Lord of the Dance
There are neither sharp right angles nor precisely shaped polygons in the domestic architecture of Micheldever – from Church Street to Duke Street and from Rock Lane to Sloe Lane. Timber framed thatched medieval cottages with wonky jettied upper floors wend and weave their way through this chocolate box village. The geometry and materiality of the Parish Church of St Mary, set back from Church Street in sylvan grounds, couldn’t be more different from its neighbours.
Behind the late Perpendicular stone tower of the church is an octagonal brick nave. Battlements over the tower; a hipped slate roof over the nave. There are earlier and later additions in between but these two components form one of the most extraordinary juxtapositions in English ecclesiastical architecture. The patron of the nave rebuilding was the banking Baring family who have two country estates nearby: The Grange and Stratton Park. The architect was George Dance the Younger.
The Barings used the same architect for Stratton Park which was completed in 1806, two years ahead of the nave. George Dance remodelled an existing house in a forceful Greek Revival style. An imposing unfluted Doric portico anchored the nine bay main front into the ground with a misleading appearance of permanence. The first floor was treated as a piano nobile with taller windows. The ground floor was like a raised basement and the second floor like an attic. A generous void to window proportion added to the sense of massiveness of the stuccoed brick exterior. In 1963 owner John Baring, 7th Baron Ashburton, demolished the house. The portico still stands and a modernist brick and glass house was built behind it.
This rearrangement had at least one admirer. “Country houses are seldom built today in the grand manner,” opined Michael Webb in the 12 January 1967 edition of Country Life, “and when they are the result is usually a dispiriting pastiche of an archaic style … The old Stratton Park was built in 1801. It was never a distinguished building, and by the time Mr and Mrs Baring took it over, it was in bad repair and riddled with dry rot. They decided to demolish it and to commission a new house on the same site from Stephen Gardiner and Christopher Knight.”
He doesn’t dance around his subject: “Of the old house, only the impressive Doric portico was worth preserving, and this became the focus of the new composition: a much smaller house, entirely modern in concept and form, but integrated with a fragment of the old, as the new Coventry Cathedral relates to the bomb scarred ruin.”
Conservation architect John Redmill, who died in Dublin in 2024, stated, “Sir Francis Baring Baronet had employed George Dance to reconstruct his country seat at Stratton. This house, only five miles north of The Grange, was built for the Duke of Bedford in 1731 by John Sanderson, and had been partly demolished some years later. Dance had added the first strictly Greek Doric portico to an English country house – in scale and conception a neoclassical landmark.”
A sectional drawing and floor plan of the nave of St Mary’s Church are in the collection of the Sir John Soane Museum. Aged 15, Sir John’s first job was in the practice of George Dance the Younger. The section – complete with preacher in the pulpit – clearly shows the influence of the Ancient Roman Diocletian Baths. Clerestory Diocletian windows light congregants rather than swimmers. The floor plan introduces the executed corner arched recesses of the octagon.
Why a nave in the shape of a Celebrations box of chocolates? The architect was 63 (he would die aged 84 in 1825) when he designed the nave so it wasn’t an experimental flush of youth. It’s a shape that does improve internal visibility lines and there is precedent. In 1759, the main body of St Martin’s Church in Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire, was rebuilt in an octagonal form to the design of James Paine. That architect also incorporated Diocletian windows into the clerestory. A later example is William Rolfe’s 1821 Picturesque Gothic octagonal nave rising to a lantern at St James the Less, West Teignmouth, Devon. William Rolfe was a pupil of Sir John Soane. Octagonal naves are rare, even if not quite “unique” as each of these places of Christian worship claims on their websites.
Dancing in the morning when the world was young; dancing in the moon and the stars and the sun; dancing; back in London, dancing.
