Monthly Archives: June 2025

Trams on the move

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Liverpool 762 and Wallasey 78

Birkenhead can claim to be the historic foundation of street tramways in Britain. 

The very first horse tramway in Europe opened from Woodside Ferry to Birkenhead Park in 1860. 

The first British manufacturer of horse trams, George Starbuck, opened his factory at Cleveland Street, Birkenhead, in 1871 and, as G F Milnes & Co, the company built hundreds of electric trams before the Birkenhead factory closed in 1902.

In the 1990s Wirral Borough Council sought to commemorate this history by opening a museum and four hundred yards of track and overhead from the Woodside ferry terminal along Pacific Road, having commissioned two specially-built double-deck trams from Hong Kong Tramways, which were tested in Blackpool on arrival in Britain.

The reason for acquiring these bizarre vehicles is obscure.  Though the trams that still operate in Hong Kong are directly derived from British models, they look nothing like any Merseyside originals, and the Hong Kong line is 3ft 6in gauge, so these two had to be built to standard gauge from scratch.  Their only local connections are their historic liveries, one Birkenhead, the other Wallasey, and their numbers, 69 and 70, which continue the numbering of Birkenhead Corporation Tramways.

The Council enlisted the expertise of several volunteer enthusiast groups one of which, the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society [MERSEYSIDE TRAMWAY PRESERVATION SOCIETY. About Us], had spent twelve years restoring the Liverpool “Green Goddess” 869, which now operates at the National Tramway Museum at Crich, Derbyshire.

The Woodside museum line was extended to a depot at Taylor Street, and the MTPS successively restored Birkenhead 20 (built in Birkenhead in 1900), Wallasey 78 (built 1920) and Liverpool 769 (built 1931-32).  The group’s latest project is the restoration Warrington 28 (a hybrid identity based on two originals, the remains of 2 rebuilt to look like 8).

In 2006 National Museums Liverpool loaned Liverpool 245 (a smaller version the Green Goddess design, nicknamed a “Baby Grand”, built in 1938), which had been stored since the Liverpool tram system closed in 1957.  The amount of volunteer work involved to restore it to operation is described here:  245 Restoration Progress Report.

The relationship between the Council and the MTPS was always vulnerable to instability.  Council officers and elected members had only tenuous insights into transport preservation;  the enthusiasts focused on raising finance to restore and maintain their growing fleet. 

The wheels continued to turn until Covid, after which the Museum failed to recover.  Tram service reopened November 20th 2021 and closed a day later because of trackwork problems.  It reopened on February 26th 2022 and lasted until April 14th.  No trams have operated on the line since.

The Council made an arrangement with a not-for-profit organisation, Big Heritage CIC, which had successfully revived the Western Approaches Museum [Western Approaches] in central Liverpool, and offered £4.5 million of ring-fenced money to expand the Wirral museum to interpret transport history on Merseyside more widely.

This didn’t work, and it’s difficult to discern why.  The funding offer was reduced to £1.5 million and Big Heritage backed away.  The MTPS eventually lost patience and donated their three electric trams to the National Tramway Museum and moved them to Crich in March 2025.

Other vehicles have been transferred elsewhere.  Liverpool horse-tram 43, together with two weather-beaten Douglas horse-trams, is now installed at the Hooton Park Hangars and Trust at Ellesmere Port.  A regauged 1930 Lisbon tram, 730, is now at the Beamish Museum in Co Durham.

The Wirral Transport Museum is left with one remaining genuine operational Merseyside tram, Liverpool 245, the part-restored Warrington hybrid and the two Hong Kong oddities.

In essence, you can’t move a museum, but you can move trams.  The MTPS statement about the move to Crich ends, “While the MTPS were deeply saddened by this move the decision was made in the best interests of the trams, to secure their future and [to] be available for members of the public to use and enjoy.”

It’s difficult to disagree.

A succinct summary of situation can be found at Just what is going on with the Wirral Transport Museum? | British Trams Online News.

Keeping clean and healthy in industrial Attercliffe

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Attercliffe Baths, Sheffield: staircase detail

Whenever I’ve led A Walk Round Attercliffe, whether for schoolkids, postgraduate architectural students or Heritage Open Days participants, the itinerary always ends at Attercliffe Baths.

The Lower Don Valley History Trail blue plaque on the corner of the building says that the Baths “provided both swimming and washing facilities for the area at a time when bathrooms at home were unknown” and “ was also Attercliffe’s speakers’ corner”.

A trawl through local newspapers in the online British Newspaper Archive reveals a more detailed view of the importance of this landmark building.

Keeping clean and healthy in the profoundly grubby, polluted atmosphere of the industrial East End was a never-ending battle for the people who lived in the modest terraces, and particularly for the men (and, in wartime, women) who grafted in the hot, noisy, dangerous works that towered above the streets.

The countryside disappeared from the Don Valley from the 1840s onwards, and Sheffield’s first baths, at Borough Bridge in Neepsend, opened in 1869.  Ten years later, the Corporation completed the Attercliffe Baths on the corner of Leeds Road and Attercliffe Common.

The fact that they cost almost £13,000 – four times the cost of the Neepsend baths – caused controversy, and subsequent municipal baths of equivalent size were cheaper:  Upperthorpe Baths cost £8,484 when it was completed in 1894. 

The architect of Attercliffe Baths was William Horace Stovin (1833-1908), the assistant borough surveyor.  He died in Canada, but his name lives on in Stovin Drive, Darnall.

For a century, the pool at Attercliffe Baths was used for swimming and lifesaving lessons, recreation and sport, and the slipper baths gave Attercliffe people the opportunity, at modest cost, to luxuriate in a private cubicle with a deep tub, hot water, soap and a towel for a few pence.

There were downsides to this busy, popular place.  The changing cubicles around the swimming pool were protected only by a curtain, and thefts were frequent.  Only those who were caught and sent to court are recorded – a pair of boots in 1881, sums of money lifted from pockets, from 1½d to £1 9s 6d.  Once, in 1908, an alert manager, John Parker, noticed a “somewhat unusual” sight, a boy in girl’s clothing.  The costume was stolen, and the thief was fined twenty shillings by the Stipendiary Magistrate.

There were fatalities in the slipper baths – from epilepsy (1903 and 1931), “natural causes” (1924) and an attempted suicide in 1911.

In 1894 the Attercliffe Free Library was built on the adjacent land on Leeds Road, and there was talk of a “laundry”, which eventually became the Wash House at Oakes Green a quarter of a mile away, opened in 1937.  Other less likely schemes, for a Turkish bath and an open-air pool, were shelved.

Furthermore, the Baths was a focus for public political meetings, sometimes indoors – the Attercliffe Independent Labour Party (1903), the Socialist Labour Party (1906) and the Anti-Socialist Union (1910).  Otherwise, meetings were held in the open air, or groups met outside the Baths, where there was plentiful road space, before processing elsewhere.

The baths closed in the 1980s.  The pool was filled in, and a conversion to office use retained and refurbished some of the interior features that cost so much in 1879, such as the tiled staircase with its cast banister incorporating the then newly-awarded borough coat of arms.

So much of Attercliffe’s architectural heritage has been lost that it’s gratifying to know that Mr Stovin’s staircase is in good condition.

V&A East Storehouse

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V&A East Storehouse, Stratford, London

The V&A East Storehouse is great fun, when you find it. 

I wasted an hour traipsing from Stratford station round the Westfield shopping centre and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, advised by a succession of friendly and well-meaning security guards who haven’t been fully briefed about east London’s latest tourist attraction.

Most of my guides referred to their iPads which confused the Storehouse with V&A East, the new museum that is yet to open. The correct transport solution is the 388 bus from Stratford Station to the Here East bus stop which is within sight of the Storehouse.

Almost all museums have capacity only to display a fraction of their full collections.

The Victoria & Albert Museum, which was founded in 1852 and covers five acres of South Kensington, has taken the opportunity to expand to Stratford, by not only building a brand-new additional museum but by opening access to its reserve collections in an interesting, exciting, inclusive way.

Entry to the V&A East Storehouse is free and, with suitable safeguarding in place, visitors are free to see otherwise inaccessible exhibits at close quarters:  [Visit V&A East Storehouse].  Indeed, it’s possible to request in advance a personal inspection of almost any item in the building:  [Order an Object · V&A].

A three-floor atrium enables visitors to wander at will admiring beautiful and unexpected pieces of art and craft, and learning about the business of curating exhibits to ensure their physical survival.

I know people whose vertigo would react adversely to the metal-grid flooring which is unsuitable for stiletto or kitten heels.  However, the visitor-friendly staff are endlessly helpful and solicitous in providing directions and looking after additional needs.

The large set-piece exhibits include the exquisite Torrijos Ceiling (c1490) [Torrijos Ceiling – Search Results | V&A Explore the Collections], made for a now-lost palace in Spain, with the opportunity to look closely at the construction of the rough carpentry framework at close quarters from the upper level of the atrium.

Another major exhibit is the Kaufmann Office (1935-37) [Kaufmann Office | Wright, Frank Lloyd | V&A Explore The Collections], the only complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior outside the USA, designed for the Pittsburgh department-store owner Edgar J Kaufmann with all its original furniture, marquetry and textiles.

My favourite interior is much more modest than these two – the Frankfurt Kitchen [Frankfurt Kitchen | Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete (Grete) | V&A Explore The Collections], a revolutionary rational, efficient and hygienic design by Margarete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky for municipal flats in 1926-27.  It is the ancestor of every fitted kitchen that followed.

Grasping the eclecticism of this place is like reading an IKEA catalogue on speed.  Visiting the original South Kensington V&A once a day for a year would merely begin to reveal its richness.  It’s only practical to treat the Storehouse as a lucky dip.

When enough’s enough, it’s easy to find food and drink on the ground floor.  And if the café is crowded, there’s the Clarnico Club [Clarnico Club] coffee shop across the road on Parkes Street.

Birley Spa

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Birley Spa, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield: Large Plunging Bath (2008)

Birley Spa is a surprise,– a nineteenth-century bathing-resort hidden in the middle of the post-war Hackenthorpe housing-estate on the outskirts of Sheffield.

Local tradition maintains that the spa is ancient, but its documented history only dates from 1734 and its practical development followed a 1788 survey which proposed the building of a Bath Hotel, laying out paths and building two bridges across the stream.

In 1843 the Lord of the Manor, Charles, 2nd Earl Manvers, financed the development of the present building, incorporating a range of seven plunge- and shower-baths built into the hillside on the lower level, and on the upper floor a “lodging-house” with facilities to drink the waters as well as “tea, coffee and other refreshments”, run by a resident manager.

There were two distinct water-sources – an iron-bearing chalybeate spring for drinking, and the Large Plunging Bath was filled with “water as pure as chrystal [sic]”.

Birley Spa offered annual subscriptions from 15 shillings, and single baths ranged in price from the “Best Marble Hot Bath” at 2s 6d, to a simple cold plunge in the large bath at sixpence.  Subscribers to the Bath Charity were entitled to recommend “Poor Persons”, on a sliding scale, to make free use of the Spa.

A special omnibus-service ran from the Commercial Inn in the centre of Sheffield, twice daily except on Sundays.

The hotel closed in 1878 and its accommodation was converted first into residences.  The hot baths and showers fell out of use by 1895 and have now disappeared, but the large sandstone oval plunging bath, 25 feet by 18 feet and 5 feet deep, survives.

The grounds of the Spa were developed between the World Wars as a privately-operated children’s playground including a boating-lake and paddling pool, wishing well, swing-boats and a sandpit.  The now-demolished balcony of the Spa House was used as a bandstand.

All this activity ceased on the outbreak of war in 1939, and in the 1950s the site came into the possession of Sheffield City Housing Department, which in 1960 proposed to demolish the Spa buildings. 

The City Architect, Lewis Womersley, presented an alternative scheme to retain the buildings as a community hall, and this was partially completed in 1966.

Birley Spa was listed Grade II in 1973.

Although some essential maintenance was carried out in 1986, the site suffered increasingly from neglect and vandalism until in 1988 the City’s Countryside Management Unit began a programme of conservation, interpretation and restoration, involving local schools, community groups and the frogmen from South Yorkshire Police. 

The initial aim was to recreate the Spa as a local amenity, as it had been at two distinct periods in its history, initially by encouraging its use as a pleasure-ground, and later by restoring the bath-house to use and perhaps marketing the mineral water.

In the event, the restored bath-house has been displayed but not used, and it has been cared for by volunteers involved in a succession of groups which became the Birley Spa Preservation Trust in 2018.

The Spa has earned a place in the Victorian Society’s 2025 Top Ten Endangered Buildings list. This article in the Sheffield Tribune provides a detailed update: The secret spa: venturing inside Sheffield’s strangest heritage building.