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Stone from the wold Here’s another repost from ten years ago to entertain my readers during my stretch of pre-Christmas work hyperactivity. It’s a house in the Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold, and a place I always glance at when I pass. Its architecture gives me pleasure – although I do worry that some of the unusual bits of carving on the front are eroding away. The old-fashioned tea shop that used to occupy the ground floor has now closed (there’s a lot of competition in Stow, some of it very impressive), and last time I went by the building looked empty. But the architecture, albeit crumbling at the edges, is still there to enjoy. Here’s what I wrote about it back in December 2008. There are some buildings that just make me smile, no matter how often I see them. This is one: a house of about 1730 (now a café) on the market place in Stow-on-the-Wold. What I love about this house is the decoration. It’s Classical, up to a point – look at the fluted pilasters with their Corinthi...

On the move (2): The King’s Board My second example* of a building on the move is a small building known as the King’s Board, which now stands in Hillfield Gardens in Gloucester. You can just see it from the road as you pass the gardens and when I’d driven past previously I’d taken it for some elaborate garden seat or gazebo built by the owners of Hillfield House, Gloucester’s grandest Victorian house and now occupied, I think, by offices – an effective and unusual garden feature, indeed, which it still is. However this little building did not begin life as a gazebo. Originally it was in the centre of the city and looked quite different, because the arches, which now make up the sides of a polygon, were once arranged in a straight line along the front of a rectangular building. This rectangular building can be seen in Kip’s engraving ( c. 1710) of Gloucester and had been in Westgate Street (one of the city’s four main streets named for points of the compass). It had been a butter mark...

Have a butcher’s at this After a necessarily brief trip to Hereford recently, the Resident Wise Woman and I simultaneously came up with the thought that we ought to return and explore the place more thoroughly. It was not just that interesting buildings other than the familiar cathedral seemed to be popping up all over the place, but also that the sunshine brought out many details I’d not really looked at before, like some of the carving on this timber-framed building in the city centre. This landmark of 1621 is known as Butcher’s Hall, and was originally part of a row of wooden-framed shops and houses built by the city’s butchers. The rest of the row was demolished in a wave of architectural violence that occurred, I think, in the 19th century, when the city’s extraordinary medieval market hall was also destroyed. Only this stunner, now isolated at one end of the long open market place called High Town, remains. The building’s name is almost certainly misleading. It seems not to have ...

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun St Mary’s church, Ripple, has an impressive set of misericords, those medieval fold-up seats that have a ledge that protrudes when in the folded position, enabling tired monks or canons to lean while standing to say, or sing, the office. Twelve of them illustrate the labours of the months, but my photograph above shows one of the others, a rather splendid sun. It’s quite unusual for a parish church in a small village to have carved misericords like these, but Ripple church is quite surprisingly large. No doubt this is because it was in the Middle Ages a possession of the cathedral-priory of Worcester. The carvings on the seats – vigorous and here quite deeply chiselled – are not the sort of great sculpture that the cathedral authorities would have used to adorn the walls and vaults of their great ‘mother church’ in Worcester. In contrast, they are typical of the vernacular work that one finds on misericords, and more than good enough for a monk to rest ...

Local interest I know some people who would scoff or at best smile tolerantly if I said I’d made a point of going to Lutterworth. A similar admission about a trip to Kidderminster once elicited a snort of disbelief from an acquaintance. These are places off the tourist trail – and places in addition that the road network has made it easy not to stop at. But I know from experience that I can find something of interest in any English town, and that somewhere engraved in my consciousness is the maxim embossed on the cover of Jonathan Meades’s book Museum Without Walls : ‘There is no such thing as a boring place’. So I expected a bit more than Pevsner’s somewhat dismissive comment that most of the town centre was rebuilt in the first half of the 19th century ‘predominantly in a debased neo-Greek style’. Here’s something later, a detail of the Reading Room, built in 1876, near the churchyard gate. A decorative bargeboard breaks out into an eruption of turned spindles above two carved panels...

The eyes have it I wonder if Hook Norton, a large village in North Oxfordshire, can stand as a symbol of what I respond to in England’s rural settlements. So far, I’ve posted about this village’s remarkable brewery , about a Shell petrol pump globe , and about Hook Norton’s early, and lovely, Baptist chapel . Buildings and objects like these are very much the kind of things that appeal to me, and that have, I hope, animated the posts on this English Buildings blog for nearly 11 years. All I need is a parish church and a beautiful, hand-painted sign and I’ve got the essence of my interests. And Hook Norton is rich enough to oblige. The parish church, then. I’ve visited St Peter’s Hook Norton (beautiful, large, airy, part-Norman, partly from the later Middle Ages) several times over the years, but only on the most recent occasion with the Resident Wise Woman. ‘You must come in here,’ I said to her. ‘There’s something you’ll really like.’ I knew that the primitive, but charmingly folkish ...

Pinecones and ammonites To mark International Women’s Day, I am posting today some pictures of what I think is one of the most outstanding and extraordinary buildings designed by a woman, the church of St Mary, Wreay. Here is what I wrote about the church in December 2012 , when reviewing Jenny Uglow’s biography of Losh, The Pinecone : St Mary ’s Wreay looks more like a work of the Arts and Crafts period of the 1880s than a building of the 1840s. But not even the Arts and Crafts produced a structure quite like this, covered with carvings that are far outside the usual church orbit – a tortoise gargoyle, a crocodile, a dragon, lotus buds, gourds, and pinecones (the latter symbolic variously of creation, reproduction, enlightenment, the spirit of man, and the expansion of consciousness). There are carved angels, it is true, but otherwise you have to look hard to find much traditional Christian imagery. It is as if Sarah Losh, having daringly entered the male preserve of architec...

The Leaves of Southwell When posting about one of the carvings in the chapter house of Southwell Minster the other week, I inevitably got down from my shelves my copy of The Leaves of Southwell , Nikolaus Pevsner’s short book about this building’s extraordinary late-13th century sculptures of the leaves of plants and trees. I did so to look at the excellent photographs of Southwell’s stone leaves – oak, ivy, maple, buttercup, hop, vine, and other species. I ended up rereading the text of the book as well. The Leaves of Southwell is in the King Penguin series, which are short hardback books published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959.* The format for the series consists of an essay (usually of about 30 pages, though Pevsner’s is double that length), followed by a series of illustrations. The photographs, by F L Attenborough, then Principal of University College, Leicester, and father of Richard and David Attenborough, are exemplary: detailed, well printed, and with just the right...

February carvery (5) I’d thought that my previous post would be the last of this month’s short ‘carvery’ pieces, but then I remembered Hanwell. This is one of the churches in North Oxfordshire that have distinctive carvings from the fourteenth century. Like Adderbury , it has a range of figures, beasts, and other carved subjects, both indoors and out. Some of them are of the ‘linked arms’ type on capitals, the kind I’ve previously noticed at another North Oxfordshire church, Bloxham , and elsewhere. The heads at Hanwell are if anything even better than those at Bloxham – individual, crisply carved, and full of character. This bearded face is one of my favourites. His hair, beard, nose, and mouth are well done, I think, although the eyes are rather small and mean. The overall effect though is good, and makes one smile. Nikolaus Pevsner says in his book The Leaves of Southwell (to which, I hope, I’ll soon return) that capitals mark a structural junction between two functions (column and...

February carvery (4) For my final short post about church carvings, here’s one from Brant Broughton. This time it’s on the outside of the building and shows a beast less ambiguous than the Much Marcle creatures: a bear, by the look of things, and one that has been chained and muzzled. A dacning bear, perhaps, and part of a long and cruel tradition, but accepted in the Middle Ages and in some parts of the world today. He’s part of a large collection of carvings high up on the outer walls, a display that reminded me of some of the glorious North Oxfordshire churches such as Adderbury . Like that area, Lincolnshire, and the bordering parts of Nottinghamshire, seem to have had a strong local tradition of medieval carving – and, in many places, enough prosperity to employ master craftsmen to do this work. Positioned on an outside wall, the bear and his neighbours have worn quite a lot. But there’s enough strength in the stone, and a bit of shelter from the cornice above, to ensure they stil...

February carvery (3) A few years back I did a post about the great yew tree in the churchyard at Much Marcle and I’ve always meant to go back and look again at the church there. One reason is these charming, and rather odd, carvings, which I’ve chosen for the next in my series of short posts. Some of the capitals in this church are a cut above the usual parish church fare of plain mouldings, stiff leaf, or more realistic foliage. Here we have a row of heads – and what else? A bird with a tail that has turned into a bit of foliage to the right of the central head; another creature with bird-like body but animal-like head on the other side, again with a foliate tail. We seem to be in the realms of the bestiary here. I’m intrigued, and, yes, when life is less busy, going back and having a further look must be on my list of expeditions.

February carvery (2) For the next of my short posts showing medieval church carvings, an example from the best place of all to see this sort of thing: the chapter house at Southwell Minster. This is one of the great medieval rooms, a feast of carving, much of it very realistic depictions of leaves. Ever since Nikolaus Pevsner worse his little book about them ( The Leaves of Southwell ), they’ve been known among architecture buffs. But Southwell is not a major tourist centre, and Southwell Minster is one of our quietest major churches. I’ve chosen an example from above one of the seats ranged around the wall. Not a Green Man with foliage coming out of his mouth or nostrils, but a face encircled with leaves. A beautiful way to fill up this space above the arch, and one of the best preserved of the carvings in Southwell’s chapter house. A real delicacy from the carvery.

February carvery (1) Life is very busy at the moment, so for the next two weeks or so, I’m going do to some short posts. I thought a common theme, medieval church carving, might be entertaining, and would enable me to share a few more pictures from some recent discoveries and rediscoveries. To begin with, a bit of early-14th century Gothic from the chancel at Navenby. This is what 14th-century Gothic is meant to look like: lots of little arches and niches, so smothered with ornament that you can hardly see the structure – crockets, finials, pinnacles everywhere. But here, as so often, there’s also a human touch – little heads that make it all less serious, one sticking its tongue out, another with a rather grumpy expression. This visitor went away far from grumpy.

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...