Monthly Archives: December 2019

Everton landmarks

Everton Library, Liverpool: entrance (2019)

One of the destinations on the Unexpected Liverpool (June 1st-5th 2020) tour is the iron church of St George, Everton, which I first visited so long ago – in 1978 – that I could photograph on the opposite side of the road the Catholic Church of Our Lady Immaculate, the only vestige of Edward Welby Pugin’s Catholic Cathedral to be built in 1853-6.

Our Lady Immaculate was knocked down in the early 1990s but there are still other significant buildings to see in the vicinity of St George’s.

Almost directly across the road on a triangular site is Everton Library (1895-6), a bold, varied but taut freestyle design – a blend of Jacobean and Arts & Crafts – by the versatile Corporation Surveyor Thomas Shelmerdine (1845-1921) who, between 1871 and 1912 built several other branch libraries and the grand Hornby Library in the city centre, the ponderous gates to Sefton Park, the fire station and tramway offices at Hatton Garden, another fire station at Kirkdale, several schools and a couple of colleges and a tactful extension to the Town Hall.  He laid out St John’s Gardens once it was decided that the Anglican Cathedral wouldn’t be built there.

Everton Library closed in 1996 and is now in a parlous state because of vandalism and neglect alike:  [https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/stop-rot-plans-evertons-jewel-10961779 and https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/signature-living-plans-transform-decaying-15342770].   Repeated efforts to convert it into a community hub and enterprise centre have foundered, and it figures in the Victorian Society’s 2019 list of endangered buildings:  https://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/everton-library-liverpool.   

A few yards from the Library stands the lively, turreted half-timbered The Mere Bank public house (1881), bristling with terracotta panels and plasterwork, and until recently still trading, though they haven’t updated their Facebook page since Hallowe’en:  https://www.facebook.com/MerebankPub.

In the distance, and visible for miles across the Mersey, is Everton Waterworks (Thomas Duncan, 1853-7) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTRfHTX0bJE], which consists of an underground reservoir and a Piranesian high-level water-tank, 90 feet above ground-level, holding 2,700 gallons, dwarfing the two Italianate pumphouses, built to provide a head of water in the time before 1891 when Liverpool took its water from Lake Vrynwy in mid-Wales.  Everton Waterworks has been long disused, yet a mystery buyer purchased it for £71,000 in March 2019:  https://lbndaily.co.uk/mystery-buyer-pays-70000-evertons-victorian-water-tower.  It remains to be seen what they plan to do with it.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Exploring Sydney: St James’ Church, King Street

St James’ Church, Sydney, Australia

Immediately after building the Hyde Park Barracks, its architect, Francis Howard Greenway (1777-1837) was commissioned to build St James’ Church, King Street (1824) directly opposite.

It’s a classical Georgian design, essentially a preaching box with a tower and spire, repeatedly adapted in keeping with the classical dignity of Greenaway’s intention.

Though it’s not as old as St Philip’s Church, York Street (founded 1793, current church by Edmund Blacket, 1848-56), St James’ is steeped in Sydney’s history and its monuments tell powerful stories of lives lived and lost.

Indeed, it’s described as the “Westminster Abbey of the South”.

The first significant memorial was executed in England by Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841) to commemorate Captain Sir James Brisbane (1774-1826), who died in Malaya and was cousin to the Thomas Brisbane (1773-1860) who gave his name to the Australian city. 

Other wall-tablets relate early episodes in the violent conflict between the British invaders and the indigenous Australians, which led to the deaths of –

  • Captain Collet Barker of His Majesty’s 39th Regiment of Foot “who was treacherously murdered by the aboriginal natives on the 30th of April 1831 while endeavouring in the performance of his duty to ascertain the communication between Lake Alexandrina and the Gulf of St Vincent on the South West Coast of New Holland [ie, Australia]”
  • John Gilbert, ornithologist, “who was speared by the blacks on the 29th of June 1845, during the first overland expedition to Port Essington [in the far north of what is now Northern Territory] by Dr Ludwig Leichhardt and his intrepid companions”, accompanied by the motto “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Scientia Mori
  • Edmund Besley Court Kennedy, assistant surveyor, “slain by the aborigines in the vicinity of Escape River [near Cape York, Queensland] on the 13th of December AD 1848” and Jackey Jackey (d 1854), “an aboriginal of Merton District who was Mr Kennedy’s sole companion in his conflict with the savages and though himself wounded tended his leader with a courage and devotion worthy of remembrance, supporting him in his last moments and making his grave on the spot where he fell”

Because of its proximity to the law courts and centre of government in Sydney, St James’ Church has always played a major part in the life of the city.

It contrasts with Sydney’s Gothic Revival St Andrew’s Cathedral (Edmund Blacket, 1868) and the magnificent St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (William Wilkinson Wardell, begun 1868, completed 2000).

Exploring Sydney: Hyde Park Barracks

Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, Australia

My initial travels in Australia gave me a false impression that the country’s architectural history begins with the Gothic Revival.

In fact, over sixty years passed between the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and the gold rushes that transformed the Australian economy from 1851 onwards.

I came to realise that the early architecture of Australia is Georgian – particularly the churches and public buildings of Tasmania and the surviving Georgian buildings in and around New South Wales.

Francis Howard Greenway (1777-1837) was a young Bristol architect who became bankrupt and was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for forgery.  He arrived in Sydney in 1814 and quickly made the acquaintance of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762-1842;  in office 1810-1821), who was instrumental in developing New South Wales from a convict settlement to a nascent colony.

The Governor commissioned Francis Greenaway to design and build the first Macquarie Lighthouse at South Head, Watson’s Bay (1817;  replaced 1883).  When this project was satisfactorily completed Macquarie emancipated Greenaway and made him Acting Civil Architect under the Inspector of Public Works, Captain J M Gill.

Francis Greenaway’s most important surviving work is the Hyde Park Barracks (1818-19) for male convicts at the head of Macquarie Street in central Sydney.

Built by convicts for convicts, the Barracks was more like a hostel than a prison.  In order to make use of their labour, the colonial government had to provide a measure of physical freedom to transported prisoners who worked, in gangs or on attachment to free employers, in the already crowded town.

The central three-storey dormitory block stands in the middle of a courtyard, surrounded by domestic and administration buildings and the deputy superintendent’s residence.

Convict transportation ended in 1840 and eight years later Hyde Park Barracks was converted to a female immigration centre, part of a government initiative to recruit single women from Britain and Ireland to counterbalance the preponderance of men in the colony.

In the decades that followed the former barracks underwent repeated changes of use, and gathered numerous extensions which are now made evident by a detailed series of models of the site.   There is a succinct summary of the site’s history at https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hyde_park_barracks#ref-uuid=2779d140-faa9-2aa0-ad8d-f4230aca4590.  

In recent times the accretions have been cleared away and the whole site subjected, like the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, to detailed archaeological investigation, interpreted in a similar minimalist light-touch manner that at the same time informs the visitor and requires imagination to reconstruct what has gone:  https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hyde_park_barracks_archaeology#ref-uuid=2779d140-faa9-2aa0-ad8d-f4230aca4590.

Temples of Sanitation – Abbey Pumping Station, Leicester

Abbey Pumping Station, Leicester Museum of Science & Technology

While Burton Corporation was building Claymills Pumping Station to rid the town of brewery and household effluent, sending the ordure and the smell to the unsuspecting village of Egginton across the county border in Derbyshire, their colleagues in Leicester were also catching up with the effects of rapidly expanding population on their town’s limited sanitation.

Sewage-disposal had been a problem for the expanding borough from the 1850s onwards. 

The civil engineer Thomas Wicksteed (1806-1871) designed a scheme for his Patent Solid Sewage Manure Company to drain the town and purify the resulting solid matter as manure. 

Though the scheme markedly improved the condition of the River Soar, the manure failed to sell and the enterprise failed. 

Indeed, pail closets continued in the poorer districts of the town and the removal of ordure by carts, canal barges and railway wagons was a continuing nuisance.

A new scheme was devised in 1885 providing two arterial sewers linking to a sewage farm on the outskirts of the borough and the Abbey Pumping Station was constructed between November 1887 and May 1891 to pump sewage 1½ miles to Beaumont Leys. 

The imposing Elizabethan engine-house, begun in 1889, was designed by the Leicester architect Stockdale Harrison (1846-1914).

The four pumping engines, very like the slightly earlier ones at Claymills and by the same local firm of Gimson & Company, are now the largest surviving Woolf compound steam-engines in the United Kingdom, and Abbey Pumping Station is one of the few places where four steam pumping engines can still be seen within one engine house. 

The high-pressure cylinders are 30in × 69¼in, and the low-pressure cylinders are 48in × 96in.  Each flywheel is 21 feet in diameter, and the beams are 28 feet long.

Leicester’s population grew more than threefold between 1861 and 1901 and continued to expand through the first half of the twentieth century. 

At Abbey Pumping Station settlement tanks and an electric pump were installed in 1925, and capacity was reinforced by the installation of a ram pump in 1939. 

The station continued to steam until the opening of the Wanlip Sewage Treatment Works in 1964.

The site was then converted into the Leicester Museum of Science and Technology which opened in 1974.  

The original eight Gimson Lancashire boilers had been replaced in 1925:  of these replacements only one survives, and the boiler house now contains other museum exhibits.  Two of the engines are restored to working condition, though limited boiler-capacity prevents them both being steamed simultaneously for longer than a very short time. 

There are other sewage-related experiences in the Museum. 

The site railway, first installed in 1926 and operated by a small petrol locomotive, has been adapted for passengers.  Trains are hauled by a restored steam locomotive, Leonard, from the Birmingham Tame & Rea District Drainage Board’s Minworth sewage treatment works.

A display entitled ‘Flushed with Pride’ (a title borrowed from Wallace Reyburn’s inimitable 1969 biography of the water-closet manufacturer, Thomas Crapper) includes a lavatory with see-through bowl and cistern, into which visitors can drop artificial faeces and watch them journey from the U-bend to the main sewer. 

Such rare delights are not to be missed.

Details of public openings at Abbey Pumping Station are at http://www.abbeypumpingstation.org/default.asp.

Abbey Pumping Station features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘Temples of Sanitation’. For further details, please click here.

Temples of Sanitation – Claymills Pumping Station

Claymills Pumping Station, Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire

By coincidence two of the three pumping stations we’re visiting on the grandly but accurately titled Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness have similar steam engines – Woolf compound pumps built by Gimson & Co of Leicester.  In other respects the two sites offer very different experiences.

Claymills Pumping Station, which stands beside the Midland main line from Derby to Birmingham, was built for Burton-on-Trent Corporation in 1885.

Burton-on-Trent had begun to install effective street sewers from 1843 but did nothing to deal with the liquid waste of its principal industry.

One of the major disadvantages of the nineteenth-century brewing process was the considerable quantity of hot, foul-smelling effluent, rich in sulphate and suspended vegetable matter, that was discharged into local streams. 

A sewer constructed in 1866 to carry industrial effluent, domestic sewage and rainwater to sediment tanks at Claymills, near the village of Stretton, simply moved the problem further from the town:  the offensive material was separated and discharged into the River Trent.

The population of Burton-on-Trent – 9,450 in 1871 – was expected to produce about a million gallons a day, but when the town became a borough in 1878 the outfall was between five and six million gallons. 

The new council included a number of prominent brewers and in 1880 promoted an Act of Parliament to build a pumping station at Claymills to pump the effluent 2½ miles to a 300-acre sewage farm at Egginton – a vertical lift of seventy feet.

Though lime was added to the material, offensive smells remained a problem around the village of Egginton and as far away as Repton and Calke until the farm closed in the 1970s.

The paired engine houses each contain two mirror-image engines, designated A and B, C and D, with the boiler house between. 

The beams are each 26 feet 4 inches between their end centres, and weigh thirteen tons.  The flywheels are 24 feet in diameter and weigh twenty-four tons each. 

In normal circumstances two engines worked at a time, running at ten revolutions a minute.  In periods of high demand, a third engine would be engaged.

The five original Lancashire boilers were renewed in 1937, and the replacements incorporate Green’s economisers and Meldrum’s mechanical stokers.  Two boilers operated at a time, with a third on standby.

The steam engines were replaced by electric pumps in 1971, and when Burton Corporation’s sewerage system was transferred in 1974 to the Severn Trent Water Authority, the new owners enlisted the assistance of industrial-archaeology groups to take over Claymills Pumping Station as a preservation project. 

Once practical repairs and asbestos-removal work was completed, the Claymills Pumping Engines Trust took over the site in 1993. 

Steam was first raised in 1998 and ‘C’ engine ran in May 2000, followed a year later by ‘D’ engine.  ‘B’ engine returned to steam in 2017.

Claymills Pumping Station is magnificent in the way of such places – a grand complex of buildings, huge beam engines – but it has a special appeal to engineering enthusiasts because most of the steam-powered ancillary equipment is preserved and restored. 

Much of the auxiliary machinery was stripped out to create storage space, and has been gradually repatriated by the Trust. 

The 26-foot-long bed lathe had been scrapped, but the Trust identified and acquired a near equivalent machine from Bamford Mill, Derbyshire.

The blacksmith’s forge, which had been demolished after the station closed, was rebuilt by the Trust in 2005. 

Claymills has a welcoming atmosphere, and it’s always heartening to see young people involved in heritage industrial archaeology.

The photograph I wish I’d captured but missed was of a youth in full Victorian workers’ rig of flat cap, waistcoat and muffler, tapping into his smartphone.

Details of public openings at Claymills are at http://www.claymills.org.uk.