THREE CHURCHES

Bus to Laverstoke, or rather Freefolk, which is just beyond. Historically dominated by the Portal family who ran a paper mill that supplied the Bank of England. Seems like there is always a connection to my previous work. That mill is now making Gin, but that's another story.

There are two churches, on opposite sides of the road, both a short and pleasant walk from the bus stop. The old church is small and only semi-active but kept in excellent condition by the Churches Conservation Trust. It really is a magical place, straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel.

There are monthly services so it hasn't quite been reduced to a museum piece. It also benefits from being close to the more active church and I'm sure held in great regard by that congregation. The larger church was built by the Portals in late Victorian times. The composition is impressive with a fine tower, centred between East and West ends, but offset to the south so that it dominates the massing as you approach.

 

 

I look forward to many more of these bus&walk trips as I spend more time in UK and flesh out the Revit-map I have developed with first hand experience of the buildings and their contexts. This pair gives a really insightful glimpse into a community starting to experience the transition from rural subsistence to mechanised production and global trade. It's right there in the images of the two churches if you care to look for it.

One church is very simple and unassuming, domestic in scale. The other shows a sudden leap in size and confidence. A carefully composed work of architectural expression. Frozen history, right there.

 

Bus trip. Church no 3. St Mary, Overton. The nave pillars are Norman, the rest a variety of ages and styles. Approaching from the town, the road dips down to the river Test, with buildings of a former paper mill on the right, now converted to residential use.

Following the road as it winds around I passed the cricket ground on the left with the church looming ahead up on a ridge. Really a splendid setting, dramatised by the walk. It was accessible, inside and out so I could take lots of pictures and pause for a moments meditation, sitting alone in the nave. 

 

Located discreetly behind the church is a modern extension : basically a community centre. All around quite a large graveyard sloping away from the building. I hope this means that the church has an active future, stretching away like the fields. In times of stress and tension elsewhere it would be good to feel that there are signs of stability and continuity here in the heart of old England.

 

 

All saints Deane. This is an interesting one. It's Gothic Revival, but early... Georgian in fact. So it's contemporary with Soane's London churches. It's more of a faux Gothick, a hybrid with a mixture of pointed arches and classical mouldings. Of course Soane himself occasionally built in the Gothic style but reluctantly, under pressure and with little conviction.

I'm trying to imagine myself as an architect of that era, with three centuries of commitment to the classical idiom behind me, representing the belief in rationality, modern science. Around me, the beginnings of industrial production, an energy transition (coal fired steam engines) global trade. Picturesque has become a thing. Playing with styles witnessed by those globe trotters and disseminated by an ever expanding printing and publishing enterprise. 

 

What style to use? No surprise if I decided that churches should be Gothic and government buildings classical. It probably seemed liberating. Creative freedom. No hint of the "anything goes" confusion that might be coming down the road as styles proliferated.

P.S. note the HaHa. The church is in Deane Park, a country estate.

 

 

 

CHURCH-HOUSE-SCHOOL

 

Images from my morning walk two days ago. This is a well-to-do area with some large houses, probably architect-designed. Then there is this little grouping of semi-detached dwellings, looking a bit younger and not quite so grand as their neighbours. All the same I think they are privately owned and have a fairly high market value.

What intrigues me is the way that garages are provided separately, grouped around a little cul-de-sac at one end of the development. This is quite common in some of the higher density suburbs of Basingstoke built under the London Overspill Plan. So what is going on?

Is this an architect /developer buying in to the philosophy of communal space that was current in the sixties? Do people actually use these garages? Most of their neighbours have private driveways and garages boast two, three or even four cars. And their gardens have much higher levels of privacy.

Times change and styles come and go. Sometimes this happens in a smooth, natural, organic way. Sometimes it's more of a top-down, ideologically driven thing. For most of my life I have felt that the architectural profession is out of touch with ordinary people and gripped by a narrow ideology.

It's not that I dislike this little group of houses. But there is something false about the forced communality of the garages and the unused open space at the opposite end. Do people use this? Why are there no bench seats, picnic tables, play equipment?

Just walking around, looking and thinking.

 

I had to take at least one trip out on the bus to a neighbouring town or village and visit one of the churches in my Hampshire study. The simplest one turned out to be Hook. Two churches, a bit of a walkabout, fish & chips wrapped in paper while seated in nice old bus shelter with a tiled roof, and back to base.

The Catholic Church was OK. Concrete portal-frame shed, with brick-arched facade. If we go by Pevsner's dictum (or is it a spectrum?) about bicycle sheds and Cathedrals, it just about sneaks over the bar into the architecture category. I'm sure it serves its purpose admirably.

St. John the Evangelist is another matter. Both the 1937 original and the recent extension have considerable architectural interest. The whole ambience is quite delightful. And I was fortunate to bump into a former church warden who pointed out a number of shortcomings and blunders, most of them structural. Tie beams have been added that block the view of the rose window. Round columns in the extension look great but impede circulation.

 

Edward Maufe was an interesting character, born Muff, he was related to Titus Salt, the textile magnate who built Saltaire. At 17 he was sent down to London for a five year apprenticeship and his parents followed soon after, living in the Red House, originally built for William Morris.

His architecture reminds me of Giles Gilbert Scott, clearly influenced by ancient traditions, by the arts and crafts movement and trying also to adapt to the Modern Movement. Whatever the practical shortcomings of the church in Hook it made a very positive impression on me. It fits into the context of a small Hampshire town, respects a centuries old tradition, but acknowledges the onset of a new industrial era.

The simple dogtooth detail down the corners of the internal window reveals is delightful. So do you prefer dull and practical, or magical but flawed? I know where I stand.

 

Last time I went to Basingstoke public library was when my first round of prostate issues really kicked in. That was winter time so it was somewhere to meet up in the warm. I wanted to go again and take another look at the local history section. Could be a regular haunt once I move back permanently.

 I stumbled across a newspaper feature on Fairfields school which is five minutes walk away. I've been interested in board schools since forever. In the north they were often stone and Gothic Revival. Down south this red brick freestyle classical was the done thing.

 

 

I'm always amazed by how simple the plans look. The way these Victorian architects could develop the massing into a rich composition seems like sleight of hand. Flemish bond and panels of flint: very Hampshire.

I haven't been inside to see what adaptations have been made over the years, but it's impressive that this school building is still in use almost 150 years down the line. I wonder how many award-winning modern schools will achieve that?

 

 

 

TRACING GOTHIC

 

BIM sketch version of St Michael, Basingstoke. This is a Revit family helping me to understand the basic massing of a medieval church. It's part of a much larger study of Hampshire Churches, still in its early stages. "I do and I understand"... the way that I have approached drawing for 70 years. Physical, digital, 2d, 3d, geometry, data. It applies to all of the above.

This is just extrusions. Some solid, some void, maybe half a dozen in total. As long as it remains a family it will be lightweight with data attached that can be scheduled to compare a series of churches. So it's a thinking tool with future extensibility. Like me "not just a pretty picture" 🤔

 

The signs of organic growth over many years are unmistakable. Differences of materials in roof and walls. I love the chequer-board flint and stone. I've spotted some misinterpretation by me already. We learn by our mistakes.

It strikes me that St Michael's could be a metaphor for Basingstoke, the London Overspill town, with its patchwork splicing together of old and new. Picturesque, not in an overly pretty way but in a messy-but-fun, lived-in kind of way. I'm exploring and learning every day. And then I will be back in Dubai, with time to reflect.

 

Just a short stroll outside the front gate of my apartment block, and looking down at my feet of course. Four different kerb details. Their must be some kind of history to this but could well be impossible to retrieve.

Let's just say that new houses have been built, new services laid, pavements resurfaced, patched up, driveways spliced in. Roads and footpaths are asphalt throughout. Easy to patch up and refresh I suppose. Kerbs starting top left and going clockwise as follows.

Basic precast concrete with a mitred corner. Seems to be the newest. Next is a stone-on-edge kerb with a flat stone gutter. I think that's the oldest. Now comes a concrete kerb with a red concrete-brick border. A token break with functionalism perhaps. And finally another stone kerb. Granite this time, I think, and a hefty cross section.

I'm guessing that the road was once stone cobbles, and the pavement flagstones. There may be fragments somewhere, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. There are some places with concrete pavers and traffic calming measures at side-streets in a variety of materials.

I'd better leave it there.

 

 

I would call this a first stumbling venture into the darkness. I have some kind of idea what's going on with this example of Gothic tracery but not enough to set about recreating it methodically, with a sureness of hand and eye.

It's always like this for me with something new. I do my best to follow a logical process but at some point it gets away from me and I just try to keep going as best I can. Simplifying and approximating. Hoping to learn something by my mistakes.

Often enough by the third or fourth attempt it becomes much easier. I find it hard to remember what was so puzzling. Let's hope that I reach that point with Gothic tracery, or at least with this one rather simple example from St Michael's Basingstoke.

In Revit terms this began as a detail item, tracing over one of the photos I took last year. It's not exactly tracing because the image hasn't been rectified. So even here I am starting to estimate and simplify, to predict what the inner logic is going to be when I understand it better. Then I "correct for prediction error". I'm putting this in the language of cognitive science. That seems to be how brains and bodies work, at a largely subconscious level.

 

The detail item is just a tentative skeleton, with extra drafting in places. I needed to move into three dimensions to make further progress. So it's loaded into a generic model family and placed on the "front" view. From here on its mostly sweeps. The profiles are sketched in place for now. Just feeling my way into it.

There's a lot of overlapping geometry. I will consider how best to clean that up in a future iteration. Right now I'm happy to say it's starting to look the part. Pathways are forming in my conscious and subconscious brain. The journey has begun.

This is digital modelling in Revit. Very different from a stone mason's setting out. But it's a way for me to begin to imagine the accumulation of artistry over several centuries as Christian Europe rebuilt itself in the aftermath of the Roman empire and the break in continuity of the classical tradition.

Gothic tracery. A metaphor for the birth pangs of Western Europe?

 

I had a really productive morning yesterday. A LinkedIn post, a walk in the park, clean Kitchen, make coffee. Those should be the everyday routine starters but I don't always hit all the marks.

I got the bus into town. Shopping, visited the medical practice where I have registered, dropped off some records from my oncologist in Dubai, post office... Those are all important items on my to do list as the clock runs down on this visit.

I was just in time to get to St Michael's and go inside. That was a first. I now have shots from both sides of the the window I am using as the starting point for my tracery study. At first glance it's remarkably similar, inside and out. Not sure what I was expecting.

 

Compared to the 19th century church I attended at the beginning of this visit, St Michael's is very obviously not the product of a single mind. It.has grown in an additive way over several generations.

I'm thinking of three phases, maybe three evolutionary stages in our approach to Gothic (the pointed architecture) St Michael's belongs to phase one, a slow unfolding of ideas, styles, capabilities, belief. All Saints would be phase two. The style resurrected, extended, transformed. Applied to a new mechanical age. And we are in phase 3. The conservation, interpretation, worship of a lost past. Several lost pasts.

You might call them the manual, mechanical, and digital eras perhaps. With great power comes loss of innocence, loss of belief maybe. But the buildings remain. Still calling to something deep within us. And I stumble blindly on. Still trying to understand.