Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !

The Churches of Cove

The Hampshire-yet-Guildford parish of Cove is another where an established old church is less interesting from our point of view than a new one. The former is St John the Baptist, built in 1844 supposedly in imitation of the Hospital of St Cross near Winchester, a pleasing but not spectacular church with the usual sort of flashy high-Victorian reredos and not a bad nave altar as these things go, plus some very odd details such as a font cover topped with a weird sort of winged urn thing, and a wooden screen of round-headed arches in the transept.

But then I went to what is now Christ Church, between Cove and Farnborough centre. This was built as St Christopher’s in 1934, and represents Gothic boiled down to its absolute essentials. There is a tall tub-shaped font very typical of the time, and a dramatic east end now rendered a bit of a liturgical backwater behind the nave altar on its dais, a somewhat paltry little table, I’m afraid, compared even to the straightforward one at St John the Baptist’s. Five years after its construction St Christopher’s gained a plaque depicting its patron saint, and it seems to have got its aumbry to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1984. I was rather taken aback by the pentagram-style light fittings, and the church feels quite uncomfortable about them too!

There was a third church in Cove: it was an Anglican congregation that used the Southwood Community Centre from its construction in 1993. In 2019 it ceased to exist as a separate grouping and the members relocated to St Christopher’s, which was renamed Christ Church.

Although we see that the sacrament was once reserved at Christ Church – to judge from experience I wouldn’t like to bet that it is now! – and it had an image of its one-time patron saint, I’ve never seen it referred to as a particularly Catholic church. Instead it shows where expectations of any new church in the mid-20^th century lay.

On the Shoulders of Architectural Giants

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Trust lecture at Merrow yesterday on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England volume for Surrey. It's seventy years since the first edition and forty years since the last revision carried out by Bridget Cherry, and now Charles O'Brien has revisited the whole county to complete the latest one. The talk gave a bit of background to the Buildings series - I hadn't realised that Pevsner got the idea from an earlier series of architectural monographs covering German regions, or how much of a popular audience the volumes were pitched at when first released; Penguin Books produced posters announcing 'The only comprehensive book about the buildings of your county', for instance. We had a whistlestop tour of Surrey churches and discovered that the original house in Stanwell where Dr Pevsner first sat at a table with Allen Lane from Penguin and conceived the idea for the series still exists. We learned how Pevsner's collaborator Ian Nairn wrote far more of the Surrey volume than anyone has tended to realise. I was delighted to learn that some omissions have been made good: St Mark's Hale with its fantastic wall paintings is in the revised volume, when the existing one not only overlooked it completely but called the other church in Hale, St John's, by the wrong name. 

Fr Jeremy has long had a responsibility for the fabric of Roman Catholic churches across the Arundel diocese and some of these are quite recent in date, as former bishop Cormac O'Connor insisted that each deanery should have one major church in it, which often meant building new ones: he asked Mr O'Brien whether he could think of particularly good churches built in the 21st century, or failing that good secular buildings. The author was forced to admit a little shame-facedly that the new Guildford Crematorium chapel wasn't in the revised book, as he was familiar with the old one and hadn't thought it worth while to go and check its replacement, 'and actually it's quite good. But it can go in the next edition'. We were all encouraged to get the new book, and if you order through the Yale University Press and quote PEV22 you can get a discount. There was one copy there at the lecture, and so many people crowded round it to look I didn't get to check whether Swanvale Halt church's entry was any improvement on the old one, which amounted to three words: 'dull lancet chapel'.

An Unexpected Find

At some point I will post about something significant, and even describe a few churches, but I haven't the energy for that today. Instead - so it is preserved - here is an image of a battered but still standing Art Deco building in the backstreets of Farnborough which I spotted while on the way to one of those churches. It's a garage now, and inside is utilitarian indeed (though I wonder what the upstairs flat is like - are there any original features left?), and it's lost most of its old glazing bars; but it holds on, and the company using it has chosen a nice jazzy font for its signage. 

Holiday

What a lot I managed to do during my week off. Resisting my natural instinct just to lie in a darkened room for five days, I amassed a pleasing list of folk seen: Ms Brightshades and Fr Fretboard in London, Lady Arlen (visiting Dorset for a festival) and my family in Dorset, Cara and her husband at Emwood, and Dr & Mrs Abacus in Surbiton. Their daughter was so small the last time I saw her that she took some convincing it had ever happened. 

And as well as taking in Art Deco buildings in Dorset, I saw plenty of other nice things too. Adverts on LiberFaciorum kept arguing that I should visit Tower Bridge, so eventually I did. Some of the views of the staircases are positively Piranesian. I was relieved that the walkways between the towers weren't open to the air, but they do have glass sections which children seemed happy to walk over but I found completely terrifying. I sometimes get vertiginous standing on a chair.

Lady Arlen and I had a few minutes to kill before seeing my Mum, so we took a little stroll on Turbary Common. The Speckled Wood butterfly was a pleasure though perhaps not an unexpected one, but we weren't anticipating meeting cows. Later in the day I paid my respects to the Shelleys in St Peter's Churchyard - it always tickles me that Mary, Bysshe, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft have ended up in Bournemouth of all places - and had an ice cream on the beach.

I may share some images of St John's Church in Wotton another day: for now, here's the churchyard and its view into the Surrey hills on Wednesday. The churchwarden let me into the building.

Finally Friday found me at historic sites just into Kent. Bayham Abbey is a ruin in - at the moment - a baking field of dry grass with a little Gothick house adjoining. It was dissolved ahead of England's other religious houses in 1525 as Cardinal Wolsey raised funds to build Cardinal College in Oxford. Apparently the local people rioted in protest, though it's so out-of-the-way it's hard to see where they can have come from. A small riot, perhaps. 

Not far away is Scotney Castle. I hadn't realised that this was the family seat of Christopher Hussey, the architectural historian who did so much to bring to public record both the history of the English country house and of the Picturesque (and so I know his stuff quite well). By his time the family lived in the New Castle built on the top of the hill by Anthony Salvin, while the Old Castle formed a colossal garden feature on its island below a quarry. It's a beautiful site, which I saw in gorgeous sunshine. I bought books in the National Trust secondhand bookshop (including one about the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in Italian but the pictures are great), and tried the pea-and-mint soup, a decision which didn't go too badly. Betty Hussey's very, very pink bathroom was a bit of a challenge, but interestingly the NT says Scotney has come with a bigger collection of objects than any of their other properties, attics stuffed full of them which they are still cataloguing after 15 years. One of these is this amazing child's fairy fancy-dress costume, laid out in one of the bedrooms. 

And no sooner had I entered the New Castle that I encountered my patron saint. 'Madonna and Child', the caption describes this painting by Luca Longhi, but that's St Catherine: she's brought her wheel along, otherwise she might not be recognised and let into the party. 

Dorset Deco - Survivals and Perils

A trip to Dorset yesterday gave me the chance to revisit some of the Poole-and-Bournemouth area's Art Deco buildings which I last paid any serious attention to some two decades ago. In fact I had never paid any attention at all to the Ice Cream Kiosk in Poole Park, but this quite splendidly survives, even if at the moment it is selling not ice cream but dog portraits:

I reviewed some of the houses on Sandbanks Road, and got improved photos of the Harbour Heights development at Sandbanks, designed by the area's premier Art Deco architect at the time, AJ Seal. This is the house he would have known as The Conning Tower, redeveloped as a block of apartments called Conning Towers in the early 2000s:

Now, I haven't visited the town centre of Bournemouth for some years. My sister's report was that the pandemic and the accelerated economic dislocations that have come with it have resulted in an environment so depressing that on her last visit she ended up going to the Library as it was the only place that seemed to offer any cheer. I didn't find it that bad, though a couple of the main commercial streets have been battered by the closure of the big department stores; I will say more about that another time, but as far as the Art Deco buildings are concerned they are mostly intact, from the humbler stores you can see here to the grander ones such as Seal's Palace Court Hotel and the Echo building on Richmond Hill.

The grand Brights Building on Old Christchurch Road is suffering a bit from the closure of House of Fraser which used to occupy most of it, notwithstanding being one of only three Listed Art Deco buildings in the Dorset conurbation.

Saddest of all, though, is Hinton Road, whose south side is a scene of devastation from the YMCA building onwards. The very first building AJ Seal designed in Art Deco style, the old Palace Court Theatre, has apparently been bought from the church that used to occupy it by Bournemouth Arts University who intend to restore it, so hopefully its future is secure, but Seal's own offices at Palace Court Chambers next door are a wreck. There's even an upstairs window which is entirely knocked out: heaven knows what's going to happen to it.

The Majestic Garage building, long used for offices and an NCP car park, is derelict too, and I had never noticed before the sprawling redbrick building that occupies the long plot to its west. Its days must be numbered. Curiously Google Maps lists it as the home of a private detective agency called 'Fallen Angel Investigations', which given the state of the building sounds like an idea for a TV series.

A Visit to the Home of Time

This afternoon I visited someone in hospital for the first time since the pandemic started. It's relatively easy now, though inflexible: you wouldn't be able to remember another parishioner in a different ward and just pop to see them on your way out. Now every visit has to be booked in. I was seeing Dol, who was anxious to know 'all the scandal, who's misbehaving'. In fact she was so keen she asked me this repeatedly. The truth is that nobody at all connected to the church is misbehaving, and in fact barely anything is happening at all.

So I will instead put up some photos from my trip to Greenwich with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen on Friday, which encompassed St Alfege's Church, the Junk Shop (an aptly-named emporium offering items ranging from Windsor chairs to a traffic light), the Observatory, and the Foot Tunnel. I had never actually seen the Meridian before: it was amusing to find that while you have to pay to get into the famous Observatory courtyard across which runs the metal line from which Time is measured, there's a free bit accessible by a path around the hilltop for plebs. The Foot Tunnel has wood-panelled lifts as though to recall its Edwardian origins (not very nice wood-panelling, but still). Looking across the Thames at the Naval College and up to the hilltop you get some dim impression of what might have been had the Stuart government decided to go with Nicholas Hawksmoor's ruinously expensive plan to turn Greenwich into an English Vatican, combining royalty, science, the military and religion, including a Chapel Royal with a dome big enough to fit St Peter's Basilica's inside it. I was taken with Gothick Trinity Hospital vastly overshadowed by the old power station, and will have to investigate it one day.