Lock-down Pictures

Aidan  de la Mare’s representation of the aptly named

“THE  LOCKDOWN  WORKS”

 Which was the headquarters of Samuda Figgis Chemicals, founded in 1880, just outside Kingston upon Hull in South Yorkshire on a spacious site, that was known as Lockdown from the original field name. 

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 Aiden's Technical notes – I have tried to bring my buildings a bit more up-to-date, but only with limited success, as this is still more than a hundred years old.  All built with Lott’s Bricks, but including many of my modified stones that allow a better standard of construction for such a large building to stand safely without glue or internal walls.  Unusually for this model I have reversed my usual practice and borrowed Richter’s roof stones for the towers (it is normally Lott’s roofs on Richter’s buildings).   A building of this size has used almost all my plain wall stones and windows, and it has been nice to be able to use window stones instead of just holes, as one has to with Richter’s; although I am not sure they all ought to be green.  It took three days to build and only required one significant rebuild of the tower to get it right.  The plan is 64 x 34 inches 162 x 86 cms, 23 inches 58 cms to the top of the tower.

Aiden has compiled a very interesting history of the ‘rise and fall’ of the building, which I am sure will appear in a future Bayko News!                                                                                          

     Aidan  de la Mare’s  ECHO  FOXTROT  GOLF  HOTEL

This building is another of my recent trend: those directly inspired by an existing building, rather than a general style of building.  But it is not a copy of the building, Bovey Castle near Moretonhampstead in Devon, which is why I have given it its own name, Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel; and I apologize for the rather thin joke about the International Code Alphabet, which should continue ‘India Juliet speaking. How can I help you?’  And, because this building is really not more than a large house built in Lott’s Bricks.

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Technical:-   All Lotts Bricks including the arches (ex Kindergarten sets), set on a raised section of the building table to give it a terrace.  The task of such buildings has to begin with laying out the roof pieces, and then trying to fit the foundations in under them.  Unfortunately by the time one has built up two or three stories somehow the roof seems not to fit as intended.  In this case I had to take down and rebuild two thirds of the rear wall to get it to fit.  Also the rear wall is almost straight, so the irregularities of the stones manifest themselves in flat walls of this height so I had to include internal buttresses to cope with the instability this induced. 

The building follows the inspiration with the Jacobean original house on the right, but departs from it with the timber-framed section, although it is not really out of character.  And it returns to the inspiration with the rather plain four story section on the left that represents the later addition.  The confines of my building table mean that I have not been able to make a proper job of the rear of the building which should display the same type of asymmetric grandeur as this, the garden front. The building occupies the whole length of the table at 69 inches (175 cms) and the roof ridges range from 11 to 15 inches (28 to 38 cms). It took three fairly concentrated days to build, and has satisfied my inspiration.

I am not sure whether this is an improved skill at modelling, or a deterioration of creative building; it is the third and the most detailed model of a pre-existing building that I have recently completed, whereas most of the others in the past were my own design.  This is Westminster College, Cambridge, formerly the Presbyterian College, then in 1972 of the United Reformed Church.  Founded in 1840 in London, it moved to Cambridge in 1899 on completion of this building on a site donated by the Scottish sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson who were prominent Biblical scholars.

Designed by Henry Hare (1860 – 1921) a very successful architect who specialized in public buildings mainly in the decades either side of 1900, and who became President of the RIBA in 1917 – 1919.  He worked in various styles usually incorporating Jacobean and Roman elements with a significant touch of Arts & Crafts style.  He also tended to favour red brick walls with generous stone dressings.  Westminster College is almost entirely red brick with stone window surrounds, mullions and transoms.  The effect is restful rather than demonstrative, perhaps appropriate for a religious college.

 Apart from the addition of a small chapel behind the main building, the rest of it remained almost unchanged until well into the 21^st Century,.  But by then it had become in need of serious refurbishment, so money had to be found by selling some very important religious texts held by the College to raise money for the work.  With this done, it is still visually as designed and listed Grade 1, and is still fulfilling its original role as a centre of religious study.  I first saw the place 40 years ago when I was actually looking at stained glass windows in the chapel by Douglas Strachan, but I took an immediate liking to whole building.

Technical --  The choice of Richter’s for this building was decided by the need for a lot of red stones for the brick walls, and a lot of different small white stones for the windows and string courses.  But even so I ran out of red stones long before completion, so I had to build the rear wall in Lott’s Bricks (The height of the wall being just right to level up with the slightly smaller Richter’s end walls by omitting one course of quarter-inch stones).  Both front and back walls of the main building need internal buttresses to strengthen them, and the projecting oriel windows need complex counterweight stones inside as well.

I discovered once again how much more difficult it is to build a scale model of an existing building than it is to improvise my own designs.  It proved necessary to shorten the main building by a quarter of its length to get it to fit the table and be completed with my inventory of red and small white stones.  They and the blue roof stones used on the ancillary buildings completely used up my stock of all three.  Although I was able to make a good job of the main building and the tower, perhaps the best that I have yet achieved, I had to improvise for the ancillary buildings for want of space and red stones.  So the outer sides and backs are in white, which is not correct.  There is not actually much more building at the back, and the rear wall is very plain as I have done it.  I had to omit a diagonal buttress on the tower, as it is not practical to work the angles, and the dome top of the tower is rather more mine than Hare’s for the similar reason.