First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  How appropriate, then, that much of Cheltenham’s aquatint architecture should be by J. B. Papworth whose plates of ornamental architecture are a regular feature of the Repository. J. B. Papworth (1775–1847) designed the Rotunda (now pitiably neglected) in 1826, Lansdowne Place and various houses to the south of the High Street. He was at home in all styles, as his aquatints show, and many of his drawings are in the R.I.B.A. Library. Another Cheltenham architect of the aquatint period G. A. Underwood, who was a pupil of Soane from 1807 to 1815, designed the church in Portland Street, the Masonic Hall and many chaste Greek villas. There is a Soanean simplicity about a row of two-storey houses in Prestbury Road which suggests Underwood’s work; Greek villas in the Park and various terraces to the south of the High Street may well have been his. Underwood’s contemporary was J. B. Forbes, who designed the superb Pump Room on the Pittville Estate in 1825. This is an Ionic composition round a large domed hall. Its exterior was recently mutilated by some municipal department which destroyed the statues with which it was adorned.

  From 1830, Cheltenham architecture sheers off the aquatint into the steel engraving. The decorator steps in as architect. The Queen’s Hotel by R. W. and C. Jearrad (1838) has a façade which forms a terminus to the leafy Promenade, Cheltenham’s smartest street. This façade is a magnificent stucco composition, original, bold, gay, decorated with coloured crowns and has, as its central feature, a row of Corinthian columns. At first glance the façade is chaste, correct, and a superb termination to the Promenade. The effect is as of a steel engraving in a local guide, a little unlikely but beautiful. Then examining the detail one sees that the columns have been engraved in not quite the right proportions, that there is something wrong about the depth of an entablature, that the building seems to be out of perspective. The Queen’s Hotel has this quality of a steel engraving. Its architecture is not quite correct, but it is, none the less, effective.

  Christ Church was designed by R. W. Jearrad, one of the designers of the Queen’s Hotel, in 1837. It is one of the most successful buildings in Cheltenham externally, but it is wildly incorrect, vaguely Gothic, and with stupendous proportions all its own. One feels that F. Jearrad had some large book of antiquarian engravings, drawn to scale, of Magdalen College Tower, Oxford. He then had the enormous pinnacles on that tower reproduced according to the scale given in his book and stuck them on to Christ Church one hundred feet lower than they are at Magdalen. Pleased with the effect he added some more pinnacles a little higher up and, boldly forgetting the years between, he included some Early English lancet windows in the intervening surfaces and invented some Early English church doors. To crown this dreamlike base, all deep shadows and aspiring pinnacles, he added a graceful tower. The effect is romantic in the extreme, and so startling that I would travel one hundred miles to be startled so pleasantly. Unlike much romantic architecture of the time, Mr. Jearrad’s Christ Church has a three-dimensional quality.

  Let us capture for a moment the rapturous appreciation of Cheltenham in the past. First—a description of the Park, an elegant neighbourhood of detached stucco villas in the Greek, Italian, Swiss and Tudor styles laid out by Mr. T. Billings. “The sheltering trees on each side of the walk render it impervious to the rude embrace of Æolus; or the burning Phœbus. There is a sweet mellow beauty in this spot, which must render it highly congenial for the poet’s mental compositions and to the nerves of the sensitive invalid.” And now let us look inside the old Assembly Rooms. “Several chandeliers hang midway in the air, and their glittering drops vie with ‘the light of the ladies’ eyes’ … there the wistful lookers-on will observe, that loving eyes and melting music conspire more to make hearts flutter, than does the graceful glide of the dance. But lo! a table full of fairy-like condiments in the opposite room, beckons the sylphs to refresh themselves by sedative and cooling draughts.”2

  The book from which these quotations come shows that Cheltenham was still progressing in the ’fifties. “New buildings are constantly and quickly appearing in Cheltenham; they rise as if a magic wand touched this lovely portion of our ‘mother earth,’ and bid it ‘increase and multiply.’” The book is printed in blue ink, with ruled margins and steel engravings.

  A playful battle of the styles occurred. Alongside the romantic architecture of the Jearrad brothers, who were primarily interior decorators, alongside the sketchy steel engravings was the sterner lithographic side. The Italian style was in. Those lithographs, faintly tinted with yellow and blue, depicting Italian villas by Lake Como or in St. John’s Wood, were adapted to the stucco of Cheltenham. Their towers rise above cedars and their terraces are in a bold Anglo-Italian style of which the best is part of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in Bayshill Road. Such architecture belongs to the ’forties, ’fifties and ’sixties.

  The battle of the styles in Cheltenham is gay. There is none of the heaviness of Pimlico or Earl’s Court, because there has always been room to play about, and the Cheltenham waters seem to have had a loosening effect on her architects. The battle is gay, and the stone or stucco Victories, for Gothic, Swiss, Italian, Greek or Oriental, are rarely gimcrack or mere façadism. Perhaps the military clients insisted on thoroughness. Perhaps a conservative tradition in the town forbade the modern skimping of details. Certainly a tradition of spacious street planning lingered in Cheltenham until 1914. Here and there are Midland glazed bricks and municipal excursions into Edwardian Baroque, but there is still a certain wideness, except in the High Street, whose decent face has been smeared with commercialism. Everywhere else you will find the best and the most old-fashioned of architectural styles.

  A Cheltenham Regency Society has been founded just in time to save this lovely town from careerist civil servants and greedy speculators. If the harm that has been done in Cheltenham goes no further, in ten years Cheltenham will be as admired as Bath, and personally I think it is a gayer, more original town, with even more to admire. It is a bookshelf of aquatints, steel engravings and lithographs of the nineteenth century, ranged out in a Cotswold valley for all bibliophiles to see.

  Pensions become reduced, colonels die, families go out to Kenya, and prefer London to the provinces when they return, but the great houses grow no smaller and the domestic service problem grows greater.

  The lonely widows of military men are driven to Cheltenham hotels, where they wait, knitting sadly in the lounge and talking to visitors. Once a week a great grandson or great grand-daughter comes to tea from one of Cheltenham’s numerous schools. And there is another week of watching the light in the chestnuts on the Promenade, walking in the Pittville Gardens, morning coffee at Kunzle’s and back to an en pension lunch. There is less and less hope of the military holding out in the battle to save Cheltenham from “progress.” The æsthetes must help them.

  1 Since this was written the Cheltenham Regency Society has been founded.

  2 Bailey’s New Hand-Book for Cheltenham (Cheltenham, 1855).

  4

  ABERDEEN GRANITE

  MOST of us know successful Lowland Scots. Products of the manse and emancipation, they come to England and work their way up to the high administrative posts in Government Offices and Universities. Where organising ability, knowledge of finance, hard work and disinterested “service” to the “community” are required (to be rewarded with a not extravagant salary but eventually a pension and a decoration), where such careers are open, there you will find the Lowland Scots. Hard, logical, calmly energetic, they are the reverse of flibbertigibbets. Naturally such an abstract-minded people excels in architecture, the severest—I had almost said the most abstract—of the visual arts. Compare the average Italian church of the eighteenth century with a public building of the same time in Edinburgh. A rich façade greets your eye in Italy, a rich façade, alas, stuck on to the front of the church as though it were nothing to do with the building behind it. Now gaze at a Scottish bank or kirk or hall of the same date. The architecture goes all round the four sides, the decoration is sparse. What there
is in the form of simple mouldings or low relief is essential only to emphasise the lines of construction. Scottish architecture is the hard logic of the theological Scot in the hard stone of Scotland. It is the energy of the organising, thorough and patient Lowlander translated into a visual style. You will see it even in medieval work. St. Mungo’s Cathedral, Glasgow, is severer even than the severe Cistercian buildings of England like Fountains Abbey. Moulding, proportion, construction, no flowing carving, no fal-diddles—because of its thoughtful simplicity I find Glasgow Cathedral the most satisfying medieval cathedral in these islands, its severe serenity is alarming.

  Then suddenly, as though he said to himself, “I can’t stand this restraint any more,” the Scottish architect goes mad and produces something more wildly exuberant, more ornate and peculiar than anything to be found in England. Roslyn chapel, for instance, is a late medieval building which so flowers with carving, pendants and unbelievable riches of decoration that you might almost consider it to be a Burmese temple, were you not certain you had come out in a bus on a short journey from Edinburgh. Even in the Presbyterian kirks, the Victorian Scots sometimes let themselves go. All may be plain within, covenant-keeping fittings, bare table, towering pulpit, plain glass, grim walls and rising rows of sermon-centred pews, but suddenly the architect has said, “You may restrain me inside the kirk, but you wait till I get outside,” and all the marbles of the cliffs of Scotland will be jammed on to the front and a steeple will be built of such fantastic richness that, except for an absence of Christian symbolism in the form of cross or statued saint, it might have been conceived by the Pope of Rome himself. I think particularly of the steeple of a Presbyterian kirk at Queen’s Cross, Aberdeen. I never saw such a thing. I cannot describe its style or changing shapes as it descends in lengthening stages of silver-grey granite from the pale blue sky to the solid prosperity of its leafy suburban setting. I only know that when I tried to draw this late Victorian steeple, I gave it up at the seventh attempt. It is this mixture of the romantic and the severe that makes Scottish architecture so exciting.

  It was this anticipation of treats for the eye that drew me to Aberdeen. For even in Lowland Edinburgh there are contrasts enough. Edinburgh, that most beautiful of all the capitals of Europe, no, not excepting Rome—Edinburgh though it produced John Stuart Mill, also, thank God, gave birth to Sir Walter Scott. If Edinburgh can thrill with contrasts what, I thought, may I not expect to find in Aberdeen?—I did not know whether the Lowland Scottish genius for architecture had a Highland counterpart.

  James Gibbs, the Adam Brothers, Colin Campbell, James Stuart, “Capability Brown,” Sir William Tite, Thompson, Gibson—these are only some of the names of Classic architects who have come from Scotland to embellish England with their buildings. Inevitably many Scots became civil engineers when that science divorced itself from architecture, and the famous names of Nimmo, the Stevensons and the Rennies are among the first. For, naturally, engineering made a strong appeal to the Scottish mind, so attracted by fundamental structural principles in building.

  In the south we think of Aberdeen granite as that highly polished pink stuff which flushes the white cheeks of Metropolitan cemeteries and forms glistening shafts to Gothic Revival façades. But the granite which comes from the immediate neighbourhood of Aberdeen is grey and silver, a lovely stone, immensely durable and worked with consummate skill in the deep, shadowy quarries. The pink granite comes chiefly from Peterhead, thirty miles north of the city, and from the Island of Mull on the other side of Scotland. No one can go to Aberdeen and not become interested in granite. I shall not forget my amazement, taking the tramcar one windy day down to the sea beach for the first time and standing on a lonely shore below the tufted links which separate Aberdeen from the sea. All around me was the veined and glittering produce of the cliffs of Scotland pounded into rounds and ovals by resistless breakers. So beautiful, so varied were the stones on the beach, grey, silver, pink, red, crimson, white, green, purple, pink-red, and silver again, that for a moment it was like standing in a dream of avarice surrounded by precious stones. And then, on the tide line where the waves had washed the pebbles so that they were still wet, they glowed with an intenser colour just as the city of Aberdeen glows a deeper, richer silver after rain. I collected fifteen different sorts of granite in as many minutes.

  Granite is the strongest building stone in these islands, the hardest to shatter and the hardest to work. So hard is it that joints are hardly perceptible and a great column in such granite can be made to appear as a solid unjointed block.

  The granite called me to Aberdeen; that it was Highland and I know only Lowlands also called me, and so did the thought that the city was the birthplace of James Gibbs, the great architect of the eighteenth century, and J. N. Comper, the great church architect of today. But there was another reason for going—the excitement of seeing a place I had never visited before. I bought guides of all sorts in one of the many marvellous second-hand-book shops of Edinburgh, for old books about Aberdeen are cheap in Edinburgh and vice versa. Finally I bought a modern one so as to see what the city looked like today: there were usual photographs of crowded commercial streets, draughty promenades, bandstands and putting greens.

  From Waverley Station north and north for hours. I had not realised there was so much Scotland. The train ran on, over wide brown moors with bluely distant inland mountains and then along the edges of cliffs whose grass was a deep pre-Raphaelite green. And down steep crevices I saw rocks and fishermen’s cottages above them, but still no Aberdeen. Could there be such a thing as a great city with tramcars, electric lights, hotels, and cathedrals so far away among empty fields, so near the North Pole as we were going? In England, spring had brought the leaves out on the trees, but here the wind-swept beechwoods were bare and daffodils and primroses were freshly yellow on brown woody banks that sloped to browner, tumbling streams. And then the line curved and objects familiar to me from my guide-book illustrations came to view.

  Here was I, a filthy Saxon, alone at last in Aberdeen. My hotel had a plain grey granite front contrasting with the brown jazz-modern of its interior. I was in Aberdeen, but in this slick lounge with its leatherette and walls of empire wood and sub-Brangwyn decorations. I might just as well have been in Manchester, in Leeds or Salt Lake City. This is progress. This is inter-nationalism.

  You can never enjoy the beauty of a Western city in its shopping streets. The multiple stores which affront the dignity of Aberdeen are no less offensive than their brothers shouting out among the now unlovely buildings in Princes Street of Edinburgh. My hotel, where old-fashioned cleanliness and comfort contrasted unexpectedly with its jazzy decorations„ was in the shopping area. I would have to turn down side streets to see the real Aberdeen.

  There are three periods of building in Aberdeen—the medieval, the early nineteenth century and the modern.

  Away down the tramlines to the north, surrounded by new granite housing estates at a decent distance and on a rise above the beech-bordered meadowland of a river, stands Old Aberdeen, which has a Cathedral, a University and some Georgian houses, built of huge blocks of granite, a strange-textured place with an atmosphere of medieval and Jacobite grandeur about it, a place that really makes you feel you are in the Northernmost seat of learning, so remote, so windswept and of such a solid, grey strangeness. Here is the old King’s College of Aberdeen University and here is its chapel with a low tower from which spring ribs that support a Renaissance style crown. St. Giles’ Edinburgh and St. Nicholas’ Newcastle and St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East London have similar spired adornments. But none of these is so satisfactory as that of Aberdeen. Inside, this chapel is remarkable for its canopied stalls in dark oak, the only medieval church woodwork surviving complete in Scotland after the ravages of Knox. It is not at all like the lace-like soaring of the East Anglian woodwork, it is squat and square and rich with inventive designs through which trail wooden thistles. And to the solid architecture, designed for resisting storms
and simply designed because of the hardness of the granite from which it is made, the elaboration of this woodwork is a perfect contrast. Finally there are windows, like the rest of the chapel very early sixteenth century, of a style so curious and original as to be unlike any Gothic outside Scotland. The buttresses run up through the middle of the tracery and the arches of all the windows are round.

  Not far from King’s Chapel is St. Machar’s strange Cathedral. The west end is the thing to see; seven tall lancets of equal height flanked by square towers with no openings, and on top of each tower a dumpy spire in a style half Gothic, half Renaissance. The interior has been stripped of its plaster and ancient furnishings, except for a wooden roof of some richness, too high and dark to be visible, so that the effect of the building inside is merely one of size.

  You cannot walk back and down the main streets of Aberdeen proper (as opposed to Old Aberdeen) without being aware of the noble planning of late Georgian times: wide streets, such as Union Street, stately groups of grey granite buildings in a Grecian style, crescents on hill tops and squares behind them. These are largely the work of two architects, friendly rivals, John Smith the City Architect and Archibald Simpson. Smith was, I think, the less interesting of the two. He built in correct classic and fifteenth-century style and with granite, close-picked and single-axed so that it was tamed to carry almost as much carving of capitals and mouldings as a softer building stone. A lovely screen in Union Street, rather like that at Hyde Park Corner, is his and many a handsome classic and English Perpendicular style public building.