Let us capture for a moment the rapturous appreciation of Cheltenham in the past. First—a description of the Park, an elegant neighbourhood of detached stucco villas in the Greek, Italian, Swiss and Tudor styles laid out by Mr. T. Billings. “The sheltering trees on each side of the walk render it impervious to the rude embrace of Æolus; or the burning Phœbus. There is a sweet mellow beauty in this spot, which must render it highly congenial for the poet’s mental compositions and to the nerves of the sensitive invalid.” And now let us look inside the old Assembly Rooms. “Several chandeliers hang midway in the air, and their glittering drops vie with ‘the light of the ladies’ eyes’ … there the wistful lookers-on will observe, that loving eyes and melting music conspire more to make hearts flutter, than does the graceful glide of the dance. But lo! a table full of fairy-like condiments in the opposite room, beckons the sylphs to refresh themselves by sedative and cooling draughts.”2
The book from which these quotations come shows that Cheltenham was still progressing in the ’fifties. “New buildings are constantly and quickly appearing in Cheltenham; they rise as if a magic wand touched this lovely portion of our ‘mother earth,’ and bid it ‘increase and multiply.’” The book is printed in blue ink, with ruled margins and steel engravings.
A playful battle of the styles occurred. Alongside the romantic architecture of the Jearrad brothers, who were primarily interior decorators, alongside the sketchy steel engravings was the sterner lithographic side. The Italian style was in. Those lithographs, faintly tinted with yellow and blue, depicting Italian villas by Lake Como or in St. John’s Wood, were adapted to the stucco of Cheltenham. Their towers rise above cedars and their terraces are in a bold Anglo-Italian style of which the best is part of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in Bayshill Road. Such architecture belongs to the ’forties, ’fifties and ’sixties.
The battle of the styles in Cheltenham is gay. There is none of the heaviness of Pimlico or Earl’s Court, because there has always been room to play about, and the Cheltenham waters seem to have had a loosening effect on her architects. The battle is gay, and the stone or stucco Victories, for Gothic, Swiss, Italian, Greek or Oriental, are rarely gimcrack or mere façadism. Perhaps the military clients insisted on thoroughness. Perhaps a conservative tradition in the town forbade the modern skimping of details. Certainly a tradition of spacious street planning lingered in Cheltenham until 1914. Here and there are Midland glazed bricks and municipal excursions into Edwardian Baroque, but there is still a certain wideness, except in the High Street, whose decent face has been smeared with commercialism. Everywhere else you will find the best and the most old-fashioned of architectural styles.
A Cheltenham Regency Society has been founded just in time to save this lovely town from careerist civil servants and greedy speculators. If the harm that has been done in Cheltenham goes no further, in ten years Cheltenham will be as admired as Bath, and personally I think it is a gayer, more original town, with even more to admire. It is a bookshelf of aquatints, steel engravings and lithographs of the nineteenth century, ranged out in a Cotswold valley for all bibliophiles to see.
Pensions become reduced, colonels die, families go out to Kenya, and prefer London to the provinces when they return, but the great houses grow no smaller and the domestic service problem grows greater.
The lonely widows of military men are driven to Cheltenham hotels, where they wait, knitting sadly in the lounge and talking to visitors. Once a week a great grandson or great grand-daughter comes to tea from one of Cheltenham’s numerous schools. And there is another week of watching the light in the chestnuts on the Promenade, walking in the Pittville Gardens, morning coffee at Kunzle’s and back to an en pension lunch. There is less and less hope of the military holding out in the battle to save Cheltenham from “progress.” The æsthetes must help them.
1 Since this was written the Cheltenham Regency Society has been founded.
2 Bailey’s New Hand-Book for Cheltenham (Cheltenham, 1855).
4 ABERDEEN GRANITE
MOST of us know successful Lowland Scots. Products of the manse and emancipation, they come to England and work their way up to the high administrative posts in Government Offices and Universities. Where organising ability, knowledge of finance, hard work and disinterested “service” to the “community” are required (to be rewarded with a not extravagant salary but eventually a pension and a decoration), where such careers are open, there you will find the Lowland Scots. Hard, logical, calmly energetic, they are the reverse of flibbertigibbets. Naturally such an abstract-minded people excels in architecture, the severest—I had almost said the most abstract—of the visual arts. Compare the average Italian church of the eighteenth century with a public building of the same time in Edinburgh. A rich façade greets your eye in Italy, a rich façade, alas, stuck on to the front of the church as though it were nothing to do with the building behind it. Now gaze at a Scottish bank or kirk or hall of the same date. The architecture goes all round the four sides, the decoration is sparse. What there is in the form of simple mouldings or low relief is essential only to emphasise the lines of construction. Scottish architecture is the hard logic of the theological Scot in the hard stone of Scotland. It is the energy of the organising, thorough and patient Lowlander translated into a visual style. You will see it even in medieval work. St. Mungo’s Cathedral, Glasgow, is severer even than the severe Cistercian buildings of England like Fountains Abbey. Moulding, proportion, construction, no flowing carving, no
