Bridge End Garden, Saffron Walden

click photo to enlarge
Bridge End Garden in Saffron Walden, Essex, was largely created in the 1840s by the Gibsons, a wealthy Quaker family with links to banking and brewing. Unusually, it didn't adjoin their residential property and they would have had to walk a short distance to enjoy its beauty.

The Garden is subdivided into seven smaller, themed areas that include a Dutch garden, maze, rose garden and kitchen garden. It features a number of carved plaques and statues that date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some made of Coade stone. A brick pavilion and a larger summer house also remain from the 1840s. Given the distance between the family home and their garden these small buildings would have been not only pleasant places to sit but also essential places of retreat from inclement weather.

The gardens suffered a gentle decline during the twentieth century and towards the end of that period were in need of attention. In 2003 a major programme of restoration was undertaken by the local community with the help of Heritage Lottery Funding and sums from other charitable bodies. Over a five year period a transformation was achieved. The aim was to return the gardens to very much the condition they exhibited at their flourishing best. So, species were planted that were available in the 1840s and the restoration of the built fabric was undertaken with sensitivity to the original materials. The kitchen garden restoration was part of the second phase of work and two Victorian-style greenhouses were installed. One of these has soft fruits such as peaches, nectarines and apricots, the other features citrus fruits such as orange, lemon and lime. Part of one of the greenhouses is used to grow annuals to display in the newly constructed plant theatre.

The gardens are open to the public, free, and offer much of interest to the visitor. They are a fine example of what can be achieved by the goodwill, effort and imagination of a community working together for a common and shared goal.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 47mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/40 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Plant Theatres and Wikipedia

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I remember reading somewhere, a while ago, that it's possible to download all of Wikipedia (minus the images). Apparently it comes to about 10 gigabytes of data. That piece of information came in the context of an article about schools in parts of the world where there is no internet access. It seems some are putting the file on a hard drive that pupils at workstations around the school can access. It sounds like a good idea.

I've been impressed by Wikipedia since its inception. I like the idea that underpins the website - that people with an interest or knowledge of a subject can write an article about it and that others can edit it: that there are certain standards against which the articles are measured, yet incomplete articles can be posted and are marked as such: and that the project manages to be both successful and accurate without the involvement of a traditional publisher, university or established producer of encyclopedias. There are a few people who remain sniffy about its accuracy, the range of subjects it covers, etc, but the fact is it compares very well with commercial offerings on every count and is far more extensive than any other encyclopedia. I rarely go to Wikipedia in search of information about a subject and fail to find something useful.

But, it happened the other day! I wanted to find out a little more about Plant Theatres and I discovered that there is no Wikipedia article on the subject nor are there references to plant theatres in other articles - at least not to the kind of plant theatre that I had in mind. Today's photograph is one that I took in Bridge End Gardens, Saffron Walden, Essex. It shows a large, outdoor plant theatre. Such a device is invariably a tiered arrangement of shelves, often, as here, in a frame or "proscenium arch", designed to show off pot plants. They were popular in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a number of European countries and were particularly used to display Primula auriculas. Smaller examples were used indoors or in glasshouses. The plant theatre shown is a larger version, outdoors in a walled garden and holds a variety of plants that are arranged, you will notice, symmetrically.

The web is a wonderful thing and has a happy knack of producing what people want. I will be interested to discover whether my blog post triggers a Wikipedia article about plant theatres because it appears that one is needed. I'll check periodically to find out.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 32mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Kitchens old and new

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I don't keep abreast of fashion in interior design: it changes too often for the flimsiest of reasons for my liking. However, interior design - in fact design of all kinds - and the way it has changed down the centuries and decades is something that does interest me. I have the feeling, from my admittedly limited experience, that the aesthetic inspiration for many of today's cutting edge kitchens is the mortuary or perhaps the operating theatre. All those easy-clean surfaces of black and white tiles and stainless steel put one in mind of places where flesh is opened and saw meets bone. There was a time in the Victorian period when a similar approach was taken to kitchen design. In large country houses they were often laid out with ergonomics, industrial scale food preparation and easy maintenance in mind. Rows of Belfast sinks, scrubbable hardwood surfaces, serried ranks of utensils, heavily tiled floors and walls and enormous cooking ranges all suggest a similar kind of utilitarian rationale underlying their construction.

I was in one such kitchen recently. It is at Audley End, a large country house of the Elizabethan period and later, near Saffron Walden in Essex. The building is owned by English Heritage, is open to the public, and often offers activities in the Victorian-period service wing. This group of rooms features a kitchen, pastry larder, cook's room, servants' hall (now the restaurant), meat safe, game larder, coal shed, scullery, dry larder, wet laundry, dry laundry, dairy maid's sitting room, dairy and dairy scullery. In the house's heyday these would be filled with servants of many ranks and job descriptions producing all the food, washing and other services that were needed to keep the owners of the house, their family and their guests in the comfort and style that they felt they deserved. Today English Heritage stages reconstructions of some of these activities with, for example, staff in period costume making bread or other food using the implements available in the kitchen.

Today's smaller photograph shows one of these re-enactments. In the main photograph you can see all the shelves that can be glimpsed on the left of the smaller image. The rows of gleaming copper pans, shiny silver serving dish covers and the  contrast of the white of the pottery on the plain wooden shelves made an interesting composition for a photograph.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11.8mm (32mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 500
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The sanitized past

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Much of the past that is presented to us in film and television, print and the web is a heavily sanitized version of reality, a past that is made more acceptable for modern consumption by being scrubbed clean and tidied. This is especially so with regard to heritage sites. There are a number of factors that give rise to this. Much of what remains was the property of the rich, is durable, designed to be visually attractive, and consequently over-represents their part in history. The remaining artefacts and homes of the poor are much fewer, less substantial, and are invested with less ornament. Unlike the rich, the remains of the past's poor frequently lacks a written narrative or primary sources that allow a detailed story to be woven around it. History is written by the victors, and the victors were invariably the rich.

England's National Trust has often been criticised for their lack of representation of the poor in the properties that it owns and chooses to receive or buy. It has responded to this by attempting to show the lives of servants in country houses as well as those of the owners, and by giving greater emphasis to the everyday activities - cooking, cleaning, gardening etc - alongside the usual interpretation of the building, art, sculpture and furniture. To further counter this criticism the Trust has also acquired a wider range of properties, including, for example, Southwell workhouse. For some critics, however, the final product looks like tokenism. Stephen Bayley has called it, "Disneyfication" and "intellectual slumming".

Today's photograph shows the inside of a large kitchen at Audley End, a Jacobean country house in Essex. This building, like most of its kind, was modified by successive owners. The kitchen presented here dates from the Victorian era. It looks quite a sight with its large, blacked range, white tiles,  glowing copper pans and rustic basket. What's missing of course is the army of servants engaged in hours of drudgery, using the range and pans to prepare meals and burnishing it between times. In fairness to English Heritage, who are now the custodians of this building, staff in period costume do make an attempt to show something of this. It does, however, like most re-enactments, come across as all rather jolly fun rather than a daily grind of long hours and hard work.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 27mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/15
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Yew hedges and country houses

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A couple of weeks ago I was cutting my side of a conifer hedge that separates part of our garden from a neighbour's. It's about 10 feet high and 50 yards or so long. It took me and my wife a morning of hard work to accomplish the task. My relatively light travails came to mind the other day during my visit to Audley End House in Essex as we took a break from our journey down to London. When I got my first glimpse of the Jacobean country house I was impressed - by the size, symmetry and setting of the building - but moreso by the fine yew hedge that stretched diagonally forward from one end of the main facade.

The hedge must be about 15 feet tall, very wide and many yards long. It is cut in the "bumpy", abstract style that is favoured by many country house gardeners. One often sees topiarised yews and geometrically cut yew hedges in such settings, but frequently these cyclopean hedges feature too. Often they act as screens separating areas of garden or block views that offer little of interest or perhaps an eyesore. At Audley End it serves to mask the hotch-potch of service buildings - kitchen, dairy, laundry etc - from visitors as they approach the front of the house. The hedge, unusually, isn't wholly yew, a few other evergreen shrubs have been allowed to intermingle.

As yew hedges go it's one of the biggest I've come across. Not as big though as this example at Montacute House in Somerset that takes 4 gardeners three months to cut! For a couple more examples of this kind of hedge see this Spalding, Lincolnshire example and this one at Melbourne, Derbyshire.

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Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Greensted Church, a wooden survivor

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Architectural historians the length and breadth of Britain know of Greensted church in Essex. I've been familiar with it through books for thirty odd years, but only got to visit it a few days ago. What makes this church so famous (if any parish church can be said to be so)? Well, it is the only surviving example in Britain of a type that in Saxon times was widespread - the log church.

The nave walls of Greensted church are made of 51 oak logs cut lengthwise. Grooves in the sides of the logs took long tongues of wood that sealed any gaps. The logs had tenons at the base to slot into a wooden sill (now replaced with a brick wall due to rot). At the corner of the wall, where it turns towards the timber spire, a log with a quarter section removed was used. Only one of these remains today. Dendrochronology shows that these wooden walls were erected between 1063 and 1100. This makes them Saxo-Norman in architectural terms. Inside the church the flat sides of the logs form the wall surface. In fact, like many Essex churches (an area of little good building stone) much of this building is made of timber and like almost all old parish churches it has been altered several times down the centuries. The brick chancel is early sixteenth century, the weatherboarded west tower is probably eighteenth century, and the nave roof and south porch are Victorian.

Greensted church is a remarkable survivor, not only the sole remaining representative of the log churches, but also the oldest standing timber building in the country (and Europe according to the church guide). I broke off my recent journey to London to take in Greensted, and was fortunate to arrive when the late afternoon sun was showing through the cloud. At that time of day a church with a west tower is best photographed from the south west to avoid glare and too much shadow on the building. For the first shot I placed myself as far back as the churchyard boundary and trees would allow. The second shot, showing the north side, was much easier to get.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1 (Photo 2)
Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.) (17mm (34mm/35mm equiv.))
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500 (1/250)
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 (-0.3) EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A Thaxted view

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The walk from the main streets of Thaxted, Essex - Town Street and Watling Street - up Stony Lane, through the churchyard gates and along the gravel track to the west tower of the medieval church is as architecturally eventful as any in England.

Leaving the shopping streets you immediately pass the Guildhall of 1450, a lime-washed, three-storey, timber-framed building that includes an eighteenth century "lock-up" (gaol). Across from it are three, three-storeyed houses that are jettied at each floor, buildings that date from the early 1400s and still show walls, timber and windows of that period, as well as sixteenth and seventeenth century additions. Behind the Guildhall is an even older house that was built in the early 1300s, heavily modified in the 1800s, and given the local, moulded plaster "pargetting" in the twentieth century. Other houses up the lane date from subsequent centuries, and nestle into their location with great charm. The church of St John the Baptist, with its tall spire, stands in its graveyard at the highpoint of the town. Its earliest parts date from around 1340, but these were remodelled in the 1400s and 1500s. Further work was added in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the rebuilding of the spire which was blown down in 1814. The exterior of the church is lavishly decorated and it makes a fine landmark that competes with the nearby windmill.

In the churchyard are two further beautiful old buildings. The single-storey thatched building known as "The Chantry" is timber-framed, plastered and painted dark pink. It was formerly almshouses and dates from the 1600s. Next to it is a row of early eighteenth century almshouses, also timber-framed and plastered, but with tiled roofs and this time painted cream. These were restored in the nineteenth century when the decorative bargeboards as well as the pointed window and the rectangular window, each with the hoodmoulds, were added. When I stood and looked at this interesting pair of buildings a couple of weeks ago, the fog that had been a nuisance all morning helpfully lifted sufficiently for me see the distant windmill between them, and I quickly took this shot. It's a pity that the more elaborate fronts of neither building can be seen. But, if I had included either, then the windmill wouldn't have been so conveniently placed!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.9mm (37mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Thaxted windmill

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There was a time when it seemed that windmills would all but disappear from Britain, perhaps remembered only by a few restored, museum-like examples or those that were turned into desirable country dwellings. A few struggled on as working buildings into the 1950s, but their time had long passed, new methods of milling superseding the old ways. Being tall structures, erected in exposed positions where they would catch the wind, many soon fell into disrepair once regular maintenance ceased. Gales removed sails, fantails and roofs. Penetrating rain and frost did the rest of the damage, and many were reduced to sad, beheaded stumps. But, as is often the way, just as it seemed that windmills were on their way out people started to realise what was happening, to mourn what was being lost, and in localities up and down the country individuals, groups of civic-minded people and enthusiasts turned their attention to restoring these fascinating relics that are half building, half machine. Today they are a reasonably common sight in central, eastern and southern England, and quite a few have been restored to working condition.

The example shown in today's photograph is at Thaxted in Essex. It is a red brick, tower mill that was built for John Webb in 1804. He was a local landowner and innkeeper whose brickworks supplied the bricks for the building. It stands in a commanding position in a field by the edge of the small town, one of two beacons, with the medieval church, that are immediately visible to the visitor as he approaches this ancient and attractive settlement. Thaxted's mill was one of those that fell into disrepair in the mid-twentieth century. But, in 1972 the process of restoration began, and today it is fully restored with machinery inside, and is open to the public.

My photograph has been converted to black and white with the digital version of a red filter to darken the sky, emphasise the clouds and vapour trails, and make the lighter building stand out more strongly from its background.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 25mm (50mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Stony Lane, Thaxted, Essex

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During my recent travels I went to Thaxted in Essex. Before my visit I knew little about the place apart from what I'd read about the church and its windmill. I also had a vague memory that there was a connection with the composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934).

Towards the end of an October afternoon I wandered through its streets, had a look at the main buildings, and came upon the well-named Stony Lane. The narrow cobbled surface of the road leading up the hill to the church and the picturesque mixture of ancient buildings attracted my attention. A look at The Buildings of England: Essex revealed that the half-timbered buildings on the left date from the early 1400s, and have many original features.

Further digging enlarged my knowledge of the Holst connection. Apparently the main theme of Jupiter from his suite, The Planets, which he adapted to fit Sir Cecil Spring-Rice's poem for the hymn "I vow to thee my country", is called Thaxted after the place Holst lived from 1914 until the 1920s. An article written for the Foxearth and District Local History Society, I Ring for the General Dance: Gustav Holst and Thaxted, gives an interesting account of Holst's time in the Essex market town. Moreover it includes fanciful alternatives for the source of inspiration for each of the movements of "The Planets". The author suggests that Jupiter, perhaps for its association with the hymn name, represents market day in Thaxted. The market was packing up as I left so I can't vouch for whether or not it exudes a Jovian jollity, but the description that the author gives of the music representing a walk from the market place, up Stony Lane, through the church and around the town, is quite alluring.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

New look & Comments are back

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After almost 3 years of the "Minima" template I decided I'd have a change, and have moved to "Tic Tac Blue". I think I like it! :-)

I've also turned Comments back on. Let's hope the spammers have gone elsewhere. If they return I'll give Moderated Comments a try even though it's fairly unsatisfactory for readers (the comment is delayed until I've authorised it), and me (I have to check and authorise).

I'll leave the email address up for a while. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to comment on the pictures or text by this method - your feedback is appreciated. However, from now on Comments is the preferred method. So, if you've got any observations to make about your visit to the blog let's hear them!

Regards, Tony

Here's a shot from my recent travels. This row of houses on Castle Street, Saffron Walden, in Essex, appealed not only for the variety of colours and the individuality of each building in the terrace, but also for the way it shows examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and maybe eighteenth, centuries. A walk up this hill is a real visual and architectural pleasure.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On