Aucher Villas, 41–46 London Road Canterbury
When Sarah Ann Vlieland moved here on the death of her husband in 1877, the almshouses were 10 years’ old, but the new Hospital is as full of interest as John Cogan’s house, where the charity began. Clearly the upkeep of an 1860s’ newbuild would be a lot less than that of a dilapidated sixteenth-century town house but, as we can see from the pictures already posted, care and beauty were lavished on Aucher Villas, making them a worthy successor. The three semi-detached houses around a central courtyard were built by John Greene Hall, Canterbury’s surveyor, and are now part of the city’s most significant Grade II listed heritage.
John’s academic architectural training would have been in the mid-Victorian ‘Gothic Revival’ style of Augustus Pugin (who designed the interior of the Houses of Parliament after they had burned down in 1834), referencing medieval craftsmanship and ornate decoration. But Aucher Villas show more modern influences as well, looking towards the Arts & Crafts movement later in the century. John would have known the Red House in Kent, built by Philip Webb for William Morris, using local materials and drawing on traditional farmhouse design and ‘honest’ craftsmanship.
Aucher Villas are built of pale cream Kentish rubble* with stone facings round the windows, ‘gothic’ gables and a striking contrast of the red fishscale roof tiles with the dark bargeboards, decorated with a trefoil and quatrefoil cutout imitating leaves or rose petals, a standard motif in Arts & Crafts textiles and homeware. This was almost certainly influenced by the work of Pugin’s contemporary William Butterfield, who pioneered what he called ‘structural polychromy’, contrasting the colours on the facing of a house, such as the bands of black brick on a red brick façade in his master work, Keble College in the University of Oxford.
The quatrefoil pattern is repeated in Aucher Villas’ beautiful lead light mullioned windows, ‘mullions’ being the stone bars supporting the window frames. Large panes of plate glass only became possible when glass itself became less expensive early in the twentieth century, so small pieces of glass in a geometric pattern were held together by lead strips to make ‘leaded lights’, above all in the downstairs’ canted bay windows (‘canted’ because they opened on three sides, with the two side panels set at an angle to the centre one).
When one of the villas was recently for sale, it was marketed as ‘an enchanting ... house’, as Sarah Ann must have found it in her declining years.
*Also known as ragstone or Kentish rag, a stone still quarried today in nearby Maidstone.
