Family China

While traversing the Midlands, we visited Stoke-on-Trent, a conurbation of six towns in Staffordshire that during the 19th century became the global epicenter of ceramics production. Household names like Wedgewood, Royal Doulton, Minton, Spode, etc. were born here, some as early as the mid-1700s. The ceramics industry drove the local economies of Stoke-on-Trent until about the 1960s, when several of the manufacturers folded, consolidated, or moved production to Asia. In Hanley, one of the six towns of 'Stoke', we visited the Museum of the Potteries, a sad old building dating from probably the late 1970s that contains the relics of Stoke's faded industrial glory: exhibits telling the story of area's history of ceramics production, mainly with wall plaques and vitrines full of the ceramics themselves. I get a bit nostalgic in dusty old museums that could use a few more visitors and maybe a new exhibit now and then. At the Museum of the Potteries, I experienced this special nostalgia but also a quickening of personal nostalgia when I realized that I might stumble upon some familiar china patterns in the vitrines: Nana's Spode Buttercup dinner plates, or Granny's Wedgewood demitasses. I peered eagerly into each vitrine, and while I didn't find Nana's Spode or Wedgewood that exactly resembled Granny's, I was rewarded with a little revelation when I found a vitrine of Parianware sculptures and realized that this was the origin of Granny's 'marble' statuette of a bathing Venus, one of the Stancliff family heirlooms. According to the wall plaque accompanying the vitrine,

"Parian porcelain was developed during the early Victorian period for the manufacture of statuary, busts, and other ornamental items in imitation of marble sculpture. The name Parian was introduced by Minton, after the white marble form the Greek Island of Paros...A number of manufacturers in Staffordshire and Worcester began to make Parian and at the Great Exhibition of 1851 twenty firms exhibited wares, notable Minton and Copeland... Portrait busts, classical figures, and the work of well-known sculptors were the most popular items during the mid-19th century..."

I was really excited to learn about Parianware because it suddenly shed light on the kind of Vicorian family and culture that Granny came from: one where beauty for its own sake was highly valued, and yet made available on a mass scale through new industrial technologies.

I was disappointed not to see Nana's Spode on display at the Museum of the Potteries, but with a little help from the Internet after the fact, I found that the Buttercup pattern was first introduced by Spode around 1885, and finally discontinued in the 1990s! Apparently it was marketed in the United States before 1939. Now I need to ask Deborah or Tory if they remember the specific origins of Nana's Spode! Did Nana buy it at Macy's? Or was it in her family for generations?

Following are some pictures I took of pieces in the Museum of the Potteries: some Wedgewood and Parianware, for Granny, and then pieces that just caught my fancy. I also included some internet images of "bottle kilns" in Stoke (where the ceramics were fired), and the Buttercup Spode pattern.

Really, really old things

This was perhaps my favorite museum visit of the entire trip, and it was not really about building or architecture at all. It was about prehistoric mammals! Colossal amphibians! Giants of the land before time! And lots and lots of tiny fossils, bugs, bones, and butterflies. This was the University Museum of Keble College, Oxford, which has an astounding natural history collection, as well as a sub-collection of anthropological oddities (the South American shrunken heads are a timeless classic). I've visited the American and National museums of natural history in DC and NY countless times, appreciated their old-school dioramas and ogled their gems and minerals, but what was special about this old museum in Oxford was its gigantic Gothic atrium spilling light down into a great hall cluttered with ranks upon ranks of wood-and-glass vitrines, interspersed with free-standing fossilized bones, skeletons, and jars of weird stuff. I'm going to backtrack and rhapsodize about the architecture just a little bit more: the iron columns supporting the prismatic glass roof of the atrium were decorated at the capitals with the most delicate metal filigree imitations of plant and flower species, and the stone columns holding up the brick walls of the arcaded building were carved with lifelike depictions of fantastic sea creatures, corals, plants, and animals. It was a natural history knock-out! As only the Victorians could have mustered.

This is the half-timbered structure I saw at the V&A (goes with the post below)

Olde Goode Things

Despite the summer school being one big lesson in all things Victorian, we did manage to absorb some ye Olde English ambiance during our two weeks. The place we visited that felt most "medieval" to me was Oxford, where the oldest building in town (according to my uncle Taylor and his wife Diana, who lived in Oxford during the 1980s)is a three-tiered, half-timbered structure that reminds one of an old man leaning on a cane. I had never seen such emphatic cantilevering in any half-timbered structure-in any wood structure at all, for that matter-and this little building had not one, but two floors thrusting out over the street beyond the footprint of its foundation; I guess this was the simplest way to maximize space for the inhabitants of an island nation. The day before at the V&A I had seen the salvaged wooden frame of a half-timbered structure mounted on a wall, also with cantilevered upper floors, and it suddenly made sense as I stood in the middle of Oxford's busy high street musing on the wonderful slumping crookedness of the real thing.

Walking around Oxford was quaint and charming, and almost gave me the urge to be a student again, holed up in some library or sitting in a cafe with a coffee in one hand and a highlighter in the other (emphasis on "almost"!). Of course we toured some of the colleges of Oxford, and at Worcester College we had the privilege of visiting one of the communal dining rooms where students dine seated at long tables (with real silverware and crested dinner plates) set perpendicular to a table reserved for the "dons," which is raised on a dais; there, the rarefied atmosphere of formality and scholarly Tradition was really quite awesome. Once I got over the impossible stuffiness of it all, however, the image that came to mind was, and I'll admit it, the refectory at Hogwart's! I'm not even a Harry Potter fan.

Speaking of supper, one of my fondest memories of the trip is the lunch we had in Oxford. It had been threatening rain all day, and just as soon as we ducked into the Nosebag for lunch (see the wonderful painted sign next to me in the photo if you need a hint as to what a nosebag is), the skies opened up and we had a heaping downpour punctuated by flashes of lightening and great claps of thunder. The storm gathered force as I tucked into my apple and persimmon soup, accompanied by a hunk of farmer's bread and a generous slab of butter (I love the English sense of proportion when it comes to butter!). The storm cleared and the sun came out just as we prepared to continue our tour of Oxford.

Stay tuned for a post on REALLY ancient things...

an English garden

On our last day of summer school, a Saturday, we had a blissful break from buildings and headed south to Surrey to see the garden of Gertrude Jeckyll, a pioneer in garden design who created over 400 gardens in England before her death in 1932. We visited the small corner of Munstead Wood, a large private estate, where Jeckyll lived (in a complex of rustic out buildings)and worked, creating gardens whose free-flowing, naturalistic aesthetic flew in the face of Victorian formality and exoticism. Jeckyll planned her gardens with an eye to the existing landscape, and with a sensibility for the seasons; thus, when we visited in late July, the "July" gardens were all but over and the "August gardens" had not yet emerged. I'm no horticulturist, but I did observe a lot of blues and whites in this transitional garden- and lots and lots of industrious bumble bees!

The special thing about this lovely garden is that it is being revived -and literally restored- by a woman who bought the property in 2002 and obviously has a passion for Jeckyll and for cultivating plants and creating peaceful outdoor spaces. Like Jeckyll, Gail Naughton lives in one of the out buildings, a small barn, and has for the past several years, largely by herself, followed original Jeckyll designs and planting schemes (with some variations here and there) in order to faithfully recreate the Munstead Wood gardens of 1900. I was glad to see that Ms. Naughton left her own mark on the property, in a small way: she had a stone mason build a little arched cat-door in the laid-stone foundation of her barn, so kitty can come and go as she pleases!

There's something so English about a rambling, slightly unkempt garden with small surprises --a sun dial, a lily pond-- tucked away here and there, that it puts me in mind of... Peter Cottontail! Lois made a point of taking what little free time we had to visit the Beatrix Potter exhibit on at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and I am so glad we made it there to see the two small galleries full of Beatrix's tiny sketches and finished water-color illustrations for The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She was quite a talented artist and a keen observer of nature; her rabbits, so simply yet fluidly drawn, seemed to bound off the page!

A note on the photos

I am still figuring out how to blog, so the photos in my last post appear in backwards order- so just read my post, then look at them bottom-to-top.

Flowers and model tenements

Our first Sunday in London we took a trip to London's East End, historically the city's poorest, working-class neighborhood. What we found when we got there was a vibrant flower market along a stretch of narrow Columbia Road, the vendors all but hidden behind drifts, sprays, and bunches of flowers and plants of all colors, textures, and sizes. The flower-men and women, actually mostly men, were hawking their plants at high volume in really terrific regional British accents that I will not attempt to identify. Each Sunday the Columbia Road flower market literally fills the street for a good five blocks, leaving barely any room to pass two abreast between stalls. A flea market spilled off onto the side-streets of the flower market, with vendors selling vintage clothing and shabby-chic knick knacks that seemed to be attracting London's hipsters- I could have been in Brooklyn! Framing this lively scene were unbroken ranks of 1860s brick row houses, each one barely bigger than an American suburban garage, but with cheerful polychrome brickwork and decorative lintels and cornices. These row houses were built for working-class people, but are now home to creative-looking boutiques, artisanal bakeries, coffee shops and the like. Leaving the flower market, reluctantly, we walked a few blocks to visit a set of "model" tenements that were planned and constructed in the 1870s by a group of progressive architects and philanthropists aiming to build better designed, more sanitary working-class housing... and thus to alleviate the condition of the poor and contribute to their general "moral uplift." The design of these five-story brick and stone tenements was innovative because each apartment ("flat," to use the English) was accessed via an exterior stairway with iron balcony-landings at each story. This meant more fresh air for tenants, less direct contact in dank, airless hallways (and so less chance of spreading contagious diseases such as cholera, typhus, and yellow fever), and greater fire safety because each apartment was separated by brick, not wood, partitions, and the exterior stairways were brick. By the 1890s, tenements identical to this one had been constructed in Brooklyn.