Misplaced Pages

#55944

39-507: Bearwood or Bear Wood , Sindlesham , Berkshire , England is a Victorian country house built for John Walter , the owner of The Times . The architect was Robert Kerr and the house was constructed between 1865 and 1874. The family fortune had been made by Walter's grandfather, John Walter I . Originally a coal merchant and underwriter , in 1785 John Walter had established The Daily Universal Register , renamed as The Times in 1788. In 1816, Walter's father, John Walter II purchased

78-712: A marine joiner may work with materials other than wood such as linoleum, fibreglass, hardware, and gaskets. The terms joinery and joiner are in common use in Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The term is not in common use in America, although the main trade union for American carpenters is called the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America . In the UK, an apprentice of wood occupations could choose to study bench joinery or site carpentry and joinery. Bench joinery

117-412: A general respiration rate; a generally-assumed time length for acclimating a board to its locale is 1 year per inch of thickness. In preparing raw wood for eventual usage as furniture or structures, one must account for uneven respiration and changes in the wood's dimensions, as well as cracking or checking. Wood is stronger when stressed along the grain (longitudinally) than it is when stressed across

156-516: Is a Grade II* listed building , and stands in parkland with its own Grade II* listing. Many of the estate buildings have independent listings, including the main lodge , the Oak Lodge, and the school's chapel. Nikolaus Pevsner , in his Buildings of England , describes Bearwood as "in its brazen way, one of the major Victorian monuments of England". [REDACTED] Media related to Bearwood House at Wikimedia Commons Sindlesham Sindlesham

195-598: Is an estate village in the borough of Wokingham in Berkshire , England . It is located around 4 miles (6.4 km) southeast of Reading and around 6 miles (9.7 km) west of the town of Bracknell , and just south of the village of Winnersh , from which it is separated by the M4 motorway . The River Loddon flows just to the west. A chapel was built in Sindlesham as early as 1220. A large 19th-century, three-storey watermill on

234-445: Is apparent, but it is as if Highclere had been sent on a weight-lifting course. The entrance front is like a sock in the jaw". The North (entrance) front is approached through an avenue of Wellingtonias . The frontage is symmetrical to its right side, but breaks into an enormous tower to the left. A large porte-cochère leads into the entrance hall. The whole is, mainly, of two main storeys, with large attics and even larger basements. It

273-455: Is considered a form of carpentry . Many traditional wood joinery techniques use the distinctive material properties of wood , often without resorting to mechanical fasteners or adhesives. While every culture of woodworking has a joinery tradition, wood joinery techniques have been especially well-documented, and are celebrated, in the Indian, Chinese , European, and Japanese traditions. Because of

312-499: Is constructed of red brick with dressings in Mansfield stone, a form of limestone . The South, garden, front is less frenetic than the North, although again interrupted by a tower to the right side. Large terraces, included within the building's listing status, drop away from the house towards the once-extensive, formal gardens. The interior centres on a large, top-lit picture gallery. This

351-564: Is only distantly related to the modern practice of woodworking joints , which are the work of carpenters. This new technique developed over several centuries and joiners started making more complex furniture and panelled rooms. Cabinetmaking became its own distinct furniture-making trade too, so joiners (under that name) became more associated with the room panelling trade. By the height of craft woodworking (late 18th century), carpenters, joiners, and cabinetmakers were all distinct and would serve different apprenticeships . In British English ,

390-785: Is the array of highly specialised service offices, including the Cleaning Room, the Brushing Room, the Gun Room , the Plate Safe and the Odd Room. The school chapel was constructed in 1934-1935 and was designed by Herbert Baker . Funding came from the Inchcape family, in memory of the shipowner, James Mackay, 1st Earl of Inchcape , who was Chairman of the Merchant Seamans Fund. Bearwood House

429-476: Is the preparation, setting out, and manufacture of joinery components while site carpentry and joinery focus on the installation of the joinery components, and on the setting out and fabrication of timber elements used in construction . In Canada, joinery is considered a separate trade from carpentry. Both having their own apprenticeship path and red-seal certification. In the history of technology in Europe, joinery

SECTION 10

#1732851514056

468-536: The Berkshire Masonic Centre at Sindlesham Court . Facilities in the village include a golf course (Bearwood Lakes) and the Nirvana Spa Health Club . This Berkshire location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Woodworking joints The characteristics of wooden joints—strength, flexibility, toughness, appearance, etc.—derive from the properties of

507-614: The British Empire . By a combination of exceptionally fast reporting; The Times' report of Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar was published several days before the British government received the official communique from the Admiralty ; and technological innovation, The Times had the first steam-powered printing press; Walter's son, John Walter II, made the newspaper profitable. Some of

546-554: The Inspired Education Group which has run the school, renamed Reddam House, Berkshire , since that time. The house has appeared in a number of television series including; Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986), Restless , Midsomer Murders , Endeavour , The Crown , and Soldier Soldier . Girouard considers Bearwood one of the best examples of "muscular Victorian gothic ". In his work, The Victorian Country House , he writes: "The influence of Highclere

585-669: The Royal Merchant Navy School , which had been established in the City of London in 1827 to educate the sons of merchant sailors lost at sea. The school moved into Bearwood in 1922. In 1966 it was renamed Bearwood College, but falling pupil numbers, declining revenues and increasing costs led to the college's closure in 2014. In the same year the site was purchased by the Reddam Group of international schools and renamed Reddam House, Berkshire . Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as "one of

624-437: The "Boudoir - defined", the "Smoking room - position, access, prospect and ventilation, "Water closets - notes thereon", the "Soiled linen closet - position and arrangement" and "Flower gardens - several kinds". The second focussed on a series of plans of actual houses, and included Kerr's, often rather dismissive, comments on his predecessors and contemporaries. Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace is considered "unsuitably grand", while

663-495: The 1960s, continued to operate at the site until 2014. In the early 1980s, the school separated from its founding charity, which retained ownership of the house and estate, leading to a lengthy legal dispute between the governors of the college and the trustees of the Merchant Seamans Foundation that was finally concluded by mediation in 2011. Falling rolls saw the final closure of the school in 2014, and its purchase by

702-561: The Bear Wood estate in Berkshire from the Crown Estate and in 1822 built a small villa on the site of the present house. Nothing remains of this first building, which was swept away in the gargantuan rebuilding undertaken by Kerr for John Walter III. The cost, £129,000, equivalent to £15,127,842 in 2023, was double the original estimate. In 1919, the house was sold and subsequently gifted to

741-454: The Bearwood brick kilns, the gas came from the estate's gasworks, the "elaborate and massive joinery " was carved in the estate's workshops. Michael Hall, the architectural writer, records that 380 workmen were on the Bearwood site in 1868. The final cost of the house came to £129,000, double Kerr's estimate. His attempts to negotiate an increase on his commission were unsuccessful. By the time of

780-607: The Bearwood estate up for sale. It failed to secure a buyer, and during the First World War , the house was used as a billet for Canadian soldiers. In 1919, the house with some of the grounds was purchased by Sir Thomas Lane Devitt , chairman of the shipping company Devitt and Moore and founder of the Naval College at Pangbourne . The purchase enabled Devitt to relocate the Royal Merchant Navy School from its original site in central London. The school, renamed Bearwood College in

819-567: The Eastern societies, though later, did not attempt to "hide" their joints. The Japanese and Chinese traditions in particular required the use of hundreds of types of joints. The reason was that nails and glues used did not stand up well to the vastly fluctuating temperatures and humid weather conditions in most of Central and South-East Asia. As well, the highly resinous woods used in traditional Chinese furniture do not glue well, even if they are cleaned with solvents and attached using modern glues. As

SECTION 20

#1732851514056

858-535: The Loddon has more recently become part of a hotel . Nearby is the estate of Bearwood House , built in 1864 by John Walter , the then proprietor of The Times newspaper, now Reddam House , a private secondary school. Also in the village are Bearwood Primary School , St Catherine Bearwood Church, the offices of Winnersh Parish Council , the control centre for the National Grid covering England and Wales , and

897-533: The Parsonage to the Palace , published in 1864. Pevsner suggests that this gained Kerr the Bearwood commission in 1865, a job that Walter had originally intended to give to the much more notable William Burn . The first part of Kerr's tome comprised an immensely-detailed guide to every aspect of the design of the mid-Victorian country house; sections included, "Privacy - defined and exemplified", "Salubrity - general rules",

936-561: The following names: A joiner is an artisan and tradesperson who builds things by joining pieces of wood , particularly lighter and more ornamental work than that done by a carpenter , including furniture and the "fittings" of a house, ship, etc. Joiners may work in a workshop, because the formation of various joints is made easier by the use of non-portable, powered machinery, or on job site. A joiner usually produces items such as interior and exterior doors, windows, stairs, tables, bookshelves, cabinets, furniture, etc. In shipbuilding

975-414: The grain (radially and tangentially). Wood is a natural composite material; parallel strands of cellulose fibers are held together by a lignin binder. These long chains of fibers make the wood exceptionally strong by resisting stress and spreading the load over the length of the board. Furthermore, cellulose is tougher than lignin, a fact demonstrated by the relative ease with which wood can be split along

1014-524: The grain compared to across it. Different species of wood have different strength levels, and the exact strength may vary from sample to sample. Species also may differ on their length, density and parallelism of their cellulose strands. Timber expands and contracts in response to humidity , usually much less so longitudinally than in the radial and tangential directions. As tracheophytes , trees have lignified tissues which transport resources such as water, minerals and photosynthetic products up and down

1053-547: The house's completion, Walter's stupendous income from The Times , £50,000 a year in 1865, was beginning to falter. The Times' circulation, already declining, came under more sustained assault in the decades ahead, with the rise of the middle-market newspapers , in particular the Daily Mail . In 1908, John Walter's grandson, John Walter V, saw control of the paper pass to the Mail's founder, Lord Northcliffe . In 1911 John Walter V put

1092-401: The introduced spanning material make use of the item's cellulose fibers to resist breakage. Biscuits or dominos may provide only slight strength improvement while still forming a strong alignment guide for the joint's pieces. Most-commonly referenced joints carried forward from historical Western traditions. When material is removed to create a woodworking joint , the resulting surfaces have

1131-526: The joint is destined to fail. Gluing boards with the grain running perpendicular to each other is often the reason for split boards, or broken joints. Some furniture from the 18th century, while made by master craftsmen, did not take this into account. The result is a masterful work that may suffer from broken bracket feet, which was often attached with a glued block, which ran perpendicular to the base pieces. The glue blocks were fastened with both glue and nails, resulting in unequal expansion and contraction between

1170-473: The major Victorian monuments of England", the house is a Grade II* listed building. John Walter I was born in London in 1738. Making, and subsequently losing, a fortune as a coal merchant and underwriter, in 1785, Walter established The Daily Universal Register , "to record the principal occurrences of the times". Renamed The Times in 1788, within twenty years The Thunderer had become the newspaper of record for

1209-434: The materials involved and the purpose of the joint. Therefore, different joinery techniques are used to meet differing requirements. For example, the joinery used to construct a house can be different from that used to make cabinetry or furniture , although some concepts overlap. In British English joinery is distinguished from carpentry, which is considered to be a form of structural timber work; in other locales joinery

Bearwood House - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-525: The physical existence of Indian and Egyptian examples, we know that furniture from the first several dynasties show the use of complex joints, like the Dovetail, over 5,000 years ago. This tradition continued to other later Western styles. The 18th-century writer Diderot included over 90 detailed illustrations of wood joints for building structures alone, in his comprehensive encyclopedia published in 1765. While Western techniques focused on concealment of joinery,

1287-422: The pieces. This was also the cause of splitting of wide boards, which were commonly available and used during that period. In modern woodworking it is even more critical, as heating and air conditioning causes more severe respiration demands between the environment and the wood's interior fibers. All woodworking joints must take these changes into account, and allow for the resulting movement. Each wood species has

1326-432: The planning of Paxton's Mentmore Towers is "incomprehensibly tortuous". The planning of Bearwood followed very closely the details of Kerr's book. Mark Girouard , in his pioneering study, The Victorian Country House , calls it a "synopsis [with] interminable offices, corridors, stairs and entrances". Everything for the house's construction and operation was undertaken on site; the 4,477,000 red bricks used were fired in

1365-401: The plant. While lumber from a harvested tree is no longer alive, these tissues still absorb and expel water causing swelling and shrinkage of the wood in kind with change in humidity. When the dimensional stability of the wood is paramount, quarter-sawn or rift-sawn lumber is preferred because its grain pattern is consistent and thus reacts less to humidity. All reinforcements using wood as

1404-659: The revenues were deployed to buy the estate of Bear Wood from the Crown, and in 1822 Walter II built a small villa, in a neoclassical style, on the site. In 1864 his son, John Walter III, employed Robert Kerr to replace his father's villa with an enormous mansion in the Jacobethan style. Robert Kerr (1823-1904) was an architect born in Aberdeen. His practice was never large, and his prominence owed more to his writings, specifically, The Gentleman's House: Or, How to Plan English Residences from

1443-510: The trade modernized new developments have evolved to help speed, simplify, or improve joinery. Alongside the integration of different glue formulations, newer mechanical joinery techniques include "biscuit" and "domino" joints, and pocket screw joinery. Many wood joinery techniques either depend upon or compensate for the fact that wood is anisotropic : its material properties are different along different dimensions. This must be taken into account when joining wood parts together, otherwise

1482-545: Was constructed to house Walter's collection of Flemish pictures inherited from his father. The pictures are now gone. The entrance hall is panelled in Spanish leather and has a dividing screens passage in emulation of medieval examples. Girouard considers the main staircase the house's coup de théâtre ; "one raises one's eyes and finds oneself looking up to the roof of the tower, 88 feet above, painted dark blue and sprinkled with gold stars". The other particularly notable feature

1521-444: Was the medieval development of frame and panel construction, as a means of coping with timber 's movement owing to moisture changes. Framed panel construction was utilised in furniture making. The development of joinery gave rise to "joyners", a group of woodworkers distinct from the carpenters and arkwrights (arks were an intermediate stage between a carpenter's boarded chest and a framed chest). The original sense of joinery

#55944