ENGLAND’S GALLERIED INNS

Evening Star, Issue 22816, 26 November 1937, Page 6

ENGLAND’S GALLERIED INNS

ARCHITECTURAL CHRKKHTKIS Balconies have a, certain natural romance about them. They suggest views, lovely intimate landscapes, and breakfasts in sunny weather (writes Kenqeth Matthews, in ‘ Coining Events’). It was, of course, from a balcony that Juliet listened in the moonlight to Romeo’s confession of love. This being so, we should expect the same romance to attach to the galleries which form, such a distinctive feature of our old English inns. The inn-gallery is, in fact a balcony—a single running balcony on to which all the bedrooms on a particular floor open out. There may or may not be a stairway, from the gallery to the ground. No _ question of a view disturbed the architects’ minds, however, because most galleries were placed facing the courtyard round which the old-fashioned inn was conventionally built. Nor have many love scenes survived from their history. It is recorded that an English king once saw a girl leaning over one of the galleries of the Bull at Dartford, and remarked to the innkeeper, “ Damned pretty woman!” only the king was not Charles 11., but George IV., and the woman not Nell Gwynne, but the wife of the innkepeerl The inn-gallery is something of an architectural curiosity. It appears as early as the fifteenth century and as late as the seventeenth, but it is always an accidental part of the inn’s design—one can always find a building in the same stylo without the gallery. Possibly it was felt to be convenient that there should be immediate access to all the bedrooms from the courtyard; here the horseman rode in, here the great carriages clattered; and in old inns which have no gallery one may often see, high up in the wall, a lonely, disused door through which the travellers’ luggage was unloaded from the coach top. Possibly even the gallery offered some security in the event of fire. But whatever its purpose, it justifies itself as a graceful and romantic decoration. The balusters are shaped and carved in the finest oak and chestnut. A sort of tradition demands that flower pots should be hung above the balusters; and in summer the gallery is scarlet with geraniums, suspended in bright, swaying like so many Chinese lanterns. One of the loveliest, as well as one of the oldest, galleried inns is the New Inn at Gloucester. This was built as a hostel for pilgrims in the fifteenth century, and there are galleries on all four sides of the courtyard, including a double gallery above the coffee room. An interesting detail is the open-lattice gates which screen off the first-floor gallery at the head of the courtyard staircase; these were originally intended to keep out stray cats and dogs. Two stiffly-pointed gables brood over the structure of ancient chestnut timbers, and the pillars and parapets of the galleries are stained green and gold by the tendrils of Virginia creeper. The staircase to the courtyard survives also at the George, in Huntingdon. The George, however, is more than 200 years later than the New Inn, and instead of the bowed and crazy timbers of the Abbots of Gloucester we have the low, white, open simplicity of a seventeenth-century courtyard. The gallery is supported on wooden posts with moulded capitals and bases; flowers blossom at the foot of the balustrade; but the balustrade itself is white and plain, like the most unpretentious of modern banisters. It runs above the entrance archway, bends, and descend:? in steps to the yard feelost

Sometimes in. the course of reconditioning an old inn the open gallery has been enclosed by a root and an oaten wall, to form a corridor. What is lost in pioturesqueness is undoubtedly gained in comfort, since there cannot have been much incentive to leave one’s bedroom when one knew that a storm was raging outside one’s bedroom door. An ex* ample of an enclosed gallery may be seen at the White Horse in on the borders of the New Forest* Another and even better example ia the old gallery in the Bell Inn at Thefc* ford. It is easy, standing inside the gallery, to see where the great beams which formed the original framework of the building end and where the outer projecting wau begins. Once more the view is on to the courtyard, where tha stage coaches from Norwich and New* market and London used to pull up only a hundred years ago. And «moa more the gallery was connected with, the courtyard by stairs, although the staircase has now disappeared. There is left one inn to mention, per* haps the most famous of all, the last of the galleried inns of old London, the George, in Southwark. It hes within a stone’s throw of London bridge, straight over the bridge and down the borough High street; it cannot be more than a stone’s throw from that other long-vanished inn from which Chaucer’s pilgrims set out anther? journey to Canterbury. The twin galleries of the Georg© are pal© with antiquity and scarlet with summer flowers; and their long assocmtion mtb the literature of England (was it or one of his friends who “ fell «ok <£ a surfeit caught with drinking bad at the George ”?) m commemorate on St George’s Day or soon after, when a play of Shakespeare is performed m the* inn yard. For a few hours there is the half-recapture of a scene which Shakespeare knew—the travelling players, the timbered inn, the sprmg even ing, and the cold stones of the courtyard. The Mayor and Mayoress of Southwark sit in the old -* lorry provides tho actors with, then: St p g osslbly the George survives because it is so discreetly hidden. It doesnob challenge the bustling commercial fjxmtages of the borough High street. The passing stranger catches sight of an. Tin* oSive sign bung above the gateway of a railway yard; he steps tarily out of the din of the traffic* and on his right, behind a outcrop of modem brick, he finds thesa oalUd timbers of older workmen from another age. He stands, perhaps, * Irttle bewldered before a facade so visibly unreal. And a small girl with bobbed hair and brave boy s trousers gives him one sidelong glanc* and runs in to tell the landlord. There is a date on the building—* 1676. It takes one back over two complete centuries, to the very birtbtimc of modem London, the age of Wren and the Stuart kings. And Mr E. V. Lucas adds; “The George is Dickens in essence. How any, Dickensian visitor to London can stay anywhere else is inconceivable, for here are the bedrooms opening on to the bal* conies, exactly as on the day when Sam Weller was first discovered cleaning the boots of Mr Alfred Jingle and Miss Rachel Wardle at the adjacent White Hart; here is the cosiest and brightest of bars* where you may still sip punch, a cordial beverage practically unknown in the rest of London and England, and very likely fine pineapple ram too.” Punch and fine pineapple rural