Tile Gazetteer - Barking & Barnet

Barking & Dagenham

Barking

Barking Magistrates Court (1893-4, architect C. J. Dawson), East Street, has extensive dado tiling throughout its interior, which includes an impressive stair hall.

Barnet

Finchley

College Farm, Fitzalan Road, was erected as a model farm for the Express Dairy Company in 1883. Its ornamental dairy is lined with Minton tiles including some from the ‘rustic figures’ series, and there was tiling elsewhere in areas where animals were housed. The dairy was used as a tea house for some years.

Golders Green

Golders Green Crematorium, Hoop Lane, was opened by the London Cremation Society in 1902, the buildings dating from between 1905 and 1939. In the main cloister (1912-16), amongst the multitude of memorials, is a series of glazed polychrome ceramic plaques, mostly in the form of wreaths; there is also an ambitious terracotta monument to Ethel Watkins, dating from around 1920 and featuring two angels.[1] The West Chapel (1905), leading off the cloister, has a Jones & Willis opus sectile panel of 1915. In the east end of the Ernest George Columbarium (1922-8) is a superb Doulton polychrome stoneware funerary casket designed by Gilbert Bayes and made for Basil Edwin Lawrence and Mary Lawrence, who both died in 1928.

High Barnet

St John the Baptist Church, Wood Street, was rebuilt by William Butterfield in 1871-5, with the fittings being installed during 1878-85; these included a fine hand-painted tiled reredos depicting the Nativity. Butterfield went ‘to meet Standish for the reredos painting’ in 1880 and charged for ‘superintendance of the picture’.[2] The stained glass of the east window (1880-2) was supplied by Alexander Gibbs, who had worked with Butterfield on the tile paintings at All Saints, Margaret Street, Westminster during the mid-1870s. Most of the actual painting had been carried out by his younger brother Isaac Alexander Gibbs, who set up a stained glass and tile painting business in the early 1880s with W. W. Howard. The style of the Margaret Street and High Barnet paintings are very similar indeed, and it is possible that the otherwise unknown Mr Standish worked for Gibbs & Howard.

Holders Hill

The chapel at Hendon Cemetery, Holders Hill Road, was built in 1899 but later re-ordered when it became the north chapel of the crematorium complex; its monumental glazed ceramic reredos is therefore at the rear of the current lay-out. The reredos was made at the Fabrica Cantagalli of Florence, established in the fifteenth century and used by William De Morgan in the late nineteenth century.[3] The firm, which specialised in majolica ware, was probably responsible for the production of most of the small, highly-glazed reliefs with religious themes, often copies of della Robbia originals, popular in England during the mid to late nineteenth century as church decoration. The unusually large Hendon example is a copy of a Luca della Robbia Resurrection relief in a sacristy of Florence Cathedral.

References

1.^         Peter C. Jupp and Hilary J. Grainger, eds, Golders Green Crematorium, 1902-2002: a London centenary in context  (London Cremation Company, London, 2002).
2.^         Paul Thompson, William Butterfield (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1971), p458.
3.^         Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 4: North. Buildings of England (Penguin, London, 1998).