by Alan Bennett
As paper became cheaper and more readily available, the floor as a draughtsman’s board must have fallen into disuse. There was a disastrous fire at York in 1829 and it was perhaps then that the loft became a storeroom and its original purpose forgotten. The templets were piled in heaps across the floor, thus preserving the traces of the original drawings. It was only in the sixties, when they were cleared out and catalogued, that the diagrams were rediscovered and the function of the room recalled.
There are other treasures here besides the floor. Since the loft was built on top of the vestibule and a little later than the main building, it abutted on and obscured part of what had been the external wall, thus taking in the top of one of the windows. Protected from the elements for more than six centuries, the moulding and the two heads that form the capitals are as crisp and unweathered as when they were first put up. I’m disconcerted, though, that their very freshness makes me not care for them; they look crude and sentimental and not all that different from the Victorian Gothic that abounds in the churches and chapels of the West Riding. The Tadcaster stone of which York is built is so luminously white it adds to this effect, though when they were put up these carvings, like the rest of the Minster, were likely to have been boldly painted (and so might have seemed crude in a different way).
As a workplace the loft can never have been cosy. Today is warm but it’s chilly up here under the roof, and it would once have been chillier as the windows were only glazed in the nineteenth century, what protection there was against the wind and cold coming from crude wooden shutters which, 600 years on, are still hanging here. But there is a fireplace and a loo, a one-seater that, primitive though it is, hardly looks to have seen the bottoms of centuries and which debouches down the outside of the vestibule wall.
Always fastidious in this respect, I ask Louise Hampson if the cubicle had a door. She thinks not, a curtain more likely (which wouldn’t have suited me at all). Already empathising with some shy fourteenth-century apprentice with the squits, I am absurdly pleased as I run my hand round the door opening to discover the iron staples on which must once have hung the door that would have saved his blushes. In a previous life I was a medieval historian but the discovery of these door hooks is more of a contribution than I ever made through my study of the archives.
Thinking about the loo, though, I wonder that there are no graffiti here, but I suppose it’s less surprising when one reflects that the masons who sat here were making their mark elsewhere in the building where some of their signatures do survive, carved in the stone in the form of mason’s marks.
I have known York Minster since I was a boy, when in the late forties I toiled over here from Leeds on my bike. York and Ripon were the only cathedrals I had seen until I was sixteen, both of them, I used to think then, plain no-nonsense places. This was only partly because the glass had yet to be put back after the war; I didn’t go much for glass in those days. Anyway what I was really missing was any mystery or romance. In our school library was a copy of an early Thames & Hudson book, English Cathedrals, with magnificent photographs by Martin Hürlimann. I used to pore over this book, marvelling at Wells with its branching chapterhouse staircase, the massive incised columns of the nave at Durham and the cloisters of Westminster and Gloucester. So York, for all its soaring splendour, seemed to me pretty basic as cathedrals go. And in a sense I was right. Not being a monastic foundation it has no cloisters, the chantries have gone, and what you see is what you get. So what this extraordinary mason’s loft does for me on this bright May morning is reinvest the Minster with magic, and confounds that precociously disenchanted boy who came here fifty-five years ago and was not impressed.
Nor is the magic quite over. The loft is still a bit of a junk room; the window sill, for instance, piled with old plaster casts made when delicate bits of moulding needed to be replaced, a boss, a shard of a vault … and there is more history here than one realises. Leaning against the wall by the door are some odd bits of wood, and as we’re going out Louise Hampson idly sorts through them. One she picks out, recognising it from some eighteenth-century drawings she’s been studying that morning. It’s a fragment of Gothic tracery from behind the medieval shrine of St William. Though the saint’s bones are in the crypt, the shrine itself was looted and demolished by Henry VIII’s commissioners in 1538. But lacking any religious imagery the doors were suffered to remain and weren’t taken down until the eighteenth century, and here is some of their medieval tracery, a relic of the ancient shrine just gathering dust in the mason’s loft. Suddenly I envy Louise her job.
County Arcade, Leeds
When in my early twenties I first went to Italy to Venice and Florence, I didn’t at first understand why it all seemed so familiar. I had the feeling I had seen these buildings before, as indeed I had. I knew them because I’d been brought up in Leeds where so many nineteenth-century banks and commercial premises were modelled on and reproduced the palaces, baptisteries and bell towers of Renaissance Italy.
When in the sixties Leeds, like all the northern cities, was sacked by property developers much of its nineteenth-century inheritance was lost and what remained was cleaned. You can always tell when there’s been some act of architectural murder because the surviving witnesses to it are all washed in dubious expiation. Lady Macbeth was probably an architect.
Among the happier survivors, though, are the arcades. There are some half a dozen arcades in Leeds. Thornton’s Arcade was always the most exciting to me as a child because it had (and still has) a clock with moving figures. County Arcade was the poshest, though it never looked quite as posh as it does today when it has been nicely restored.
There was always something festive about County Arcade, an air of holiday and theatrical exuberance, but it wasn’t until I was asked to compile this programme that I found out why. County Arcade is one of the few, as it were, lay buildings by an architect whose reputation rests on his design of Victorian and Edwardian theatres, Frank Matcham. Fifty years ago there was scarcely a town of any size in the United Kingdom that didn’t boast one of Matcham’s theatres and though scores have since been lost enough remain to testify to the achievement of someone who was undoubtedly this country’s greatest theatrical architect.
Though this is not a theatre, it was built as part of a scheme involving one, the Leeds Empire lower down Briggate, which Matcham had designed – and which I remember as a child if only because it used to advertise some of its stalls as ‘Fauteuils’, a word both mysterious and unpronounceable. The Empire is long gone but here is County Arcade, which still somehow smacks to me of the seaside. I think it’s because it’s built in a material (glazed brick and terracotta tile) which is also the stuff of the grander hotels and boarding houses that line the front at Morecambe and Cleveleys.
As a child I was in this arcade more often than most (and I don’t apologise that its charm has as much to do with memory as with architectural merit). I can remember the shops that used to be here and in particular a toy shop. At the start of the war toys were in short supply, and my dad had invested in a fretsaw and took to making toy animals. His speciality was penguins, which he mounted on a little four-wheeled cart. On his afternoon off he hawked them around the toy shops of Leeds without much success until one day he called here at a toy shop run by a Mr Baildon. ‘Old Baildon’, as Dad always called him, offered to take his entire output, though at a very modest rate. So, week by week, we would come down here with two dozen or so penguins and the occasional giraffe. They seemed to my brother and me a very dull toy, but did we ever see a child trailing one we would follow behind hoping to overhear some expression of pleasure, Dad presumably experiencing much the same frisson as an author does when he catches someone reading one of his books.
Many years after I saw one of these penguins in a shop window now elevated to the status of an antique. But the shop was closed and when I came back it had gone. One of the memories of my childhood is of rows and rows of penguins ranged on top of the wringing ma
chine, uniform and without personality until Dad painted in the eye and suddenly they acquired a face.
Here used to be the Mecca Ballroom, which imparted a degree of whoopee to the arcade. It was thought, by me at any rate, to be a place of great wickedness, and boys in my class at school would sometimes go dancing there and come back swearing they had seen a prostitute, the cast-iron proof a chain worn round the ankle. Opposite the Mecca was Redman’s the grocers, a grander version of the Maypole or Gallons, branches of which you found all over Leeds.
The window would be filled with great boxes of raisins and prunes and candied peel and you could buy homemade oatcakes here, Thompson’s barley kernels and Allinson’s brown bread – health food even then, though with none of the ideology that nowadays goes with it. And here, at the Vicar Lane end, was Cashdisia, the gents’ outfitters where we got our school blazers but didn’t get those great class indicators, the Cash’s name tapes that better-class boys had sewn into all their clothes.
There are some surprising survivals: little milliner’s shops, shops selling babies’ knitwear, which somehow seem to cling on in the teeth of the fiercest economic gale. There was a corsetières here in the forties and the same corsetières is here now. It’s a curious profession and not one I associate with the present day. Corsetières seldom had premises as it was a profession taken up by single ladies of a certain age, who did fittings in the home. My Aunt Eveline was briefly a corsetière, herself an ample lady and, like many of them, a model for the product she was marketing.
County Arcade runs between Briggate and Vicar Lane. In my day it marked the border of respectability because on the far side of Vicar Lane is Kirkgate and that other splendid survival, the covered market, and beyond the market is the slaughterhouse, or ‘the yard’ as my father called it. This is where the city began to be slightly disreputable and so here had lodged the less orthodox retail establishments: herbalists, shops selling surgical appliances, rubber goods, remedies for haemorrhoids or hair, wanted or unwanted, and remedies for babies too, wanted and unwanted.
Happy though I am to see this arcade so splendidly restored, if I’m honest it’s just a bit too smart for me now – too done up, and the painted leaves make it look like Christmas all year round – but that’s a small price to pay to keep it from the bulldozer. Oh that the financial institutions which rule our lives and which have helped to restore this arcade had learned the lessons of conservation twenty years earlier, in which case England would be a pleasanter place to live. As it is, I’d like to come back here in a few years’ time when this particular restoration won’t seem quite so synthetic. Time will have weathered it a bit, distressed these slightly too twee shopfronts, faded the lettering, and maybe some of those seedier backstreet establishments will have begun to creep back – a second-hand bookshop perhaps, a herbalist, shops for what people really want rather than what they can be persuaded to want. But I imagine babies’ knitwear will still be hanging on like grim death.
Nowadays we live to shop. It’s the only thing that holds us together. There’s no such thing as society, said the Blessed Margaret, just shoppers. And if we can’t shop we get depressed and feel oppressed, the deliverance of Eastern Europe not so much the restoration of freedom as the restoration of freedom to shop.
Small specialised shops selling chocolates, pot-pourri and scented candles, card shops with messages for all sorts of occasion, grave and gay, and straight, kitchen shops selling jams in esoteric combinations, rhubarb and ginger, apricot and almond, out-of-the-way mustards, pedigree vinegars – lovely, lovely shopping.
A Room of My Own
‘You’re from Yorkshire and he’s from Yorkshire. You’re from a state school and he’s from a state school. You’re reading history and he’s reading history. You seem to me,’ and Rector Barber gave what I took to be a smile, ‘you seem to me to be very well suited.’
So my first disappointment with Oxford was finding I was going to have to share. But the disappointment turned to consternation when I found I had been put in with someone with whom I had intermittently shared a barrack room and a bedroom for much of my two years in the army. He was amiable enough, much more so than I was (and far more convivial), but he was no more anxious to share with me than I with him. It was this depressing prospect that had emboldened me to knock on the door of the Lodgings the first day I arrived and ask to be moved.
Though a kindly enough man, Rector Barber had an air of death-in-life about him that is caught well in the Annigoni portrait, now hanging in Exeter College hall; a classicist from the age of Housman, he made even that austere figure seem jolly and certainly I got no joy that day. I came away thinking, ‘Well, I’m here for three years and that’s put paid to the first year.’
It hadn’t, of course, but I have to say that, though I ended up staying at Oxford not for three years but for eight, the place inspires little nostalgia. Still, it was at Oxford that I first had a room of my own.
When, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder decorates his college rooms at Oxford he puts up a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a poster by E. McKnight Kauffer and a screen painted by Roger Fry, bought at the closing-down sale of the Omega Workshops. Later, when Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte and is exposed to a more sophisticated and idiosyncratic taste, these slightly shaming objects are put away.
They’re not shaming today, of course, when both the screen and the McKnight Kauffer would be thought eminently ‘collectable’. Still, Waugh catches well the uncertainty of a young man called upon to stamp his personality on a room but who is not sure what he likes or what he should like.
For many undergraduates, though, and certainly in the mid-fifties when I went up to Oxford, the problem did not arise. In my own college, Exeter, most undergraduate rooms were papered in beige and even rooms with eighteenth-century panelling were painted an unprepossessing cream; the furniture was heavy and uncomfortable and carpets thin and violently patterned, the better to stand the strains and stains of undergraduate occupation.
Billeted in rooms that resembled a cheap boarding house in Hull, few of my contemporaries felt impelled to brighten up their surroundings or even mitigate their discomfort. It wasn’t only indifference, though, that left the walls bare, so much as a shortage of anything with which to adorn them. The glimpse of light, colour and good design that was the Festival of Britain had been snuffed out and drabness was back. Even posters were in short supply and there were no shops selling cheap reproductions. Long-playing records were just coming in, however, and their covers were often colourful and well designed, sometimes with good photographs; these at least were readily accessible and several rooms that I remember had record sleeves artfully arranged around the walls.
I myself was far from indifferent to questions of decoration, and having a room that I could do up and arrange as I wanted was what made me look forward to Oxford. University to me had less to do with broadening the mind than finding a place I could call my own. I had never had a room to myself; at home I had shared with my brother, and during my two years’ National Service had been in various barrack rooms. Some of this time, though, was spent in Cambridge, which, perhaps because it boasted a School of Architecture, wasn’t the design desert most provincial cities were.
At Joshua Taylor’s there were pots by Lucie Rie which foolishly (and with only my army pay) I did not buy; Robert Sayle’s had Isokon chairs and I didn’t buy those either. The same shop did stock some hand-blocked wallpaper and though it was expensive, too, thinking of the room I was going to have I invested in a length. Few freshman undergraduates arrive at college, I imagine, with a single roll of wallpaper under their arm, but I did.
It was all to no purpose. Finding I was going to have to share meant that my precious wallpaper would have to wait. In an ideal world, I suppose we might have come to some arrangement about doing the place up together. But interior decoration was not high on my room-mate’s list of priorities and so, since it was plain we were never going
to be Colefax and Fowler, the wallpaper went back into the drawer.
At the time I had even less idea than Charles Ryder what it was I liked, though I didn’t bother as much as he did about the impression I created, as none of my friends cared one way or the other. Exeter happened to have been the college of William Morris, and at the bottom of my staircase was a room enshrined to his memory, papered in green willow-patterned paper with his portrait over the mantelpiece along with various drawings by Burne-Jones. Together they had designed and furnished the college chapel, modelled on the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. I didn’t care for it or Morris either, nor did the thick-necked women of Pre-Raphaelite portraiture much appeal. I would have liked Kelmscott had I seen it, but there was no hope of that. Too far to cycle, it was lost in the depths of the car-free countryside.
While not quite a sleepy provincial town, Oxford in 1954 was both quieter and dustier than it is today. Few college or university buildings had been restored or cleaned: the old emperors’ heads around the Sheldonian were still shapeless and decayed, the stucco everywhere peeling and scrofulous. It smelled older too, some of it the smell of ancient meals in hall and buttery, and it’s this smell rather than more obvious fragrances (wallflowers, old books, cold stone) that calls the place back.
It was not until my second year that I achieved the sole occupancy of a set of rooms, under the eaves of the front quad and looking out at the back over Exeter garden and walls of the Divinity School. I could also see the towers of All Souls and the spire of St Mary’s. Still, it was less the view than the interior I was interested in. I put my wallpaper up on the chimney breast and at the windows I hung long grey curtains of some shiny material which were purely for decoration because, since I was on the top floor, nobody could see in anyway. To the left of the fireplace I hung a plain gilded nineteenth-century mirror, which was falling to pieces then and is falling to pieces now where it still hangs at the top of my kitchen stairs. Below it in the photograph is a small black-and-white portrait of myself in profile. Though I am no artist, I was immensely pleased with it and mortified when it was later lost, the linen on which it was painted recycled, I’ve always thought, by a young painter for one of his own less distinctive efforts. I had painted a coloured portrait at the same time and this has survived. However, since I was the only subject I seemed able to tackle, I thought it was best, or at any rate healthiest, to cease production.
