The Pevsner guide to my childhood
A new book brings memories of County Durham flooding back, from the cathedral’s rib vaults to pitmen’s back-to-backs
County Durham is one of the leastknown parts of the British Isles.
I was born and brought up there, surrounded by its buildings. From the ultimate splendours of the cathedral – with its rib vaulting above the choir stalls, ‘the first ever ventured upon in the West’ – to the lonesome outdoor privies over the road from the pitmen’s back-to-backs, there is as rich a variety as can be imagined.
Now it can all be can relished afresh in the new Pevsner guide, County Durham. It’s the latest in the series created by Nikolaus Pevsner from 1951 and subsequently developed into a series of revised volumes.
This is the third edition of County Durham and what a lush and plush book it is. Half as large again as the previous edition, which dated back to 1983, it is uncommonly handsome and scholarly. There is an abundance of colour plates, as well as exquisitely refined engravings, such as of the enormous Norman doorway to Le Puiset’s hall at Durham Castle, dwarfing a lurking, frock-coated gentleman carrying his top hat.
Three cheers, too, for the extreme delicacy of the neoclassical cow house at Burn Hall, designed by the young John Soane in 1783. We are given the rare and relatively unknown delight of being shown the first stained-glass windows in the United Kingdom, dating from AD 684 – both of them tiny; one circular, one arched – at the church of St Peter and St Paul, Monkwearmouth, founded in 681: ‘One of the most venerable churches in the kingdom’.
How moving it is to be shown the soulful beauty of the 1st Duke of Cleveland’s marble effigy of 1844, by Richard Westmacott, at St Mary’s, Staindrop. His saintly countenance may be somewhat misleading. His outraged contemporary Lord Belhaven said that he ‘always had his wine glasses made without a foot, so that they would not stand, and you were obliged to drink off the whole glass when you dined with him’!
In this 2021 edition, Martin Roberts describes the remarkable changes that have smothered County Durham. With its coal mines, it ‘suffered from the ugliness of industrial activity, be it bleak workers’ housing or scarred landscapes’. Now the pits are no more, ‘…this legacy has been almost entirely eradicated. The steel works are silent, coal mines have closed, and even their fierce coal tips have been pacified into quiet fields. County Durham has never looked better.’
I can vouch for this strangely magical transformation. Where once the heart sadly sank – although it was often stirred – at the sight of slag heaps, it now sings at the sight of Elysian Fields. How well I remember the miners’ baths with long, long queues of white-faced, blackened-by-coal-dust men, lining up at dawn for their morning wash. There were tin baths as well, still hanging outside every miner’s house to be filled with kettle-warmed water in front of the fire.
It was a life that was fast disappearing. In 1970, museum curator Frank Atkinson set out to preserve the disappearing heritage of the north-east. He was in charge of the great French château/ hôtel de ville- like Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, designed by Jules Pellechet in 1869. Rather than concentrating on its European objets d’art, he felt there was ‘an urgent and desperate need to save anything and everything that was local’ before it was too late.
So it was that the Beamish Museum was born, with Atkinson responsible for the most marvellous venture of gathering together a vast multitude of northeastern artefacts. From a 250-ton steam navvy to a sea coal-scavenging rake, from a cardboard milk-bottle top to a child’s sampler – what an intoxicatingly interesting jumble it was!
A particular star of the show was a child’s coffin carriage, dating from the late-19th century, fancifully carved with stained and cut glass. The night before it opened in 1970, I was up till five in the morning along with everyone else there, photographing the museum.
Shops, farms, pubs, pits and chapels were all reassembled – institutions that would have vanished had it not been for him. I remember seeing a child cowering with fright at the sight of a coal fire burning in Beamish’s rebuilt pit village. With its toasty warmth, it was heating an adjoining oven and was part of what used to be every house’s fireside arrangement, in which cooking, especially bread, was done daily. The frightened child had never seen living flames indoors before.
The Elephant Tea Rooms in Sunderland, designed between 1873 and 1877, is, for me, one of the architectural stars of this north-eastern show. It has a wealth of Gothic arches of polychrome red and white brick, terracotta and faience. Most pleasingly described as built in the ‘Hindoo-gothic style’, it was built for local tea merchant Ronald Grimshaw by architect Frank Caws.
What sprouting, exotic details: ogee-arched windows with fleur-de-lis finials; a projecting trefoil frieze; and crocketed capitals galore. Most wonderful of all, sheltered on Gothicroofed stone platforms, five white, faience elephants march forth, bearing crates of tea on their backs.
This delightful building has, I fear, been most brutally wrecked, by its ground floor having been demolished and replaced by a horror of a modern façade for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Now – hurray, hurray – help is on the way, with the tide of taste at last turning.
The Sunderland City Council have announced that the elephants ‘are getting ready to trumpet the beginning of an exciting new development’. Restoration is already underway.
By way of a violent change, we can admire classicism at its most refined, with the 1769 chapel at Gibside.
It was built for George Bowes, by the architect James Paine, inspired by a Palladio drawing. Terminating a long, straight sweep of a parkland vista, it is glorified by a great double portico of Ionic columns, with four urns on a
balustrade and a dome raised on a high swagged drum. ‘The detail,’ writes Pevsner, ‘is of the finest; the tooling of the stone, for instance, most delicate.’
Inside, vast Corinthian columns carry the dome and groin vaults, surrounding a three-decker pulpit with an umbrella-like sounding-board raised on an Ionic column. An assembly of box pews, of finest cherrywood, is perfection, with curved seats for the servants and visitors and those closing off the corners for the owner and agent.
One of a quantity of ancient castles in the county, Raby has a cavernous chamber of a kitchen. Apart from its windows’ being enlarged in the 18th century, it has remained untouched since 1370. The entrance hall too is remarkable, with its lofty Gothicry of large enough proportions to shelter a coach and horses delivering its passengers to the bottom of a vast sweeping staircase.
Where and how can I stop? Durham has architectural and scenic jewels at every turn. Yet because the county lies between Scotland, the Lake District and Yorkshire, might-have-been visitors to Durham inevitably streak along the A1, past the county, on their way north or south.
What foolishness, when the tempting tips of Durham Cathedral – the most splendid example of Romanesque domestic architecture in Europe – can be spotted but yards away over the fields.
The Buildings of England: County Durham by Martin Roberts, Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson is published on 9th March (Yale University Press)