Local foundations
With the help of a specially commissioned series of his drawings, Matthew Rice meditates on the qualities that imbue the architecture of the British countryside with its wonderful variety
DRIVING around Britain, from top to bottom or side to side, the appearance of our villages changes dramatically. Leaving the moors and flower-studded banks of Devon and Cornwall for the pale-green hills of Dorset, the farmhouses, cottages, barns and stables are clearly different and, continuing through the Downs and Thames valley to the Cotswolds, the scene changes again. The shifts continue all the way to John O’groats. It’s in the smaller buildings that the local vernacular is most noticeable. In architectural terms, that means construction according to local customs using easily available materials and often built by the resident or user.
Until the railway spun its lines through mid-19th-century Britain, the sheer difficulty of transporting heavy materials forced builders to look at the quarry, wood, field or marsh closest to hand. As a result, each district established its own way of building.
Geological forms run in diagonal lines from South-west to North-east and can be
traced by looking at buildings that over-lie them. Those belts in the west of Britain are igneous or metamorphic rocks: ancient volcanic strata, as originally formed or changed by subsequent seismic or thermodynamic events. They are the granites and slate. Then come the sedimentary rocks formed, more recently, by the sea over millennia; sandstones and limestones, chalk and flint. These stones give each area its particular buildings and character according to availability and quality. The soft Oolitic limestones of the
Cotswolds allow complex carving of decorative doorcases and windows, whereas the unyielding granites of the Highlands make all but the most modest decoration impossible. In areas without handy stone, materials are taken from the surface or soil: clay, mud, timber, rush or straw. Parts of Devon and Hampshire make use of cob, a mixture of mud, lime, straw and cattle manure, whereas Norfolk is the brick county par excellence.
Economics also play their part. Local industries; brewing, cider, weaving or other trades necessitating the development of building types: oast houses, net sheds or weaving lofts. The buildings of relatively impoverished north Wales are smaller and simpler than those of the lusher Home Counties, enriched by their proximity to London and better farmland. There are other influences, too. The buildings of East Anglia, being near the Low Countries, imported sophisticated brick and tile-making skills and adopted some of the styles of gable used across the North Sea. Curving pantiles —rather than the flat peg tile—occur in
Soft limestones allow complex carving; unyielding granites make all but the most modest decoration impossible
Yorkshire and on up the east coast to Fife, perhaps due to return cargoes of tiles in ships taking grain from the arable east to Europe.
On that cross-country drive, therefore, it becomes easy to understand why the low, whitewashed cottages on Bodmin Moor yield to more generous limewashed farmhouses in Devon and why the limestones of Dorset, from close-grained Portland stone and glossy Purbeck Marble change mile by mile, becoming ever softer and warmer in colour. As the stone softens even further to chalk, the seams throw up flint, in fact the petrified remains of sea organisms turned glassy and crystalhard. These make resilient facings that withstand rain and frost better than chalk or clunch-type supersoft limestones. That limestone is the main material from Dorset to East Yorkshire is proof of its geological supremacy in that great diagonal stripe
That limestone is the main material from Dorset to Yorkshire is proof of its geological supremacy
dividing Britain. The levels of plant material, as opposed to old shells in the sediments that created these rocks 135 million years ago, raises the iron levels and makes them darker.
Occasionally, the changes are geometrically at odds with the tracks of human desire. Thus the granular sandstones of Cumbria and Lancashire quickly usurp the Pennine limestones within a few miles of road and, in north Norfolk, the crash of iron-rich carrstones, snowy-white chalk and various coloured flints and brick makes the texture differ from one coastal village to the next.
Some vernacular styles migrate into polite architecture. Churches, the highest status buildings in any village or town, were usually built using stone, cement and wood from their immediate environs. This gives rise to particularities, such as the round flint towers of East Anglia. Conversely, a Georgian rectory or farmhouse that, in elevation, may be the same in North Molton, Malton and Melton Mowbray, all in quite different parts of the country, will use materials that tie them to their hinterland, even if they all sport fanlights between elegant Ionic columns over their identical six-panelled front doors. In timber-built Suffolk, these façades may be of lime mortar carefully scored to look like stone, but, in Kent, 3in-thick tiles might be
hung over a wooden stud to imitate brickwork and produce that near-identical Georgian façade. The inclination to make the utilitarian beautiful, as well as to imitate—or out-do— neighbours reveals itself in parts of Dorset or Northamptonshire, where stone is layered in neat stripes of lighter and darker limestones.
The railways sounded the death knell for the purest vernacular, as national distribution brought Welsh slate into Suffolk villages and Portland stone to market squares everywhere. Easily transportable materials
Most standard developments are exactly that... anywhere housing. There is work to be done!
diluted local styles and, until antiquarian interest in our folk culture developed as a reaction to industrialisation in the late 19th century, the vernacular was in retreat. Now, it is having a renaissance. ‘Legacy’ developments and other high-value new estates are trying to pay more than planning-authority lip service to local character and to make houses that sit comfortably in their surroundings. This is far from universal and most standard developments are exactly that… anywhere housing. There is work to be done!