Samuel Sanders Teulon - a diamond geezer!

Though it certainly wasn’t the beginning of Hunstanworth’s story – it is mentioned in the Boldon Book in the second half of the twelfth century – 1863 was the year that the village was remodelled using the Victorian Gothic styling that makes it so very different from any other place in Northumberland or County Durham.

The Reverend Daniel Capper, then owner of the Newbiggin and Hunstanworth estate but whose permanent home was in Gloucestershire, appointed flamboyant London architect Samuel Sanders Teulon to redesign the village. One of around a dozen architects at the time whose style is referred to as Gothic Revival, Teulon’s work over a career spanning more than 30 years included more than 100 churches, dozens of parsonages, schools and country houses, and five complete villages. At the same time as remodelling work was taking place in Hunstanworth, Teulon was also designing the church of St John the Baptist in Huntley, Rev Capper’s Gloucestershire base.

St James' Church, Hunstanworth designed by Teulon

By the early 1860s the population in Hunstanworth parish had reached an all-time high, at nearly 800 people almost four times what it had been at the beginning of the century. To help meet the demand for more homes and improved local amenities, Daniel Capper engaged Teulon to design a new church, school, and a range of houses and cottages to accommodate the burgeoning community.

Teulon’s buildings are easily identifiable by the ornately carved tall chimneys, the extremely steep pitch of the roofs, and of course the diamond-patterned designs of the roof tiles.

Author of the iconic work The Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner does not appear to have been particularly fond of Teulon’s style. He refers to Teulon disparagingly as ‘one of the most ruthless and self-assertive of the High Victorian rogue-architects’ and is only grudgingly admiring of the Hunstanworth architecture: “Here, where he cannot play with multi-coloured bricks as in the south, he devises at least patterns of dark and light slates and plays (it must be admitted, wholly successfully) with three colours of local stone, a smooth pale biscuit for dressings and a darker, rougher buff and rust-brown irregularly arranged for the walls. There are of course plenty of gables and a number of odd little Gothic windows (many replaced or enlarged), but on the whole Teulon lets us off lightly.”

Well, Sir Nikolaus may have had his opinion, but today Teulon’s work at Hunstanworth is considered important enough to protect it by giving it conservation area status and all of the buildings a Grade II listing. And back in 1863, while they may have looked pleasing to the Victorian landowner’s eye, they also fulfilled a desperate need for decent rural workers’ accommodation.

Some years ago it I was lucky enough to meet a descendant of the architect, Alan Teulon and his wife Christine, who, whenever they are travelling in an area they know contains examples of their ancestor’s work, they try to pay a visit. We met outside St James’ Church, Hunstanworth, and I remember being slightly disappointed that Alan wasn’t wearing a Fair Isle sweater (to match the diamond patterns on the church roof of course!).

Alan has written a book on the village of Thorney in East Anglia, which was remodelled by Teulon for the Duke of Bedford starting in 1849 and continuing in gradual stages through until 1865, so overlapping the time that Hunstanworth would have been under construction.

In his book, Alan relates how in the mid-1800s, many landowners had become increasingly aware of the need to improve on the often cramped and insanitary living conditions of their tenants. The ‘model cottage movement’ was in part a reponse to the Public Health Act of 1848, and aimed to provide enough space for living, cooking and sleeping, with separate bedrooms for parents and children, and outside, a ‘privy’, a pigsty and some garden. Tycho Wing, the Duke of Bedford’s agent who worked closely with Teulon on Thorney Village wrote in 1849: “The advantage of a garden to poor people is much increased by them having the means to keep a pig.” The Reverend Capper ensured the villagers of Hunstanworth got their pigsties and their gardens, and their children could attend a brand new school, located half a mile away up at Townfield to be more accessible for the families throughout the parish. And all of it gloriously Gothic!

I still hold out the hope that one day, squirrelled away uncatalogued in some dark archival repository, a pile of correspondence, plans, drawings and accounts is going to come to light between Samuel Sanders Teulon and the Rev Daniel Capper or his agent, that will reveal the full story of how the model village of Hunstanworth came about.