to Anderson’s documentary was another. This was a film made for the television arts programme Aquarius, just before the market closed in 1972. First there was a shock: a very staightlaced introduction by presenter Humphrey Burton, square black spectacles and all, revealed that  it was in colour – but then in 1972 I was probably watching it on my mother’s television set, which was black and white, so my memory of it was naturally in monochrome. And when the introduction was over, the clang of a metal shutter resounded and the opening chord of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 8 Opus 13, the Pathéthique, rang out. In no time at all, we were off with people drinking in the Essex Serpent at 5 am, vans being shoehorned into minimal parking spaces (to the accompaniment of much bleeped-out swearing), and business beginning and after the music’s slow, declamatory opening, film and music were off at a canter, and the market’s frenetic daily activity was underway. As it appears on YouTube the film still has its relentless timecode and a persistent background hiss, but was still good enough to make me gasp, ‘This is it!’

It was a revelation, as a succession of images unfolded and came back to me. Lippy greengrocers, old codgers in pubs, all-night cafés, men in a workshop making ballet shoes, other people making market barrows, ceramics, copper pans, bookbindings, suits of armour, and an aristocratic woman arriving for her job in a publishing company, something I’d be doing a decade after the film was made, although not in a chauffeur-driven car. Most uncanny for me was a point where they were talking about traffic and parked cars blocking the way and into my head came the thought, 'In a moment some blokes are going to pick that car up in their bare hands and move it.' And this is what happened. It was striking that there were still some vestiges of the old area very much there when I first worked there (but then I arrived in 1980 so this was not totally surprising): the ballet shoe shop, Collins's ironmongers ('Four candles'), some of the greasy spoons, Rule's Restaurant (roast beef and suet puds for the well upholstered), the opera house, one of the pubs.

The film was made when there was a very real prospect that huge swathes of the area would be demolished to make way for better roads and modern office buildings. The Covent Garden Community Association made the case for more measured change, and this is what we got – the fruit and vegetable market went, and the boutiques and tourist shops arrived, but most of the streets were preserved and much of the area’s architectural character survives. But the community is different. Few people like those drinking in the Essex Serpent or dropping in to chew the fat at the barrow-makers could afford to live in the area now. That’s a cost of the crowded shops and gentrification and tourism on speed. The film's last shot shows a graffito saying ‘This was home’.

The Tenbury oval

When I began this blog some ten years ago, the very first building I featured was the extraordinary spa at Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire. When I chose it to start me off, I had some inkling that it provided the kind of qualities – architectural originality and quirkiness, strong colour, striking form, unusual materials, and the fact of being little known – that might be ones I’d be celebrating often in the posts to come, and so it has proved. I had another inkling, that at some point I should return to Tenbury Wells and share another of the town’s remarkable buildings, the Market House, also known as the Round Market, which shares several of these qualities.

So here it is. As with the spa building, it’s quite unlike what we’d expect. Victorian market halls, it’s true, do sometimes use striking brickwork to help them stand out. But you’d have to go a long way to find another quite like this, a ‘round market’ that’s actually oval in shape, with walls of a mix of red and blue brickwork, and a roof, set on brackets, that slopes up to a ventilation feature at the top. It’s a building, what’s more, that uses a delicate form of Decorated Gothic in its window tracery, which combines trefoils, quatrefoils, cusps and arches within a series of rectangular frames.

This original design of 1858 was the work of James Cranston, who was also (surprise, surprise) the architect of the spa building. He seems to have been a Birmingham man who did a lot of work in Worcestershire and Herefordshire (including the usual Victorian architect’s staple diet of schools and church restorations).* In Tenbury, he was given a chance to shine, and took that chance with considerable flair. The town got a building that still, nearly 160 years after it was built, is being used for buying and selling: a good record in these times of out-of-town and online retailing and a tribute to those who have kept it going and to its original architect, unsung but well worth celebrating. 

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*If he’s the architect I think he is, he had a son of the same name who played cricket for Gloucestershire under W G Grace and once made it into the England team to play against Australia.

Well provided for

I always think of the Tudor and Stuart periods as the great age of English market houses, which are so often built in a kind of rustic classicism that suggests local pride and modest prosperity. The one at Chipping Campden is a favourite, Abingdon another, on a far grander scale and far from rustic. The stone town of Martock, however, has a mid-18th century one.

It’s quietly classical, with elliptical arches and piers that don’t have capitals but just a continuation of the stringcourse that runs around the building to show where the arch begins. Up above there are sash windows and, at the end, a Venetian window above a row of scroll brackets, and above that a blind niche in the form of a semicircle that, when you look at it closely, turns out to be a vent.  It’s very simple, a local builder’s assemblage of basic ingredients, but a satisfying enough recipe for a small country town.

Next to it is a structure known as the Market Cross or the Pinnacle. It’s a tall Tuscan column (about 6 m in total) that bears the date 1741. It is allegedly a copy of one once at Wilton, but wherever the idea came from, it’s effective enough as a corner feature on this junction. Not that it needs a landmark, with the Market House there too. In this, as in its profusion of stones buildings generally, Martock is well provided for.

Multi-purpose

Reflected in the window of the shop in my previous post you can see the Market House (or Town Hall), the focal building at the centre of Castle Cary. Regular readers know that I am fond of market houses in English towns, precisely because of their function as all-purpose buildings and the way they act as a hub for so many places. Buildings like this are part market, part local government centre, part information centre, part museum, part clock tower… The list goes on.

This one was built in 1855 and so is a relative youngster compared to the Tudor or medieval examples seen in some towns. But it has the same layout as its forebears, with a partly open ground floor for trading, an upper floor originally for a corn market I think, and a top floor for assemblies and meetings.

The architecture is similar to earlier such halls too, with a row of shallow arches supported on simple cylindrical columns to the ground floor and simple mullioned windows to the top floor. In between, though, the middle floor has a surprising combination of round and arched windows, set in pointed (almost triangle) relieving arches. This touch, original as far as I know, was probably the invention of the architect, F C Penrose.

The Victoria County History records that the 19th-century market was not a great success, but that the building was valued as an assembly place and as a base for the local council as well as for such groups as the vestry, the poor law officials, education officers, and police. Clearly it still is much valued. It has recently been resorted and its rooms contain a museum and spaces for hire. It is still at the heart of the town.

Corn Exchange, book exchange

This is one of those jaw-dropping buildings that constantly stop me in my tracks as I walk around English towns. A corn exchange was a major centre for a country town and an important adjunct to a market. Corn exchanges are often imposing buildings, symbols both of civic pride and rural productivity. They have carvings of reapers or goddess like Flora on them, big doorways so that you can get in and out with ease and sacks, and are designed to be both landmarks and useful.

This one was built in the 1840s and makes its mark with a giant order, a tall door and windows, and the requisite corn-related decoration: sheaves of corn at the top of each column and a group of resting harvesters in the centre of the parapet. No doubt for quite a bit of the last century it was still a much-used building and a local hub – read Adrian Bell’s classic book Corduroy (and the sequels Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree*) for accounts of English farming in the interwar period, in Suffolk especially, to get the idea of how important this business was. But by the 1960s, this building was ‘just’ a landmark, and no longer used for its original purpose. It was saved from demolition thanks to a local campaign and is now the town’s library.† A nice example of creative reuse.

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* These gentle, reflective books about country life have been reprinted and can also be found in wonderful early Penguin editions. Maybe Bell made country life a bit gentler and more idyllic than it really was (though it’s not always easy for the young farmer whose life they chronicle) but there is much to like in them, I find, and much to learn. If I’m perhaps a little indulgent towards the generally rosy picture of country life they paint, maybe it’s because they describe life on the land in a period when my own father was a farm worker, somewhat to the north of Bell’s territory, on the Lincolnshire Wolds.

† Now libraries themselves are under threat. But I hope Sudbury can sustain one, and sustain this outstanding building.

Clifton-Taylor’s English Towns: Brick and flint

January’s cold and dark days encourage armchair travel rather than the real kind. I’m using my armchair to sit and rewatch some of Alec Clifton-Talyor’s television programmes about the history and architecture English towns. They’re almost forty years old now, and have a different pace from more recent documentary television. But for well informed commentary, accompanied by relevant shots of the towns, their streets, buildings, and surroundings, they’re still terrific.

The link below is to the first in the series, on Chichester, and at the beginning, Clifton-Taylor explains what he does. It’s an exercise in looking, he says, and he looks especially at houses, and at their building materials. At Chichester he starts with the Romans and the medieval builders who came after them, and their use of flint to build walls. The Romans also created the town’s street plan, with its two main streets at right-angles,* and the medieval period brought the ornate market cross at their intersection (above) and the nearby cathedral. Clifton-Taylor is very good on the different stones (various limestones) used for the cathedral, and on the calamitous collapse of the spire in 1861.

The second half of the programme turns to the town’s houses, many of them Georgian and beautiful. Here we’re back to flint again, and the camera shows with great clarity how builders coped with the challenge of making regular courses using lumps of flint of highly irregular shape. The diverse colours of Sussex bricks are another feature that makes Chichester’s houses stand out and both brick and flint walls are complemented with painstaking details like elegant fanlights and meticulous cornices. As usual, I find Clifton-Taylor’s restrained, old-fashioned enthusiasm infectious.

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*Already partly pedestrianized in 1978, so there are relatively few glimpses of old cars (Triumph Heralds and Hillman Imps among them) in the background of this programme.

Deal-maker

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed my liking for market buildings of all kinds, from medieval mutli-arched halls to the glass-roofed markets of the 19th century. I also like market crosses – the focal points of market activity that still stand in many towns, many of them medieval and elaborately carved.

Market crosses, like this one at Shepton Mallet, are partly shelters for stall holders, partly three-dimensional signs to indicate the site of the market, and partly religious buildings that reminded medieval traders and shoppers that their business took place under the eye of God – and probably that deals agreed under the cross had an oath-like and binding force.

Shepton’s handsome stone cross dates from the year 1500, although it has been much altered and the precise dates of its various parts aren’t entirely clear. The central shaft looks largely original (though it may have been restored in the Victorian period). The surrounding hexagonal structure with its shallow elliptical arches has a 17th-century appearance, so may replace an earlier set of arches, it being unlikely, though possible, that the shaft originally stood without the surrounding structure propping it up. Above the arches are six very Gothic-looking pinnacles that seem out of keeping with the Jacobean arches but very much in keeping with the central shaft: perhaps they date from the 19th-century restoration, when the outer structure was Gothicized, to make it more like the original cross. There is a lot more detail about the history of this building on the local Shepton Mallet website.*

Whatever the exact story, the market cross still forms a focus in the town square.† Shepton is, I think, no longer quite the bustling place it was – although I was last there on a quiet Sunday and it may well be busier during the rest of the week. But the town has obviously looked after this beautiful structure for over 500 years, and I hope it attracts more people to the town’s shops. I hope to be back soon on a weekday, when they’re open.

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* For example, the website gives evidence for work on the cross in 1841, with various accounts including one that says only the upper part of the cross was rebuilt at this time – though we are not told exactly what ‘rebuilt’ means in this context. However, this online account is itself a very shortened version of a much longer study. See the website for more details.

† One more thing hat adds to the historical interest of the market cross is an old iron road sign, attached to one corner, that shows distances to various towns and cities. I did a post about this sign some time ago, here.

Now where are we?

I’ve gone on quite often about English market buildings, those welcoming structures that mark the centres of so many towns, their open arches generously offering shelter not just for stall holders but also for passers-by, shoppers catching their breath, or teenagers hanging out. I’ve dwelt on the intricate carving on medieval market crosses, on the clock turrets that top many of these buildings, and on grander examples that are not just markets but also magnificent town halls.

But, as regular readers will know, this blog is not just about architecture. What strikes me about buildings is very often the incidentals – odd bits of carving, the details of a window, fragments of old gilded decoration, and signs and lettering of all sorts. So here on the market cross in the middle of Shepton Mallet (a tall carved pinnacle originally of about 1500 surrounded by a stone hexagonal arched structure originally of about 1700, the whole rebuilt in 1841) it’s not only the architecture that caught my eye, but also these cast-iron signs.

Signs like this were not about giving directions. This one doesn’t tell you which way to go to get to Wells or Frome. It just tells you where you are in relation to the nearby towns. That in itself was useful to the traveller. When most people didn’t have a map, let alone a satnav, it helped to know whether your destination was, say 12 miles away (better to find a stable and a bed for the night and finish the journey in the morning) or 5 miles (in which case there might be enough time to press on). More than this, it places the town in its context, not far from the major centre of Bristol but over 100 miles from London; and it tells us that there are a surprising number of small towns within a few miles of this spot in Somerset.

I find the spaced-out lettering, with even the full points spaced, charming. It’s also functional in that it enabled the sign-maker to accommodate nearly all the names. Long names like Sherborne and Ilchester fit the sign and only Castle Cary and Glastonbury have to be abbreviated. Modern travellers who are hurrying on to Bristol or Bruton are likely to miss all this, of course. Only the slow pedestrian has time to take in such things. And I’m rather glad that I did.