Patrick Comerford
Edward Swinfen Harris (1841-1924), the Stony Stratford-born architect who died 100 years ago last year, on 30 May 2024, remains a towering figure striding across the landscape of the neighbouring counties of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire.
I spoke about his life work earlier this year in Stony Stratford library (24 February), and there are invitations later this year to speak about his work in the Swinfen Harris Hall in Stony Stratford (19 September) as part of the programme for Heritage Open Days, England’s largest festival of history and culture, and in the library in Buckingham with the University of the Third Age Architecture Group (11 September).
Edward Swinfen Harris worked mainly in the Arts and Crafts style, and his works include vicarages, houses, schools, church alterations and additions, church halls, almshouses, lynch gates and memorial crosses in the London Road cemetery. He seems to have been particularly adept at receiving commissions from local GPs, and his work can be seen in Stony Stratford, Bletchley, Buckingham, Calverton, Great Linford, Maids Morton, Newport Pagnell, Roade and Wolverton.
His legacy in Newport Pagnell includes: Lovat Bank on Silver Street (1876-1877), designed for FJ Taylor of Taylor’s Prepared Mustard fame; probably Lovat Lodge, beside Lovat Bank; his alterations to Tickford Abbey in the late 19th century; and the former Bassett’s Bank, now the Post Office on High Street.
I went to see both Tickford Abbey and the former bank when I was in Newport Pagnell at the end of last week.
Swinfen Harris designed the Post Office, built in 1870-1872 for Bassett Son & Harris, or Bassett’s Bank, the oldest banking institution in Buckinghamshire. The Bassett family were Quakers originally from Leighton Buzzard. Barclay’s, another bank founded by a Quaker family, had been Bassett’s London agents from the beginning.
The two-storey former bank has a symmetrical design in the Gothic Revival Style, and it is built of brick with polychrome brick and stone dressings, a stone plinth and quatrefoil openings. The pitched slated roof has lateral and axial chimney stacks with dentil bands. The entrances in end bays each has a stone doorcase of paired colonettes, with deeply carved capitals, supporting a gable with fleur-de-lis finial and an inset pointed arch with trefoil a motif.
The other features include wooden doors with herringbone panelling, round-arched ground floor sashes, with carved capitals supporting gauged polychrome brick heads, shallow brick pointed arch arcading with stone impost bands and gauged brick arches with stone hoodmoulds and ballflower springers and rectangular stone plaques with quatrefoil ventilation openings set in spandrels.
A continuous stone sill band has strips of white brick between windows. The central window has a two-stage head and a shaped stone hood, dated 1870, with a fleur-de-lis finial and ballflower corbels. There is a stepped brick cornice with stone gabled stops and a moulded parapet.
Barclay’s Bank took over Bassett’s Bank in 1896, and later new modern Barclays was built further down the High Street during the 1990s at the Market Hill. Meanwhile, the interior of the buikding designed by Swinfen Harris had been altered to suit modern banking and post office needs.
Further west along the High Street, Nos 60, 66 and 68 High Street form an architecturally interesting group of buildings.
No 60 High Street is an excellent example of an early 18th century town house. The Queen Anne frontage is deceiving, however, as the interior details indicate a much older property.
For most of the 20th century, this was the home of the Newport Pagnell Urban District Council.
This red-brick three-storey house with a hipped tile roof has a beautiful wooden doorcase with a fanlight above and two reeded Ionic pilasters, a stone plinth, bands and quoins, and a plaster coved cornice. There is an entablature with a pulvinated frieze and dentilled pediment.
A few doors down, on the same side of the street, No 68 is the offices of the Nationwide Building Society. It was once a 16th century dwelling house, although the timbers are about the only original building material remaining.
Brewery House at 84 High Street is a Queen Anne red-brick period house with a shell porch and doorcase, and was carefully restored and renovated recently. It is a three-storey early 18th century house. The central panelled door has a fanlight, with a rusticated surround and a shell hood on consoles. The interior retains some attractive period features, including 18th century panelling and early 19th chimneypieces.
The house was home to the owners of the brewery that once stood beside it. The brewery buildings were used by Cooper’s the agricultural engineers, for more than half a century. They were demolished in 1990 and replaced by the present Boots Pharmacy and medical centre.
Walking along the High Street in Newport Pagnell, I had to look again at some of the many other interesting buildings along the street. No 38 High Street is an early 17th century half-timbered house built of timber frame and plaster.
Now a shop, this building is a three-storey house with an attic on a prominent site. The old timber framing was covered for many years by heavy rendering, but this is exposed once again, and the interior also has a fine early l7th century staircase .
I also peeped through the archway that leads to the United Reformed Church. The church dates back to 1659 and was built by independents or nonconformists on the site of an ancient meeting barn after the Revd John Gibbs, who had been the Vicar of Newport Pagnell until 1659, had been ejected for not administering the Sacrament to a notorious local drunk.
In time, the Independents grew in numbers and eventually built their own new chapel. The former Congregational church is now part of the United Reformed Church.
The Newport Pagnell Town Clock on the High Street commemorates the bicentenary in 2010 of the rebuilding of the town’s bridges in 1810.
The ornamental centre pillar and railings reflect the design of the Tickford Iron Bridge, the oldest cast iron bridge in the world remaining in everyday vehicular use.
Close to Tickford Bridge, Queen Annes Almshouses on Saint John’s Street were originally founded in 1287 as Saint John’s Hospital. It was rebuilt in 1891 to designs by Ernest Taylor a former assistant of Edward Swinfen Harris. Taylor also designed the reredos in Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church.
But more about these almshouses and this link with Swinfen Harris on another evening, hopefully.
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