We know that in 1867 John designed Aucher Villas, the almshouses where Sarah Ann Vlieland spent the last 25 years of her life. It was his first big commission, as he had become Canterbury city surveyor the year before, aged only 31.
John was born in Hampshire in 1835 and apprenticed to his father Thomas as a cabinet maker. He studied for his RIBA1 examinations and rose to be managing clerk of Colsons, architects of the major restoration of Winchester Cathedral in the early 1860s: the influence of the Cathedral’s turrets and flat-faced gables is all over hislater work on Hammond’s Bank (see below).
In his 20 years in Canterbury, he transformed the city streetscape and, in 1882, built a narrow, brick-banded office for himself at no. 4 St Margaret’s Street. In 1887, he was commissioned to rebuild no. 51, Hammond & Co., the Canterbury Bank, founded in 1788 (now Lloyds Bank). Although he died before it was finished, it is his finest work, and if you know Aucher Villas you can clearly see his ‘hand’, even if the bank is more ‘civic’ and less Art & Crafts-inspired.
The bank’s red ‘Bracknell’ brick2 and pale stone frontage has the same oriel windows, quatrefoil cutouts on the lintels and a whole course of ‘gothic’ gables, and the ‘AD’ and ‘1887’ date stones are entwined with stylisedfruit and foliage. The turreted chimney stacks also reference St Alban’s Court in Nonington, the nearby ancestral home of the Hammond family, directors of the bank since the 1800s, but they make the frontage look cramped and cluttered compared to the simple outlines of Aucher Villas.
St Alban’s Court was originally a convent dedicated to the first English martyr, killed under Roman rule and buried in St Albans Abbey outside London. One can see its ‘Romanesque’ features in The London and County Bank (now NatWest Bank) that John built in 1885 at no. 11 The Parade, a beautiful rag3 and Bath stone ‘palazzo’ with broad flat window lintels and heavy rounded ‘aedicule’ columns.4 Was this a quiet doffing of the cap to his patron that got him the Hammond’s Bank commission 2 years’ later?
1 Royal Institute of British Architects.
2 The ‘TLB’ trademark stamped on the high-end bricks John used stood for ‘Thomas Lawrence of Bracknell’, whose bricks were also used in Westminster Cathedral and the Royal Albert Hall, machine-made for standard walls and hand-pressed (with their own number in the brick) for an individual design. In Hammond’s they were laid in the ‘English Bond’ pattern, with one course or row of bricks laid on their side (stretchers) and the one below end-on (headers).
3 Rag stone is a blue-grey limestone, quarried in Maidstone, 30 miles from Canterbury.
4 ‘Romanesque’ architecture flourished between 900 and 1200, using massive stone arches and arcades. An ‘aedicule’ was originally a niche in a wall holding a saint’s statue; at no. 11 they are small top-floor windows,sharing the fashion after the 1860s for commercial premises to look like an Italian ‘palace’.
Thanks are due to The Victorian Web for their post on the restoration of Winchester Cathedral under John Colson (2009); the Canterbury Historical and Archeological Society for information on Hall’s background and work in Canterbury (2015); John Harrison for his information on Thomas Lawrence; and particularly Martyn Fretwellhttps://ukbricks.blogspot.com for the ‘Bracknell’ brick and other help. I am also indebted to SherbanCantacuzino’s Canterbury (Studio Vista, 1970). Very many thanks are also due for the picture of Hammond’s Bank to the two friends of the blog who photographed the graves of Jerome Nicholas and Sarah Vlieland in 2010.
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