Monthly Archives: December 2013

Camp castle

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle is a designer castle – practically capable of being defended but primarily intended to make a statement.

It was built by Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1403-1455) who did very well out of the post of Treasurer of England under King Henry VI. His badge of office was the tasselled purse and crossed money-bags. Tattershall was one of his five residences.

He was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “a tenacious man with a great gift for administration, a tidy mind, a faith in accurate records, and an ability to steer a safe course amid the intrigues of the age of Henry VI.” He built the huge brick Great Tower within the inner bailey of an earlier castle, and established a college of clergy – the customary medieval insurance against damnation – to worship in the adjacent parish church. In his will he asked his executors to restore to their previous owners lands worth almost £5,000 “for conscience’s sake”.

The Great Tower is a series of splendid state apartments, stacked one on top of the other rather than laid out in a line. From the roof it’s possible not only to drop missiles on unwelcome visitors, but to see the towers of Lincoln Cathedral and Boston Stump.

This medieval skyscraper was characterised by the guide-book writer Dr M W Thompson as reminiscent of “the self-dramatisation so characteristic of fifteenth-century life”. The finished building would have been startling to contemporary eyes, just as its surviving remains are impressive to ours. It was designed for someone who had a clear idea of the effect he wished to create.

It’s possible that the whole tower was originally rouged with ochre. It’s not so much a masculine building as a butch one.

We owe its survival to a particularly quirky personality in early twentieth-century politics, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon (1859-1925), who went through life, poor man, encumbered with the anonymous undergraduate ditty –

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

This much derided, stiff, unhappy man, when he wasn’t working incredibly hard in the “Great Game” of British politics in which he rose to be Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-24), purchased the derelict site of Tattershall Castle in 1911, renovated the Great Tower, restored the moats and reinstated the original fireplaces which had been crated up ready for sale to the USA. His action provoked the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913. He bequeathed Tattershall to the National Trust, along with Bodiam Castle in Kent which he bought in 1916.

Tattershall Castle is open to the public throughout the year, but not every day: see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-tattershallcastle for up-to-date details. The ladies of the parish serve excellent tea and cakes in the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity most days between Easter and the end of September: check at http://www.httf.org/heritage.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals: past views of English architecture, please click here.

High-speed designer

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Sheffield Midland Station (1985): British Rail High Speed Train 253 001

It’s an interesting challenge to name ten modern British designers – almost as difficult as naming ten modern British engineers or, notoriously, ten famous Belgians http://www.famousbelgians.net.

One of the greatest modern British designers, still very much alive and working, is Kenneth Grange (b 1929), who is celebrated by an exhibition, ‘Kenneth Grange: making Britain modern’ at the Design Museum in London until the end of October: http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2011/kenneth-grange.

His first major commission was the original British parking-meter, now a rare artefact, in 1958. He went on to design the Kenwood Chef food-mixer, the Kodak Instamatic camera (1968), the Adshel bus-shelter (1993) – another great British bus-shelter designer was the late David Mellor (1930-2009) – and an acclaimed new version of the London black taxi (1997).

Kenneth Grange’s own favourite is the biggest of all his designs – the InterCity 125 High Speed Train, introduced by British Railways in the early 1970s. He didn’t engineer the entire train; indeed, he was originally commissioned only to design the livery, but as he explained to Rachel Cooke [The Observer, July 17th 2011], “…I decided to have a go at the aerodynamics, testing it in wind tunnels with the help of an engineer I was employing. I showed it to [the British Railway Board] with some trepidation. It was a bloody nerve, to be honest…But they weren’t difficult to persuade in the end because the argument was sound: the design made the train more efficient.” It’s instructive to compare the prototype with Kenneth Grange’s more familiar production model, illustrated above.

Train passengers take the HST for granted: after all, it’s been around for thirty-five years now, upgraded, re-engined, rebadged, and still going strong. Some operators have replaced it with newer models, not all of them fully satisfactory, while others have indicated that with further modifications these trains could run until at least 2035 when they will be approaching sixty years old.

The High Speed Train is a credit to British engineering: the prototype broke the world speed record for diesel traction (143 mph) which is now held by a production-version HST (148 mph). Introducing the HST to the Western and East Coast main-lines and other routes in the late 1970s and early 1980s significantly increased passenger numbers and pushed up house-prices in such towns as Reading, Swindon, Huntingdon and Peterborough.

The design was exported to Australia as the basis for the XPT train, introduced in 1982 and still operating on five routes out of Sydney. It’s oddly reassuring for a Brit to stand on an Australian station platform as one of these instantly recognisable beasts glides in.

Back home, its proudest passenger is its long-lived designer, who continues to travel on HSTs regularly from his home in Devon to work in London.

Update: Kenneth Grange was awarded a knighthood in the 2013 New Year Honours. He features in this BBC News clip celebrating forty years of HST operation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/36188805.

Grand hotel

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Grand Hotel, Scarborough

The Grand Hotel, Scarborough dominates the resort’s South Bay. Its eggcup domes provide an unmistakable skyline, and the wedge-shaped plan, built into the cliff-side, enables it to overlook both the South Bay and the Valley.

Designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, the architect of Leeds Town Hall and the Leeds Corn Exchange, it belongs to the first generation of British hotels on the American pattern of public rooms combined with suites and bedrooms.

Brodrick provided an elaborate top-lit central hall and staircase, and the coffee-room and drawing room each measured 110ft × 80ft with bow windows facing South Cliff and the Spa.

Nikolaus Pevsner characterised its style as “Mixed Renaissance…[with a] touch of Quattrocento…a High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence, of denial of frivolity and insistence on substance”. It cost £66,000 to build and opened in 1867.

Legend has it that Brodrick contrived the design to include four towers to represent the seasons, twelve floors for the months, 52 chimneys for the weeks and 365 bedrooms for the days of the year. If so, it’s a measure of the opulence of the place that the modern configuration, with en-suite facilities, provides 382 bedrooms.

Nowadays the Grand is “grand” in the Yorkshire sense. After years as a Butlin’s hotel it now belongs to the Britannia chain which owns, among others, the Liverpool Adelphi. As such it offers budget accommodation in palatial surroundings, with sometimes interesting dissonances. The last time I walked in the PA system was playing Gene Pitney’s 1964 hit ‘Twenty-four hours from Tulsa’.

In recent years the Grand Hotel has had some unfortunate publicity. The building now wears a vast hairnet because, apparently, the mating cries of the seagulls disturbed the guests. In other places, the reverse might have been the case.

The Wikipedia entry is interesting, but its neutrality is disputed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hotel_(Scarborough). For the moment, the entry carries a health warning. As well it might.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all: the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside: the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Midland Grand renaissance

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Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

How very satisfying to see the former Midland Grand Hotel finally restored and fully operational as the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which opened in May 2011.

And what a pleasure to be shown round by the Hotel Historian, Royden Stock. Royden has been associated with the building throughout its recent restoration, and has an unrivalled archaeological knowledge of the building.

I learnt from him, for instance, that English Heritage insistence that the grand staircase should be restored to its 1901 decoration, red with gold fleur-de-lis, obscures the much lighter original scheme, cream with a dado rail and scroll decoration to echo Skidmore’s ironwork.

He also reports that what were thought to be iron spandrels underneath the stair-treads are in fact fibrous plaster, which makes me wonder whether George Gilbert Scott would ever sanction such deceit, or whether they too date from 1901.

There is, oddly, no photograph of the staircase dating before 1901.

The original stair carpet was, unsurprisingly, unusable and a sample length woven to the original colours proved wildly garish because it was designed for the original cream colour-scheme, so the fitted carpet that stretches three floors up and down the staircase and reappears elsewhere in the building is newly woven to the faded colours of the original.

There’s an inevitable tension in taking a historic tour of a working hotel. Royden Stock is adept at circumnavigating ongoing events to show visitors on any particular day as much of the building as possible. He can’t, of course, provide access to the private apartments on the Euston Road wing of the building. The smart advice, from a man who ought to know, is that tours booked at the weekend are likely to be more comprehensive than those in the middle of the week.

The refreshments at the end of the tour were worth waiting for, though the service was several stars short of the Renaissance aspiration, perhaps because the hotel was extremely busy on the day I visited. Some members of my group were put out by this, but I considered Royden’s guiding alone was worth £20, and to me the pot of tea and an empty croissant was incidental – welcome, but not serious hospitality.

I hope Royden writes a book about St Pancras. His knowledge will add greatly to the existing literature on the station and the hotel.

Tours of St Pancras can be booked at www.stpancrasrenaissance.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals: past views of English architecture, please click here.

Iron curtain at the Abbeydale

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Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

While the Adelphi Cinema lay dark Sheffield’s other listed cinema building found a practical use as a performance building.

I’ve a soft spot for the Abbeydale Cinema. Though I only ever once saw a film there, I repeatedly visited it in the 1980s when it was an office-equipment showroom – an unexpected fate for a superannuated cinema. The company that bought it, A & F Drake Ltd, sold filing cabinets and office desks in the stalls and balcony, and separately operated the former ballroom and billiard hall in the basement as a snooker club. The Drakes and their manager, Ian Humphreys, repeatedly allowed me to take adult-education groups to see the place from top to bottom, and on one occasion Ian McMillan and Martyn Wiley broadcast Radio Sheffield’s Saturday morning show live from the Abbeydale auditorium.

Because the Drakes had the imagination to find a productive use for the building – they regarded it as a better customer attraction than an anonymous box on a trading estate – it survived intact long enough to attract the attention of a Friends’ group who are restoring it as a venue for film and amateur dramatics. Cinemas in the 1920s featured live performance as well as silent movies, and the Abbeydale had an organ – long ago destroyed – and still has a full-scale stage with wings, fly-tower and dressing-rooms.

Even more interesting is the iron safety-curtain, which has remained in situ even after Drakes jacked up the stage-floor six feet to create more space for their wares. This must date back to the 1920s, but its unique interest is the complete set of painted advertisements that faced audiences between films. Clifford Shaw, the greatest expert on Sheffield cinemas, has dated the existing adverts to the 1950s. Ian Humphreys observed to me in the 1980s that all but one of the businesses advertised had by that time folded. The Cinema Theatre Association reports that, to the best of their knowledge, no other cinema safety-curtain survives with contemporary advertisements, and for this reason is supporting the proposal to upgrade the listing.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Cross about Clay Cross

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Clay Cross Schools, Derbyshire

Recently I joined a Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group walking tour of Clay Cross, the company town in mid-Derbyshire founded by George Stephenson & Co following the discovery of coal and iron seams during the digging of the Clay Cross tunnel on the North Midland Railway.

I was curious, having driven many times through Clay Cross without stopping, what there was to see of historic and architectural interest. The honest answer is – not a great deal. There’s a very fine parish church by the Derby architect Henry Isaac Stevens (1851/1857), and a well-kept municipal cemetery with a miniature brick chapel and a monument to the 45 men and boys who died in the Parkhouse Colliery disaster of 1882. Neither building was open when we visited.

At the end of our walk we came upon the remaining educational centre of the town – two of the three company schools built between 1854 and 1884, alongside the later Mechanics’ Institute, another school and the original Victorian police station.

As we surveyed this concentration of sturdy public buildings, a local man asked us what we were doing, and suggested that we look while we can “because it’s all coming down”.

The schools were replaced by new premises in 2009, and have no obvious further purpose.

It seems that Derbyshire County Council plan to replace this complex with something called a “care village”, and that North East Derbyshire District Council, which has the power unilaterally to declare it a conservation area, has no conservation officer or spare funds to block the demolition of the biggest and best concentration of historic buildings in a town which has no history to speak of older than 1837 and deserves to conserve as much of its character as possible.

Understanding and appreciating Clay Cross requires patience. There is an excellent historic trail of Clay Cross at http://www.jonellis.plus.com/stbarts/town/Clay%20Cross%20trail.pdf and a further guide at http://www.derbyshire-peakdistrict.co.uk/claycross.htm.

The Auditorium

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The Auditorium Building, Chicago

It’s easy to walk straight past Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889) on South Michigan Avenue. Once the tallest building in the city, it’s now one of the magnificent group of structures that form the “streetwall” overlooking Grant Park.

The philanthropist Ferdinand Wythe Peck (1848-1924), supported by such luminaries as Marshall Field (1834-1906) and George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897), intended it as a major cultural centre and with a strongly egalitarian emphasis, following the bitter and tragic Haymarket Riot of 1886, which first provoked the celebration of May Day as a workers’ festival.

Peck wanted a civic auditorium that would provide equally good sight-lines and acoustics for every seat and, as originally conceived, no private boxes. Built at a cost of $3,200,000, it was one of the earliest American buildings to be air-conditioned and lit by incandescent electric lights.

The Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler combined in one structure a 4,300-seat auditorium, a speculative office block and a 400-room hotel. Adler designed a foundation raft of railroad ties (railway sleepers, in British terminology) and steel rails to support the ten-storey structure, with its seventeen-storey tower, on the deep bed of clay beneath.

Unfortunately, the weight of the load-bearing exterior walls led to spectacular settlement, in places over 2½ feet, so that to this day the lobby floor slopes perceptibly. Nevertheless, Sullivan & Adler’s practice moved into an office suite on the top floor of the tower, where the young Frank Lloyd Wright served his apprenticeship as a draughtsman.

The auditorium is magical: the ceiling arches are embellished with 24-carat gold leaf and the walls are elaborated stencilled to Sullivan’s designs. Albert Francis Fleury painted murals of Spring and Autumn on the side walls and Charles Holloway decorated the proscenium with forty-five life-size classical figures, all inspired by Louis Sullivan’s poetry.

The building has provided the venue for many milestones in Chicago’s cultural life: it hosted the Republican National Convention in 1888, the year before the building was completed; it was the venue for the debut of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891.

However, the Symphony Orchestra moved out in 1904 and the opera company followed in 1929. The office space proved difficult to sell because of the noise of the elevated railway on South Wabash Avenue, and the hotel failed to thrive because newer competitors featured en-suite bathrooms.

The only reason the building survived the 1930s was because it was too expensive to demolish. In 1941 the theatre company went bankrupt. During the war it was used as a servicemen’s entertainment centre, with a bowling alley on the stage and front stalls.

In 1947 the Auditorium Building was sold for $1 to the then Roosevelt College, now Roosevelt University. The hotel rooms became classrooms and the former dining room became the college library. A group led by Mrs Beatrice T Spachner campaigned for the restoration and reopening of the derelict auditorium, which took place in 1967. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975, and a further, thorough restoration took place in 2001.

The Auditorium has a regular programme of performances – http://www.auditoriumtheatre.org/wb/pages/home/performances-events/performances.php – and Roosevelt University offers public tours of the building: http://auditoriumtheatre.org/wb/pages/home/education/historic-theatre-tours.php.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Milntown – more than a cup of tea

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Milltown House, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man’s latest historic site to open is Milntown, a country house and garden on the outskirts of Ramsey. (This is a reversal of history, for Ramsey was, until the late 1880s, on the outskirts of the Milntown estate.)

The house is a delightful early-nineteenth century Gothick confection, built around a seventeenth-century core on an estate that belonged to the McCrystyn, later Christian, family from the early fifteenth century at least.

This was the birthplace of the great Manx hero, William Christian, otherwise Illiam Dhone or Brown William (1608-1663) [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiam_Dhone]. Fletcher Christian, the instigator of the mutiny on the Bounty was of the same family.

After the Christian family left, Milntown was a school, a hotel and then a private house belonging to the owners of Yates’ Wine Lodges. The last owner, Sir Clive Edwards, left the estate in trust to the Manx people, and it’s now gradually opening up for public enjoyment.

In an interesting reversal of UK National Trust practice, visitors enter through the tea-shop to reach the proudly organic gardens, which provide produce for the kitchen and an array of the sort of flowers that the monochrome photographer Cecil Beaton sourly described as “retina irritants”.

Designed by Richard Lucas, the garden is a vivid, crowded, complex place to wander, with woodland walks, seats and a mill-pond. The waterwheel of the 1794 mill turns idly, and the mill will one day open to the public.

This will be a site to return to – not least for the serious catering. When you walk in to pay your admission, you see satisfied customers tucking into the full cake-stand for afternoon tea. It’s difficult to resist the temptation on the way out.

Details of Milntown’s opening arrangements are at www.milntown.org.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Picture palace gathers dust

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Former Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1985)

The Adelphi Cinema (1920) on Vicarage Road, Attercliffe, is one of Sheffield’s two listed cinemas alongside the more prominent and interesting Abbeydale Picture House on the other side of the city.

Originally located up a cul-de-sac, it has an interesting façade of buff and blue faience with a stubby little dome, designed to catch the eye. Now that the surrounding buildings have been cleared, it’s more visible from the main road and forms one of a group of historic buildings alongside the former Attercliffe Baths (1879), the former Attercliffe Library (1894) and one of Attercliffe’s two Burton’s stores.

All these survive alongside the site of the Don Valley Stadium, formerly Brown Bayley’s steelworks, and now being redeveloped: there is an opportunity waiting to be taken to develop the possibilities of this location. The Baths have been converted into a largely sterile office and conference facility, which at least safeguards the fabric, and the Library has recently opened as a splendid café and restaurant [Sheffield | Restauraunt & Bar | The Library by Lounge | Attercliffe] but the Adelphi remains dark.

The Adelphi closed as a cinema in 1967, and operated as a bingo club until well into the 1980s. There was a project to take advantage of its elegant classical interior as a gay club, and eventually it was transformed into a rock venue. It was listed Grade II in 1996 but after a period as a music-teaching venue in 2000-2006 it fell into neglect.

By 2013 it was used as a storage facility, and someone went to great trouble to strip out the original plasterwork.

This was an object-lesson in how not to treat a listed building.

Yet the Adelphi stands on the main road between Sheffield, Rotherham and the M1 motorway. There’s no shortage of car-parking.

It’s a possibility waiting to be turned into a practicality.

Plans are afoot to rescue the Adelphi: The new Adelphi | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Picture palace bites the dust

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Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe (1982)

Another building that the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group couldn’t visit during their Attercliffe walk in 2010 was the Pavilion Cinema, opened in 1915 and eventually demolished in 1982.

Though the original plans show that a classical interior was intended, in fact the auditorium was mock-Tudor, with black-and-white timbering, strapwork and lanterns as house-lights. The auditorium was distinguished by side boxes, as in a theatre, very popular with couples: the cinema management had an interesting strategy of pricing these box seats at 3/- for five people.

The Pavilion was converted to bingo briefly in 1970 and then became an Asian cinema: at some point the owners repainted the entire auditorium in raspberry pink and two shades of blue.

When demolition began, in the innocent days before security fencing, I explored and photographed the entire building, primarily because it was one of the two Attercliffe cinemas that my parents patronised regularly on Saturday nights. (My dad, who wasn’t nicknamed “Scottie” for nothing, declared around 1954 that we wouldn’t buy a television because they’d soon be making colour ones.)

I alerted the Victorian Society to the imminent demise of this unusual building, to be told that no-one had any idea how unusual it was, because no survey of Sheffield cinemas had been attempted.

So I tramped around the city checking out the survivors and was briefly the greatest living expert on the subject until Richard Ward produced his book In Memory of Sheffield Cinemas (Sheffield City Libraries 1988). (I happen to know that Richard wanted the book to be titled A Memory… but made the common error of dictating his intention over the phone.)

I’ll always have a soft spot for the Pavilion, not so much because it was part of my childhood as because it kick-started my interest in the architecture of the entertainment industry, and led me to run continuing-education courses and study tours about pubs, theatres, cinemas and the seaside under the umbrella title ‘Fun Palaces’.

And that has proved to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of all my history work.

The demolition of the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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