Bewdley

     Just back from a few days away in Bewdley visiting with my family.  As I written here before Bewdley is rather a gem; small and trim, standing on the w bank of the river Severn in the north of Worcestershire with a little of the jaunty vulgarity of the seaside resort.  I really won't bother you with further superlatives, except to say a visit is well worth it. As is a trip to the Severn Valley Railway in the town.  The restored station is delightful.
     Town, station, and locality have been used a lot for location filming; in particular they have been used for the 1970s adaptation of Charles Dicken's 'The Signalman', and the 1980s adaptation of Masefield's 'The Box of Delights'.  

St Michael, Tenbury Wells I

     We had a further three stops on the way to Bewdley; Monkland Cheese Dairy (we really do recommend a visit), Leominster, and our third, which concerns us here, St Michael Tenbury Wells. From the burgeoning Late Gothic Revival at Kinnersley back to High Victorian Gothic.

     This, it has to be said, is a quite extraordinary building, best Camden Society approved middle-pointed, built both as parish church and school chapel, for it is part of a complex of buildings, such as All Saints, Margaret St or All saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead. Fruits all of the Tractarian movement intended to develop and nurture the spiritual and intellectual lives of the surrounding people and that have their origins in the work of Pugin, particularly in his polemical book 'Contrasts'. Here church and school are parallel to one another linked, umbilically as it were, by a cloister so as to form a quadrangle open to the west. From a distance the church looks like a gigantic scale model of a French High Gothic cathedral that had been dropped into the unsuspecting Worcestershire countryside, and to some extent it is a building out of time and place, for although it partakes to a degree of local materials and local styles it isn't vernacular like St James back in Kinnersley. Something is different, and that is, I suppose, that it is a product of an industrialising society, of Modernity. It is to a certain point self-conscious design, while Kinnersley organic. A building that at one time in the mid 20th century would provoke hatred among many architects and critics, but love in others such as Sir John Betjeman. Perhaps a building constructed out of antinomies. Changeable. Mannered - it is no mere copy of a medieval building, but an imaginative, thoughtful, if not wilful, set of variations on a theme. The details are ever inventive, and seem occasionally to move into unknown territory. Restless even, certainly it has that relentlessness and intensity common to that stage of the Gothic Revival. Earnestness, and muscularity are terms often used in this context. That context being a forceful reaction to the good manners of most 18th and early 19th century architecture. The architect was Henry Woodyer (1816-1896) one time pupil of William Butterfield. It was built for that remarkable man Sir Frederick Ouseley - professor of music, priest, composer and Baronet - with the intention of not only satisfying the spiritual requirements of the local population but playing a national role in the revival of English church music, a role it played until the closure of the school in 1985. Since then the church has continued parochial, and until June this year the school occupied by another educational establishment. The building is now empty and apparently up for sale. I wish I had known this at the time as I would have taken some photos of the school buildings.

     Alas, due to the current events we couldn't gain entrance, so here are the photos I managed to take of the exterior of the chapel.  

The Pump Room, Tenbury Wells

     The object of our foray into England was a family birthday. On our return journey I insisted we stop at Tenbury Wells, a small and attractive, work-a-day market town in the extreme north-west corner of Worcestershire. I wanted to see the spa. And as you can see from the photographs what an extraordinary little structure it is. Pevsner said, perhaps a little harshly: 'much like Gothicky or Chinesey fair stuff without seriousness or taste'. I prefer to see it as an example of British eccentricity.

     As you can well imagine it is Victorian in date, by an architect who even I've never heard of James Cranston. A local, I think, though the local tourist information says he was a Brummie. Apparently the whole thing, apart from the porch, is prefabricated. The roof is clad in 'bespoke' iron sheets. The tower looks like it has strayed from a Hollywood production set in medieval Russia. Pevsner was right, it is rebarbative; but I think that misses the point.

     The Pump Room isn't the only building by Cranston in the town which is mainly red-brick Georgian with a handful of the Medieval thrown into the mix. It's well worth a stroll about.

     Below is the only slightly less extraordinary Market House dating to 1858. Not that many buildings I know are oval in plan. Pevsner rather liked it but I feel somewhat less sympathetic. It isn't bad in itself, quite whimsical really, even charming, though from some angles it looks like a grossly inflated cabbies' shelter.  The problem lies for me, however, in the execution which is rather harsh, better suited to a Victorian city than a Georgian and Medieval market town. That is partly down to the use of machine made bricks and tiles. Perhaps it will have to stand around for another 150 years for it to have bedded in properly, quietly maturing like a cheese or fine wine. Perhaps it never will, but be doomed to be forever an architectural outsider. In the meantime a change of colour scheme re paint may help. Both buildings are High Victorian in style, and one suspects Cranston was under the influence of 'Rogue' architects such as Lamb and Teulon. Drunk and disorderly on Muscular Gothic and the possibilities of mass production in the new Industrial Age.

Great Malvern Priory

     To Worcestershire Saturday to see family. En route we stopped at Malvern, that most salubrious of Birmingham's suburbs, for breakfast - and a slightly curious affair that was.  Malvern and the Priory were much better.  Malvern itself is a sprawling, hospitable nineteenth century spa town - all ad hoc around the base of the Malvern Hills (from Moelvryn meaning 'bald hill') like a big-boned but friendly dog. Sometimes picturesque, sometimes confusing.  The whole is very much the territory of John Betjeman and John Piper. I went there as a teenager with my folks and the experience was at once interesting - all those villas, etc. - and boring - small shopping area. The residential, as now, dominated. As an adult my experience was more positive, though I can image living on one of those interminable suburban roads a bit dull no matter how good the architecture is. That said the place is a sort of open-air museum of nineteenth century architecture, and a such endlessly fascinating. A place of random and extraordinary buildings. I think we often forget how good the Victorians could be in creating the built environment partly because of their failures in the Industrial Cities, though even in a small industrial town like Pontardawe in the Tawe valley here in Wales you can come across a street as delightful as Thomas St lined with small semi-detached houses of stone and brick, some even retaining their cast iron railings. The only difference being that the Thomas Streets of this world are far more vulnerable to slow evisceration and destruction than the Malverns.
     It was Betjeman who likened Malvern to the tiny Italian republic of San Marino, it being so set apart from the usual run of the West Midlands. And it is strange, being a suburb detached from its city and dropped from a great height into the mist of heath and farmland. Other writers have said that hills form the true border of Wales. There is certainly a difference between east Worcestershire, beyond Severnside, and the western part of the county which can be very remote.
     Breakfast over we headed to the Priory Church. But first a little history, and it is a little confusing it has to be said.  All we really need to know is that there may have been a community of hermits living about the hills pre-Conquest in some sort connection with the martyrdom of St Werstan which is thought to have occurred at Malvern during the Viking Invasion of England (the presence of hermits may though predate St Werstan), and that sometime around the Norman Conquest (or after) this community developed into a regular Benedictine community with connections to Westminster Abbey.  At the Dissolution of the Monasteries the church was bought by the local community and became parochial, subsequently losing its Lady Chapel and s transept. Apart from the priory gatehouse all the monastic buildings were also destroyed. There are larger parish churches it has to be said, but what survives is superlative, for the church was rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic some time late in the Middle Ages in a beautiful sandstone.  

     The Tower in particular, based on the tower at Gloucester Cathedral, which in turn is based on that at Worcester, is splendid; a powerful design full equally of strength and intricate detail. Poised. In the past some credited Sir Reginald Bray (born nearby at St Johns, the western suburb of Worcester) with the design of the tower. He was also credited with Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey and St George's Chapel Windsor. However Bray, who had been an officer the household of Lady Margaret Beaufort (Yes, her again) and later that of her son Henry VII, was essentially an administrator and not an architect, and that explains his involvement with the Royal commissions.  The real architect of the priory remains unknown.
     The interior gives a sense of great space and luminosity.  Of the earlier church there survives the powerful Norman nave arcade and the s aisle wall which contains at the e end a blocked Norman processional doorway which led to the cloisters. Everything else Perp. Soaring and lucid. The influence of Gloucester is present in the space beneath the crossing tower and in the base of the great east window where the mullions extend down to the ground forming the screen to the Lady Chapel. (Delightful Gothic Revival internal porch hiding the original doorway.)

     The chancel, rightly, is the culmination of the interior. Light floods in through the vast clerestory windows, and where the again the mullions descend from the windows down this time on to extrados of the arcade arches leaving very little, if any, inert wall surface. And little space, it has to be said for, large scale mural painting as you would find, say, in the Italian peninsular. All is articulated and decorated by architecture. Architecture has, as a result of a long-term trend in the Gothic, become essentially its own decoration.  The chancel aisles are, in contrast, much plainer, more utilitarian, with simple quadrapartite vaults. The scale of these too is 'parochial'  - the difference so marked that I'm tempted to assign them to a different master mason. All of that said there are some slightly strange details in the chancel: the capitals of the arcade are weak as to be almost obsolete (the arcades at near-ish Merevale Priory are similar but cruder in design) and the springers of the unattempted high vault look 'wrong' somehow. But these are minor quibbles.

     And in addition to all that architectural richness there are fittings to match: the original choir stalls, the very rare Medieval wall tiles and the Medieval stained glass, which includes two Royal commissions - the E window paid for by Richard III and the N transept window by Henry VII.  All lucky survivals. Perhaps it was the connection with Royal monastery of Westminster that inspired such Royal patronage. In addition there are several good monuments both Jacobean and Neo-classical. The priory was restored in by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1860 and a relatively sensitive job he did of it; I particularly liked the nave ceiling which is beautifully decorated to his design. Alas the place is awash with well-meaning clutter, and muzak - well, classy muzak to be fair - was playing.