IT’S an enjoyable paradox that a material born of the Industrial Revolution should have become assimilated into the built vernacular and produced some of our most delightful small-scale buildings. Wrinkly tin, as it’s affectionately known, saw its heyday between the 1860s and the First World War, but hundreds of corrugated iron structures survive today, as photogenic when gently succumbing to shades of rust as when trim in their livery of colourful paintwork.
Foremost among them are tin tabernacles —that distinctive breed of portable chapels, churches and mission halls put up in response to the church-building boom of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unpretentious by nature and assembled from kits, they are associated in particular with the burgeoning of non-conformist religion, with its myriad congregations of Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Mormons, Plymouth Bethren, United Free Presbyterians and numerous other septs that required affordable places of worship quick to build and easy to recycle.
Many served predominantly working-class congregations in new industrial, as well as rural, communities and in the rapidly expanding cities. Some were funded by subscription or hired from their manufacturers; others were built by companies intent on keeping their employees on the straight and narrow. The Church of England also explored the potential of corrugated iron, particularly for army garrisons and the colonies, and for temporary use as permanent churches were being built.
Denne historien er fra July 22, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra July 22, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
