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Town texture: columns and tile-hanging Marlborough is one of the English towns (Blandford Forum and Warwick are others) whose history was changed by a great fire. Marlborough’s major fire occurred in 1653 and there were further fires in the late-17th century. Substantial rebuilding in the late-17th and early-18th centuries has left the centre of the town with its own distinctive appearance – the High Street displays a unified townscape of red tiled roofs, gables facing the street, tile-hung walls, bay windows, and arcaded ground floors.* It’s not all like this – there are also a few white and black-and-white facades – but there’s enough of it to set a dominant and satisfying style. The most unusual and outstanding aspect of this is the arcading. There are a few English towns that have substantial runs of arcading in main streets, and they vary quite a lot in design. At Totnes, the upper storeys of the buildings overhang the walks beneath, so that the columns are flush with the upper pa...

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...

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...