CHURCHES IN CONTEXT

 

St Lawrence, Ecchinswell by Bodley and Garner 1885. Both partners were former pupils in GG Scott’s office. They specialised in Ecclesiastical work across a broad area of England and had connections to William Morris. The continuous sweep of the tiled roof is quite distinctive, with a subtle change of pitch over the aisles.

My technique continues to develop. Here the windows are created as recessed and a glass material painted on. Sizes are all guessed. It will benefit from a second pass. The porch-tower is quite distinctive with its steep, shingles spire and louvred bell chamber.

 

 

The village still contains a few timber framed, thatched houses, giving a feel for how things were in the late Medieval period before the old church collapsed. I have no information on the design of this previous church, but suspect it was quite different.

 

Kingsclere dates back to the time of King Alfred. A clearing in the Royal forest that became a medieval market town. The current church is recognisably Norman, with a perpendicular South-East chapel. I modeled it from a Google Earth plan and a few photos, then found a floor plan at the last minute while looking for background on the village.

 

All in all it’s not too bad. I made the nave a tad too wide and didn’t even try to show the bent axis. I will make some adjustments on second pass. The church is cruciform, flint walls with ashlar dressings like most of the Hampshire Churches. Thick walls small round headed openings.  Classic Norman solidity.

Some of the houses in the street shot seem quite old, and the whole composition is delightfully wonky and picturesque. Definitely worth a visit. I like the triple chimneys twisted at 45 degrees to the brickwork below.

 

 

TWO MORE CHURCHES

 St James Woodcott, first pass. It’s a small single-cell church with a “bell turret” at least that’s what Historic England calls it.  Simplest form of housing for a church bell.  There are a few of these in my study area, but not very common.  1853 no architect given.  I’m not sure I can get to this one by bus, some arm-twisting may be called for.  There are farms at Upper & Lower Woodcott about a kilometre apart and a handful of houses between..  So it’s a sparsely populated farming area a little to the south of Highclere, visible no doubt from the iron-age settlement on Beacon Hill

 

 

Time to look at some towers without spires. I will start with the Church of the Ascension at Bughclere, a small village around 1900 which has expanded greatly since. The church is from 1838 by George Guillaume of Southampton, a cruciform plan with a substantial tower at the West End.  The choir and vestry were added a little later.  Using the schedules and sorting by the Architect field, I was able to quickly identify two more churches by Guillaume, one in Southampton and the other just outside.  There are common stylistic elements, in particular the hammerbeam roof trusses internally, and the use of slate roofing. Nothing about him on Wikipedia, but I found a book of architectural views of Netley Abbey on Abe Books that he produced in 1848. So he had an interest in researching architectural history using the same tools and skills with which he earned his living.  A connection there.

 

The collection of modular families is gradually expanding, as is my understanding of how best to approach these massing models.  Let’s keep going.  As always a big shout out to GAJ for rescuing me from Zimbabwe, backing my enthusiasm for Revit and helping me plan a soft landing into some kind of “retirement zone”

 

 

Working the Burghclere model up to the next level.  First get the roof material right or at least in the right ballpark. It’s blue-grey slate, not orange clay tile.  Then add some slots and a clock to the bell tower. What is not so obvious here is a change in tactics for gable ends.  Instead of having a single vetical extrusion for the nave & chancel then adding a triangular bit for the gable, I deleted the “wall” at the east end and extended the horizontal extrusion for the gable right down to the ground.  Not the face-based family for the window can sit nicely anywhere on that east wall.  That should be the standard tactic from here on in.

You can see the hammer-beam roof that is typical Guillaume in the interior view.  It’s kind of fake. There is a tie beam right across, so it’s pretty much a queen-post truss with decorative additions. Also the choir screen in similar dark wood.  Perpendicular style east window by the way.  My version is not parametric in any way. Seems like wasted effort to figure that out. After all, once you add some tracery it’s going to become even more ridiculous to try to control it all with parameter.  Much easer to treat it as a one-off and just draw the void cut directly.

 

 

 

PUTTING HIGHCLERE ON THE MAP

 

Further refinement of my massing models of Hampshire churches. Two churches here. On the right is my second pass at St Michael, Highclere.  A snapshot from the map shows that this was built just outside the Highclere estate, on the road leading to the village. You can also see that the village has doubled in size since 1900.  Highclere Castle is located in the middle of the park, facing North (which is downhill) with woodland and lakes along the northern edge and the entrance road meandering down the hill towards the entrance gates to the North-West.

There are ruins of an earlier church close to the Castle (known to many as the location for the Downton Abbey TV series)  The present church dates from 1870, a classic example of High Victorian Gothic Revival by the celebrated architect George Gilbert Scott who ran a large successful office and founded a family dynasty. He is well known for the wonderful curved frontage of St Pancras Station in London which was my point of arrival in London when travelling from Sheffield in my twenties and a favourite place just a short walk from University College when I as a student.

 

 

As the work progressed I start to realise that I was using too may voids as shown on the top-left image. This is St Mary & St John the Baptist, Newtown, at first glance very similar to Highclere. But here the dominant tower with Broach Spire is placed at the West end, doubling as an entrance porch, whereas Scott places his similar tower at the junction of chancel and nave. Both churches have a triplet of lancet openings at the belfry level of the tower, louvred to reject rain while allowing the sound of the bells to ring out towards the village.

The second image shows my folder of source material for Highclere. I have more than 400 hundred folders like this, arranged in  a Hierarchical structure by deanery and benefice.  A lot of work, but it’s starting to come together now as I see churches in context of village and manor house with the ability to compare and contrast the basic design elements.

 

 

 

Second pass of St James the Less, Litchfield and third pass at GG Scott’s church and Highclere.  Rather different in scale and grandeur, but both built with flint walling and plain clay tile roofs.  These are the vernacular materials of the Hampshire downs although thatch was once the main roofing material. I suppose that clay was comparatively rare in the chalk downlands and thatching reeds common in an era of small village settlements.

I think these massing models are probably at about the right level of development now.  I will be able to classify the major elements and make comparisons across larger groups of churches.  I created a family to represent buttresses. Fairly crude, but they do the job.

 

 

A slightly larger snapshot of the Revit map reveals some interesting points. Two iron age hillforts on the high ground that runs across the middle of this image. These are very common in my chosen study area, much more than I had expected.  So the map records history from pre-Roman times to the present day. The Sandham Memorial Chapel at top centre dates to 1926 and was built expressly to house a series of large paintings by Stanley Spencer a controversial artist who painted religious scenes as if they took place in the rural countryside in the top right corner of this image.  The paintings at Sandham are like renaissance frescoes and reference the devastating impact of the First World War on Spencer’s generation.

There are 4 victorian churches here and one each of medieval, Georgian and modern.  This surely represents the impact of the industrial revolution: population and wealth rising together across England.  This is not to suggest that the ordinary people has a fair share in the wealth but landowners and industrialists did feel the need to invest in public goods including churches and often improved housing for workers.  Very different times.

 

Finally I will note the existence of common land, often with shared grazing rights, a hangover from the feudal period before enclosures, dissolution of monasteries and the privatisation of farming land. I remember all this from my schooldays and am trying to update my understanding of the history as I continue the work. Common land could be heath, moorland or marsh. In this case with have rolling hills including Watership Down which inspired the fantasy novel of 1972 later adapted into an animated film.  Looking this up on my phone now it seems that it is both a very effective children’s story with environmental themes and an allegory of the Second World War.

So there we go. Working away in Revit, taking technical decisions, overcoming difficulties, reflecting on the history and geography of an area with centuries of cultural development, millennia in fact when the hillforts are factored in.