Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Pam (1990, 148) concludes:
…In this manner the whole front was built in a solid block, the circular niches
with their carved cherubs being afterwards cut out with a chisel.
Whitaker (1911, 206), describing this masterpiece, says:
…Nothing could exceed the beauty of the workmanship …. The similarity of its
elevation to that of Temple Bar cannot but strike the most inattentive observer,
and the arched recesses and their enrichments recall the beautiful blank windows
towards the western end of St Paul's Cathedral.
Certain constructional aspects of the magnificent gauged frontispiece to the
chapel at Christ's Hospital School (The Bluecoat School) in Horsham (Sussex)
are similar to the above masterpiece (Fig. 76). Originally erected in 1672 in
Newgate Street, London, where Helder certainly worked in the 1670s and early
1680s. The design Lloyd (1925, 96) attributes to Wren, who along with Hooke,
was a Governor of the school.
This frontispiece was carefully disassembled and re-erected, when the school
moved from the city to its present site in 1901. (Bryant, 1902) records:
On the south end of the building (Old School) there is a very interesting piece
of brickwork and a statue of Edward VII. This brickwork came down in little
wooden boxes about a foot [305mm] square and numbered and it was rebuilt
here exactly the same as in London.
The whole edifice, from first-floor level up, is of ashlared gauged work with
delightfully textured orange-red rubbers. Of particular interest are the Ionic
capitals to the four engaged pilasters with entasis, and the hood of the central
niche, all of which have been formed of courses of ashlared gauged work, set
to bond, in either hot or cold cement to form lumps and then carved. Again,
the fineness of their joints compared to the surrounding gauged work is read-
ily apparent.
Of interest are the seventeenth-century red rubbers, with their inher-
ent texture and visible inclusions so typical of this period, compared to the
1902 gauged arch of the entrance doorway directly below, constructed of
Edwardian, washed and clean-bodied TLB orange-coloured rubbers. It is an
excellent example of how the latter class of rubbers, though of first-class qual-
ity and universally copied today by the present brickmakers, are so often an
imperfect match for rubbing bricks on gauged work dating from before the
mid-nineteenth century.
