Monthly Archives: July 2025

Hepworth’s Arcade

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Hepworth’s Arcade, Hull (2023)

Hepworth’s Arcade is a picturesque shopping opportunity in Hull’s Old Town, situated on the corner of Silver Street (the continuation of Whitefriargate) and Market Place.

It was built in 1894 for the Leeds tailor Joseph Hepworth (1834-1911), who had founded his clothing factory with his brother-in-law James Rhodes in Leeds in 1864.  The company moved into retailing in the 1880s and the Hull arcade was part of Joseph Hepworth’s development of a chain of tailor’s shops across Great Britain.

In the years after Joseph Hepworth’s death the company became the largest clothing manufacturer in Britain.  (Though greatly transformed, the company still exists;  it’s now known as Next plc.)

The arcade was designed by Alfred Gelder & Llewellyn Kitchen, a practice that survived until 2021 with headquarters at Maister House, a few minutes’ walk away on Hull’s High Street. 

Hepworth’s Arcade is L-shaped, lit by barrel-vaulted glazing linked by an octagonal glass dome and cupola.  Most of the units were originally two-storey, except that those at the Silver Street (north) and Market Place (east) entrances have three storeys.

The street facades are described as “Renaissance” in style, with segmental-arched entrances and bay windows with swan’s-neck pediments.

Hepworth’s original “new and handsome” premises were at No 8 Silver Street, a spacious unit at the entrance to the arcade.  It set the tone for affluent customers seeking fashionable apparel.

Marks & Spencer provided a further magnet for customers when they opened one of their “Penny Bazaars” at 15, 17 and 19 Hepworth’s Arcade in 1899, transforming their units into an open-plan market which could be closed by roller shutters at the end of the trading day. 

The departure of Marks & Spencer to prestigious premises (now abandoned) in Whitefriargate in 1931 signalled the beginning of a decline in shopping in the Old Town.

Nevertheless, in the repeated German attacks on Hull in 1941, the Arcade was blasted but not directly bombed, and its premises were in heavy demand while the city centre was redeveloped after the war.

Eventually, as the brand-new buildings between Queen Victoria Square and Paragon Station refocused the shopping area, the Arcade was taken over by Hull City Council in 1961.

It was listed Grade II in 1990 and refurbished in 1995 and again in 2002.

There’s a prodigious collection of photographs, from 360° panoramas to fine details, at Hepworth’s Arcade, Non Civil Parish – 1283101 | Historic England.

And all the history of shops and tenants that’s fit to print is set out in enormous detail in Graham Hardy, Hepworth’s Arcade:  one hundred years of trading (Hutton Press 1996).

Finding the other Frick

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The Frick Pittsburgh, USA

Every time I arrive in New York City I visit The Frick, Henry Clay Frick’s exquisite Fifth Avenue mansion housing his superb art collection, so when I travelled to Pittsburgh I made a point of seeking Frick’s family home.

This wasn’t easy, because I couldn’t get the hang of the local bus system.  My first attempt landed me at Frick Park, which appeared to be a playground and tennis courts, a bequest from Henry Clay Frick, opened in 1927.  There’s more to it than met my eye:  Frick’s initial bequest ultimately extended to 644 acres.

Persistence pays.  The following day I found the exact bus and bus stop to The Frick Pittsburgh.   

It’s a compact site, with the original house, Clayton, in one corner:  there’s a greenhouse, a café, a shop and an admirable display of carriages and early motor cars, and an art gallery, much of which I was told was closed, except for an exhibition of high-heeled shoes which I felt I could live without.

Henry and Adelaide Frick moved into Clayton shortly before the birth of their son, Childs Frick (1883-1965, named for his mother’s maiden name).  He was utterly unlike his rapacious father – a scholarly palaeontologist, who grew up learning to love the animals that roamed in the grounds at Clayton, and he spent his life acting as a benefactor and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Of the Fricks’ four children, the only other survivor to adulthood was their daughter, Helen Clay Frick (1888-1984).  Her childhood was darkened by the deaths of her young brother and sister.  Their father notoriously favoured Helen at Childs’ expense, and his will, leaving her $38 million, alienated her from her mother and brother.

Helen shared her father’s interest in art and art history.  She travelled extensively in Europe with her parents, and advised her father on purchases for his collection.  She also gathered a formidable archive of reproductions and catalogues, including records of many works of art lost in the two world wars.  She curated what became the Frick Collection in New York City, and later established the Frick Art Museum in the grounds of Clayton where she habitually spent summers. 

She liked the place as she remembered it in her childhood, so it was never modernised or extended.  In the last few years of her life she resided at Clayton permanently, and died there aged ninety-six.

The house and grounds were opened to the public in 1996.

It’s a delightful place to spend a leisurely day.  For lunch I was placed outside under a table-umbrella.  I didn’t take notice of not being asked whether I wanted to be in the cool air-conditioned interior, where elegant ladies were eating at tables with tablecloths.  I simply relished the experience of sitting in a beautiful place in beautiful weather and eating steak parmesan with a less than generous pot of house-blend tea.

I had time to sit in the lounge of the ultra-modern shop, well stocked with books about Frick, the architecture of the Golden Age (that is, late nineteenth-century eastern USA), fashion and high-heeled shoes until I was summoned by the docent, Pam, for the two-o’clock tour.  Pam was wonderful.  She was courteous, affirmative, formidably well informed, and managed the group with charm and precision.

The Frick Pittsburgh took some finding by bus, but it was well worth the effort.

Blood and treasure

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Frick Building, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: lobby, showing John LaFarge’s ‘Fortune and Her Wheel’

From time to time a public figure rises to prominence with hardly any redeeming features.

One such was Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the American steel magnate who took over the Andrew Carnegie Corporation, which he sold to J Pierpont Morgan to establish the US Steel Corporation in 1901.

Using family money from his grandfather’s whisky distillery and loans from the Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) he founded the Frick Coke Company in 1871, which he renamed H C Frick & Co when he bought out his partners nine years later.

The rising Pittsburgh steel industry relied on coke-manufacturing, and Frick formed a partnership with Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), and ultimately became chairman of the Carnegie Corporation.

The two men were complete opposites.  Carnegie was a Scot who grew up in Pennsylvania, modest, phenomenally industrious and guided by strongly-held principles.  His wealth derived from the steel industry, and in his lifetime he disposed of ninety per-cent of his fortune through philanthropy.

Henry Frick, on the other hand, cared for little but making money and spending it on fine art.

He joined a consortium of over sixty Pittsburgh businessmen who bought the largest earth dam in the world, built and later abandoned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in the hills upstream of the city of Johnstown, and established an exclusive resort, the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club.  Though the group possessed sufficient expertise and resources to make the leaky, badly maintained reservoir safe, they neglected its upkeep, lowered the height of the dam and partially blocked the spillway to conserve fish stocks, until on May 31st 1889 it failed, sending a sixty-foot wall of water down the Little Conemaugh River to Johnstown where 2,209 people perished.  The Club evaded paying compensation for the disaster, and an independent engineers’ report was suppressed until 2018.

Though he shared responsibility for the Johnstown Flood with many others, he was solely responsible for the consequence of a bitter trade-union dispute when, in 1892, workers at the Carnegie works at Homestead, seven miles south of Pittsburgh, walked out and were locked out over wages.  Andrew Carnegie, who himself supported trade unions, had delegated responsibility for running the company to Frick.

To break the strike, Frick hired and armed three hundred private security agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.  The vicious conflict that followed led to sixteen deaths and many injuries, and the strikers maintained their opposition until confronted with four thousand state militia.  Frick himself was wounded in an attempted assassination.  Ultimately, support for the strike evaporated, and the powerful Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers narrowly escaped bankruptcy.

He asserted his presence in the centre of Pittsburgh by building the Frick Building, designed by Daniel H Burnham and completed in 1902, over three hundred feet high and deliberately sited to cast a permanent shadow over Andrew Carnegie’s headquarters next door.  The lobby is decorated with John LaFarge’s stained-glass, ‘Fortune and Her Wheel’ (1902) and two bronze sentinel lions (1904) by the sculptor Alexander Proctor.

When he married in 1881 Frick bought an existing eleven-room house which he called Clayton within easy reach of his steelworks and the city.  Here he and his wife Adelaide raised their four children, two of whom survived to adulthood.  In 1904 he built a 104-room summer residence, Eagle Rock, on Boston’s North Shore, and rented the William H Vanderbilt House on New York’s Fifth Avenue, until the completion of his Henry Clay Frick House, further uptown along Fifth Avenue, in 1913.

He willed his house and its fabulous art collection to the City of New York.  It opened to the public as The Frick Collection in 1936, following Adelaide Frick’s death five years earlier.

Clayton is now known as The Frick Pittsburgh. It opened to visitors in 1990, six years after the death of Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay Frick.

Eagle Rock was demolished in 1969.

The biography by Les Standiford, Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, And The Bitter Partnership That Transformed America (Crown 2005), pulls no punches.  A more recent study is Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait (Abbeville 2020).