Castle Drogo

The story begins with a marriage between two biscuit empires - Meredith & Drew, and Peek Freans.  Julius Drew was a descendant of both the former and the latter, his bride, Frances Richardson was a descendant of the latter.  Aged 34 at the time of his wedding, Julius had recently retired from running the large and profitable grocery chain he had founded in 1878 - Home and Colonial Stores - and planning a life of country pursuits and genealogy research. Having no doubt been exposed to the condescension of the aristocracy, routinely directed towards those they considered to be nouveaux riches, Julius developed a passion for genealogy in his search for more illustrious and titled forebears.  One of his cousins was Rector in the Devon village of Drewsteignton and Julius paid several visits in search of any evidence that might connect him with the Norman family, Dru, that gave their name to the village. Julius began buying land in the neighbourhood of Drewsteignton and conceived the idea of building himself a modern Norman-style castle in the locality. His masterstroke was to engage the services of Edwin Lutyens as architect - though Lutyens was initially reluctant and would have preferred a more orthodox commission for a large scale country house, he eventually accepted the task of designing a home with all the features of a traditional castle fitted out with the best of modern comforts.

It turned out to be a protracted project that had to be juggled with many other demands on Lutyens’s attention over two decades.  A site was chosen in 1910 on the top of a granite outcrop high above the Teign Valley, perfectly placed for repelling intruders. Lutyens had to be persuaded to abandon his initial proposal for a Tudorbethan fantasy in favour of a more rugged medievalism and came up with a plan for a sprawling monumental design on such a grand scale that it had to be reduced by two thirds to be affordable.  Locally quarried Dartmoor granite was the basic construction material and the client rejected Lutyens’s plan for to go for cavity wall construction (two walls two foot thick with a gap between) and insisted on solid walls six feet in depth. A further round of economy measures was imposed in 1920 requiring the relocation of key features and demolition of several partially completed elements.  The project muddled along, not helped by Lutyens’s frequent and prolonged visits to New Delhi in the service of the Raj and it was 1925 before the family were able to partially occupy their home and another five years before it was finally complete by which time it was one third of what was initially envisaged and had cost three times its original estimate.  All this effort to somehow give credibility to Julius Drewe’s unsubstantiated claim to be a living descendant of an ancient Norman family.

Julius died in 1931 leaving his heirs with an ever expanding financial burden of maintaining the vast edifice in sound condition and watertight.  Later generations toiled away through the privations of wartime, giving up the struggle in 1974 when the castle was acquired by the National Trust (NT).  The NT had the funds to stabilise the condition of the building and conserve and curate it as a memorial to Julius Drewe and his campaign for acceptance by the nobility and Edwin Lutyens and his eccentric brilliance as an architect.  In the chapel there’s an architectural model of the Lutyens designed war memorial at Thiepval dedicated to the Missing of the Somme that intentionally or not seems to underline the point.

Dartmoor granite is the hardest to be found in the UK and the precision cut granite forms, steps and archways make a powerful expression.  Lutyens’s command of internal spaces, alternating the spacious and the confined, creating forward glimpses that lead us around the building all combine to make the corridors, stairwells and passageways the most interesting elements in his scheme. Together with a restrained sensibility and formal austerity the castle transcends its faintly absurd rationale by force of personality.  And it’s the lower ground level that offers the finest transitions and the delights of the kitchen and scullery where Lutyens-designed fixtures and furnishings are illuminated by natural light from overhead lunette and lantern windows.  In the family rooms most of the furnishings and wall hangings are drawn from Drewe’s enormous collection of Spanish furniture that came into his possession in 1898 when he bought the palatial Wadhurst Park in East Sussex along with the opulent contents that had been assembled by the previous owner, Spanish banker Adrian de Murietta. Despite their often ponderous forms, the high ceilings, massive windows and overall spatial grandeur of Lutyens’s rooms cuts them down to size and deprives them of any power to detract from the overall impression.  It is a tribute to Lutyens’s ability to orchestrate these complex and demanding spaces into a coherent whole that we often find ourselves overlooking the essential frivolity of the entire project. 

 

Great Railway Stations No. 22, York

Many years ago Michael Palin pointed out the association between railway towns and footballing mediocrity. There are exceptions - Derby and more recently Brighton have played in the Premier League, but for York, Darlington, Crewe, Gateshead, Doncaster, Swindon, Eastleigh, Ashford and Horwich, success on the pitch has been hard to come by. Not to mention Newton Abbot, Melton Constable and Woodford Halse.  The railway arrived in York long before football was organised into leagues and the North Eastern Railway built a station of epic proportions, in the process demolishing significant portions of the old city walls in the casual manner that Victorians displayed toward ancient relics that got in the way of progress and profits.  York was well connected with both East Anglia, the Midlands and the industrial North West from its position on the main route linking London with Edinburgh and developed into a major railway town.

The station we see today dates mostly from 1877 and a modest exterior of no great merit is no guide to what lies within.  A curving track dictated 13 curving platforms and a triple span curving roof built to awesome proportions. Polychromed Corinthian capitals support the roof and tapering iron ribs, elegantly perforated to save weight.  Spandrels are decorated with the letters NER (for the North Eastern Railway) and the white rose of Yorkshire. The roof trusses make a glorious sight soaring overhead in repetition, especially when viewed from the station footbridge. On platform 4, to the right of the entrance is a repurposed signal box that contains a WHS shop and a café above. Bracketed to the roof structure over the steps to the footbridge is a massive clock with three faces.

The other great station built by the North Eastern Railway with a broad curving roof is Newcastle Central, completed in 1850 at which date it had 6 platforms. Following a series of expansions, by 1877 when York opened, Newcastle had 12 platforms (by 1892 there were 15). Interestingly though Newcastle is listed at Grade I by Historic England, York is listed at Grade II*. Newcastle has by far the best entrance (designed by John Dobson) and there is nothing at York to equal the extended sweep of the curving portico with its catering and retail services at Newcastle.  Despite the York Tap’s interior of restrained elegance, it’s easily upstaged by the scale and ceramic splendour of the Centurion Bar at Newcastle.  But having recently visited both stations on the same day, my impression is that a comparison of the train sheds alone favours York in terms of magnitude where the slender iron ribs almost deceive the eye into anticipating its imminent launch into the stratosphere. For a better written and more detailed comparison, I recommend this from the great Beauty of Transport blog.

 

Bridge Postcards of 2024

Another annual selection of pontine postcards - the products of hours of rummaging through bulging shoe boxes stuffed with unsorted postcards, priced at 4 for £1, at Postcard Fairs where the average age is about 75.  Most of the cards inspected are depressingly dull but now and then something different will startle the eye - it may be an unorthodox composition, or an inventive viewpoint, or a remarkable quality of printing, or a subject you never expected to see celebrated in this way. The physical discomforts are many - an aching neck, a weary eye and the close proximity of fellow collectors, some of whom lack any concept of boundaries or interest in personal hygiene but the compensation is a growing stack of visual treasures.  The show begins with three examples where a viaduct intrudes into an urban setting - Newcastle, Morlaix and Truro. It concludes with some elaborate ironwork from Ohio and Littlehampton. In between are railway viaducts from California and Fontainebleau, a pair of bridges spanning the Niagara River, urban river crossings from Berlin and St. Louis and a primitive wooden bridge over which three young women display their traditional Dutch costume. My favourite example comes from Preston where an enormous viaduct marches over river and countryside alike, foregrounded by neo-classical parkland.

 

Bridges of 2024

This year’s choice of bridges (mostly) crossed and photographed would be very modest but for a visit to Newcastle, which it must be admitted has some fine specimens. From west to east along the Tyne, our first is the High Level Bridge designed by Robert Stephenson (1845-49), with T E Harrison - the rail deck is supported by cast-iron box columns while the road deck is suspended from the rail deck by wrought-iron hangers encased in the box sections. Grade I listed by Historic England. Next is the Swing Bridge of 1868-76, designed and built by W G Armstrong & Co. - a wrought-iron structure supported on cast-iron rollers to allow free movement of shipping, operated by the original Armstrong-built hydraulic engines and controlled from the cupola that spans the deck. Listed by Historic England as a Scheduled Monument and last opened in November 2019. The New Tyne Bridge (1925-28) comes next, built by Dorman & Long of Middlesbrough and designed by Mott, Hay & Anderson - the profile of its single span is often employed as a symbol of the city.  The design is a reduced version of the 1916 design produced for the Sydney Harbour Bridge - the four massive pylons, faced in Cornish granite were intended to house warehouses with freight and passenger lifts, none of which came to pass.  Grade II* listed by Historic England.  Finally to the only bridge over the Tyne designated for pedestrian and cyclist use - the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (1995-2001) designed by Wilkinson Eyre. The deck is suspended from an elegant parabola that can be rotated through 45 degrees to permit the movement of passing ships - a major element in the riverside regeneration project as an artistic and cultural quarter that in turn led to the conjoined coinage of Newcastle-Gateshead.

Finally, two views of the Scarborough Cliff Bridge, a pedestrian footbridge opened in 1827 when it was known as the Spa Bridge, it's an unusual example of a multiple-span cast iron bridge. Connecting the town centre with the Spa, it originally operated as a toll bridge. In the view from the deck the imposing bulk of Cuthbert Brodrick's Grand Hotel looms over the scene. Grade II listed structure.