Sir Edwin Lutyens I: Spalding War Memorial

     Lincolnshire is perhaps not rich in the work of well-known architects, and what work there is tends to be on the small scale.  This small building, that might easily be mistaken for a mere garden pavilion, is a case in point.  It is, in fact, the War Memorial in the southern Lincolnshire market town of Spalding (I've mentioned it briefly before on this blog).  It is the work of the most important 20th century architect in Britain, Sir Edwin Lutyens.  It is his only work in the county.
     The memorial, which was unveiled in 1922, stands in the 18th century gardens of Ascoughfee Hall.  The billowing, cloud-like hedge on the right of first photograph is original, though grown to deformity with the years.  I think the pond too may be an original 'feature'.  Perhaps, then, a cramped place for the annual Remembrance Day commemoration.  It is an Italianate sort of design - Lutyens by this time had, to a great extent, abandoned the Arts and Crafts style for the Grand Manner of Classicism. However the spirit of the Arts and Crafts lived on in a building such as this; the roof is shod in pan tiles, and the cornice is constructed of stone and creasing tiles.  Inside, on the back wall are carved the names of the Fallen.  The floor of brick and stone recalls those he designed for his early country houses.  The Wiki article points out the similarity between the Spalding war memorial and the entrance pavilion Anneux British Cemetery at Cambrai
     In front stands the austere and enigmatic Stone of Remembrance which Lutyens had designed for the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

 

Back in Birmingham II

   Domesticity dominated the second half of our day in Birmingham.
   Just down the road from the Barber is Winterbourne House, also owned by the University.  This as an Arts and Crafts House dating from 1903 built by the local architect Joseph Lancaster Ball (1852-1929) for the Nettlefold family - Birmingham manufacturers and Unitarians. It too is very good.  Bequeathed to the University in 1944 the garden which is vast, with formal and informal sections, subsequently became the University Botanic Garden, and the house a museum and conference venue. In the outbuildings are a gallery, second hand bookshop and press.  The garden shelter looks as though it was influenced by the Elizabethan bell cage at East Bergholt. A gate in the garden fence lead to a most miraculous place: a great lake with views across to Edgbaston Golf Club. Lucky golfers. Hard to image we were in the midst of the vast West Midlands conurbation.

   Mid afternoon and we were on Hurst St heading for the Gay Village when we suddenly came across a group of Georgian Houses, their good proportions deeply striking in what is, it has to be said, a street of very vulgar buildings.  It took us a few seconds to work out that this was the 'Back-to-Backs' owned by the National Trust.  Back-to-Back housing was a feature of working class housing in the great cities of Industrial Revolution England.  Most now have been replaced.  While in cities such as Leeds they formed uniform terraces, in Birmingham they formed courts, with the houses divided along their spine walls to form two dwellings only one room deep looking out either inwards on to the court or outwards on to the street but sharing common sanitary provision in the court.  As now conserved the 'exterior' houses have been turned into holiday lets, while the 'interior' ones have been furnished as they would at various stages of their occupation, based on information gleaned from contemporary sources such as the Census.  Fascinating they are too.  Squalid they are not, for, though cramped and unsanitary, they were occupied by skilled artisans.  The kitchen/parlours actually had a lot of charm, far removed from the rather self-conscious life at Winterbourne.  The bedrooms at the top of the each house were, however, not places to linger.  Over time many of the houses ceased to be residential and industrial/artisanal use took over. One house is presented in this way; a tailor's shop that continued in use, I think, until the 1980s.  The owner had come from the West Indies in the 1950s/1960s and had established a successful business by a lot of hard and work and shear will power.  In all it was quite touching.  Guided tours only.
   The evening was spent in the Jewellry Quarter; pre-dinner drinks at the quirky 'Ana Rocha Bar and Restaurant' on Frederick St., and dinner itself at 'The Viceroy', a rather stylish Indian restaurant on Iknield St. The Murogh Chicken Livers were fabulous!

London II: The Russian Orthodox Cathedral

     We walked through Hyde Park, and then plunged into the maze of residential streets north east of the V&A our goal goal being the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens.  A building that has been recently been restored, and I was eager to see what had been done and experience its Orthodoxy.

     The cathedral, however, started out as an Anglican parish church, designed in the 1830s by Lewis Vulliamy (although work didn't commence for another decade).  In the 1850s Robert Louis Roumieu designed a sky-rocket of a campanile, which thankfully wasn't built. The present bell tower dates from the 1870s.  The interior, like many post-reformation Anglican churches of the eighteenth century onwards, is based on the early Christian basilican form - nave, aisles and apse.  We've met the form before on this blog.  The interior is very vertical in feeling.  The great columns are made of cast iron.  In 1892 Owen Jones's decoration was replaced by Arts and Crafts architect Charles Harrison Townsend and the artist Heywood Sumner, who decorated the nave walls with sgrafitto and the triumphal arch over the apse with mosaic.  The apse decoration, by Derwent Wood, dates from 1911. The work is excellent, and it was really pleasing to see that the recent restoration has respected the history of the church.

     Researching for this post I was faced with the same issue that afflicted my research on Houghton Hall last year; none of the secondary source materials seem to quite agree with each other.  It could be that the west front is original, and merely modified by Harrison Townsend i.e. the porch, which has very Byzantine detailing.  However the design, which is based on San Zeno, Verona, is nothing like that in 1850s perspective drawing illustrated in 'Victorian Churches', (Country Life Books, 1968).  I suspect that the whole façade is by Townsend in collaboration with Sumner who made the sgraffito decoration in the porch. The central panel over the door is not mosaic as claimed in one guide book. Either way it's a vast improvement on that illustrated.  When a student in west London a friend and I attended the Divine Liturgy one Sunday when the very holy Anthony Bloom was archbishop, and the place, as far as I can remember, was a little shabby.  There wasn't much money available then, I suppose.  Money, judging by what has recently been achieved, is now plentiful.  And rather splendid, and light filled, is the result. Not, thankfully, as lavish as I feared.

Birmingham II Buildings

     The cathedral sits on Colmore Row, and in and around that street are a number of exuberant Victorian and Edwardian buildings - mainly banks and other institutions.  The majority are classical. The one exception in the my selection is the quite strange and enigmatic 'Eagle Insurance Buildings' , 1899-1900, by the extreme Arts & Crafts practitioner William Lethaby (1857-1931).  It has gilded bronze doors and is fenced about with an obscure, almost occult symbolism. 

     It shouldn't be forgotten that Birmingham was one of the centres of Art & Crafts production and patronage in Britain with its own traditions, producing architects like the brilliant W H Bidlake, and painters such as Henry Payne and Joseph Southall as well as numerous artist/artisans in the applied arts.  Of the buildings I photographed the only other one I have been able to identify and accredit a designer with any certainty is The Joint Stock Bank in Temple Row West by J A Chatwin, who I mentioned in my last post.  A slightly odd design, which on the ground floor seems to have been influenced by C R Cockerell's design for the Old Schools Quadrangle in Cambridge.  It was originally was intended to be a library; it is now a pub. 
     The twentieth century was not kind to cities like Birmingham - the best description of that long painful process is, paradoxically, in 'Scottish Architecture' by Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie (Thames & Hudson, 2004). What they say about Scottish cities can readily be applied to cities in England and Wales.   The havoc wrought in Birmingham was very great, and this area is probably the best place to get a feeling of what the centre of the city looked like in late nineteenth century when Birmingham was at its zenith as a manufacturing centre - and claimed, like Glasgow and Dublin, to be the Second City of the Empire.
     Finally a brief word on one of those things that makes Birmingham unique - the very beautiful Victorian street signage you can find in the older parts of the city.  Cast iron I suspect.

Tattershall

   On the day that the clocks have changed and the golden leaves are floating down from the cherry tree in the back garden, I'm returning to a damp summer's day and the trip the bf and I made through Lincolnshire to Gunby Hall.

   Leaving Sleaford we went deeper into the county crossing the fens and the wide Witham valley stopping next at Tattershall and the remains of a Late Medieval complex of castle, church and almshouses.  They are the work of Ralph Cromwell, Treasurer of England, and originally the complex was bigger still with buildings to house the college of priests and a grammar school. Some of this was not even started by the time of Cromwell's death in 1456 and it was left to his executor, Bishop William Waynflete, to complete the work - the Cromwells were childless.

   The parish church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, was completely rebuilt from 1469 onwards.  John Cowper was appointed mason 1474.  It is a vast glasshouse of a church, the architecture a little chill - there is no cusping at all in the tracery, but the interior as a real nobility.  It would have been sumptuous when all the windows were filled with stained glass, but most of what remained after the Reformation was removed in the 18th century to decorate St Martin's in Stamford.  The leftovers have been collected in the chancel east window. Unfortunate too that it never benefited from the hand of a Gothic Revival architect such as 'somethingofthechameleon' favourites G F Bodley and Sir J N Comper who would have filled it with gorgeous things as the architecture demands.  Of the surviving Medieval fitments the best is the Pulpitum built in 1528 Robert de Whalley, less than ten years then from the beginnings of the English Reformation.

   And now to the castle.  Odd to consider that really not much of the castle survives, except that what does survive is stupendous: the great donjon built by Ralph Cromwell, an almost fairy tale vision of Late Medieval architecture.  It was part of a massive remodeling of an existing fortress, however apart from the moats, and the guardhouse, everything else has gone - chapel, hall, walls, towers, gatehouses.  All gone.  Just grass and a few foundations.  For the survival and restoration of the tower we have to thank the Tory politician and Viceroy of India Lord Nathaniel Curzon, who in the early years of the last century rescued the spectacular fireplaces from being shipped to the U.S and commissioned the Scottish born Arts and Crafts architect William Weir to re-floor and re-roof the tower.  New stained glass was installed, and Ernest Gimson and/or the Barnsley brothers designed and made new bridges for the moats and display cases for the small museum installed in the remains of the guardhouse.  All this done, Curzon handed over the castle to the National Trust.  Curzon also bought furniture, including tapestries for some of the rooms.
   The tower is an ingenious piece of Medieval planning: each floor has one enormous room in the centre surrounded by smaller spaces in the corner towers or else buried in the thickness of the massive walls.  It is also one of the earliest brick structures in Britain.  In one year of construction 322,000 bricks were supplied for the donjon alone.  A colossal undertaking.  And it was not Cromwell's only house.  The exposed mortar, I believe, was once painted red to match the bricks, and each of the corner turrets was originally topped with a short spire. At the very top of the tower, (it is 110 ft high), is unexpectedly a courtyard, almost like a cloister.
   From the battlements there were incredible views of the county - the great low lying ridge of the Lincoln Edge to the west climaxing in the north-west with Lincoln cathedral, the Minster, proud and glorious on her hill, and then in the south-east across the vast level expanse of the fens the mighty finger of Boston Stump, and all the time the weather, a great bank of cloud piling in from the west like we were in the midst of some Neo-Romantic painting, vast and visionary.  I think I nearly cried with the sublimity of it all.