sey016

Polite architecture This charming classical church was the goal of my detour to Farley, where I also saw the village hall in my previous post . I’d read about this church and seen a picture of it in John Piper’s Wiltshire Shell Guide, but as the photographs in the Shell Guides are in black and white, I wasn’t prepared for the beautiful warm colour of the brickwork, which has mellowed in the 400-odd years since it was laid in English bond and is set off wonderfully by the surrounding greenery and the pale stone of the quoins and window surrounds. If this looks rather a grand church for a small country village, there’s a reason. It was built in c . 1680–90 under the auspices of a wealthy and well connected local man, Sir Stephen Fox, who also founded a ‘hospital’ (actually a set of almshouses) opposite, a while after the previous village church had fallen into disrepair. Fox was a friend of Sir Christopher Wren, the greatest architect of the time, the two having worked together on the h...

A twinge of nostalgia Making a trip to Salisbury the other day, I decided to divert and look at the church at Farley, a rather beautiful bit of rural classicism that I hope to share with you soon. I seem to remember reading an account of it somewhere that praised the church while decrying the ‘ugly village hall’ next door. When I got there, this is what I found. Ugly? Well, it’s hardly rural classicism, but as a lover of corrugated iron I found something to admire in the simplicity of this structure, which has clearly been serving the local community for many decades. It looks like something a bit more, too, than the standard off-the-shelf corrugated-iron building from one of the many manufacturers that allowed you to order up a church, village hall, or isolation hospital from a catalogue and have it delivered to you local railway station as a kit of parts. The curvy bargeboard is a nice ‘extra’, while the window at the front, which looks as if it wants the angled portions to be glazed...