St Peter, Barton upon Humber

click photo to enlarge

When I was studying the history of architecture the church shown above was invariably the second most cited example of an English Anglo-Saxon (Romanesque) parish church, after Earl's Barton, Northamptonshire. Other churches of this period were sometimes illustrated and discussed, particularly the examples at Brixworth (Northamptonshire), Sompting (Sussex), Stow (Lincolnshire), Escomb and Monkwearmouth (Durham) and Greensted (Essex), but the two "Bartons" were the most frequently chosen exemplars. These two buildings perhaps best illustrate the widest range of characteristics of Anglo-Saxon architecture: simple, rounded arched windows often with baluster shafts; triangular headed windows; small, splayed, circular windows; mid-wall shafts with arched and zig-zag bands; corner lesenes (long and short work); very narrow chancel and tower arches, and crudely formed arched- or pointed-headed doorways with large lumps of stone in place of classical elements. Barton upon Humber also shows the simple, three-cell plan with axial tower derived from Byzantine precedents.

The current arrangement of St Peter's, Barton upon Humber, is two thirds of  the original Anglo-Saxon church with a large medieval addition that dwarfs the early work. To see it as it was when first built in the late 900s we have to visually remove the top stage of the tower (late eleventh century). We must also remove the mass of building to the east of the tower (mid fourteenth and fifteenth century) and in its place imagine a chancel no bigger than the baptistery/porticus we see on the west of the tower (the left of the photograph). This small building, the base of the tower serving as the nave, lasted unchanged for probably less than a hundred years. A larger eastward extension with an apsidal-ended chancel was built in the late eleventh century. This was swept away for a bigger nave and chancel in the twelfth century. However, this too lasted a mere hundred or so years before the present structure was built.

St Peter no longer functions as a parish church and is in the care of English Heritage, a body who through their excavations and renovations have discovered much about the life of this venerable building. However, the parochial needs of the small town are not neglected because a few hundred feet away from St Peter's stands St Mary's, Barton upon Humber's second medieval church. It is reasonably common to find more than one ancient church in an English town, but it is most unusual in a settlement as small as Barton upon Humber.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.00 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Clouds, letters and imagination

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"Clouds That Look Like Things" is the very accurate title of book available from the Cloud Appreciation Society*. The photographs for the publication were supplied by Society members and come from all over the world. Flying saucers, fish, dragons, people - you name it and someone, somewhere has probably photographed a cloud that, with a little imagination, looks like it. When you think about it, it's quite an obvious subject for a book. Who, as a child, hasn't stared at the clouds and seen the profile of a face, the outline of a castle, a bird or some other shape momentarily formed then slowly dissipating into an amorphous, cotton wool-like mass? If you're like me you see such things still.

But, as I discovered the other day, sometimes clouds, like people, feel the need to break the chains of their everyday existence and venture into situations new and challenging. I was photographing the "Water's Edge" visitor centre in Barton upon Humber, Lincolnshire. I'd taken shots inside the building, and I was looking for some of the exterior. One end of the building has a very prow-like canopy that reaches out to an area of tarmac where cars can be parked. I walked away from the building, turned round, put on my wide-angle lens and raised the camera to my eye. Immediately, what hadn't been apparent in my unencumbered field of view, suddenly became very obvious within the confines of the viewfinder. Clouds were forming the letter "Z" in the sky. More than that, they were making it right next to what, with a little imagination, was the letter "A". What a fortuitous conjunction - A to Z! What are the chances? Why have I never seen anything like it before? Perhaps, I thought, these were rogue clouds, clouds that wanted to extend their aerial art by combining it with earthly shapes. Perhaps the "letters" in my photograph are forerunners, the avant garde, the shape of things to come.

*I am a proud member with a certificate, number and badge to prove it!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/500 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Humber Bridge

click photos to enlarge

For the 16 year period from its opening in 1981 until 1997 the Humber Bridge was the world's longest single span suspension bridge. It is currently the sixth longest though apparently retains first place among the longest suspension bridges that you can cross on foot or by bicycle! I've never crossed it on foot but I've done so several times on a bike.

During the years that the Humber Bridge was built we lived in the city of Hull (as Kingston upon Hull is more generally known) which is to the east of the northern point of the span. Before the bridge's completion the River Humber presented a barrier that could be crossed only by passenger ferry or by road via a circuitous detour of many miles, both of which we enjoyed and endured. The rationale for this major construction was to promote a wider area of economic activity that embraced both banks of the river. That never really happened. One reason was the debt that was incurred to construct the crossing, a figure that over the years grew instead of falling. An initial cost of £98 million had, by 1998, reached the enormous sum of £360 million. Despite write-offs it was still £333 million in 2008. It was the size of this debt that caused toll charges to be unfeasibly high. And, of course, high toll charges deterred many potential users, reducing income and making any reduction of the debt impossible. However, in 2011 the government agreed to write off a further £150 million. This allowed the toll for a single crossing to be halved from £3.00 to £1.50, a change that was implemented on 1st April 2012. It remains to be seen if this has any effect in terms of increasing traffic and promoting additional economic activity in the region or whether it is just too little too late. From a personal point of view it makes our visits to Hull a little less expensive than they were.

I took today's photographs from the "Water's Edge" visitor and business centre on the south bank of the river at Barton upon Humber. The smaller image is a crop of a shot taken with a lens at 300mm. As I was writing this piece I remembered that I'd posted a shot of the bridge in the early days of the blog. Here it is. I recall being particularly proud of the title I chose for this one!

photograph and text © T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 20mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1250 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Glass blocks and connections

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Earlier this year we visited Peterborough Museum. It had re-opened after undergoing a refurbishment and very interesting it was too. The building itself started life in 1816 as a fine Georgian mansion but its time as a private residence was relatively short-lived because in 1857 it became the city's first hospital, a role that it fulfilled until 1928. The operating theatre from those days remains and is now an exhibit within the museum. When we entered that room with its white tiled walls, sinks, stainless steel and utilitarian atmosphere I was reminded, fairly appropriately I thought, of some late Victorian and early twentieth century butchers' shops. The easily cleaned surfaces from which blood could readily be swilled were very similar. The other thing that came to mind was the kind of clinical-looking modern kitchens that fill the pages of some magazines.

Connections of this kind are a very strong influence on what people buy and on how they view things. For example, I could never buy a pair of grey trousers because they would remind me too much of the uniform that I had to wear as a schoolboy. It was associations and how they affect how we see the world that came to mind on a recent visit to Water's Edge, Barton upon Humber. This fairly new Lincolnshire building combines a visitor centre and offices on land next to the River Humber. It is an aggressively modern design that, in places, makes use of glass blocks (sometimes called glass bricks). I've written elsewhere in this blog about my liking for these blocks. At Water's Edge they have been used to form short sections of north-facing walls. The regular grid, subdued light transmission, and translucence that simplifies the outside view making it a semi-abstract experience, drew the photographer in me. I took a shot of the wall, then realising that the irregularity of the human form would make a good contrast to the regularity of the grid, I asked my wife to stand in front of it.

As we wandered off to take shots of the Humber Bridge I reflected once more that there isn't enough use made of these blocks in Britain, and perhaps that's associational. They found some use in the 1950s, often in places such as bus stations, public toilets, the stairwells of flats and such like. Less often were they used in private houses (except determinedly modern higher cost examples) or for their decorative qualities rather than their utility. Perhaps those early uses coloured people's view of glass blocks and that memory will have to fade before they can be more widely adopted.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 36mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Police stations new and old

click photo to enlarge

Ever since I started to take an interest in architectural history, about forty years ago, I've compared buildings. Take town halls. These are invariably made to look imposing and designed to ornament the community in which they are located. They are a visible symbol of civic values and pride. Architectural styles and fashions come and go, and town halls reflect these changes. I've seen excellent town halls, mediocre examples, and some that are downright terrible. You'd think the same would be true of police stations given that they originate from the same public procurement processes. Yet, as far as Britain goes, it's unusual to see a good police station and all too common to see a bad one.This is partly because many date from the period when Britain had a spell of building new, bigger police stations - the late 1960s and 1970s. Examples from this time often exhibit the worse fashion of those years: raw, shuttered concrete, acres of barren paving, grim glass walls, main entrances that are hidden from view, and flat roofs topped by excrescences - lift gear rooms, flag poles and multiple aerials. I remember particularly dour examples in Morecambe and Blackpool, Lancashire.

The other day I came across a police station from a much earlier time, 1847 to be precise. It was in the small Lincolnshire town of Barton upon Humber and it currently serves as the premises of a veterinary surgeon. However, the main entrance doorway boldly proclaims (sans one letter) its original purpose. It is made of brick laid using the Flemish bond (alternating headers and stretchers) with stone dressing round doors and windows and a Welsh slate roof. The main entrance is flanked by windows and at each side a wing projects forwards, single storey on the left, two storey on the right.The building is not, overall, a thing of beauty. But, the section with the main entrance, shown above, has a certain simple charm. What prompted my photograph was the paving, seating and planting, some work of recent years, and the way it complements the symmetry and regularity of the building. As I looked at the building I reflected that the original door would almost certainly not be the strong red that it is today, was more probably dark blue, perhaps black, or some other reserved or muted colour, but definitely benefited from the louder hue.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Kingsforth Windmill, Barton on Humber

click photo to enlarge

The first house we bought was quite old and so to smarten it up we quickly set about painting the main downstairs rooms. However, despite taking great care in the choice and application of paint, we found that on one ceiling it dried, cracked and then flaked, peeling back from the surface. Someone more experienced told us that it must have been painted with distemper, a form of whiting or whitewash, a paint based on chalk or lime, widely used in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. There was nothing to do but remove all the new paint and old distemper, and get right back to the original plaster surface. It was an arduous task.

What has this to do with my photograph of the remaining tower of Kingsforth windmill in Barton on Humber, Lincolnshire? Well, during the first part of its life as a working mill, as well as grinding the usual corn it had an additional pair of vertical edge runner stones that produced Paris Whiting from local chalk. This was the best grade of whiting with uses in putty making as well as the production of whitewash and distemper. But, whether due to changing fashion, newer technology, or some other reason, the production of whiting ceased in 1859, though corn milling continued until 1950.

Kingsforth windmill is a tall, tower mill with an ogee cap,  a type common in Lincolnshire. It dates from around 1800, was erected on the site of an earlier windmill, and is unusual in having chalk rubble between the brick walls. The black finish is pitch, designed to improve the weather protection, something that is also widespread in the eastern counties. A granary building is attached to the tower which today houses a pub, "The Old Mill". The mill itself originally had six sails. However, when one blew off in 1868 the power for milling was changed to the town's gas supply. Consequently, the view that we see today is the one seen for most of the windmill's life. I quickly took a photograph as we passed by. But, as we continued on our way a Royal Mail worker delivering letters on a bicycle came by, adding a little local colour and making for a more interesting and better balanced composition.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 32mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On