Brisbane’s bijou tram museum

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Brisbane Tramway Museum, Queensland, Australia: Brisbane Tram 47, built 1901
Brisbane Tramway Museum, Queensland, Australia: Brisbane Tram 554, built 1964

Brisbane had a fine tram system until the 1960s, when it was sacrificed by politicians attracted by the apparent flexibility and economy of motor buses.

The Lord Mayor, Clem Jones, assisted by his Town Clerk, James Cameron Slaughter, took advantage of a disastrous fire at the Paddington tram depot in September 1962, when sixty-seven trams – 20% of the fleet – were destroyed. He used this accident to close down the entire system in favour of buses by 1969.

Fortunately, the Brisbane Tramway Museum Society was formed in 1968, to acquire a compact plot of land near the railway station at Ferny Grove in 1972, and collected twenty-five trams (including one from Sydney), two non-operational trolleybuses and a number of Tramways Department support vehicles. It opened to the public in 1980.

The Brisbane Tramway Museum packs a lot into the available space. There is only 250 metres of track, but there are plenty of sidings and a steep hill with a tight curve at the top which guarantees evocative sound effects and a sense of going somewhere. It’s neatly laid out with plenty of seats for picnics but not, sad to say, any kind of café.

Among the workshop sheds I found a gentleman called John, who invited me to see his Scammell Tractor Truck, built for wartime use in North Africa and bought by Brisbane City Council to rescue broken-down trams, trolleybuses and buses. His truck was indeed interesting, and he was proud of the fact that its capabilities were measured in Imperial tons. His information was invaluable, and I thanked him warmly.

Then I found the genius of the place, embodied in the non-stop performance of the tram-driver (in Brisbane always the motorman) Peter Hyde, who could deliver eloquent, interesting histories of each of the serviceable trams, and aided by his conductor actually drove them all, one after the other, in chronological order, the oldest dated 1901, the newest built in 1964 (five years before Brisbane’s tramways finally closed).

I was full of admiration: anybody with an articulate brain can explain the typology of a fleet of vehicles, but to do so while driving them and shuffling them between depot roads and sidings is beyond praise. All this was accomplished with total attention to passenger safety, with all the bells and gongs in the right order.

Both crew members wore the kepi which in Australian transport was headgear peculiar to Brisbane and Rockhampton.

The Sydney tram museum, like Crich and most other rail museums, offers rides and invites the visitors to pretend they’re going somewhere.

Brisbane Tramway Museum educates enjoyably.

Jam Jar Cinema – more than just a cinema

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Market Pavilion, Blyth, Northumberland

In the heyday of the cinema, children in the North West of England could trade clean jam jars at the box office for a part or the whole price of a ticket.  The practice was subsequently copied across Britain, and it’s remembered in the name of Tyneside’s pioneering community cinema, a charity based in a converted job centre in Whitley Bay. 

The Jam Jar Cinema was founded by Dan Ellis, then aged twenty-three, in 2013 to allow local people to see movies in a welcoming environment run by local staff and volunteers.  Dan and his founder colleagues, Stephen Fairly and William Smith, ensured that the standard of comfort was high from the outset:  most of the original seats were unused Odeon Premier seats, supplemented by sofas.

The opening night audience was nineteen people watching Gladiator.  This initial auditorium was supplemented by two more in 2019, along with a bar and lift.  The respective capacity of the three screens is 50, 29 and 38.

The whole place is welcoming – “We offer a cosy hug rather than a corporate handshake”.  Dan, who says he has the best job in the world, declares, “For me, it’s always been about creating as magical and premium an experience as possible – but also affordable,”

In 2019 Dan introduced a tiered pricing system, ‘Pay as you Please cinema’, because “We appreciate that people haven’t got as much money in their pockets as they once did.”  Customers are invited to choose a price that’s right for their situation by selecting either the standard Tier 2, currently £9.00/£9.50, or a lower Tier 1 (£7.50/£8.50), and anyone who feels able to pay more can use Tier 3 (£10.50).  No questions are asked or judgements made.

The Jam Jar Cinema received ‘Small Business of the Year’ and ‘Heart of Gold’ accolades in the 2020 Small Awards, and in 2023 Dan Ellis was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to cinema.

Northumberland County Council appointed Dan’s Jam Jar Cinema to operate the prestigious Market Pavilion in Blyth as “a vibrant and welcoming arts centre that will revitalise the community and encourage investment, developed with input from local residents”, designed by the Newcastle architects FaulknerBrowns.

The council’s aim is to draw local people to the neglected town centre by planting a social hub in the once-popular market place.  The Pavilion has three cinema screens, a 120-seat performance space called Studio 25, a bar and café.  It’s fully accessible and very comfortable, and is planned to attract 60,000 visitors to Blyth, generating £3.1 million visitor income and create 58 additional jobs.

This uncompromising and attractive building was opened in 2025 on the site of the former Central Cinema (built 1924;  closed 1961;  demolished 1974) with an extensive cultural festival of free events entitled Blyth Celebrates.  The Pavilion’s brick and glass structure is pleasant to look at and to look from, and it sits comfortably with the surrounding traditional buildings and the traditional markets held on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

This flagship initiative didn’t come cheap, of course.  It was funded by the UK Government’s Future High Street Fund and Northumberland County Council as part of the £90 million Energising Blyth regeneration programme that’s intended to “advance Northumberland’s economic prosperity, regenerate communities, improve liveability and create a more connected and aspirational County”.

This Newcastle University Business School case study indicates that the Jam Jar magic is working in Blyth:  Case Study: Market Pavilion, Blyth | Newcastle University.

I’m grateful to Charles Hooton for his itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026).

Enjoyable history

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Former Grand Cinema, Ryhope, now at Beamish Museum, Co Durham

The Grand Cinema, Ryhope, near Sunderland, is delightful, yet it’s the most ordinary small-town picture house you could imagine and it’s no longer in Ryhope.  Built in 1914 to seat just over nine hundred people, it’s basically an oblong brick box with a foyer, a balconied auditorium and a modest stage for live shows.  Its plaster decoration and stained glass made it cosy and attractive.  It was the only picture house in the pit town. 

Its subsequent history is conventional:  it was equipped for sound movies in 1930, converted to bingo in the 1960s and fitted out as a garage in 1997.  There are photographs of the decorative auditorium packed with cars before the building was emptied and dismantled from September 2020.

The Grand is typical of hundreds of small-scale cinemas, originally designed for silent movies with a musical accompaniment, which made it valuable to the Beamish Museum as a landmark in its 1950s town, where it has been transplanted and restored to show short local-history documentaries and period feature films as part of the Museum’s varied entertainment programme:  What’s on – Beamish Museum.  It opened on its new site on July 6th 2024.

Beamish Museum has built up an eclectic collection of structures and artefacts to illustrate “the development of industry and the way of life of the North of England” since it began in 1972.  The first director, Frank Atkinson (1924-2014), made it his mission to collect any and every historic item that people were willing to donate.  He was inundated.

To provide a convincing simulacrum of a past time, Frank Atkinson pursued a policy of acquiring complete buildings which were dismantled and translocated, and also replica structures that incorporate historic materials from a variety of locations.  The Grand Cinema is not a brick-by-brick reconstruction.  That was the initial intention, but the fabric turned out to be too fragile and dangerous to dismantle, so as many original features as possible were salvaged and incorporated in a new construction at the entrance to the 1950s town.

This approach has been criticised by some historians and museum professionals as inauthentic, but the purpose is to give future generations a vivid impression of how ordinary people lived from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s.  SPACE Architects of Newcastle “focused on creating a coherent townscape…rather than producing isolated replicas”:  Remaking Beamish 1950s Town | SPACE Architects.

Education should be enjoyable and accessible, and it’s now possible to sit in the stalls for a film show as well as eating fish and chips from a fake newspaper, riding on a heritage tram or bus or patting a pit pony.

Times have changed, however.  I noticed on my visit that when the national anthem was played at the end of the show, nobody stood up.  Nor did they race for the stairs as soon as they saw the final credits.

I’m grateful to Charles Hooton for his itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026).

Footfall for old cinemas

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Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland

Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland: proscenium viewed from front balcony

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham: proscenium and light fountains from balcony

One of the admirable features of the J D Wetherspoon pub chain is that they’re kind to old buildings.  I’ve previously written blog-articles celebrating their Tunbridge Wells Opera House and Palladium Cinema, Llandudno.

Thanks to Charles Hootons’ itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026), I’ve visited and learned about the Grade II listed Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, designed by Charles Alfred Harding of the Newcastle practice Percy Lindsay Browne, Son & Harding and opened on November 16th 1937.

The style of the brick and concrete exterior is the toned-down version of Art Deco that is termed Moderne, but the interior is more exciting with Art Deco detail in the staircase of the impressive foyer and a fine auditorium with plaster coves by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland and concealed lighting by Devereux Moody & Co Ltd of Newcastle.  It originally seated 1,600.

The name “Wallaw” is derived from the name of its owner Walter Lawson whose Ashington-based cinema chain ran several picture houses in the area.

The Blyth Wallaw was tactfully subdivided in 1987 and refurbished in 1998, the year that it was listed, but it closed in 2004.

J D Wetherspoons took it on and celebrated its original intact architecture and decoration, and it opened as a pub on December 10th 2013 as The Wallaw.  An original projector and a sample row of seats are exhibited in the foyer.  It’s in good hands, thriving, and though it’s a pub you can clearly see it was a cinema.

Charles Hooton’s tour also took us to the Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, another magnificent Thirties cinema which is, after some vicissitudes, still a cinema.

The Globe was designed by the same architect as the Wallaw – Percy Lindsay Browne of Newcastle – and the interior plasterwork was by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland.  The third cinema on the site, it opened on April 20th 1935 as a variety theatre.  Its original seating capacity is variously recorded between 2,372 and 2,574.  

The proscenium is 49ft 2in wide:  the stage area is 39ft 2in deep and the grid sixty feet high.  The foyer leads into the circle level, so the stalls and stage are below street level and the backstage get-in is three metres above the floor and has to be accessed by a lift.

The building was acquired by Associated British Cinemas in 1937 and rebranded as ABC in 1967.  In the 1960s the Globe hosted big-ticket concerts featuring stars from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry as well as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

It closed as a cinema in 1974 and, after a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert the following year, became a bingo hall.  Bingo ended in 1997, and the building remained dark for over twenty years.

It could so easily have gone, but Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council resolved to restore it, at an eventual cost of £27.9 million, of which the National Lottery fund contributed £4.5 million.

The restoration, designed by SPACE Architects (whose Remaking Beamish project embraced the 1950 town including the Grand Cinema) and undertaken by Willmott Dixon Interiors (who also refurbished the Granada Cinema, Walthamstow in 2025):  Globe Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees | Willmott Dixon.

The Globe reopened in 2021 and is now configured for a seated audience of 1,650, with capacity for 3,034 for standing events.  A former bridalwear shop next door has become a stylish box-office and bar/café.  The Globe is operated on a 25-year contract by the Ambassador Group.

It’s evident that even in a time of economic stagnation, local councils with vision – and enlightened operators like J D Wetherspoon and the Ambassador Group – can find funds to revive heritage cinema buildings that will pay their way by attracting people through their doors and enrich the local economy.

St Enedoc’s

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St Enodoc's Church, Trebetheric, Cornwall [Matthew Lemin]
St Enodoc’s Church, Trebetheric, Cornwall [Matthew Lemin]

One of the first novels I ever remember reading in childhood was Nine Bright Shiners by Lois Lamplugh, and I instantly recognised its dustcover on eBay recently and bought a copy.

The writings of Lois Lamplugh (1921-2013) are manifold – much fiction, especially for children, biography and books about the area of north Devon around Barnstaple where she was born.

Nine Bright Shiners was published in 1955, which means I must have read it when it was new and I was eight or nine years old.

Its main characters are a group of young people, well-mannered, energetic, forever organising picnics and lighting camp fires while on holiday from boarding school, who become intrigued by the legend of a church buried in the coastal dunes near their homes.

It’s a conventional example of its genre:  the characters are cardboard and the plot ticks along like a well-oiled clock.  The children’s parents exist only in the background, a source of food for picnics and tools to borrow.  One older gent is pivotal to the plot, and there is one necessary group of stock villains.  All of them could be sourced from Central Casting.

I enjoyed every minute of it, as I did five decades ago, when I was all for digging up the sand dunes when we went on holiday to Llandudno.  It didn’t happen, because my parents weren’t from Central Casting.

When I revisited the novel recently, I wondered if Lois Lamplugh was thinking of an actual church, over the border in Cornwall which was buried in the dunes for centuries.

Perhaps she was aware of the story of St Enedoc’s Church, which stands beside the estuary of the River Camel near Trebetherick in Cornwall.  I was taken to see it when I was a guest of Bodmin Decorative & Fine Arts Society some years ago.

For at least three hundred years, until the middle of the nineteenth century, St Enedoc’s was buried by the sand dunes that still surround it, so that the vicar and clerk – and perhaps some parishioners – had to gain entry through a hole in the roof once a year to conduct a service that guaranteed the right to collect tithes.

The building was uncovered at the instigation of a local vicar and in 1863-64 it was restored by the architect James Piers St Aubyn (1815-1895).

The family of Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) kept a residence nearby:  the poet’s father has a memorial inside the church and Sir John himself is buried in the churchyard.  He wrote about the church in the poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall’.

There are two other poignant modern memorials at St Enedoc’s – one to the three crew-members killed in the wreck of the Maria Assumpta (1995), carved by Philip Chatfield, one of the survivors;  the other the grave of Fleur Lombard QGM (1974-1996), the first female firefighter to die on duty in peacetime Britain.  She is also commemorated by a plaque near to the supermarket where she died in Bristol.

The church and the stories are detailed at St Enodoc (greatenglishchurches.co.uk).

As good as new

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: London County Council 1 – “Bluebird”

It would be hard to overestimate the historical significance among British tramcars of the London County Council’s 1931 prototype double-decker which became known as Bluebird No 1.

Among a number of smaller London municipalities, the LCC was the largest tramway operator in the capital.  Their great rivals were the Underground Group, which owned three separate tramways and the mighty London General Omnibus Company. 

One of the Underground company’s tram subsidiaries, the Metropolitan Electric Tramways, built its own “Bluebird” prototype, no: 318, one of the precursors of their large-capacity Feltham design, of which 331 survives at the National Tramway Museum.

The LCC Bluebird was powerful, capable of speeds up to 30mph and fitted with air brakes.  Its interior offered standards of comfort that were rarely found in contemporary public transport vehicles.  It was handsome, in a distinctive blue livery, and might have transformed London’s street transport. There are detailed descriptions at London County Council No. 1 – National Tramway Museum and LCC 1 – Restoration Par Excellence.

It remained unique because in 1933 all London’s tramways were absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board, which quickly resolved to replace all its street tramways with trolleybuses and motor buses.

No: 1’s distinctive livery, part of an energetic publicity campaign to encourage passenger ridership, was replaced by the London Transport red and cream livery and during and after the war its non-standard specification meant it was little used.

When the LPTB sold the bulk of its fleet of Feltham trams to Leeds Corporation in 1951, Bluebird was included in the deal as a make-weight to replace two trams destroyed in a depot fire.  In Leeds it was given the fleet number 301.

In 1957 Leeds City Council donated it to the British Transport Museum in London, which passed it on to the Tramway Museum at Crich, where it was repainted in London Transport livery.

I wrote a blog-article about Bluebird No 1 in 2015 [Bluebird no 1 | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] when it became apparent that its bodywork was deteriorating.

The subsequent protracted and expensive restoration is a fine achievement and an object-lesson in the principle that preservation of vehicles, like buildings and gardens, is a continuing process.

A sumptuous book, edited by Lynn Wagstaff, Bluebird Reborn: The History and Restoration of LCC No. 1 [Bluebird Reborn: The History & Restoration of LCC No. 1 (LRTA) – Platform 5] (LRTA 2023) gives a detailed account of the difficulties and dilemmas that beset returning a historic tramcar to its original condition.

Bluebird No 1 returned to service in September 2024 and gives visitors a chance to experience as new, a vehicle that’s nearly a century old.

That’s because, though as much as possible of the original has been incorporated in the restoration, it’s been stripped back to its component parts and built again.

Most of the trams in the operating fleet at Crich and other working transport museums have been substantially renewed, primarily to restore their appearance at a specific historic period, but also so they can safely carry passengers and provide enjoyment for decades to come.   After all, the Flying Scotsman has had numerous modifications to its design, as well as eighteen different boilers, since it was built in 1923. 

The alternative, as with Leeds 602 at Crich and Mallard in the National Railway Museum collection, is conservation rather than preservation, so museum pieces become relics rather than exhibits.

If we want to feel, see and hear what it’s like to ride in a 1932 modern tramcar, or a vintage car, bus or railway carriage, we can’t afford to be squeamish about provenance.  Otherwise we’d be looking at a collection of garden sheds, chicken houses and cricket pavilions.

Coronet filling station

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Coronet filling station, Effingham Road, Attercliffe, Sheffield

There are enthusiasts for every imaginable aspect of history.  Some fields of interest are less penetrable than others:  if you want to know about most sports there’s no shortage of sources for arcane data, and the same is true of transport by air, land and sea.

I discovered recently that there are people who collect material on petrol filling stations:  Old Garages and Filling Stations – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum.

A little-known and remarkable example that attracted my attention is the former Coronet Filling Station on Effingham Road, between the canal and the River Don in the Lower Don Valley, of which there is a superb photograph dating presumably from the early 1950s when the site first opened.

The only online image of this picture – Coronet Petrol Station – Sheffield History Chat – Sheffield History – Sheffield Memories – appears to be from Kathryn A Morrison & John Minnis, Carscapes – The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England (Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 2012).

Effingham Road acted (and still acts) as a relief road from Attercliffe to the city-centre, in the 1950s giving direct access to Victoria Station;  nowadays, as the B6071, it’s still useful to reach Sheffield Parkway en route to the M1 southbound. 

The location was ideal for a petrol station but, as one of the posts in the accompanying thread points out, the footprint of the site was crammed between the road and the Sheffield Canal. 

The need to spread the fourteen pumps and their associated tanks laterally, however, gave the architect a pretext for a spacious, eye-catching modern design.

Very few new buildings appeared in the East End in the fifteen years after the war and those that had survived the Blitz were grubby, blackened by atmospheric pollution, and dated.  The Coronet filling station was by comparison glamorous – and glamour was in short supply in 1950s Attercliffe.

A guest contributor to the Sheffield History Forum, ericsson, reported his family connection with the Coronet:

My dad, Eric Shaw ran this petrol station in the very early 1950s just before I started at Whitby Road Infant School. My dad was 90 years of age on Jan 24th 2015. I’m 65 now and was born Dec 21st 1949. The name changed to Effingham Road Filling Station when my dad had it. NB the wall behind is the canal wall! We then moved on to Staniforth Road Service Station, which is still a mainly vacant lot, but eventually moved on to Abbeydale Road Filling Station, now a Tesco station. That’s progress for you.

According to two contributors to the Sheffield Forum website, Simon Tow and coffeebean, the site changed hands in 1963 and the company that owned it was wound up in 1966.  [Coronet filling station – Sheffield History, Memories & Ex-Pats – Sheffield Forum]

Recently most of the clutter of a scrap business has been removed, making it easier to recognise the visual impact of the Coronet.

In fact, most of this structure remains and could be restored if anyone thought of a compatible, appropriate use for the site. 

Attractive though it was in its heyday, it’s almost inevitable that this brave piece of 1950s design will disappear. 

Non-Pots

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Former Attercliffe Non-Political Club, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2023)

Citu, the company responsible for the Waterside development which plans to transform Attercliffe after decades of decline, is respectful of the historic heritage of the area [FIRST LOOK: Attercliffe Waterside – Citu], yet some landmarks inevitably have to be sacrificed.

The Attercliffe Non-Political Club built a particularly distinctive landmark at the junction of Effingham Road and Attercliffe Road, an eye-catcher on the approach to town from the bottom of Staniforth Road, but it’s gone.

The working-class Attercliffe community supported a range of distinctive working-men’s clubs from its Victorian heyday to the end of the twentieth century and a while after.  A politically committed workman in Attercliffe, Carbrook or Darnall had a choice of joining the Radical, the Liberal or the Conservative WMCs:  the Conservatives, prompted by Disraeli, cast themselves as the friends of the working man in opposition to the business-oriented Liberals. 

I won’t speculate why Attercliffe never had a Labour Club, but it certainly supported a thriving Non-Political Club, the “Non-Pots”, for those whose honest priority was drinking cheap beer and having a good time.

The history of these eminent organisations is patchily recorded.  The Carbrook Conservative WMC has left records dating back to 1880.  The Attercliffe Liberal Club opened in 1882, and I’ve tracked the Radical Club back at least to 1888.  The Attercliffe Non-Political Club doesn’t appear in the street directories until 1913, but it may have operated earlier elsewhere.

The Attercliffe Liberal Club carried on until Covid and closed in 2020.  The non-partisan Darnall Victory Club, founded after the First World War, closed in 2022.

The Non-Pots building was at 450 Attercliffe Road from 1913 to 1920, and from 1921 it moved round the corner to 429 Effingham Road.  The damage that building sustained in the Blitz wasn’t fully reinstated until 1950.

There are no further planning applications involving the Attercliffe Non-Political Club in Sheffield Archives after 1959, so I’m at a loss to know when the distinctive grey brick corner building with its copper roof actually opened.  Graham C, a contributor to the Sheffield History forum, suggests that the concert room moved downstairs after 1966. 

After the Non-Pots club closed, the building became a gay club, “Rockies”, and then the “Dancing Dollar”.  Latterly it was a bathroom showroom until its demise in 2025.

The history forums are very useful for recording the Non-Pots’ place in late twentieth-century show-business history.

The club was an early supporter of Charlie Williams (1927-2006), the ex-Barnsley professional footballer who paved the way for black comedians to be accepted by British audiences.  Charlie continued to show up at the “Non-Pots” even when he was appearing in The Comedians at the London Palladium, and Graham C records that on nights when Charlie returned to Attercliffe members who couldn’t get served at the crowded club bar would bring beer in from the Sportsman Inn up the road.

A younger performer who served his show-business apprenticeship at the “Non-Pots” and other places was Paul O’Grady (1955-2023).  He told Paulette Edwards on BBC Radio Sheffield, “I used to love working there. I used to do two Sundays a month in Rockies.”  The fact that Lily Savage came to Attercliffe needs to be commemorated, otherwise the next generation might not believe it.

Whatever structure arises at the corner of Attercliffe Road and Effingham Road, I hope it carries blue plaques to honour two fine performers who were held in deep affection by the people who lived in Attercliffe before – and indeed after – the terraced houses were swept away.

Brisbane’s cathedrals

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St Stephen’s Old Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St Stephen’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Brisbane, like all the major cities of Australia, generated two major Christian communities – Anglican and Roman Catholic – from its earliest days. 

It began as a convict settlement in 1824.  Settlers arrived in the 1830s, and the site was declared free in 1842.  Queensland was separated from the colony of New South Wales in 1859, with its capital only a few miles north of the border, by which time the Catholic Archdiocese and the Anglican Diocese, both of Brisbane, were established.

The Catholics quickly raised what is now Old St Stephen’s Chapel, a simple stone cell designed from afar by the great pioneer of the English Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), consecrated in 1850.  It was formally designated Brisbane Cathedral in 1863, the year that the foundation stone of its intended successor, also St Stephen’s, was laid. 

The British-born Benjamin Backhouse’s planned grand cathedral proceeded no further than its foundations, and Backhouse’s associate, Richard George Suter, designed a simpler nave which was consecrated in 1874.  Nothing more was built until after the First World War.

Meanwhile, the Anglicans had opened St John’s Pro-Cathedral in 1854, but hastened slowly to start their cathedral.

The British architect John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897) began work on St John’s Cathedral, for a site bordered by George, Elizabeth and William Streets in 1885.  He had been commissioned to design Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, which was begun in 1880 and took thirty years to build.  Pearson’s plans for Brisbane were approved by 1889, but work had yet to start at the time of his death.

His son, Frank Loughborough Pearson (1864–1947) was appointed to revise his father’s plans, but the intended site was taken over by the state government and Frank Pearson had to further revise the design for the eventual site on Ann Street.  Phase 1, the east end and first bay of the nave, was completed in 1910, after which work stopped for over half a century.

Meanwhile the Catholic Archbishop James Duhig (1871-1965), characterised by his church-building projects as “Duhig the Builder”, proposed a grandiose Baroque Cathedral of the Holy Name, designed by the Sydney practice of Hennessy & Hennessy for a different site to St Stephen’s.  Their 1925 drawings depict a showy version of the London St Paul’s Cathedral, intended to be the largest sacred building in the British Commonwealth.

Construction started, to a toned-down design, in 1927 and eight years later Archbishop Duhig consecrated the main altar of the crypt.  After that nothing else was built.  The architect Jack Hennessy successfully sued the Archidiocese for unpaid fees in 1949-50, and the site was sold in 1985 to property developers who erected Cathedral Place in place of the cathedral.  A heritage-listed retaining wall is all that remains.

The Anglicans hardly had better luck for decades, even after Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein laid the foundation stone for Phase 2 of St John’s in 1947.  That project, for two further nave bays, was eventually built in 1965-69, and the final Phase 3, two more nave bays, a porch, the west front and three towers and two spires was completed in 1989-2009.

Later, at the very end of the twentieth century, the earliest surviving church building in Brisbane, Old St Stephen’s, was rededicated.  It contains a shrine to Australia’s first Catholic saint, St Mary McKillop (1842-1909).

Brisbane has two fine cathedrals, each the result of redesigns and changes of site, and – like the federal capital Canberra – a cathedral-that-never-was.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform…

He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sov’reign will.

[William Cowper, 1731-1800]

Brisbane’s Old Windmill

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The Old Windmill, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

What can you do with an old windmill?  Let me count the ways.

The Old Windmill is the oldest building in Brisbane, which is now the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, but began as the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, a remote and inaccessible convict punishment facility akin to Port Arthur (1833) in Tasmania.  The town and its river were named after the governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane (1773-1860).

The tower was constructed in 1828, when after three years’ development the settlement was growing more wheat than could be ground by hand.  The first proposal was to use a treadmill to drive the millstones, enforcing prisoners to work either as a routine task or a punishment for indiscipline.  Supplementing man-power with wind-power provided greater capacity and flexibility.

Brisbane was opened to free settlers in 1839 and the convict settlement closed down three years later.  The Windmill continued in use until 1845, and in the following years the grinding machinery and the treadmill were dismantled.

However, a 52-foot brick and stone tower on the top of Spring Hill overlooking the town was useful for all manner of purposes, some of them unimaginable in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  • As a prominent landmark it had already been utilised for surveying and allocating land to incoming settlers since 1839.
  • In 1841 it was used as a gallows for the execution of two Indigenous men accused of murdering a surveyor.
  • Its picturesque views made it a popular informal resort after it became disused.
  • As the port of Brisbane developed it proved invaluable as a semaphore signalling station connected to the electric telegraph, and was fitted out as a public observatory with a time-ball in 1861.  In 1866 the time-ball was replaced by a time-gun to serve locations outside line-of-sight.
  • The following year the Windmill became the first location of the Queensland Museum.
  • Experimental radio transmissions were carried out at the Windmill from 1921 onwards.
  • The first television broadcast in Queensland was a demonstration from the Windmill in 1934.
  • From the end of the Second World War to the present-day Brisbane City Council has developed the Old Windmill and its surroundings as a tourist site.

Counting its original use to grind corn, that’s nine different applications of a redundant historic building to useful purposes.