My Kind of Town: Amersham’s architectural styles chart more than 1000 years of history
My first experience of Amersham was at the tender age of 11 when my parents moved from a remote farm in North Yorkshire to a town nearby. Within six months I started at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, and my journey into the world of architecture began to take shape. The genesis of my interest had been kindled by a remarkable primary school headmistress who gave me a copy of the delightful ‘Observer’s Book of Architecture’, and was further fuelled by an inspiring art teacher, Bob Crichton. So, Amersham and more importantly the historic town of Old Amersham has played a significant part in my life. While many other incredible cities and places have fashioned my understanding and heightened my interest in the built environment, my childhood home has been somewhat of a constant.
Nestling in the Chiltern Hills, Amersham appears in six entries in the Domesday survey of 1086, but the earliest mention is of a settlement called Elmodesham in 796. It has a fascinating and colourful history and distinction needs to be made between the original settlement now known as Old Amersham and the more recent development of Amersham on the Hill, which prospered after the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway in 1892. John Betjeman’s acclaimed 1973 ‘Metro-Land’ documentary celebrates the suburban life that grew up on the line which connects Amersham to the City of London.
While the charming high street presents a chocolate box view of an English town, it was once an active centre of dissent”
Located on the banks of the river Misbourne, in a valley surrounded by ancient beech woodland and good farmland peppered with flint stones that migrate to the surface from the base chalky layers, Old Amersham became a prominent market town and a first coach stop on the road from London to Oxford. This partly explains why such a small town still boasts seven pubs.
While the charming high street – with its wide range of architectural styles that chart over 1000 years of history – presents a chocolate box view of an English town, it was in fact an active centre of dissent in the sixteenth century. On a hill just above the town and beyond the sweeping cornfields is the Martyrs’ Memorial erected in memory of a group of men and women known as the Lollards who were burnt at the stake during the reign of Henry VIII. Their crime was a simple desire to pray and read the bible in English. The town was also home to Oliver Cromwell’s family during the English Civil War, and in the seventeenth century prominent Quakers settled in the area and endured persecution.
Amersham also proudly boasts one of the gems of the modern movement. High & Over was designed by Amyas Connell for Bernard Ashmole in the 1920s, and firmly put Amersham on the contemporary map when it was completed in 1931. Known locally as the ‘aeroplane house’, it sits like a proud parent overlooking the Misbourne valley, with its white-rendered offspring ‘Sunhouses’ marching down the hillside wearing their modernist styling with pride and in defiance of the anodyne suburban fare surrounding them. A beautiful and heroic architecture that adds yet more layers of interest and history on this ancient place.
Returning to the area has somehow connected me again to the importance of place in our psyche”
Having spent years away, at architecture school and then at work in London, I recently rekindled my relationship with Old Amersham quite serendipitously. For many years I’d searched southern England for a site on which to build my own family home, and an opportunity arose by chance in the very place it all began. I bought a site on a lane close to the historic high street and designed a carbon-neutral house that is influenced by the historic materiality of the area and is informed by many years’ of experience of designing sustainable buildings. Returning to the area that has so many memories of my early life has somehow connected me again to the importance of place in our psyche and its influence in shaping our response to the world around us.
