remember when you were more were easily led

Kind of a sequel to a previous post on pigeon lofts, here's a short photo-essay on another peculiar building type, the cricket pavilion (images discovered in the usual absent minded google image search).

What I particularly like about them is their hybrid quality, the fact that they are a mash-up of different typologies. Part house and part grandstand, they also include lots of other exciting add-on elements including score boards, clocks, flags and signage. Inside they are a cross-between a summer house, beach hut and, of course, bar.

Sometimes they're just a modest structure with a sign attached, like this one where the score board lives in its own slightly dormer which looks like its been removed from a larger pavilion elsewhere.



And sometimes they don't even have that, like this one, a utilitarian brick box with the name of the cricket club perfunctorily stuck on it. Some cricket nets attached to the side and jaunty white picket fencing are not enough to lift the drabness though.

This one has mated with a hump in the pitch, becoming both folly and picturesque landscape at the same time. I like the green painted timber work too which removes the mock-tudor from any vestigial structural role and reinforces its use as pure applied decoration.

In this one the sign has been incorporated into a small black shed all of its own (complete with operator inside presumably) that opens up on matchdays, leaving the pavilion free to pursue its dream of turning into a strange shaggy beast.

A charming example in suburban sixties moderne, complete with faux-digital scoreboard/commentators hatch. A man in a stripey shirt appears to be operating the scores whilst a large sign with the mysterious slogan of "Blair" is propped idly against some plastic lawn furniture.

Finally, this one has dispensed with almost everything except the sign, and become instead a giant building-board complete with clock face, flag poles and florid scrolls across the top.