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Specific gravity My photograph shows a representative selection of the architecture of St John’s Wood High Street. In the left background are classical blocks, probably of the 1830s or soon after, of white or yellow brick with stucco details. Then, a bit closer, a red brick and white ‘Queen Anne’ group with the fancy curvy gables and the characteristic square-pane glazing of the late-19th century. There’s a lot of  late-19th century stripy masonry round here, as witness the building in the right foreground, a bank, more classical but still in a contrasting mix of materials, here brick and Portland stone. In the middle of it all is the pub, the Sir Isaac Newton, standing out like a flashing beacon. This is another late-19th century building (1892, says Pevsner), this time in red brick and orangey terracotta, a combination of colours that means that the bands are there but don’t provide much contrast. Instead, the whole building glows. Like its neighbour, it has ornate gables. The other

On high When in Salisbury I always look up at the sign of the White Hart Hotel, a particularly lovely three-dimensional inn sign that stands out against the sky. The building it crowns is a large inn of about 1820 with an enormous Doric portico, but there has actually been an inn here since at least 1635. The use of the white hart as a badge goes back further still – it was the device of King Richard II and that fact accounts for the crown around the creature’s neck. On this sign the crown and chain look as they have been made of metal and attached to the figure of the hart. The fact that the antlers are a different colour makes them stand out too, as if the sculptor had used a real pair of antlers. although this is no doubt the effect of a paint job.* From ground level, everything is less distinct than in my photograph, which was taken with a zoom lens at full extension. Most passers-by are therefore unaware of the details of the sign. More often than not in my experience, the creatur

Cornish in Oxon I thought I knew the Oxfordshire market town of Chipping Norton well but, as so often with places we visit frequently, there’s always another side street or two to explore, and I was delighted to find these 17th-century almshouses in Church Street.* You can see that we’re in the Cotswolds here: those stone walls and the broad gables built as upward extensions of the front wall are very Cotswold, as are the dripstones above the upper windows. There’s a datestone that tells us that the almshouses were ‘The work of Henry Cornish. Gent. 1640’. Cornish died in 1649 and left these eight houses as dwellings for eight poor widows, together with an endowment providing 20 shillings a year for the building’s maintenance and 2 shillings weekly for bread to be given to the widows. I don’t know much about Henry Cornish, but one source suggests that he was an opponent of the royal taxation that pushed England towards the Civil War and was imprisoned by the royalists for his views and

Top Dec. Seen from across neighbouring gardens, the church almost disappears behind greenery. But the east window still stands out, and I think: ‘Yes! More glorious Lincolnshire tracery.’ Lincolnshire is a county full of churches with elaborate curvaceous 14th-century window tracery. At big parish churches like the ones at Sleaford, Grantham, and Heckington, the tracery curves this way and that in a series of patterns of sometimes dizzying complexity and variety – curvilinear tracery of the most inventive kind. This is a smaller church, but the east window is as wonderful as those of its larger cousins. The tracery pattern here is dominated by two mouchettes – the shapes that look like gigantic skewed commas, their tails pointing down and outwards, their heads nodding towards each other and touching at the centre. Within each mouchette are other shapes – large multi-cusped trefoils in the heads, elongated ‘daggers’ in the tails. This is all very showy and was designed to hold stained g

Pride of lions…and gryphons It was with difficulty that I restrained myself from lying on my back and purring when I found this beautiful shop front in Lincoln’s Corporation Street. Restraint was a little easier than it might have been because of the number of other people present on the street and because of the poor 20th-century shopfronts on the building’s ground floor – I have spared you, gentle reader, from witnessing more than the merest sliver of these. The upper part of this building is a gem. It’s a lovely example of the hybrid style of about 1900 – a bit Tudoresque, a bit Queen Anne. In the middle, just above the shop signs and at the bottom of my picture is a carved plaque bearing the building’s name: ‘St Hugh’s Chambers’ and the date 1899. Corporation Street was new in the 1890s, St Hugh’s Chambers must have been built soon after the street was laid out, probably for the two solicitors who are recorded as occupying the building in 1901.* There is much, decoratively speakin

Untroubled waters This is one of those architectural miniatures I particularly like. It’s St Mary’s conduit house, built in the 16th century to provide a source of clean water for the people of Lincoln. It’s said to have been built partly out of fragments of from a chantry in an old friary that was dissolved, during the depredations imposed by Henry VIII on the country religious houses, in 1530. By incorporating them into the walls of the conduit house (connected to a network of supply pipes begun by the friars) a few years after the dissolution, the builders gave a new life to bits of tracery and blind arcading, plus some corbels, niches, arch heads, and other bits and pieces. They also provided an invaluable service to local people. The conduit and others in the city carried on supplying water until 1906, although not the conduit house did not remain in exactly the same positron – it was moved away from the street into St Mary’s churchyard in 1864. When mains water was laid on at the

Bits of history To Lincolnshire, in search of the Resident Wise Woman’s ancestors. Our journey took us to Potterhanworth, southeast of Lincoln, where her grandmother Betsy was brought up and went to the village school. We took with us the Betsy’s typescript memoirs of her early life in this Lincolnshire village with her grandparents* – her grandfather (the RWW’s great great grandfather), the wonderfully named John George Pepperdine Salter¶ was the first stationmaster at Potterhanworth station. We found the old station house, where they lived, and visited the village school, whose head was very happy with the gift of a copy of the memoirs and rewarded us, quite unexpectedly, with the sight of their author’s name in the school register, inscribed in a copperplate hand in 1901. The most remarkable building in Potterhanworth is this water tower (now converted to a house). I can’t remember when I last saw such an impressive one in a village. It was built in 1903 with funds provided by Chri

First post Just inside the entrance to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln is this post box. It was made in 1856 at the Handyside foundry in Derby and installed the following year at Gosberton Bank near Spalding. In 1969 is was moved to the museum, as an example of a very early type of post box – from the time before there was an accepted standard design. A number of the early post box designs were octagonal like this one and like the Penfold , of which a number survive. The Lincoln example, ten years earlier than the Penfold, is rarer still and almost as striking. With its vertical slot and octagonal shape, it looks quite unlike modern cylindrical boxes and as the red finish wash’t standardised until later, it might originally have been a different colour too. But many features – the royal monogram, the panel showing collection times, and the words ‘Post Office’ are all similar to those on the boxes we use today. I don’t often feature here items from museums, but there are so