52 C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 Metall into moulds… for House Work and Garden Ornaments’. Predictably, Batty Langley soon jumped on the bandwagon, to the deep displeasure of Holt who called him a ‘certain pretending architect, a meddling busy man… full of new Fangles, that has already deserted several trades’. The golden age of artificial stone would begin a little later, in the 1760s, when a Daniel Pincot moved his compound stone manufactory to NarrowWall, Lambeth. There he would be shortly joined by one of the most formidable female business teams of the 18th century, that of the family Coade, mother and daughter. Mrs Eleanor Coade soon ejected Pincot and, with her daughter, also named Eleanor, created a wonderful company. This married a material of impressive technical quality, worked by the finest clay modellers, with the finest precedents from classical antiquity, sold to the foremost architects and most influential patrons of the day. Conservationists are never sniffy about Coade. Scott strips away the remaining veils of mystery surrounding the material which was a very highly fired terracotta, good to look at and long noted for its remarkable resistance to environmental decay and pollutants. After the death of the younger Eleanor, the Coade company failed. Although its moulds lived on in the service of later firms which fired similar compounds, such as Blanchard of Bishop’s Waltham, the baton was increasingly passed to competitors like Austin and Seeley, who dispensed with a firing process and used Portland cement to harden the cast products. They had an intrinsic technical advantage, as Coade and later terracotta compounds all suffered from unpredictable shrinkage in the mould and the kiln, which led to high wastage for architectural products which had to meet fine dimension tolerances. It is telling that the companies that still make well-designed, premium artificial stone products today, Chilstone and Haddonstone, both employ the cement-based technique. At this point it is necessary to disclose that Simon Scott is a director of Haddonstone. In his text, he betrays a certain bemusement that conservationists are such critical friends (if, indeed, they can be described as friends at all) of a product type that has a long and occasionally illustrious history of its own. The answer lies in that little word, cement. As long as there is a demand for replicable cast ornament, supplied at an affordable price, there will be a place for artificial stone in the building industry. As long as it involves the use of cement, it is unlikely that conservationists will have much sympathy for it. But do read this book. It will make you scrutinise your core beliefs and that is rarely a bad thing to do. Michael Scammell, a conservation officer in East Cheshire In the Vodafone age The Buildings of England: Berkshire Geoffrey Tyack, Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner,Yale University Press, 2010, 812 pp, ISBN 978 0 300126 62 4 £35. Arriving 54 years after the original Pevsner volume of 1966, the new Berkshire has expanded to more than 800 pages. It is well illustrated with colour photographs, and a good number of black-and-white illustrations. The county has altered greatly in the meanwhile, due to a massive increase in the population of its main towns and densely-settled rural areas. The bulk of such development remains outside the remit of these architectural surveys. Descriptions are given of some of the more notable new buildings that have appeared since 1966, such as the libraries at Maidenhead and Newbury, and the Vodafone headquarters on the outskirts of Newbury. Conservation is treated in a way which would have been unlikely back in the sixties. The late-1930s country house, Charters in Sunningdale near Ascot, was one of the last great projects of its type before the second world war, and new or restored country houses were almost unknown when Pevsner first wrote. But now, ‘after long use as commercial laboratories, splendidly restored in 2005-8’ is the praise for the rebirth of Charters and its parkland for luxurious residential use. Listing had saved it, as it had the huge House of Mercy begun in 1854 on the outskirts of Windsor in ‘severe early gothic meant to instil piety and to discourage visitors’. ‘The extremely large complex has been converted to apartments,’ a further recognition of the role of conservationists in activities that would have been practically unknown in 1966. Reading, the county’s main town, and its large university take up about the same total of 50-plus pages, as do Windsor and its castle. The University of Reading launched the research work for Berkshire’s new architectural survey in 2002. A debt is owed also to Oxford, where Geoffrey Tyack is a fellow of Kellogg College. From Abingdon northwards into the western outskirts of Oxford, the volume includes these farther reaches of the original historic county. Slough in the east is within the new Berkshire boundary but, with Eton and Datchet, it is excluded from the new book as these areas are considered part of historic Buckinghamshire. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, however, includes Eton and Datchet, confusingly. The 2010 dedication runs accordingly: ‘To the memory of the old county of Berkshire c860-1974’. Following the boundary changes, the county council was abolished in 1998. Its powers passed to Slough and to the five district councils in the cutdown area along the M4 corridor. I looked for any of the buildings reflecting Berkshire’s post-1966 multiethnicity and did find Reading’s Hindu temple, formerly a Wesleyan mission Hall. This building’s facade of 1905-6 is described as ‘a reckless cocktail of seventeenth century classicism and Tudor gothic’. It is pleasing to note that the traditional Pevsner one-liners live on. Berkshire has undergone much change since the toll roads, the canals and the railways first traversed it over 200 years ago. The losses are probably outweighed by the sheer range of buildings now existing within the county. From medieval churches to 21st century commercial headquarters, from country houses in lovely parks to rugged stations and viaducts, Berkshire has it all. The new Buildings of England volume is an admirable guide to these varied assets. Graham Tite, a conservation officer at Windsor and Maidenhead, 2002–3
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