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Happy New Year! This figure of a Scotsman in Highland dress taking snuff is a memory from my childhood. Growing up in Cheltenham, I regularly saw it outside Frederick Wright’s tobacconist’s shop in the town’s High Street. He is taking snuff – snuff from Scotland being famous – and guiding people towards his owner’s door. He’s now in the town’s museum (known as The Wilson these days), and is one of several extraordinary shop signs be seen there. Highlander figures were well known as tobacconists’ shop signs by the time of the 1745 rebellion, as after this date highland dress was banned and tobacconists sought to confirm that they could continue to exhibit these figures outside their shops without being accused of breaking the law or of a lack of loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy. The figures, usually made of wood, were still common the Victorian period, but relatively few survived into the 20th century. This particular example was a well known landmark in the town and Wright’s address

Christmas already So it’s Christmas already. Since the last one I’ve written a book, Phantom Architecture (see right-hand column), done various editorial odd jobs, grubbed around several bits of England, visited the Czech Republic again, and posted about one hundred times on this blog. That’s (nearly!) enough from me for this year, then. So here’s an almost seasonal Madonna and Child, one of the wall paintings in the church of St Peter ad Vincula, South Newington, Oxfordshire. Beneath an ornate cusped and crocketed 14th-century painted ogee arch, the Christ-Child reaches towards his mother with one hand while the other holds an apple. There’s just enough left of the painting to give one a sense of the artist’s strong line, his expressive but bony way with hands and fingers, his careful approach to drapery, his love of curvaceous ornament (both architectural and foliate), and what were probably his strong colours. The fragmentary nature of what’s left makes it, as so often with medieva

Hats off, here they come… London’s Shaftesbury Avenue is one of the best known streets in the capital – the part between Piccadilly Circus and Cambridge Circus, which is full of theatres, is in the heart of tourist London. But the northern part, north of Cambridge Circus and bordering the Covent Garden area is less well known. If you’re around there, I’d suggest wandering towards the northern end, and having a look at the Covent Garden Odeon, a large Art Deco building that started life as the Saville Theatre in 1931.   The reason I think this building is particularly worth a look is the long frieze that stretches across the facade. It’s the work of the sculptor Gilbert Bayes* and depicts theatre through the ages, with the ancient Greeks and Romans at one end and the twentieth century at the other. ‘Theatre’ is interpreted loosely (spectacle might be a better term), with Roman gladiators and Greek Bacchantes included and the very English sight of Punch and Judy also putting in an appear

Out of dust… Drifting around the area north of Old Street the other day I was impressed by how spruced up the area was: quite different from the interesting but run-down district I remembered from when I occasionally crossed it in – when could it have been – ah, yes, the 1980s. Of course, I knew how it had changed, how the old Hoxtonites and young artists of the 1980s had in part given way to an influx of entertainment venues and hi-tech industries, and how some buildings had been converted to upmarket flats. In the process quite a bit of the architecture has been spruced up, but the arts have not gone away: witness this building, the home of the National Centre of Circus Arts. That’s not all it is. This appealing bit of reed brick and terracotta started life in 1896 as the Shoreditch Electric Light Station and Refuse Destructor. Its job was to burn rubbish to produce steam that was used to drive turbines and generate electricity. The terracotta panels above the entrance tell this stor

A well for all seasons? Before leaving Combrook, the parish church of which featured in my previous post , I want to share this less obvious feature of the village. It’s one of two well heads, built around the same time as the church and I’d guess designed by the same architect, John Gibson. It has an ogee arch, the double-curved design that is characteristic of the 14th-century Gothic that inspired the church’s west front, and if you look very closely at this opening you can see that it’s decorated with ballflowers, another 14th-century motif. I take this well head to be more evidence of the care that the landlord was bestowing on this village in the 19th century. The church, two well heads, the former village school (it’s now the village hall) and several of the houses were built or rebuilt in this period. Along with the houses, the water supply was the most important facility of all, and giving the well this kind of ornate gable in white lias and limestone (complete with coat of arm

Ornamental Thoughts of St Augustine, Kilburn , were still in my mind recently when I visited Combrook, a village in Warwickshire, not far from the Fosse Way. Combrook was an estate village of Compton Verney and seems to have had a lot of attention paid to it in the mid-19th century, when a number of cottages were built or rebuilt, a school was erected, and the church given a new nave. The architect of the church was John Gibson, who was also at work making alterations to the great house of Compton Verney in the early 1860s. Gibson gave the church a striking west front, a visual highlight in the centre of the village. The style of this front is Gibson’s very ornate version of what the Victorians often called ‘Middle Pointed’, that’s to say the phase of Gothic fashionable in the first half of the 14th century. Elaborate window tracery, naturalistic carving, and ogee arches are typical features. However, this frontage is hardly typical. It’s a Victorian throwing everything a

Pearson’s triumph I was reminded the other day by an article by Gavin Stamp in Apollo that this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Victorian architect John Loughborough Pearson.* I’ve been a fan of Pearson since the 1990s, when I got to know his lovely early church of St Peter, Vauxhall. Gavin Stamp rates the architect highly too, although he rightly insists that Pearson was sometimes too eager to rebuild to his own design when restoring ancient buildings.† Pearson’s masterpiece is the church of St Augustine, Kilburn, known to some by the nickname ‘the Cathedral of North London’. From the outside it has a fine soaring spire, but it’s the interior that really sets this building apart. I’d single out three aspects of it that work especially well. The first is the handling of space. It’s tall, and the large windows at gallery level make it also very light. It’s also broad, because there are double aisles, meaning that there is plenty of room for a large congregation and

William Whyte, Unlocking the Church: The lost secrets of Victorian sacred space Published by Oxford University Press Here’s the last of my Christmas book reviews: an illuminating study of 19th-century church buildings that’s also a good read… William Whyte’s new book offers a revealing way of looking at Victorian churches, one that highlights neither the battle between architectural styles nor the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ church. Whyte instead concentrates on the ways the Victorians understood and experienced church buildings, stressing in particular two key ideas – the church as a symbolic building that can be ‘read’ and the idea that church architecture can shape people’s emotions. Both of these themes are given a new emphasis in the 19th century and they cross theological boundaries: they are expressed by High churchmen and Evangelicals, by Catholics, and even by nonconformists. These ideas are in sharp contrast to those of the Georgian period, in which churches lacked r

Richard Rogers with Richard Brown, A Place for All People Published by Canongate Books My next pre-Christmas review is an account of life, works, and beliefs by one of our foremost architects... We tend to think of famous architects in terms of their most high-profile projects. Richard Rogers, one of the pre-eminent architects of his generation, brings to mind instantly major buildings like the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s Building in London. But there is much more to him than that, and this book – part memoir, part architectural inside story, part manifesto – tells the stories not just of these but also of many less well known designs, from his early houses to more recent social housing projects. All these have fascinating aspects, and it’s one of the pleasures of reading this book to discover more about familiar and unfamiliar buildings alike – what drove the designs, the thinking behind them, how they got built. The book is revealing, as one would expect, on the architec