Worcestershire is England’s most undervalued county. Sauce, Elgar and cricket, not necessarily in that order, are what most people associate with the name. Otherwise it is that place we cross on our way to Herefordshire, its far smarter western neighbour, or the territory glimpsed on either side of the M5 as we whiz northwards to Birmingham, whose sprawl has chewed up a sizeable part of the ancient shire.
Among those small towns which ‘heritage’ enthusiasts like to claim as a distinctive English speciality, Pershore, Upton and Bewdley must be among the most spectacularly unvisited. Georgian canals, failed spas, even urban schadenfreude, have their buffs and adepts, but which of these ever moseys around the dock basins of Stourport, saunters through Tenbury Wells or pauses for a shudder at Kidderminster’s irredeemable hideousness?
John Betjeman, in a rare moment of imbecility, referred to Worcestershire as ‘dim’. Heaven knows what he meant, since, visually, the whole point about the county is its radiant openness, with broad vistas and big skies. The micro-landscapes within this panorama are embedded in a fascinatingly diverse geology. Patches of medieval forest dot the grey eastern escarpment, a long sandstone ridge to the north-west shelters the hops and cherries of the Teme valley, orchards and market gardens cover the rich alluvial Vale of Evesham, bounded on its southern fringe by the greeny-pink granite crags of the Malvern Hills, once known as ‘the English Alps’.
Something of this variety caught the eye of Nikolaus Pevsner, whose Worcestershire (1968) is among the last volumes in his Buildings of England series. ‘Altogether Worcestershire was conservative,’ he declares of its architecture, noting the persistence of Norman work in the parish churches, the fact that so many of them hung on to their Jacobean pulpits or the way in which ‘the Jones-Pratt-May-Wren style’ took so long to oust stone gables and mullions from the manor houses.
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