St Benedict, Glinton

     I spent a week back in Lincolnshire in the beginning of December catching up with people and things.  I took the opportunity to pop over to Glinton and have a look at the parish church of St Benedict, a building that has connections with the poet John Clare (1793-1864). It was here that Clare went to the village school, which was then located in the N. chancel chapel and here too that the love of his life, Mary Joyce, lived.  The day of my visit damp, cold and thoroughly miserable.  It seems a long way off as I type theses words in a spring-like Swansea. Like Helpston and Northborough, Glinton suffers from proximity to Peterborough and the slow defeat of 'village' by 'suburbia'.  All three are stone-belt villages that sit on the wide flood plain of the Welland. To the east beyond Northborough and Glinton (which is, I think, on some sort of gravel peninsular) lie the fens. Places then that one wouldn't necessarily associate with charming stone-built cottages.

     Be that as it may St Benedict's and its large graveyard sit midway along the straggling High St. The spire is quite something - tall and quite out of proportion with the squat tower below, it changes angle about two thirds of the way up.  Quite a landmark and unique, I would guess. Dramatic too. The church less so, small, with a noticeably tall Perp clerestory. In the porch are a couple of large, much worn effigies, male and female, removed from inside.  They probably took up too much floor space - the interior is on the small side, but that tall clerestory does add a much need sense of drama and verticality.  (Note the large corbels high between the windows - evidence of an earlier, perhaps more interesting nave roof) All that said the interior is, quite frankly, dull; a victim of conventional Anglican taste. The font is possibly the best thing - square, Norman and carved with abstract patterns.  One wants, however, a little mystery.

St Michael and All Angels, Ledbury

     Two weeks ago now and on the way to family in Worcestershire we made a breakfast stop in Ledbury, Herefordshire.  I hadn't been there for years and I was eager for a return visit to the parish church of St Michael and all Angels, a large town church of warmest sandstone, vibrant in the sparkling winter sunshine. So much more noticeably colder than Swansea, with a heavy, lingering frost on the churchyard grass.

     St Michael's is reached from the High St by the almost improbably picturesque Church Lane - a fitting lead up to a church that is rich in texture and is architecturally complex and varied.  Quite my sort of place.  So where to begin, when stepping through the fine churchyard gates and you are met with such a competition of interest with all the elements begging for your attention - detached bell tower, north transept, two storey porch and west front with a great Norman west door embedded in its midst? I made for the north transept which I had completely forgotten about until I saw it illustrated in a book by Basil Clarke and John Betjeman.  It was so intriguing and so beautiful I had to return one day.  It took two years from buying the book in a second-hand bookshop in Cromer to make the journey. It did not disappoint at all.  It is an exquisite piece of architecture.  Early decorated, with vast windows encrusted with a plethora of ballflower ornament, a Herefordshire/Worcestershire speciality. Think sleigh bells! I particularly loved the small, richly detailed doorway poking its head into one of the windows in the west wall. In all exceptional. And so then to the rest of the church.  The chancel is Norman, but the nave is Decorated Gothic, though not as elaborate in style as the N transept.  Workman like, I'd say, but far from unattractive.

   The aisle windows are exceptionally tall, because the vast interior, all reddy-brown for the walls have at one time been stripped of plaster, is a hall-church of sorts with nave and aisles are equal height separated by thin arcades of octagonal piers (the work of two separate building campaigns by the look of it) giving a great sense of space and height (there is no clerestory).  The chancel though retains its original Norman arcades and now function-less circular clerestory windows. The three parallel roofs are open and a little dark it has to be said, but the interior is rich in civic and funerary trumpery.  We would have lingered but the there was a meeting getting underway in the Lady Chapel so I felt unable to fully explore the east end.  Still, it is an excuse to return.

     Ledbury is a beautiful place with a mixture of sandstone, warm red brick and half timbering.  I love the architecture and the urbanism of these west Midlands market towns. Apart from architecture the shopping in Ledbury is exceptional for a town of its size.  On the east side of the High St are a number of yards and alleys that contain some fantastic shops, one of which, Tinsmiths, I have to confess, was, after reading about it on my friend Ben Pentreath's blog, another reason for my visit.

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XXVI

     Another completed painting in my long-running painting sequence following Sebastiano Serlio's 'Rustiche' - the thirty designs found in his posthumous 'Extaordinario Libro di Archittetura'.  It follows the long established format: mixed media over pencil under drawing on 300gsm watercolour paper, 25.5 x 24.5 cms.

Cathays Park II: Glamorgan County Building

     My second post in an ongoing occasional series on the remarkable collection of civic buildings that make up Cathays Park in the the Welsh capital Cardiff.  This time it's the turn of Glamorgan County Hall by Vincent Harris (1876-1971) and Thomas Andersen Moodie (1874-1948).  I had never heard of the later until researching this piece, but Harris's work has long been familiar to me; I know his work in London best, such as Kensington Library, a very late work by him and severe to the point of banality, and the extraordinary Gothic Revival building he designed for the corner of Bond St and Burlington Gardens for the perfumers Atkinsons in 1926.  He did a lot of municipal work across the country and perhaps his best work, the Town Hall Extension and Central Library in Manchester (1934-8), fits into this category.
     Opened in 1912 the Glamorgan Building is nominally six years younger than the nearby City Hall (opened 1906 but designed back in the 1890s) and a comparison of both buildings provides an interesting exploration of the direction of British architecture in the early twentieth century, paralleled in Harris's own career - the difference between the Kensington Library and the Glamorgan Building is startling. As I said in my previous post on Cathays Park this is a building under the influence of the American Beaux Art tradition; richly detailed but a contrast none the less to the Edwardian Baroque of the City Hall and the Crown Court building and both the work of Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards with their restless sky lines and the Baroque merging of sculpture and architecture. The skyline of the Glamorgan Building (as it is now known) is simply a cornice - no sculpture, no urns to break that long emphatic horizontal. Note also how the façade down plays the centre. There is no risalto as such, just a long portico of paired Corinthian columns  - a 'giant order' rising between two floors - between heavy pylons (derived from that long, long colonnade of paired columns on the east façade of the Louvre?). Unlike the Louvre, however, the columns sit not on a ground floor (a podium in effect), but on a stylobate as though it was a Greek temple. The detailing is indeed neo-classical at times, but generally eclectic in tone - touches of Neo-renaissance and Edwardian Baroque, for instance in the way the wall surface is rarely inert, but is quite heavily layered and restless. Everything, however is done, as one one expect from a building of this period, with consummate skill and the overall result is rather sophisticated, sculptural, urban and urbane.  A far more formal and austere composition than either the City Hall or Court. Interestingly the sculpture on the building is purely architectural - there is no blending of disciplines here, for the remarkable and lavish sculptural groups, by Albert Hodge, are placed firmly on the ground.