TrustNews Jun 22

From Ancient to Modern: 95 years of Winchester School of Art

Judith Martin looks at the origins of the Schoool of Art as it plans to expand

 

Art schools are anarchic, bohemian places, in the public mind at least. Artists are disreputable and generally regarded with suspicion, not just in the early 20th century. There may be some justification in this as artists frequently like to shock. For every starchy figure like Munnings, with his horses, or Holman Hunt, pained by the sacrilegious behaviour of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, there were several others bolstering the public’s prejudice, such as Augustus John with his two wives (at least) and his gipsy caravan, and the Bloomsberries, living, as they say, in squares and loving in triangles.

 

And yet in the 1860s it was a number of Winchester College dons who conceived and promoted an art school for Winchester, which began life in the highly respectable Bishop's Palace. By 1876 it was housed in a fine extension to the Guildhall, where you can still see the carved name of the School of Art. As it grew, it added temporary new premises across the city, including what was the Reference Library on North Walls. Then when the Guildhall premises were requisitioned for the war effort in the second world war, the temporary premises became permanent, until the 1960s.

 

It's unclear how the independent School of Art came to be under the aegis of local government, but post-war, the search for permanent new premises was led by the (unnamed) County Land Officer. His colleague, County Architect H Benson Ansell, was appointed in 1960. When the site on Park Avenue was chosen, it took some time to develop plans, not least because of the challenging ground conditions. A write-up on the eventual plans in the journal The Surveyor, in February 1963, notes that ‘test drillings showed a wide variety of results, with, in one case, over 74’ of soft chalk’.

Ansell would be responsible for a large proportion of the largely unloved rectilinear public buildings in Winchester, many of them demolished (Hampshire Police Headquarters on Romsey Road, Winchester Police HQ on North Walls) or considerably reconfigured (Hampshire County Council's own of?ces at Ashburton Court on Sussex Street), but there is no doubt that the Rotunda at the School of Art is designed to lift the heart.

There is very little in the public domain about Ansell as a man, and the only published photo of him, in the journal Education, where in 1963 he writes about schools in Hampshire, suggests a serious figure, not given to frivolity. But the twelve-sided jewel-box of a library, designed to reflect in the water from which it rises, is like a folly, more in keeping with the playfulness of at least one of its alumni: John Buckley, who fought a long battle with Oxford City Council to be allowed to show the shark he made plunging into the roof of his friend's house.

 

Winchester School of Art was dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1996, and its property, rights and responsibilities were transferred to the University of Southampton. The university was keen to expand, and in 1998 it took on the Textile Conservation Centre which had been based at Hampton Court. However, the Toblerone blocks – the triangular buildings designed to house the Centre by the next County Architect, Colin Stansfield Smith, next door to Ansell's buildings - were demolished when the TCC was closed in 2009.

 

There are now a number of more recent buildings on the site, by reputable architects, and several academic functions other than art, but it's noticeable how it is the Rotunda that is generally used in promotional material.

The write-up in The Surveyor, mentioned above, explained how ‘the twelve-sided library rises out of an ornamental pool...and is entered by a bridge at first floor level and by a stepping stone path to the small exhibition room at ground level’, and described the whole proposal as ’an attractive layout retaining the maximum number of existing trees….’ The pool is now (in May) full of duckweed, and the concrete is stained, but with care and attention it could again be the pinnacle of the Art School ensemble.

 

The best account of the Headington shark is here:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/Ietter-from-the-uk
/in-memory-of-the-englishman-who-kept-a-shark-on-his-roof