letters
I FOUND the latest edition of Cornerstone particularly fascinating because a couple of the articles brought back memories of ancestors and my childhood. The article on medieval
warreners’ houses (“Ruin, Rabbit, Ruin”) has encouraged me to investigate my father’s ancestry. My father, Frederick George Warren, believed he came from a family of warreners. When I was young I met my
grandparents, who were living in a back-to-back in Nottingham, a house which struck me as at least as “melancholy as a lodge upon a warren”, as Shakespeare put it. My grandfather apparently came from EastAnglia. The other article that was
especially interesting to me was that on historic buildings surviving in Croydon (“Palace and Poundstretcher”) by David Randall.When I was 10 years old I qualified for the Trinity School of JohnWhitgift in Croydon, and I would take the 130 bus from “Little Siberia” – as the New Addington estate, where my family had moved to in 1939, was known to local people – into the centre of Croydon, regularly passing the WhitgiftAlmshouses. In 1856 theWhitgift
Foundation approved a scheme to build two schools, a “poor” school
email your thoughts to
letters@spab.org.uk A la recherche deCroydon perdu
and a “middle-class or commercial school”. But there was money only to build the “poor” school. It was moved in 1931 to North End and renamedWhitgiftMiddle School. But over the years the significance of the word “middle” became increasingly pejorative, and seen as inferior toWhitgift Grammar School, which is located to the south of Croydon. So in 1954WhitgiftMiddle
was given the grander name of The Trinity School of John Whitgift. The buildings were gothic in style, with an impressive tower. However, a few years later the site, like so much of Croydon, was redeveloped. TheWhitgift shopping centre
is a very poor replacement for the original school buildings and playing fields. I entirely agree withMr Randall that the historic character of Croydon has been destroyed by some of the most mundane and characterless townscape in London. Though I am
a keen photographer, I have never been inspired to take one photo of the centre of this Neopolis in the Suburbs, as Mr Randall calls it. Unfortunately, unlike the
original, this one in unlikely to sink beneath the waves.
David Warren London SE3
Sell-offs: revert to donor?
WITH reference to the article by Ian Lush in the spring edition of Cornerstone, on the subject of councils selling of historic buildings, I thought it might be of interest to readers to know that in some cases where property has been gifted for public purposes, and is held on the public’s behalf by a local authority, the terms of the gift may provide that if the building ceases to be used in the manner set out in the terms of the gift, the property reverts to the donor or the donor’s estate. In the case of the King’s Cross
railway development in London the donor of part of the land was Great Ormond Street Hospital, and there was either a financial settlement or, possibly, legislation to “unscramble” the problem.
Sinking feeling: Croydon’s Bridge of Sighs
ElizabethJones Sandwich Kent
James Innerdale Conservation Rituals Kenyon Peel’s charm
IWAS much taken by the use in the Casework section of the spring Cornerstone of a picture of Kenyon Peel Old Hall (which stood in a flat, dismal Lancashire landscape). The house was a conservation
cause célèbre in the 1950s – Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s words from Murray’s Lancashire Architecture Guide (1955). The picture of the mansion is so vivid – almost better than seeing it for real. Cornerstone gets better by the issue.
DonaldMcNeill Oxford
Correspondence Letters can be emailed to the address at the top of this page, or posted to Cornerstone Letters, SPAB, 37 Spital Square, London E1 6DY
8 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 2 2011
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