STONES OF HAMPSHIRE

 

Three examples of stone carving. Paradoxically the one in the youngest style is probably the oldest. (memorial plaque in the classical style) The other two date to the restoration by Scott. The floral termination to an internal window head I would classify as Decorated Gothic in style. These are just labels but it helps to structure our knowledge as long as we keep an open mind.

The font is definitely by Scott and I would suggest that he was giving a version of Norman or late Saxon. To me it's a splendid, robust, rustic form: well suited to a small rural church.

To the right of the plaque, or wall monument is one of the main timber uprights supporting the roof structure.

 

 

St Michael Heckfield. An interesting conglomerate stone called Ferricrete is used for most of the walling. Lower courses are Reading Beds Sandstone and the carved dressings around windows and doors Bath Stone. The Ferricrete can only be roughly shaped and the matrix is porous. Restoration work has filled up the joints flush and used broken pieces of tile, pushed into the surface, to stop the thick mortar from slumping.

It makes for fun patterns, but I'm guessing the original approach was to Limewash over the whole wall. Except perhaps for the Bath Stone dressings? It looks like some kind of Resin coating has been used in recent times as a modern approach to waterproofing.

 

What can I say? This strange patchwork of materials has become merged into the identity of the church. Should there be a campaign to revert to whitewashed purity? Thankfully it's not my decision. But I would like to think there is a place for strange patchwork churches like this: monuments to serendipity, as well as for others with a unity of form: frozen records of the old ways.

 

 

I spotted this building from the bus the other day. Built in the 1930s for international pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Shades of Art Deco but without the flamboyance. "During the 1930s the Town Council was promoting the town as a good place for businesses to build their factories"

That's from a small book I bought a while ago. A history of Basingstoke from the year dot. Last week I borrowed a book on Basingstoke in the 1960s from the local library. The beginnings of the London Overspill plan for the town.

Gradually piecing things together.

 

 

 

CHURCH CRAWLING

 

Rotherwick Church, visited today with two of my dearest friends. It dates back 800 years, with alterations and improvements at regular intervals ever since. Not spectacularly beautiful, but full of character, craftsmanship and texture.

There is wonderful, warm red brickwork. There is magnificent structural oak framing. There are areas of flint cobble facing with limestone ashlar trim. I love the scissor-trusses with the subtle curves at the end, supporting the nave roof.

 

So much beauty accumulated over centuries. It must reflect something valuable in the culture that spawned it. We can't just go back. Secular modernity has brought many wonderful gifts. But when I visit these churches, atheist that I am, I feel a sadness for something we have lost, but also great pride in my British cultural heritage.

 

It was splendid sunny day, ending at a country pub in Rotherwick. Typical old-style English country pub with good food and a picture of Winston Churchill over a rustic fireplace. Cliché perhaps, flawed character (like me) But that's not the point. Travelling through the villages and farms to see three old churches, take photos, discuss the experience with two dear friends. What a privelege.

 

Hartley Wespall. What wonderful names. Inside it's a Saxon Barn but with a wild flourish of artistic flair. Lavish curves playing with the tension between negative and positive space. On the outside it has been careful curated by GG Scott, the architect of St Pancras Station Hotel.

 

I am left to marvel at the fact that one of the first large commercial practices in Britain could blend respect for tradition/craft with bold intervention, on such a tiny project. It's a beautiful little church and I couldn't care less that the tower was altered dramatically in Victorian times. It holds together as an integrated whole and maintains a chain of connection to the distant past.

Etymology. Parish. Para-wick. Near the clan. Village lands. Saxon settlements walked their boundaries in a ceremonial procession.

 

ZIMBABWE CALLING

 

End of the month. I have a new system where I keep all my current images in a root folder of my OneDrive cloud storage. When the month ends, I move them into a more deeply nested folder in a hierarchy that organises everything in a structured way.

So all the diary images are about three levels deep, in groups of several years at a time, then folders for individual years, then months. For the early part of my life there aren't many images, so I just have a folder for early years, one for primary, one for secondary. Even my university years are quite sparse.

While moving my August images from the more easily accessible root folder to the correct slot in the nested hierarchy, I inevitably go down the "let's clean things up a bit" rabbit hole. This morning that took me to 1998, a year of great optimism, before Zimbabwe started to implode.

Top left uses Autocad 3d tools and a semi-render DOS package called Autovision. This was the core of a 20 storey office block, my biggest project to date and under construction in 1998. I was planning the interior decor of the core.

Top right is a project for a house extension, using a pirated copy of Archicad, which offered a faster way to produce those semi-render images, but not yet a serious contender for construction drawing packages.

Then below we have a cluster housing project that was built in Harare. 2d Autocad in which I was highly fluent. Every view separately drawn and updated in case of changes, but still a quick way to knock out this kind of project. Site photo of the same project after completion.

 

 

1999 and the biggest project of my career as principal designer. This is in the very centre of Harare and was intended to read as one in a series of office blocks by Clinton and Evans on the same short stretch of Samora Machel Avenue. The black granite and flush glazing were trademark materials.

I wanted to give this one a Zimbabwean identity, hence the chevrons and different colours of glass. I wouldn't claim that it has great architectural merit, but it works and in some way catches the spirit of the time, when the early optimism of independence was beginning to fade.

I took this project from inception to completion, almost single handedly. Autocad (DOS version) was my main tool throughout. Some use of Photoshop and MS Word to compose these pages from the letting brochure which we created for the client as part of our standard service.

I was not an experienced architect when handed this project, having taken a 16 year detour via bricklaying and teaching: finally registering as an architect at the end of 1995. So I have mixed feelings about the design . But it's part of my story and I never aspired to be an "Architect's Architect"

However, I do wonder what might have been if Zimbabwe had not imploded and I had continued to lead projects from concept design onwards. I did that for my first two small projects in Dubai, then found myself in the "production" team. On the positive side I got to be the BIM guru for almost 20 years but that's another story.