Worcester
Hopping* There’s not much left these days of the Venetian Gothic architecture of Myer’s hop warehouses in Worcester’s Sansome Street, but the sculpted pediment survives. It shows a group of women hop-picking, with, in the background, ‘luxuriant clusters of the bine’†. Those are the words of the Worcester Journal, commenting on the building when it was new in 1875. The newspaper attributes the design to an architect called Haddon, of Malvern and Hereford, while the sculptor William Forsyth of Worcester did the carving. Forsyth was born in Scotland, but by the 1850s was working at Eastnor Castle with his brother, James, also a sculptor. Whereas a commission took James to Somerset, where he settled, William set up in Worcester, and the city has quite a bit of his carving, from work on the restoration of the cathedral to decorations for business fronts. He must have done a lot of work in the area for by the 1870s his yard employed twelve men and three boys. Clearly he could car...