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Tuesday 25 March 2014

Datchworth

All Saints looks strangely out of place, and unHertfordshirey, with a southeast Essex spire and rendered walls (the spire is really inappropriate). The airbrushed interior was dull but it contained a first for me in the north aisle - having come across a pool table in a north aisle nothing should surprise me but it did - by having a yurt; something to do with Easter no doubt but what I have no idea.

I'm afraid, despite the yurt and it being open, I didn't warm to it but have to admit that many other churches I've visited could benefit from the addition of a yurt, after all it does make a distinctive addition.

ALL SAINTS. Small flint church. Nave to which late in the C13 a N aisle was added (arcade of four bays on octagonal piers with slightly hollow-chamfered arches). W tower and chancel C15 (upper stage of the tower 1875, chancel re-modelled C17). The plastered C15 nave roof looks rather domestic with its wind-braces. - FONT. Good C15 work with panelled stem and panelled octagonal bowl. - STAINED GLASS. E window early C19. - In the N aisle W window good c. 1875 glass in the style of Walter Crane. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, 1569. - MONUMENT. Coffin lid with foliated cross; c. 1300.

All Saints (2)

SW window (1)

Headstones

Datchworth. Ivied elms and a lonely church spire brave the winds that sweep across this high ledge. The fine modern spire is set on a 14th-century tower. The nave may be Norman, but the aisle and the arcade are late 13th century, a 15th-century arch opening into a patchwork chancel of various ages. The nave roof and the font are both 500 years old, and there is a chair, a chest, and a poor box which have served for 300 years. In a recess is a gravestone carved 600 years ago with a flowery cross, perhaps to cover the body of John de Burgh, the church’s patron, whose widow founded Clare College, Cambridge.

Half a mile to the south is Datchworth Green, where an old whipping-post six feet high, still with its iron handcuffs, stands by some cottages which have been here 300 years. Not far off are two pleasant 17th-century homes, timbered Hoppers Hall and Cherry Tree Farm. Under Datchworth’s yew trees Edward Young, the 18th-century poet then living in retirement at Welwyn, wrote some of his Night Thoughts, his best remembered poem, though by now he might say, as he said of himself in his lifetime “I’ve been so long remembered, I’m forgot.”

Woolmer Green

St Michael and All Angels is a very dull turn of the last century build. I don't know about its locking status or the interior since there was a funeral service in progress when I visited and it's always a bit rude to interrupt one of those.

ST MICHAEL, 1899-1900, by R. Weir Schultz. The exterior in no way remarkable (tower projected but not built). But inside the low panelled room with a big panelled pointed wagon-roof and tie-beams has much character. Rood screen with naturalistic leaf and fruit tracery. The apse arch is lower than the small apse itself.

St Michael & All Angels (2)

North porch

Mee missed it.

Welwyn

Despite the heavy restoration - it was basically rebuilt twice, first by Blomfield in 1911 and then again, following a fire, in 1952 - I really liked St Mary, mostly for the good glass contained within.

ST MARY. The exterior is too drastically restored to have preserved any of its original character. The SW tower, nave, clerestory, N aisle (with its odd N gable), S aisle wall, and S chancel chapel were newly built in the 1910. Inside, the chancel has a long lancet window in the S wall and two blocked ones in the N wall. The E end has a group of three stepped-up lancets, with Purbeck marble shafts inside. The Double Piscina has pointed trefoil heads. The chancel arch is double-chamfered on broadly moulded capitals. The forms of these and the arches are repeated in the S arcade of four bays. - SCREEN and COMMUNION RAIL destroyed by fire in 1952. - PLATE. Chalice, 1666; Paten, 1678; Flagon, 1750. - MONUMENT. Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts and On Original Composition, who was Vicar of Welwyn from 1730 to 1765.

Christopher Webb east window 1954 (12)

Hugh Easton S aisle window (1)

Christopher Webb 1952 S aisle St Nicholas & St Cecilia (2)

Welwyn. Within a mile of new Welwyn, the garden city of 20th-century colonists, lies this old Welwyn where the Roman colonists settled, probably with a temple where the church now stands on the edge of the Maran valley. Roman tiles have appeared in the churchyard; Roman bricks are in the church walls; but most of the church has been made new. There is a bit of a Norman capital in the vestry walls, and some medieval heads are preserved in the aisle. One of the arcades is 13th century, and from the 15th come two plain roofs, the screen with elaborate tracery and finials, and the porch approached by a grand yew hedge. The piscina is 700 years old.

Under the altar Edward Young was buried in 1765. On the wall is a tablet to this poet, who was rector for 35 years and planted the rectory’s fine avenue of limes. Dr Johnson much admired his Night Thoughts, and admired also these lime trees when he called here at the invitation of the poet’s son, an invitation manoeuvred by Boswell, who went on ahead leaving Dr Johnson sipping tea at the inn quite ignorant of his friend’s intention. Boswell came back with the invitation, and Johnson greeted the poet’s son with a very polite bow, saying: “Sir, I had a curiosity to come and see this place; I had the honour to know that great man your father.” They sat and talked in the rectory summerhouse, and we may think that Johnson would recall that much-quoted epigram of Dr Young on Voltaire:

Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin,
At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin.

In the home of Edward Young there lived for 40 years another famous man, Henry Fynes Clinton, one of the most remarkable classical scholars of the 18th century. It is known that he mastered in eight years 33,000 pages of Greek literature and that he read 69,322 verses of poetry. He kept a journal in Latin and Greek till the day before he died. Few men have ever had a more complete knowledge of Greek poets and prose writers; he lived out the Psalmist’s span of life and gave nearly every day of it to scholarship. He lies in a village graveyard in Nottinghamshire.

The rectors of Welwyn are also the lords of the manor, for the manor was given to the church by Edward the Confessor.

The graves of Romans buried here centuries before the Confessor’s day have yielded many interesting objects, including glass decanters and a tiny clay statue of a lady of the 1st century. Older finds from the park of Lockleys form a striking group in the Iron Age Gallery of the British Museum. They include an iron frame 42 inches high which may have served as a sacrificial altar, three pairs of fire-dogs ending in fantastic animal heads, and five huge jars for wine or oil. Other finds were some silver cups and bronze vessels, and three bronze masks marked with moustache and hair. They appear to have been imported from the Mediterranean about the time Julius Caesar first invaded Britain, when his raiders reached the neighbourhood of St Albans, where a critical battle was fought. Half a mile outside Welwyn is Lockleys, a handsome brick-built mansion erected in 1717.

Ayot St Lawrence

The village boasts two St Lawrences; a C18th Palladian new build and the ruins of the original which, so rumour has it, was partially demolished by the builder of the new church, Sir Lionel Lyte (or Lyde), and both are splendid.

I was amazed to find new St Lawrence open but deeply appreciative. Excepting the truly awful blue 'upholstered' faux oak chairs it still retains a sense of its Georgian layout and is another contender for church of the day.

As is old St Lawrence which is probably the best preserved parish church ruin I've seen - it was rescued in 1999/2000 and is lovingly maintained. Odd survivals, and oddly placed in the tower, are the remains of the font, a monumental tomb chest and a coffer lid.

OLD ST LAWRENCE. The old church in the village is in ruins. Tradition has it that Sir Lionel Lyte began to pull it down when he had decided to build (as one would then have called it if today’s jargon had already existed) an ultra-modern church in the grounds of his house. The Bishop heard of this when demolition had gone some way, and prevented further destruction. The damage was not repaired, and so the picturesque ruin which we see today resulted, a sight which would no doubt have pleased Sir Lionel and his friends. What survives of the building shows that the church had a NW tower, nave, chancel, N aisle, and N chancel chapel. The windows in the N wall of the N chapel tell of Dec tracery (one has a combined star and quatrefoil motif in the head, known as Kentish tracery). The W arch of the same chapel with early C13 stiff-leaf capitals was originally that of the nave arcade. - A decayed C15 tomb-chest under the tower with recumbent effigies of a Knight and Lady.

NEW ST LAWRENCE was designed by Nicholas Revert and built in 1778-9 partly to replace the old church, partly to serve as an eye—catcher from the house. Hence its ‘gloriette' like far-spreading front. The church itself, no larger than, and rather similar to, an early C19 cemetery chapel, has a Grecian front, a thing unheard of at that time. The Grecian Revival had only just begun with Revett and his colleague James Stuart's voyage to Athens and their publication of the Antiquities of Athens (vol. 1, 1762). To let one of them do a church or chapel with a real Greek temple roof proved a client to be eminently progressive (or ambitious, or perhaps just wanting to be fashionable). The portico with its columns only fluted at the top and foot is copied from the Temple of Apollo at Delos. But the whole composition with side colonnades and little outer aedicules is not at all Grecian. It is a purely Palladian composition, that is the type of composition which was customary for  English country houses right through the C18. To have churches really copying Greek temples another fifty years had to go. The ground plan of Revett's church is remarkably original. A rectangular centre with coffered ceiling and a short W arm with a screen of two columns and a coffered tunnel-vault. Transepts of the same length and height, also tunnel-vaulted. The E end is a coffered apse, again of the same height and width, with two curved recesses. The small organ is original. - In the outer aedicules stand the urns to Sir Lionel Lyte and his wife.

St Lawrence (2)

Looking west

St Lawrence (3)

Ayot St Lawrence. The ancient and the beautiful, the quaint and the curious, all come near each other in this quiet place. In Prior’s Wood was found a hoard of 230 Roman coins. There are black-and-white timbered cottages, a 14th-century ruined church in a garden of roses, and a Georgian church with a classical colonnade which seems to have dropped from some 18th-century town into a field by a Tudor manor house.

In the bird-haunted tower of the medieval church is a panelled tomb on which lie a 15th-century knight and his lady. In a niche are kneeling figures of Nicholas Bristow, who died in 1626, with his wife and four children. On a modern gravestone we read the simple words, “Fell asleep in his garden.” The Georgian church was designed by Nicholas Revett, whose book on the Antiquities of Athens led Englishmen to appreciate Greek architecture. At each end of the colonnade are open vaulted pavilions with memorials to the builders, Sir Lionel and Lady Lyde. The interior is a simple hall with panelled roof and Greek ornament on pilasters, and on the altar in the apse is a modern painting of the Adoration of the Lamb.

Shaw’s Corner, the 20th-century house which belonged to George Bernard Shaw, was given by him to the National Trust, and is now open to the public.

Monday 24 March 2014

Kimpton

I've said it before but Hertfordshire churches suffered from disproportionate Victorian attention when compared to its East Anglian neighbours and SS Peter & Paul is no exception. Don't get me wrong - I liked it a lot but just feel that if it was in Essex or Cambridgeshire it would be less scrubbed up. There's a set of good poppyheads, two screens and some excellent glass. This has to be a contender for church of the day.

SS PETER AND PAUL. Large flint church standing to the NE of the village. The exterior seems Perp, the interior tells of earlier history. Low W tower with spike, nave with clerestory and hipped roof at the E end (when was this unusual feature introduced? In the C18?). N and S aisles, S porch of two storeys with outer stair-turret, S chancel chapel, and lower chancel. Of all this nothing reveals motifs earlier than the C15 except the chancel E window of three cusped lancet lights under one two-centred arch. This is a motif of c. 1300 (renewed). And the masonry of the chancel must date back further still in the C13; for inside, the E window can be seen to have replaced simpler lancet windows. Even they, however, are not the oldest evidence in the church. Directly one has entered, one sees that the whole of the long even N and S arcades of six bays are of Transitional or E.E. date. Which of the two is it? There is no answer to the question. The truth as proved by this village church is that the Transitional overlap into the E.E. style was more considerable and important than is realized. All piers are circular, all arches of the same complex moulding which must be later than 1200, but of the capitals of piers and responds eight are scalloped with little bits of abstract decoration in the individual flutings and six have fully developed stiff-leaf, ranging from upright to diagonal. - The S chancel chapel opens into the chancel with finely moulded arches and a slim pier with the usual C15 section of four shafts in the main axes and four hollows in the diagonals. The S aisle roof is also c. 1500. - SCREEN. C15, broad divisions of four Lights each, with simple Perp tracery. The coving seems much renewed. - BENCHES. Some with poppy-heads. A few of them have little faces at the lower lobes of the poppy-head. - PAINTINGS. Remains of early C13 figures of angels in the jambs of the chancel lancets. - STAINED GLASS. S chancel chapel, Lord Chesham Memorial, 1885, with Morris influence. - PLATE. Chalice, 1635. - MONUMENTS. Brass to a woman with open hair, early C15 (chancel). - Thomas Brand, twentieth Baron Dacre, d. 1851 : an E.E. blank arch with stiff-leaf and dog-tooth decoration; no doubt the design of a notable architect.

Nativity (3)

Poppyhead (7)

S door corbel (2)

Kimpton. We see the tiny lead spire of its church peeping over a group of old barns in a valley by the Bedfordshire border. The church is 13th century, with stiffly ornamented capitals on its 14th-century round pillars, but was much transformed in the 15th century, when the tower and the spire were added and the two-storeyed porch was built; it has a stone figure of a child on the doorway. To the same century belongs the roof over the south aisle borne by stone angels, and the beautiful arcade between the chancel and the chapel. The chapel has two medieval oak screens, one with a richly vaulted canopy, and poppyheads 500 years old. There is an angel in a medieval painting on the splay of one of the chancel windows, and a brass portrait of an unknown woman of the middle of the 15th century is let into the chancel floor. The priest’s desk is Jacobean, and is carved with symbolism of the fruitfulness of the earth; we noticed on it a bird pecking at a bunch of grapes. The east window has figures of Our Lord and the saints in memory of the 24th Baron Dacre and the second Viscount Hampden. Many of his family lie in the church, having been brought here from their home at Hoo, set in a beautiful park of 250 acres.

Codicote

Largely a Victorian rebuild St Giles is lnk apart from the south chapel but from the little I could see I don't think I missed much.

ST GILES. Mostly 1853, but the S aisle has C13 bases to its arcade, the nave N wall has a C13 lancet window, and the tower arch is of the C15. - PULPIT. Jacobean. - PLATE. Small engraved Chalice, 1558; Paten, 1568; large Standing Paten, 1772.

St Giles (4)

Blink

John Gootheridge 1824

Codicote. One house catches our eye in the long village street, as it is meant to do, for this pleasant gabled inn has halted travellers on their way for more than 300 years. It has a contemporary not far off in Codicote Bury, which still keeps its Jacobean panelling, staircase, and carved overmantels. The lower part of the church tower has walls five feet thick, probably part of the church dedicated here 800 years ago when the Conqueror’s second son was on the throne. For the rest, the church is mainly 14th century, its age disguised by restoration, but with some ironwork probably old enough to be Norman on the door, a Jacobean pulpit, and an Elizabethan chalice.



Knebworth - St Martin

I was disappointed to find St Martin closed but with a notice implying it's normally open. It was closed last week due to local schools taking part in an Easter journey - mmmmmm.

The disappointment lies in this being a Lutyens church and he designed very few religious buildings, fewer still were actually built and none of them was finished to his original designs. Best known are the two churches at Hampstead Garden Suburb (started c. 1909) and his aborted Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathedral. St Martin’s, Knebworth is chronologically between the Hampstead churches and Liverpool Cathedral and so has been seen as a part of the development process that led to the design of the Cathedral.

ST MARTIN. In New Knebworth, on the A1 road. One of Lutyens’s most remarkable churches. Red brick with stone dressings. No tower, but excessively far projecting roof eaves. So far of the three bays of the nave only one has been built. The aisle separated from the nave by little arches on Tuscan columns, three arches per bay. Big and high transepts, two bays deep. Between the two, separating the transepts from the crossing, one colossal Tuscan column on each side, deliberately dwarfing those of the arcades of the aisles. Similar small arcades on the outer sides of the transepts. Bare chancel and apse. The interior is all white with a timber ceiling supported by the walls and the two giant transept columns.

St Martin (3)

Knebworth. Modern Knebworth on the Great North Road has a church on the hillside, reached by an avenue of limes, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with great eaves overhanging the brick walls, and an unusual interior with many pillars and arches, two huge pillars at the crossing reaching to the roof.

Aston

I'm rather ashamed to admit that after less than a week from visiting St Mary the only memorable thing here was that the tower was undergoing a major restoration. Victorian restoration has rendered the interior utterly bland and aseptic that it is totally immemorable. The exterior and location aren't bad though.

ST MARY. The chancel shows signs of its erection in the C13 (one lancet window, Double Piscina). The rest, as far as visible, is C15 (W tower with diagonal buttresses with five set-offs) or C19 (S porch, nave S windows, whole N aisle). - PULPIT. C17, very simply panelled. - SCREEN. Simple, but handsome, c. 1500. - PLATE. Chalice and two Patens, 1571; Chalice, 1612. - BRASS. John Kent d. 1592 and wife (nave, E end)*.

* now under carpet.

Chancel screen

Christ

Aston. Its thatched cottages and barns stand on high ground away from the main roads, and the church is a little way off, with a giant elm near it. The nave and chancel are 13th century in origin, with roofs set over them in the 15th, after the bold west tower was finished. There is a grand double piscina of 600 years ago, a little white-and-gold glass 500 years old, a chancel screen of 400 years, a panelled oak pulpit and altar table of the 17th century, and the brass portraits of a woman and her husband John Kent, who was steward in the household of Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Queen Elizabeth I.

In their day the brick house named Aston Bury rose a mile away with gabled wings and ornate moulded chimney stacks, and part of an older building in its walls. It is an almost perfect example of an Elizabethan home, with oak-framed windows crossed by mullions and transoms and with two staircases of solid oak. Three ponds still mark the line of the old moat.

Friday 21 March 2014

Shephall

St Mary was lnk and I mistook it for a Victorian build but it seems that at its core it's old but, as so often with Herts churches, heavily tarted up (it is also a rather odd Herts church and not at all the usual style for these parts). I thought I hadn't missed much here but having read Mee, and taking the usual pinch of salt, now I'm not so sure.

ST MARY. Small; nave and chancel with big tiled roof. N aisle of 1865; no W tower, only a bell-cote. The nave Roof has arched trusses with broad pointed trefoil tracery in the spandrels. - SCREEN. Simple, C15. - MONUMENTS. Several epitaphs to members of the Nodes family, 1695, 1697, 1713, 1731.

St Mary

Shephall. An avenue of giant elms guards the vivid green which widens in front of the church and surrounds the village well; and shading the lychgate are the quivering leaves of two tall aspen trees, rare in England now, but prized as the best arrow wood by our ancestors. They are old, but not nearly so old as the timbers which for 600 years have served as chancel arch in this church, one of the few wooden chancel arches in England. More venerable beams support the nave roof; there is a medieval chest scooped out of a huge log; and the top part of the chancel screen is 15th-century work of great beauty. All the rest of the church has changed and much is modern.

One of several brass inscriptions to the Nodes family records that George Nodes was master of the buckhounds to Henry VIII and his three reigning children. A century after this huntsman was laid here, John Rudd the rector was laid to rest, with a memorial painting of  him as a shepherd standing above the alabaster record of his life and service. We found the font, at which he must have baptised the Nodes children, crumbling away beside the stately yew.

Stevenage

I visited three churches - Holy Trinity, SS Andrew & George and St Nicholas, the first two were open (although SS Andrew & George is normally locked but a funeral was being prepared for when I visited and the man organising it let me look around) while St Nicholas was locked.

St Nicholas was firmly lnk, although I could hear someone hoovering inside they plainly did not hear me rattling doors, which is a pity as it sounds interesting even if the interior is as overly restored as the exterior.

Holy Trinity is a very bland 1861 Blomfield creation but deserves bonus points for being open

SS Andrew & George is without doubt the ugliest church, and quite possibly building, I've ever laid eyes on but once inside I rather liked the light and air space; just ignore the feeling that you're in a prototype Stansted Airport.

ST NICHOLAS. Away from the town to the NE, almost entirely on its own. A flint church with a low W tower with leaded spire. The upper parts and the diagonal brick buttresses are C15, but the tower itself (see its windows and W door) is Norman. The S view of the church is specially rewarding with the various steps in height and in depth. The church is entirely embattled. S porch at the W end of S aisle, S transept added 1841. Most of the windows point to the C14 (chancel N and S; chancel chapels E but with early C14 tracery; N chancel chapel N; odd windows in the aisles). The arcades between chancel and chapels are of the early C14 too. Those in the nave are C15 on C13 bases and shafts. The clerestory and the nave and chancel roofs are also C15. The niche for a statue in the NE corner of the N chapel may be C14 or c15. - FONT. Plain C13, with later ogee-shaped cover. - SCREENS. Complete set of screens between nave and chancel, aisles and chapels, and also chancel and chapels, the latter as usual more modest, but the principal ones also by no means as lavish as those of East Anglia. - CHOIR Seats, C15, with MISERICORDS (mostly leaves; also an angel with spreadout wings, and a face with leaves growing out of the mouth). - STAINED GLASS. E window, 1842, S chancel window, 1848, both supposed to be by Wailes (TK); but can they be by the same artist? The E window has four saints, with canopies, in traditional colours. The S window is a three-light Noli me tangere in gaudy colours (still the painterly approach of the C18 and by no means yet medievalizing). - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, 1634; Flagon and Paten, 1683. - MONUMENTS. Brass to Stephen Hillard, c. 1500, largish figure of a priest in vestments. - Mutilated effigy of a lady wearing a wimple; an angel and a priest by her pillow; c. 1300.

HOLY TRINITY, 1861, by Blomfield. An early church of his, before his style became smooth and competent and stale. Nave and chancel only, with a bellcote. Flint with stone, red brick, and white brick adornments. Tiled roof with bands of fancy tiles. Plate tracery. A new larger nave and chancel were added by Tate & Popplewell in 1881-5, ‘and a very good match they made’ (GR).

St Nicholas (6)
St Nicholas

Holy Trinity (2)
Holy Trinity

SS Andrew & George (2)
SS Andrew & George

Stevenage. It lies on the Great North Road which widens as it passess by the six little hills which set every motorist wondering. How ol they are no man knows, but, Danish, Roman, or Celtic, they were built up here as burial mounds and remain as the town’s chief monument, the six hills from which the Saxons named it Stevenage, meaning Hills by the Highway. There are inns from the coaching days which seem young compared with the six graves, but at one of them, the Swan, the first Earl of Minto died in 1814. on his way home after a vigorous rule of India as Governor-General. At one end of the town is the grammar school founded by Thomas Alleyn in 1558. It has, of course, grown greatly, but has one of its oldest buildings still in use. At the other end of the town, near the new church, is a timbered building 400 years old which is now used as offices. The main street is bordered with picturesque houses and inns, and any boy you meet in it will tell you that it is the highest street between London and York. We must leave them to settle it with the boys of St Albans.

Since this book was first written great changes have occurred at Stevenage, and the little town has grown into a sizeable city of 50,000 inhabitants and is still expanding. This rapid growth has, of course, involved the loss of much good farmland and quiet scenic beauty.

A fine avenue of limes and chestnuts leads to where the 15th-century spire of the old church rises on a hill, with but a remnant round it of the village which moved down the hill after a fire. The church is Norman and medieval, the Norman tower with little Norman windows remaining after 800 years. The nave arcades have 15th-century arches on 13th-century pillars, and the chancel arcades are 14th century, so that we have Norman work and the work of our three great building centuries. Above the tower arch is an opening made by the Normans which led into their nave roof, and from the outside we may see another opening made to lead into a roof 600 years ago. There are ancient wooden corbels supporting the nave roof, and stone angels supporting the chancel beams. The 13th-century font has an ancient cover still touched with colour. There are six stalls with misericords carved about 1400, and four screens with handsome 15th-century woodwork in them.

In one corner of the church is the broken stone figure of a woman in 13th-century dress, a priest and an angel supporting her, so that she must have been a great lady, though not too great to have been used for generations as a stone in the floor, face downwards. On a brass of 1500 is the portrait of the rector, Stephen Hellard, in his canon’s cope.

Minsden

A ruined chapel of ease, St Nicholas is hidden away in a copse off the beaten track and is only accessible by foot. It was protected by local historian Reginald L Hine until his death in 1949 and although he said that he would "endeavour in all ghostly ways to protect and haunt its hallowed wall" it is, despite being Grade II listed, slowly disintegrating. Its history can be found here.

CHAPEL. In ruins. The antiquarian will not find much to instruct him, but the picturesque traveller much to delight him. Situated in a coppice, completely surrounded  by trees and undergrowth. The fragments of nave and chancel stand irregularly to a height of Io to 20 ft. They are of flint and all details have decayed so much that outlines, door, and window holes now appear like designs in a Henry Moore or Hepworth style. Inside the building and closely around it is lawn. The ivy has been removed to bare the wall surfaces.*

* This was presumably Hine's work and is now long gone - the remains are now swamped by an entanglement of undergrowth.


Minsden chapel - St Nicholas (3)

Minsden chapel - St Nicholas (4)

Minsden chapel - St Nicholas (5)

Mee covers it in his Preston entry.

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Chesfield

St Etheldreda is a ruin on private property and appears to be being maintained - which is nice.

Pevsner doesn't mention it.

St Etheldreda (1)

St Etheldreda (2)

A narrow road leads up to another which is now in ruins. Ivy clings to all that is left of its 600-year-old walls, and nettles and grass grow where men and women once knelt in prayer. Beside it is the manor house of Chesfield, still with its old boundary wall and the big chimney stacks which boldly proclaim its Stuart origin.

Graveley

I felt conned by St Mary - the south porch door was ajar and seemed to indicate that she was open but she turned out to be locked, but reading Pevsner I'm not sure that I missed out on much. Externally curious, with a low pitched nave roof (which looks decidedly odd - I thought the original roof must have fallen but there's no higher pitch line on the tower so the chancel must have been built taller than the nave for this odd look) and a crucifix spike, the setting is lovely.

ST MARY. Small flint church. W tower with diagonal buttresses, nave and long chancel. The latter dates from the C13 (see the windows on the N and S sides, the fragments of E windows replaced by a Perp window, and especially the double Piscina with pointed arches formed by the intersection of semicircular ones just as at Jesus College, Cambridge). The chancel N doorway was originally in the nave. Its date is C12, a date which is borne out by the nave Double Piscina. The windows of the nave C14- C15. The N aisle 1887. - SCREEN. C15; nothing special. - MONUMENT. Big epitaph to Mary Sparhauke d. 1770, by B. Palmer (classical with a crowning completely smooth and unadorned urn against a black obelisk).

St Mary (3)

Graveley. The Conqueror gave this village to his friend William Ewe, and the Normans built a church here. We find it up a country lane with two 17t.h-century farms and a few attendant cottages, while the rest of Graveley’s houses keep to the main road. Only the nave is left of the Norman church, and its doorway was removed to the chancel when the aisle was added last century. If we may judge by the beautiful double piscina this chancel must have been a lovely place when it was rebuilt in the 13th century. The chancel arch, its oak screen, and the nave roof are 500 years old. The modern pulpit has panels of carving a century older still. In the 15th-century tower hangs a bell made in 1589.

A short distance from this church a narrow road leads up to another which is now in ruins. Ivy clings to all that is left of its 600-year-old walls, and nettles and grass grow where men and women once knelt in prayer. Beside it is the manor house of Chesfield, still with its old boundary wall and the big chimney stacks which boldly proclaim its Stuart origin.

Flickr.

Little Wymondley

St Mary the Virgin, even though being practically on the East Coast Mainline, is really rather lovely despite the expected Victorian makeover. A peculiarly truncated tower with its Herts spike - or perhaps an unusually tall nave, it's hard to tell because this is a small church - adds to the charm.

Even though it has been scrubbed almost bare I really liked this bijou church; Pevsner, however, is dismissive:

ST MARY. Chancel, nave, and only slightly higher W tower of the C15. The rest 1875.

Cartwheel

Flower arrangers association

Harry Ernest Tabor 1961

Little Wymondley. It has two old neighbours of the centuries, the big barn and the little church. The church, set on a knoll, has an Elizabethan bell still ringing in the 15th-century tower. The nave and chancel are 15th century, and the north aisle, vestry, and south porch were added in 1875. The Hall is an early 17th-century timber-framed house with a fine group of chimneys. The barn is a grand sight, 100 feet long and 40 wide, divided into nave and aisles by rows of posts, while an elaborate framework of medieval timbers supports the tiled roof. The barn, with some 13th-century arches left in the moated farmhouse beside it, comes from the priory Cardinal Wolsey used to visit from Delamere House at Great Wymondley. Close by is the conduit head of the monks’ water supply, its medieval rubble patched with 16th-century brick. The monks were driven out and James Needham, the Clerk and Surveyor of Works, whose name is on a brass in the church, took possession and put in a few doorways that are still here, his successors adding good panelling. To the south of the church is 16th-century Wymondley Bury, with a gabled brick dovecot in its grounds. The rest of the village gathers round a 17th-century inn.

Great Wymondley

St Mary is rather odd. In the middle of nowhere with a Norman apse, which are rare in Herts in my experience (Bengeo, Great Amwell), and heavily restored but inside the Norman features are of interest, particularly the south door tympanum and capitals with faces, also the internal corbels are striking otherwise this is a typically over restored Herts church.

ST MARY. Small flint and stone church. Its most remarkable feature is its apsidal chancel. Nave and chancel are Norman as proved by the S doorway (colonnettes with rudely carved faces on capitals, star ornament of the abaci, and star ornament all over the tympanum) and the chancel arch (shafts with primitive volutes at the angle of the capitals). The Double Piscina also has waterleaf capitals. The windows are C13 lancets (chancel) and C14 and C15 designs in the nave. The W tower with diagonal buttresses and a pyramid roof behind the battlements is C15. The nave roof also belongs to the C15. It rests on primitive head corbels.

St Mary (2)

South door capital (3)

Double Piscina

Great Wymondley. Facing a row of thatched cottages is Delamere House with three storeys rising to Elizabethan gables. But there was a finer house here before it, where Cardinal Wolsey entertained Henry VIII. Great Wymondley indeed had a permanent link with the kings of England, for the lord of the manor, who lived in the timbered 16th-century house to the north-west of the church, held the right to be cupbearer at their coronation.

If Wolsey did not hear mass in his private chapel, he must have gone to this ancient village church which was here so long before him and has so long survived him. In imagination we may follow him in his red cardinal’s robe past the pond and up the green slope to his church where Roman tiles dot the flint walls built by the Normans. The Norman work is also well shown in the apse, the round windows, and the arch of the chancel, while their humour looks out from the sharp-featured faces on the capitals of the doorway with its starry tympanum. On the south wall is scratched an ancient sundial.

Supporting the 500-year-old roof of the nave is a medieval portrait gallery in stone scowling barons, a king, a patient nun, and women in curious square headdresses, a shaggy lion among them resembling the beasts on the 15th-century tower. The plain font and a few of the patched benches were made 500 years ago, and one of the bells is old enough to have tolled for Queen Elizabeth I. Steps inside the wall lead to the vanished roodloft, and on one side of the Norman chancel arch is a peephole to the altar.

The ground falls away behind the church, where is the mound of a fortified enclosure which covered five acres in Wolsey’s day. Beyond it lived a Roman farmer who sowed pottery, tiles, and coins for our own generation to harvest. The farmer probably built the rich villa buried a mile or so away on the bank of the River Purwell, where an almost perfect tessellated pavement was found half a century ago. Still older inhabitants raised their huts beside the lake which then covered this valley, and their flint knives and scrapers prove that Great Wymondley was a village even in the Stone Age.

Tuesday 11 March 2014

Hitchin

I visited four churches, St Mark, Holy Saviour, St Faith and St Mary, but only one really counts and that is St Mary.

Holy Saviour, lnk, is an 1865 Butterfield build and rather bland, St Faith, lnk, is utterly devoid of interest and St Mark, which does have the merit of being open, is a drab 1936 build.

St Mary is a large wool church and is without doubt one of the top ten churches in the county but as both Pevsner and Mee have long entries I'll leave it to them to extol its virtues.

ST MARY. The church is different from all other Herts parish churches in that it is evidently a building representing the commercial wealth of a late medieval town. As in most English towns the source of the wealth was wool. The building has a nave and aisles of five windows and a chancel and chancel chapels of five windows, the chancel chapels projecting exactly as far as the chancel. Thus the E view, from where the town has opened it up to the nicely landscaped river, is of three parts with their large 5-light windows, the aisles low-pitched with battlements, the chancel flat-topped with angle pinnacles and battlements. The church is in fact embattled all round, one of the usual ways to express importance and money spent. The most spectacular piece is the S porch, two-storeyed with an E staircase turret, two bays, window openings on the W and E sides, an elaborate lierne-vault inside, an inner doorway of six orders of thin colonnettes, and an outer doorway with above it a three-light window and four niches with brackets for statues and a relief of the Trinity in the central battlement. The arms of the Staple of Calais prominently displayed on the S wall. This porch was probably paid for by Nicholas Mattock, a rich merchant of Hitchin. The N porch is also two-storeyed. The N and S windows of aisles and chancel chapels are all Perp, large, and of three lights. There are, however, other differences between nave and chancel. The nave is flint, the chancel chapels stone, the nave battlements are flint, those of the chancel renewed in brick. Much brick has also gone into repair work of the relatively low W tower (with spike) which, in spite of its angle buttresses, was begun in the C12 and completed in the C13. Under the angle buttresses early flat buttresses have been found. The W door is obviously E.E. (two orders of shafts with moulded capitals and voussoirs of complex section), the windows on the bell-stage are also E.E., the stair-turret starts rectangular, before it becomes polygonal, and the treble-chamfered tower arch towards the nave can well be of the C13 too.

The general impression of the church from outside is one of comfortable spaciousness, an impression which the interior bears out. Nave arcades of octagonal piers with double-chamfered arches, early C14, With a clerestory irregularly added in the C15, four-centred chancel arch erected at that time above the responds of an earlier one, and chancel of four bays with stone piers with shafts in the main axes and hollows in the diagonals. Irregularities at the E end of the chancel (where a charnel-house is built underneath) and at the junction of nave and chancel. Oddly enough the nave has four bays but the aisles four windows and the porches, that is five bays, and the chancel has also four bays and the chancel chapels five windows. No building dates are recorded.

Uncommonly fine series of ROOFS. The flat ceiling in the N aisle with its broadly and beautifully cusped panels looks early C14, the S  aisle and S chapel, nave, and chancel roofs are all C15. That of the S chancel chapel has principals resting on stone angels and sub-principals with long wooden angel-figures at their feet.

Uncommonly fine series of SCREENS. N and S chancel chapel to N and S aisles and Parclose Screens to the chancel. The latter are, of course, simple, but the W screens are richer than any other in the county and differ from each other in design. No standardization of tracery design in the Parclose Screens either. - FONT. Stone, C15, with mutilated figures under ogee canopies. - PULPIT. With angle buttresses and restored C15 panels. - BENCHES. Some with poppy-heads in the chancel. - DOOR. Impressive S door with cusped panels, C15. - PAINTING. Adoration of the Magi, Flemish, C17. - PLATE. Patens, 1625 and 1634; Salver, 1635; two Chalices and two Flagons, 1705. - MONUMENTS. Many, but none of great importance. They will be given here topographically. Chancel: Brass to a priest, largish, late C15. - Brass to a man and woman in shrouds with children, late C15. - Brass to a man d. 1452, wife and children, large frontal figures. - Brass to a woman, late C15, the figure much rubbed off. - Brass to a man with three wives, late C15. - N Chancel Chapel: Three C15 tomb-chests with quatrefoil and heraldic decoration, on two of these brasses (John Pulter d. 1485; civilian and wife). - Brass to a shrouded young woman with hair let down. - N Aisle: On window sills three defaced stone effigies, one mid C13, the other two late C14. - Epitaph to Ralph Skinner d. 1697, with scrolly pediment, flowers and garlands, but no figures (by Stanton, according to Mrs Esdaile). - S Chancel Chapel: Many epitaphs, notably to four Radcliffes, c. 1660. - S Aisle: Brass to a shrouded woman with children. - Brass to a man with indent of wife. - Nave, W end: Mid C15 brass to a civilian and wife. - S. Aisle: Epitaph to Robert Hinde d. 1786, by Chadwick of Southwark, with a female standing under a palm tree.

HOLY SAVIOUR, Radcliffe Road, 1865, by Butterfield, and in every way a full-blooded example of his style: E.E. of red brick with stone and blue brick dressings; no tower; only a W bellcote, the W front with two windows and three buttresses so that one runs up the centre of the facade. Interior rather dark, as all windows have stained glass. Short rectangular piers without capitals, and walls decorated with sgraffito, white brick, red brick. and blue brick in complex diapers. Twice as many clerestory windows as arcade arches. Thin iron Screen with trefoil arched tops to the sections.

St Mary (4)

Corbel (4)

Font (4)

Hitchin. It is old-world England wherever we turn in this small town, with one of England’s smallest rivers flowing by Hertfordshire’s biggest parish church. It is the River Hiz, ten miles long. The streets are attractive with old houses, some so low that we may touch the eaves from the pavements, and there are three groups of attractive almshouses, 16 in the street called Bancroft, glowing in the sunshine behind pretty gardens; the Skynner almshouses of the 17th century; and, most delightful of all, the Biggin almshouses by the church and by the river, a mellow group of tiled and gabled roofs and leaded windows looking out on a courtyard enclosed by a cloister with wooden columns, and with medieval stones from a nunnery built into the walls. The Hermitage is an irregular building linked up with a 16th-century timbered barn. In its garden are traces of ancient cultivated terraces.

Church House was at one time a school, and one of its schoolmasters was Eugene Aram; it is said that the vicar, Pilkington Morgan, once preached before him on divine retribution. A house called Mount Pleasant, standing on the higher ground of the town, was the birthplace in 1559 of the famous George Chapman, and has on it a tablet reminding us of his claim to immortality. It was here during Shakespeare’s day that Chapman produced an enormous output of comedies, tragedies, and poems, though he is chiefly remembered now not for the plays with which he collaborated with Ben Jonson, but for the translation of Homer which so stirred Keats, as he tells us in that sonnet beginning:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

This is the inscription on the tablet on Chapman’s birthplace:

The learned shepherd of fair Hitchin Hill, as his young contemporary William Browne describes him in his Britannia’s Pastorals, himself records in The Teares of Peace that it was while he was “on the Hill next Hitchin’s hand” the shade of Homer filled his bosom with a “floode of soule.”

The great medieval church, with a little Garden of Rest beside it is rich in craftsmanship of the 14th and 15th centuries. Its tower is older still, for it stands on Norman foundations and has Roman bricks in it. Its doorway is 13th century. Though Hitchin was a home of Nonconforrnity, it would seem that the congregation at this church was glad to have the Stuarts back, for the sundial on the wall of the tower has a Latin inscription reading, In the year of security 1660. The porch is magnificent, with many niches filled with statues 400 years ago. It has two storeys, with pinnacles crowning the walls, and a carving of the Holy Trinity over the doorway. The vaulted roof has carved bosses, and a room above it (now a small museum) has in it a 14th-century tile of a man with his right arm across his chest and his left arm pointed upwards, supposed to be the builder of the church. The door opening for us into the church has been swinging on its hinges 500 years. The font is of the same age, and has 12 sides on each of which is the figure of a saint under a beautiful canopy; its cover is like a lovely spire.

It is an impressive interior into which we come. Most of the roofs are 500 years old, with wooden angels looking down from them into the chapels, and among the stone corbels are portraits of Edward III and his Queen Philippa, a beggar feeding from a bowl, and an angel and a demon both whispering into the ears of a girl. The roof of the north aisle is partly older still, the elaborate cusping in its panels being the work of a 14th-century craftsman. The screens are striking and beautiful, particularly the 15th-century screen of the south chapel, which has a central bay with two bays on each side, all with lovely window tracery, a row of quatrefoiled arches and shields above them, and over this a cresting of angels. The work of the medieval craftsman is also in some of the bench-ends of the chancel and in the traceried panels of the pulpit. The unusual length of the chancel is one of the striking features of the church. Hanging on a wall is a painting of the Adoration of the Wise Men which is said to be by Rubens.

The church has a big collection of brasses, most of them worn and of unknown people. On the floor of the chancel are portraits of a 15th-century priest, James Hert, an unknown merchant of 1452 with his wife and ten children, and another unknown with his wife in shrouds and their eight children.

In the south aisle Margery Beel is engraved with her eight children and in the nave is a civilian with three wives and another unknown family of ten, all of the 16th century. Against the wall of the north chapel are three 15th-century tombs in a row, one having the brass portraits of a man and his wife, the second a man with his wife in shrouds, and a third with the name of  John Poulter, a draper. An unknown 13th-century knight in the nave, much worn after 700 years, lies on the window-sill of the aisle leading to the north chapel, and there are two other marble figures here of a knight and his lady in 14th-century costume. The first of these figures is believed to represent Bernard Baliol, an ancestor of the man who founded Balliol College, and the knight with his wife is Edward de Kendale, who fought at Crécy and Poitiers and helped to quell the disorders in Hertfordshire which followed the Black Death. In the south chapel are the memorials to the Radcliffe family, who lived in Hitchin for 12 generations; the east window showing Christ stilling the waters is in memory of one of them. Two other windows are notable, one in memory of three brothers, John, Frank, and William Hawkins, benefactors of the town, the other the peace memorial window, showing St George in gold armour, Christ red-robed and crowned, and the Archangel Michael in silver grey. Below these fiigures are panels of St George slaying the dragon, Satan cast out of Heaven, and St Andrew.

An interesting man lies under the south aisle, Captain Robert Hind, the original of Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy Who does not remember Uncle Toby and the corporal at the lieutenant’s deathbed, the corporal insisting that he must die, Uncle Toby insisting that he shall live?

“He shall not die, by God,” cried my Uncle Toby. The Accusing Spirit, which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in; and the Recording Angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out for ever.

Hitchin has a modern church founded by the first vicar, George Gainsford, and built in 1865 by the well-known architect William Butterfield. It has much interest, having a small gallery of pictures by well-known artists. One is the head of the Madonna by Carlo Dolce, another is the Good Shepherd by Frederick Shields, a third is a good copy of Raphael’s Entombment, and a fourth is the Nativity probably by a Flemish artist. In the sanctuary are two gilded candlesticks which once belonged to John Mason Neale, the famous writer of hymns who founded a religious community at East Grinstead in Sussex.

Hitchin has an interesting possession in a chapel, for in the Baptist Chapel in Tilehurst Street is a chair John Bunyan gave to the minister in his day. Behind the chapel is a graveyard in which lies Agnes Story, who as a girl was Agnes Beaumont, a devoted follower of Bunyan. She figures in a story which must have been a source of much distress to Bunyan. Her father, a farmer at Edworth in Bedfordshire, had been much moved by the tinker’s teaching and her own name is entered in Bunyan’s handwriting in the register at Gamlingay, of which he was pastor. It happened, however, that the father lost his love for Bunyan, and Agnes, who had become an ardent disciple, found it difficult to obtain permission to attend the meeting-house. She had arranged on one occasion to go with a minister from her brother’s house to hear Bunyan, but as the minister did not turn up John Bunyan rode over to take his place. John Beaumont lifted his wife on to his own horse and Bunyan lifted Agnes Beaumont on to his. The father, looking out from the fields and seeing what had happened, was indignant, and barred the door against his daughter, so that she spent the night in a barn and afterwards took refuge at her brother’s house. The next Sunday she decided to obey her father and went home again, and in two days, by a dramatic stroke of fate, her father died suddenly. The story was spread abroad that he had been poisoned, and there was scandal and enquiry, but Agnes was acquitted, she having been entirely innocent.

To the South of Hitchin is a lovely park of over 100 acres in which stands all that is left of Hitchin Priory, now incorporated in the old home of the Radcliffes. Most of it was built in the 18th century, but there is a beautiful arcade and panelling from its 17th-century predecessor, with fragments also of the medieval house of the White Friars.

At Hitchin was born (brought up at the 17th-century gabled house called The Grange) the famous Sir Henry Hawkins, an unrivalled criminal judge for about 20 years of the last generation. His court was always crowded, though he sat long hours and kept every window shut. He died as Lord Brampton, and is chiefly remembered because he won his spurs in the romantic Tichborne case.

There was born at Charlton hereabouts, in 1813, a man with over a hundred inventions to his credit, the chief of them being the manufacture of steel. He was Sir Henry Bessemer. During the Crimean War it was felt that there was weakness in the metal used for guns, and Bessemer began fusing cast-iron with steel. During his researches he found that fragments of iron which had been exposed to an air-blast remained solid in spite of intense heat, and on touching them with an iron bar he discovered that they were merely shells of decarbonised iron. He instantly realised that by the aid of the air-blast iron could be entirely freed of carbon, the unknown quantity removed and the desired quantity introduced at will. The process created a great sensation, but early experiments failed and iron-masters who had clamoured for licences to use the process abandoned them in scorn. But Bessemer went on, brought his invention to triumphant success, and was soon selling steel £20 a ton cheaper than his rivals. He was on a flowing tide, and added new resources to engineering all over the world.

We know from George Chapman’s own pen that he was a Hitchin man, born in 1559. It is believed that he was at Oxford, where, according to tradition, although he excelled in Greek and Latin, his weakness in logic and philosophy prevented his gaining a degree.

He was closely associated with Ben Jonson, who “loved him,” with Spenser, Marlowe, and others of the immortals, and he attested his friendship for Inigo Jones by dedicating one of his plays to him. As poet and dramatist he filled a high place in Elizabethan England, but his original poems and his 18 dramas are dead beyond revival. In an age whose every breath seemed charged with inspiration, Chapman had his hours of serene inspiration, and left us examples of lofty thought, snatches of lyric passion, flashes of humour and satire (one exercise in which, supposed to reflect on the needy followers of James I, landed him in prison). Generally, however, he is arid, ponderous, and dull.

But as a translator he soared supreme, and his Homer earned him undying fame. It was here that he translated the last 12 books of the Odyssey in 15 weeks!

The work was begun for Prince Henry, from whom he had expectations of high preferment; and with the death of that bright hope for England Chapman wrought in a sustained ecstasy, as if the spirit of Homer himself animated his faculties. Marred by occasional obscurity, harshness, and mistakes in Greek, the work yet remains the finest metrical translation of Homer we have. It was superseded by Pope’s translation with its modern spelling and idiom, for every age requires its new translation of the Father of Poets, but it was Chapman that Keats found “Speak out loud and clear,” Chapman’s Homer which caused Keats to break faith with his own deathless sonnet:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.

Thus at a stroke the names of Keats, Chapman, and Homer are linked in lines that will sing the Elizabethan’s glory as long as an Englishman survives to read his mother tongue.

Flickr.

Ickleford

I loved St Katherine up to and including the ugly cement render - a large part of this unconditional love is the setting of old, and majestic, cedars. Inside it's a bit antiseptic but the south and north doors are palpably Norman, as is the chancel arch, and there are some good corbels. Not an outstanding church but for all that lovely.

ST KATHERINE. Nicely placed amid cedar trees. Not very attractive plastered exterior. The interesting history of the church becomes more evident as one enters. The S doorway and a blocked N doorway are C12 with inner zig-zag arches. The S doorway has in addition three orders of scalloped columns outside and three orders of zigzag voussoirs. The W tower has one lancet window on the S side, the chancel one on the N side. The chancel arch is also clearly C13. Nave roof on stone corbels and S porch C15; S aisle and S chapel. 1859 (by Sir G. G. Scott). - STAINED GLASS. W window, 1898, by Kempe. - PLATE. Cup, 1798. - BRASS. Thomas Somer and wife, late C14, demi-figures (nave, E end)ɫ.

South door

Corbel (8)

War memorial (1)

Ickleford. Passing along an avenue of cedars from where the road widens in the middle of the village, we come to the ancient church. The nave is mid-12th century, the chancel and tower are early 13th century, and the south porch was added about 1450. In 1859 Sir Gilbert Scott heavily restored the fabric and added the south aisle, chapel, and north vestry in a Norman manner. Grotesque stone creatures hold up the 16th-century roof, and on the oor are the brass portraits of a 14th-century couple, Thomas Somer and his
wife ɫ.

A worn stone marks the grave of a gipsy king, who was born on the Six Hills of Stevenage the year after King James II fled, lived to see the American War of Independence, lived on through the reigns of three Georges, and travelled nearly every road in England till he died at 90. They carried him at last along the Icknield Way and laid him here, with his name, Henry Boswell, on his stone.

The pleasant new cottages do not spoil the attractiveness of Ickleford, and for company they have an old timbered inn, and a gabled house with 1599 over an oriel window.

ɫ The brass is now under carpet.

Letchworth

I found St Mary the Virgin open but only because the Ash Wednesday Mass had just finished, normally it is LNK which is a shame since this is an interesting building although without much internal interest. The brasses are now carpeted over but the Richard Montfitchet effigy sits on a windowsill and I liked the window to eight non Gospel apostles but the best item is the recently uncovered ship painting and scratch ship in the porch.

ST MARY. Flint; nave and lower chancel; no tower, only a timber bell turret. C13 windows in the chancel. - DOOR with C13 iron hinges. - PLATE. Late Elizabethan Chalice and Paten. - MONUMENTS. Stone effigy to a Knight, only 2 ft long, on a window sill. He holds his heart in his hands. - Brass to Thomas Wyrley d. 1475 (chancel), to a husband and wife (later C15; nave).

Richard Montfitchet 1268 (3)

Ships (3)

Altar angels (2)

Letchworth. It is the city built by dreams, the dreams of Ebenezer Howard, who while others talked of garden cities, went out spade in hand and made one. It is worth while to think a little of his story before we come to Letchworth.

He was born in London, tried office life, was private secretary to Dr Parket of the City Temple, went out to Chicago, and then came back to London to find himself disgusted with its slums. He felt as he looked at them like Abraham Lincoln when he looked at slavery, and he decided that if ever an opportunity came he would hit them hard. He saw a city of the future, like a New Jerusalem in a green and pleasant land, where people could live with trees and lawns and flowers about them and feel the wind blowing everywhere.

It was not enough, he said, to think of the town as one magnet and the country as another, pulling different ways; there should be a town-country magnet which would as far as possible combine the advantages of the other two while reducing their disabilities. This Utopia would join beauty of Nature with social opportunity, low rents with high wages, low rates with plenty to do, low prices without sweating, pure air and water with good drainage, bright homes and gardens with no smoke and no slums, and freedom with co-operation. He proceeded to draw plans of such a garden city as he imagined. He set out a site of 5000 acres planned with streets and houses and gardens, with allotments, fruit farms, pastures, woods, water supply, and space for factories and markets as well as for schools and convalescent homes, and all with access to a railway.

Such was the plan, and he handed it over to the critics. They were not silent, nor was he. Having begun the movement on paper he brought it into the public eye by every means within his power. With a dozen friends he formed a Garden City Association. The fruit of his hundreds of public meetings and the clear business like nature of his propositions so convinced the sceptics that three years after the publication of his practical propositions the Letchworth site was purchased for £150,000. That was in 1903. From that time forward, despite jealousies, ridicule, and afterwards the interruption caused by the Great War, the scheme advanced and took continually more concrete shape. After Letchworth came Welwyn, and more remarkable than either, Wythenshawe.

These were all his foster-children, but they had many descendants. Out of his scheme sprang the Town Planning Act. Garden suburbs and garden villages all owe their existence to this man who loved the countryside and wished our people to enjoy it.

Letchworth is perfectly delightful, planned on 1500 acres with a green belt of twice as much round it. It has 30 miles of roads with 7000 trees planted along them in about 50 varieties, and it is so spaced out with fine avenues, quiet walks, squares and gardens and cloisters, that 200 factories make no difference to its rural aspect. It has a shopping centre, a civic centre, residential areas, a museum and a grammar school, and, of course, the old church which was here long before it, when all this place was three small villages. The Icknield Way runs through the centre of the town with a mile-long stretch of almond trees, the beauty of which must be seen in springtime to be believed. It is all hardly more than a generation old, yet nearly 25,000 people have their homes here, among the limes and chestnuts and poplars growing tall and shady. The grass verges and the belt of lovely country, which must never be built on, are an example for all reformers and a rebuke to every slum.

Close to this city of the 20th century is the site of a British settlement of 20 centuries ago; we may see some of the finds from it in the museum, together with Roman and medieval objects and a fine photographic survey of the whole neighbourhood.

The museum, admirably arranged by the well-known naturalist Mr Percival Westell, has in its natural history collection skulls of mammals and birds, eggs and nests, insects, shells, and stones and local fossils of the Chalk Age and the Ice Age. The cases of Bygones are of remarkable interest to students of old Hertfordshire life, and the room of Roman and prehistoric antiquities is constantly growing in a county which has so much history beneath its feet.

But there is an old Letchworth still in existence, aloof from the new. First we come to the timber house with dormer windows which is now the post office, an outpost of 300 years ago; then to a house as old which has been turned into a row of cottages; and then to a screen of great chestnut trees with the 17th-century Hall on one side and a diminutive church with a queer little 16th-century bellcot on the other. A copy of this church has been erected in the garden city, but there is history in these old walls which cannot be repeated.

For 500 years the porch has sheltered a door strengthened with 13th-century ironwork. The nave walls were probably laid by Norman masons though the doorway and the windows are later. The chancel arch seems to have been made new in the 16th century, and the chancel is a medley of the centuries going back to the 13th. Fragments of medieval glass are in two windows. The font bowl has served for 600 years and all that time a bell with Ave Maria written on it before the Reformation has continued to call people to church. Some of the benches were made 500 years ago, and medieval beams are glimpsed through the plaster roof. The brass portrait of a 15th-century rector, Thomas Wyrley, is near the brass portraits of a couple he knew well, William and Isabelle Overbury; and lying on the sill of a window where glows the shield of the Hertfordshire Montfichets is the small stone figure of a knight in chain mail, much worn after more than 600 years. He holds a heart case to show that only his heart was buried here, and he was probably close of kin to Richard Montfichet, one of the 25 barons appointed to see that the liberties won by Magna Carta were not lost.

The old hall, now a hotel, has a fine oak screen 300 years old, and a plaster of the judgment of Paris over a fireplace. It was the home of an eccentric rector who would hold services here to which he would summon giant musical boxes and any wandering minstrels who would add to the din, and it was his fancy to ride up and down the hall on his velocipede after the service, now crashing into the screen, now stopping to hand a jar of snuff round the congregation.

Flickr.

Letchworth Garden City

When I hear the words 'Garden City' I automatically think Harlow - which is technically wrong because although Arlow is a new town heavily influenced by the Garden Cities, it's not a Garden City per se - and have an automatic preconception of what I'll find.

Not to my taste but the original Garden City is actually rather well planned and you can see what the movement was trying to achieve but I have to say that I found it all rather soulless and not helped by later development. Strangely, or perhaps not, I felt I was in a set for EM Forster's Howards End - an oddly transposed piece of the worst of Surrey or Cheshire imposed on Hertfordshire, it seems to me a shame that the Garden Citys' first attempt didn't quite work.

Of the three churches I visited only St Paul should have qualified under normal rules, however I think I made a mistake in not entering St George, the other two, St Paul and St Michael, were lnk.

Letchworth, to nearly all those who know the name in  Britain and abroad, means a garden city, in fact the first garden city ever built. The adventure began in 1903, several years before the Hampstead Garden Suburb and seventeen before Welwyn. The idea of the garden city came from Ebenezer Howard’s book of 1898. To translate the idea into visual terms Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin had to make an organism out of a diagram. In this they succeeded. The Hampstead Garden Suburb makes that even clearer than Letchworth. For Letchworth, as the first exploratory pioneer job, suffered from some initial faults which it has never quite overcome. The principle of the garden city is one of controlled social and architectural structure and controlled growth. Number of inhabitants, type and location of houses, type and location of factories has to be kept in a certain relation to each other, with the result that the town should be an independent and self-sufficient unit. At Letchworth it took long to attract industry, and population consequently did not grow fast enough to justify an architectural display of public buildings as the plan had foreseen them along the large central square or green. In fact the visual failure of Letchworth is that very square, laid out in axis with the station and at right angles to another main axis. Corning from the station one has, as one should have, an initial feeling of urban bustle (a few shopping streets of tallish buildings). But then the square is reached and the public buildings are mostly small, architecturally indifferent, and do not seem to be related to each other (Council Offices by Bennett & Bidwell, Grammar School by Barry Parker). The largest of them, St Francis’ College (by Morley Harder; new extension by L. H. Shazzock) stands in no comprehensible position and represents no scale echoed anywhere else. The domestic architecture of the early years, on the other hand, is eminently convincing. It is very similar to that of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, except that exposed brick is rarer. The style is mostly a free and comfortable Neo-Tudor with gables. The houses are detached or in groups of four. The streets curve, except for the main axes, existing trees are preserved, no garden walls since cut up for green - all principles adopted since for municipal estates. To the younger generation they have thus become a matter of course, but it should not be forgotten that they were for the very first time systematically followed at Letchworth. The old village of Letchworth lies outside the garden city, and it seems a pity that the Parker-Unwin plan did not choose to make use of the church and hall as a centre or sub-centre. It would have meant a welcome break in the architectural uniformity of the small-scale housing (cf., for example, Oxhey).

St George (2)
St George

St Paul (3)
St Paul

St Michael the Archangel
St Michael
Letchworth. It is the city built by dreams, the dreams of Ebenezer Howard, who while others talked of garden cities, went out spade in hand and made one. It is worth while to think a little of his story before we come to Letchworth.

He was born in London, tried office life, was private secretary to Dr Parket of the City Temple, went out to Chicago, and then came back to London to find himself disgusted with its slums. He felt as he looked at them like Abraham Lincoln when he looked at slavery, and he decided that if ever an opportunity came he would hit them hard. He saw a city of the future, like a New Jerusalem in a green and pleasant land, where people could live with trees and lawns and flowers about them and feel the wind blowing everywhere.

It was not enough, he said, to think of the town as one magnet and the country as another, pulling different ways; there should be a town-country magnet which would as far as possible combine the advantages of the other two while reducing their disabilities. This Utopia would join beauty of Nature with social opportunity, low rents with high wages, low rates with plenty to do, low prices without sweating, pure air and water with good drainage, bright homes and gardens with no smoke and no slums, and freedom with co-operation. He proceeded to draw plans of such a garden city as he imagined. He set out a site of 5000 acres planned with streets and houses and gardens, with allotments, fruit farms, pastures, woods, water supply, and space for factories and markets as well as for schools and convalescent homes, and all with access to a railway.

Such was the plan, and he handed it over to the critics. They were not silent, nor was he. Having begun the movement on paper he brought it into the public eye by every means within his power. With a dozen friends he formed a Garden City Association. The fruit of his hundreds of public meetings and the clear business like nature of his propositions so convinced the sceptics that three years after the publication of his practical propositions the Letchworth site was purchased for £150,000. That was in 1903. From that time forward, despite jealousies, ridicule, and afterwards the interruption caused by the Great War, the scheme advanced and took continually more concrete shape. After Letchworth came Welwyn, and more remarkable than either, Wythenshawe.

These were all his foster-children, but they had many descendants. Out of his scheme sprang the Town Planning Act. Garden suburbs and garden villages all owe their existence to this man who loved the countryside and wished our people to enjoy it.

Letchworth is perfectly delightful, planned on 1500 acres with a green belt of twice as much round it. It has 30 miles of roads with 7000 trees planted along them in about 50 varieties, and it is so spaced out with fine avenues, quiet walks, squares and gardens and cloisters, that 200 factories make no difference to its rural aspect. It has a shopping centre, a civic centre, residential areas, a museum and a grammar school, and, of course, the old church which was here long before it, when all this place was three small villages. The Icknield Way runs through the centre of the town with a mile-long stretch of almond trees, the beauty of which must be seen in springtime to be believed. It is all hardly more than a generation old, yet nearly 25,000 people have their homes here, among the limes and chestnuts and poplars growing tall and shady. The grass verges and the belt of lovely country, which must never be built on, are an example for all reformers and a rebuke to every slum.

Close to this city of the 20th century is the site of a British settlement of 20 centuries ago; we may see some of the finds from it in the museum, together with Roman and medieval objects and a fine photographic survey of the whole neighbourhood.

The museum, admirably arranged by the well-known naturalist Mr Percival Westell, has in its natural history collection skulls of mammals and birds, eggs and nests, insects, shells, and stones and local fossils of the Chalk Age and the Ice Age. The cases of Bygones are of remarkable interest to students of old Hertfordshire life, and the room of Roman and prehistoric antiquities is constantly growing in a county which has so much history beneath its feet.

But there is an old Letchworth still in existence, aloof from the new. First we come to the timber house with dormer windows which is now the post office, an outpost of 300 years ago; then to a house as old which has been turned into a row of cottages; and then to a screen of great chestnut trees with the 17th-century Hall on one side and a diminutive church with a queer little 16th-century bellcot on the other. A copy of this church has been erected in the garden city, but there is history in these old walls which cannot be repeated.

For 500 years the porch has sheltered a door strengthened with 13th-century ironwork. The nave walls were probably laid by Norman masons though the doorway and the windows are later. The chancel arch seems to have been made new in the 16th century, and the chancel is a medley of the centuries going back to the 13th. Fragments of medieval glass are in two windows. The font bowl has served for 600 years and all that time a bell with Ave Maria written on it before the Reformation has continued to call people to church. Some of the benches were made 500 years ago, and medieval beams are glimpsed through the plaster roof. The brass portrait of a 15th-century rector, Thomas Wyrley, is near the brass portraits of a couple he knew well, William and Isabelle Overbury; and lying on the sill of a window where glows the shield of the Hertfordshire Montfichets is the small stone figure of a knight in chain mail, much worn after more than 600 years. He holds a heart case to show that only his heart was buried here, and he was probably close of kin to Richard Montfichet, one of the 25 barons appointed to see that the liberties won by Magna Carta were not lost.

The old hall, now a hotel, has a fine oak screen 300 years old, and a plaster of the judgement of Paris over a fireplace. It was the home of an eccentric rector who would hold services here to which he would summon giant musical boxes and any wandering minstrels who would add to the din, and it was his fancy to ride up and down the hall on his velocipede after the service, now crashing into the screen, now stopping to hand a jar of snuff round the congregation.

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