The beauty of Cheltenham has been preserved almost entirely by the military1; and there is an absence of municipal swagger such as is to be found in a stock-broking, commercial town like Brighton. Lace curtains are only now disappearing from the windows, since the Colonel’s daughter has been to the Slade; old-fashioned shops still exist. Bootmakers have discreet window displays. Chemists are still pharmaceutical and their shops have still those large bottles in the windows and a multitude of lettered coffers round the walls: there is a shop in Cheltenham which especially deals in ladies’ hats of a size large enough to contain a mountain of coiled white hair.
The earliest Cheltenham architecture just comes into the copper engravings of the late eighteenth-century antiquity book. It is the Parish Church, to which most guide books desperately draw attention, beginning in ardent detail on every medieval feature, however much it has been scraped and renewed. But the Parish Church, though its origin may have been in the twelfth century, shows so much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth, that all its texture, delicacy, original arrangement and proportion have disappeared. It is a wood engraving from Brandon.
The first great period of Cheltenham is of the Ackermann’s Repository date. It is possible in Cheltenham, on a sunny spring day, to see Greek revival architecture exactly as it looks in a coloured aquatint. There are the chestnut, the copper beech, the silver birch, the single Scotch fir embosoming the bright stucco house, be it Greek or Perpendicular, Soane or Salvin. The roof is purple-blue and with a low pitch, running to broad eaves under which sharp, engraved shadows fall deep down the bright yellow wall. Probably the house has little external decoration beyond a singularly delicate ironwork veranda painted green. Be the house Gothic or Moorish, Cheltenham ironwork is almost always Greek in design and painted green. In front of the house a sweep of golden gravel among green lawns furnishes a foreground to the aquatint.
How appropriate, then, that much of Cheltenham’s aquatint architecture should be by J. B. Papworth whose plates of ornamental architecture are a regular feature of the Repository. J. B. Papworth (1775–1847) designed the Rotunda (now pitiably neglected) in 1826, Lansdowne Place and various houses to the south of the High Street. He was at home in all styles, as his aquatints show, and many of his drawings are in the R.I.B.A. Library. Another Cheltenham architect of the aquatint period G. A. Underwood, who was a pupil of Soane from 1807 to 1815, designed the church in Portland Street, the Masonic Hall and many chaste Greek villas. There is a Soanean simplicity about a row of two-storey houses in Prestbury Road which suggests Underwood’s work; Greek villas in the Park and various terraces to the south of the High Street may well have been his. Underwood’s contemporary was J. B. Forbes, who designed the superb Pump Room on the Pittville Estate in 1825. This is an Ionic composition round a large domed hall. Its exterior was recently mutilated by some municipal department which destroyed the statues with which it was adorned.
From 1830, Cheltenham architecture sheers off the aquatint into the steel engraving. The decorator steps in as architect. The Queen’s Hotel by R. W. and C. Jearrad (1838) has a façade which forms a terminus to the leafy Promenade, Cheltenham’s smartest street. This façade is a magnificent stucco composition, original, bold, gay, decorated with coloured crowns and has, as its central feature, a row of Corinthian columns. At first glance the façade is chaste, correct, and a superb termination to the Promenade. The effect is as of a steel engraving in a local guide, a little unlikely but beautiful. Then examining the detail one sees that the columns have been engraved in not quite the right proportions, that there is something wrong about the depth of an entablature, that the building seems to be out of perspective.The Queen’s Hotel has this quality of a steel engraving. Its architecture is not quite correct, but it is, none the less, effective.
Christ Church was designed by R. W. Jearrad, one of the designers of the Queen’s Hotel, in 1837. It is one of the most successful buildings in Cheltenham externally, but it is wildly incorrect, vaguely Gothic, and with stupendous proportions all its own. One feels that F. Jearrad had some large book of antiquarian engravings, drawn to scale, of Magdalen College Tower, Oxford. He then had the enormous pinnacles on that tower reproduced according to the scale given in his book and stuck them on to Christ Church one hundred feet lower than they are at Magdalen. Pleased with the effect he added some more pinnacles a little higher up and, boldly forgetting the years between, he included some Early English lancet windows in the intervening surfaces and invented some Early English church doors. To crown this dreamlike base, all deep shadows and aspiring pinnacles, he added a graceful tower. The effect is romantic in the extreme, and
