Category Archives: Victorian Architecture

The water cure

The Yorkshire town of Ilkley had a modest reputation as a spa from the early eighteenth century [No additives | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] on the remarkable attribute that its mineral water was practically devoid of minerals.

Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), a Silesian peasant farmer, developed and patented hydrotherapy treatment, a system of baths, compresses and treatments involving wrapping patients in wet sheets, at Gräfenburg in Silesia in 1829. His procedures were satisfyingly uncomfortable, yet less life-threatening than other medical practices.

Captain Richard Tappin Claridge’s publication Hydropathy; or The Cold Water Cure, as practised by Vincent Priessnitz… (1842) encouraged the development of the first British hydropathic establishment at Malvern where the water had long been “famous for containing just nothing at all”.

Ilkley was quick to follow, when a consortium of Leeds businessmen opened a magnificent Scottish Baronial hydro named Ben Rhydding in 1844.

Ben Rhydding Hydropathic Establishment from “Ilkley, Ancient and Modern … Eighty illustrations” – PICRYL – Public Domain Media Search Engine Public Domain Search

The first resident physician, a Silesian, Dr Anthony Rischanek, left under some kind of a cloud, about which he harboured resentment for the rest of his life. He was succeeded by a leading proponent of the water-cure, Dr William Macleod, who established at Ben Rhydding the rigorous, wholesome lifestyle which initially characterised hydropathy.

The success of Ben Rhydding inevitably encouraged competitors. Wells House was established in 1853, at a cost of £30,000 in competition to Ben Rhydding, offering many of the same facilities at comparable prices.

The four-square turreted building, opened in 1856, was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, who was at that time engaged in building Leeds Town Hall and would later create the Grand Hotel, Scarborough.

Smaller, less expensive hydros followed. Craiglands, which opened in 1859, boasted Dr Macleod’s services as “consulting physician”. Charging around £2 12s 0d per week, about a pound less than the Ben Rhydding and Wells House, Craiglands was repeatedly enlarged, until the original plain classical structure sprouted a dour and domineering Scottish Baronial extension.

The Troutbeck was financed by the then resident physician from Wells House, Dr Edmund Smith, and opened about a year before his death in 1864. Its medical practitioners were brought in from Wells House, including a Dr Harrison who combined hydropathic treatments with galvanism.

Other Ilkley hydros included the Grove (c1870, later the Spa), supervised by Dr Scott from Wells House, Sunset View (by 1871), Rockwood (1871), Marlborough House (1878), Stoney Lea (1883), run by a former bathman from Ben Rhydding, Mr Emmott, and Moorlands (1897).

Steadily towards the end of the nineteenth century the hydros’ therapeutic purpose was diluted by increasing demand from guests for leisure facilities. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia of 1906 commented that “most [so-called hydros] originally started with [the] full equipment for treatment, including a resident physician…but many now are merely high-class country boarding-houses”.

In the twentieth century every one of the Ilkley establishments declined and closed. Ben Rhydding closed permanently at the start of the Second World War and was demolished in 1955. After wartime requisition Wells House became a college of further education and is now luxury apartments; Craiglands is now a hotel and Troutbeck was until recently a care home. The Spa and Rockwood were converted into flats, and Marlborough House and Stoney Lea have been demolished.

Memorial of Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), formerly at Ben Rhydding, now at Canker Well, Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Water is best

Leave a Reply

Rose Garrard, Malvhina drinking fountain, Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Great Malvern is a pleasant place. It’s populated by smart-looking ladies with Waitrose carrier bags and relaxed gents sitting around reading hardback books indoors or outdoors according to the weather. It’s long been a place to retire to, whether transitorily or permanently.

“Malvern” is a portmanteau placename for a cluster of small settlements – Great Malvern, Little Malvern, West Malvern, Malvern Wells and Malvern Link – all of which lie at the foot of the Malvern Hills ridge, where ancient Pre-Cambrian rocks provide prolific quantities of pure water from as many as 240 natural springs.

The name itself derives from Old Welsh, meaning “bald hill” and in modern Welsh rendered as moelfryn. This is associated with the name of a Gaelic goddess Malvhina, who was resurrected from obscurity by the local writer and photographer Charles Frederick Grindrod (1847-1910) and is commemorated by Rose Garrard’s 1998 fountain on Belle Vue Terrace.

Great Malvern grew up around the impressive eleventh-century Priory, of which the Perpendicular church survives because it was bought by the parishioners after the Dissolution. The only other remnant of the priory is the gatehouse, the home of the Malvern Museum of Local History.

Malvern water was esteemed from the seventeenth century, but was not widely known outside the local area. Dr John Wall (1708-1776) promoted it in a pamphlet entitled Experiments and observations on the Malvern Water (1756), which a critic summarised in an ironic couplet:

The Malvern water, says Doctor John Wall,
Is famed for containing just nothing at all.

We must remember that until the nineteenth century, pure water was a rarity. Most people drank small beer, cider or mead if they could get it. Tea, coffee and drinking chocolate were outlandish luxuries, accessible only to the very rich.

Gradually, through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, Malvern’s trade in its natural water grew.

The two most celebrated Malvern wells are St Ann’s Well which the Lady of the Manor, Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900) encouraged by extending the existing building in 1841 and, in Malvern Wells, the Holy Well which became the base for Schweppes’ bottling plant from 1850. Both these wells specifically made Malvern water available to local people.

The district was transformed by the arrival in 1842 of Dr James Wilson (1807-1867) and Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883), leading exponents of hydrotherapy, the highly popular but ultimately controversial water treatment developed by Dr Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851) at Grafenburg, Silesia.

The pair set up clinics in Malvern (Holyrood House for women and Tudor House for men) and were joined by other practitioners to make the area famous.

The railway from Worcester to Malvern Link opened in 1859, and a succession of distinguished figures – among them Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale – visited and took away glowing recommendations of the benefits of taking the Malvern waters. Indeed, Malvern water has been preferred by British monarchs from Queen Elizabeth I to Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria refused to travel without it.

Enthusiasm for being wrapped in wet blankets at the crack of dawn declined by the beginning of the twentieth century, but Malvern’s quiet charms remained attractive, and the hydros and large residences were easily converted to boarding schools, of which Malvern College (1862), Abbey College (1874) and Malvern St James (1893) remain in operation.

As an education centre, Malvern encouraged cultural activities. Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), who was born near Worcester and grew up in the city, spent much of his life in and around Malvern and Hereford: ELGAR – The Elgar Trail. Rose Gifford’s Elgar Fountain (2000) on Belle Vue Terrace incorporates a statue of the composer.

The Head of English at Malvern College, George Sayer (1914-2005), knew both C S Lewis (1898-1963) and J R R Tolkien (1892-1973). Lewis had been a student of George Sayer, who became his biographer, and he introduced his Oxford University colleague Tolkien to Sayer and to Malvern and its hills. C S Lewis is said to have been inspired to write the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by a snowy street lit by Great Malvern’s characteristic gas lamps.

Malvern is a healthy, comfortable place whether you’re growing towards adulthood or reaping the rewards of a working life, and in between it’s an admirable base for exploring a beautiful part of England, resonant with history and culture.

Note: The Malvern Museum of Local History is closed for refurbishment from November 2025 and is planned to reopen on March 28th 2026: Welcome to Malvern Museum – Malvern Museum of Local History.

Crown & Kettle

Leave a Reply

Researching the history and architecture of public houses is a minefield. Documentation is widely scattered, images are variable in quality and often undated, and personal memories are often vague because they’re born of habit.

The Crown & Kettle on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Road north of Manchester’s city centre has a coherent story that’s repeatedly told but some of the details are open to debate.

The name is unusual, but not as strange as the earlier name, the “Iron Dish & Cob of Coal”. Neither has been satisfactorily explained.

The earliest reference to a building on the site is dated 1734 and indicates it was used as a courthouse, and the connection with justice leads to unlikely tales of a secret tunnel to Strangeways Prison (built 1866-68) and “hanging pits” beneath the gents’ lavatory.

The eighteenth-century building isn’t the present-day two-storey pub. Neil Richardson’s The Old Pubs of Ancoats (2016) cites a directory of 1800 and includes an 1820 sketch of a three-storey, eighteenth-century building with a distinctive sign of a crown and a kettle.

The Manchester Evening News (August 26th 1976) mentions that the Crown & Kettle held a drinks licence by 1799. There are repeated newspaper advertisements for auctions on the premises from 1800 onwards.

Whatever its origins the current grand building with a high-ceilinged ground floor makes an excellent hostelry and has been a landmark for something like the better part of two centuries. Its interior is memorable for its elaborate Gothic plaster ceiling and the huge pendants which originally carried gasolier lighting fixtures.

Until the 1990s the snug had mahogany panelling which allegedly came from the R101 airship. This seems unlikely because the R101 was destroyed when it crashed and burst into flames near Beauvais, northern France, in October 1930 killing 48 passengers and crew. It’s possible that the panelling actually came from the R100, which was grounded and scrapped after the R101 tragedy.

In the mid-twentieth century the Crown & Kettle was a popular watering hole for journalists and printers from the Daily Express building next door. One history-forum contributor blamed the pub for the paper’s “speeling mistakes”. There’s a story that the Express photographer Jack Kay used to visit with his pet duck, which was teetotal and drank water from an ashtray.

The Crown & Kettle was listed Grade II in 1974. It was closed after an altercation on February 3rd 1990 between supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City that was variously described as a “fight”, a “riot” and “like the Wild West”, and according to the Manchester Evening News caused £30,000-worth of damage. Every member of staff on duty was injured.

A subsequent arson attack ruined the mahogany panelling in the snug.

It remained closed until 2005 when, with assistance from English Heritage, the ceiling was partly restored, leaving the remainder “as found”. After a change of ownership and a further refurbishment in 2000-2001 some of the interior walls were stripped back to the brickwork.

These vicissitudes have enhanced the atmosphere and appeal of the place. It was awarded the Greater Manchester CAMRA regional Pub of the Year 2015 and the Central Manchester Pub of the Year 2019.

The Crown & Kettle is a star in Manchester’s city-centre constellation of fine pubs. Its history is lengthy and robust, and loses nothing in the telling.

Roupell Street

Leave a Reply

When I booked a weekend in London at the Premier Inn London Southwark (Southwark Station), my London-based friend Eric prompted me to seek out the Roupell Street estate as an unexpected historic experience.

It takes only a couple of minutes to walk into a nineteenth-century time-warp of neat little terraces that are now marketed as two-bedroom houses at close on two million pounds each.

The area was developed in the early nineteenth century by the son of a jeweller, John Palmer Roupell (1771-1835), an ambitious, indeed rapacious gold-refiner and metal merchant, who bought seven acres of land in Lambeth Marsh in 1792. The area was previously tenter grounds, used for drying new-made cloth, until John Palmer Roupell introduced iron and lead works and later, from 1824, laid out streets which were initially named after him and his wife and only son.

This was not a happy family. The son, Richard Palmer Roupell (1782-1856), feared his father, who he knew would disapprove of his liaison with a carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Crane, with whom he had four clandestine children. He did not marry Sarah until both his parents were dead, and subsequently had a sole legitimate son, Richard (1840-1883).

The second of the four illegitimate children, William Roupell (1831-1909), assisted his father in developing fifty-five acres of land around Streatham Hill into the Roupell Park estate. He too was ambitious, and became MP for Lambeth in 1857 after spending £6,000 on campaigning. This was expedited by destroying his father’s will that left his estate to sixteen-year-old Richard, and forging a substitute that made his mother sole heir and himself sole executor.

This fraud unravelled in 1862, and though he destroyed documents and fled to Spain, he chose to return and face charges. He repented in a confessional pamphlet, and after serving a fourteen-year sentence he went to live with his mother and sister on Brixton Hill, made himself respectable but not frugal, outlived the rest of the family and died in poverty. Three hundred people attended when he was buried in the family vault in West Norwood Cemetery, the last of the Roupells.

Roupell Street is the sole memento of these doings, an urbane enclave that takes no notice of Waterloo East Station and the South Bank. The elegant little cottages are built in a warm brown brick, many of them with gables that are oddly out of step with the rhythm of the front doors.

In the middle of the grid of streets is a dignified pub, the King’s Arms, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for a century, but boasts a fine Thai kitchen. The Londonist website [King’s Arms | Londonist] advises, “[it] might lazily be declared a ‘hidden gem’. Judging by the crowds who find the place every evening, there’s nothing very ‘hidden’ about it. Turn up of an afternoon, however, and you’ll find the perfect corner pub for a quiet pint.” Its interior is described and evaluated at King’s Arms, London – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale.

If I didn’t know Eric, who knows London, I would never have found it.

Hepworth’s Arcade

Leave a Reply

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

Leave a Reply

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.

Keeping clean and healthy in industrial Attercliffe

1 Reply

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.

Birley Spa

Leave a Reply

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.

Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, Istanbul

Leave a Reply

When my friends Richard and Janet returned from their first trip to Turkey they had, as usual, lots of travellers’ tales and a couple of phones full of images.

One building they described attracted my attention particularly – the Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, a magnificently Baroque confection looking out over the Golden Horn, the river estuary that makes the shape of a horn as it drains into the Bosphorus.

St Stephen’s is fallaciously described in tourist literature as “the world’s only iron church”, when it may be the only iron and steel prefabricated Orthodox church in the world, an epithet which in no way diminishes its charm or significance.

Under the Ottoman Empire Christian congregations were classified as Greek or Armenian, and the Bulgarian congregation of Constantinople was administered by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy. The Bulgarians persistently asserted their separate identity, objecting to the imposition of the Greek language in their schools and churches.

The Bulgarian-born Ottoman statesman Stefan Bogoridi (1775- or 1780-1859) gave a wooden house in the district of Balat for use as a church in 1849. Replacing it with a purpose-built stone structure proved impossible because of the unstable ground, so when it eventually burnt down it was replaced by a lightweight steel-framed iron church.

Iron churches had been manufactured from the early nineteenth century. The Liverpool ironmaster John Cragg (1767-1854) used designs by the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) to market architectural components for prefabricated churches from 1812 onwards: in Liverpool St George’s, Everton and St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth remain, and a third, St Philip’s, Hardman Street, came to light when the building that had enveloped it was demolished.

Architectural iron and steel technology was revolutionised during the nineteenth century. Even after Bessemer steel became available in the 1850s, wrought iron remained the dominant material in building construction. Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889) were both built of iron. The first major steel structure in the world was the Forth Bridge (1890).

There was a short period when iron was employed to clad lightweight steel structures, before the steel-frame construction developed by the Chicago School of architects meant that buildings of any height were not dependent on the weight-bearing capacity of the walls, so the exterior could be clad in any weather-proof material.

The Bulgarian Church in Istanbul is arguably the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century iron churches. It was designed by the Ottoman-Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur (1854-1935) and the highly detailed exterior was manufactured by the Viennese Rudolph Philip Waagner Company, which was responsible a century later for the Reichstag Dome (1999) and the Great Court of the British Museum (2000).

Only the iconostasis, the screen that partitions the east end of the interior, is wooden: it was the work of the painter Klavdy Lebedev (1852-1916). The 131-feet-high tower contains six bells cast in the Russian city of Yaroslavi.

St Stephen’s was inaugurated on September 8th 1898.

Its contemporaries include the San Sebastian Church, Manila, (1891) built primarily to resist earthquakes, and St Louis’ Cathedral, Fort-de-France, Martinique (1895) built to resist also to survive hurricanes and fires like that which destroyed its predecessor.

All these buildings are beautiful and fascinating, and Istanbul’s Bulgarian Church deserves a visit alongside the city’s first-order experiences of seeing Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

Loxley Chapel Cemetery

Leave a Reply

I’ve never understood why people claim that Sheffield is, like Rome, built on seven hills. There’s even an Italian restaurant in Hillsborough called Sette Colli: Home – Sette Colli Restaurant, Italian Restaurant, Sheffield, S6.

In fact, the city is drained by five significant rivers – Don, Loxley, Rivelin, Porter and Sheaf. That makes six hills, each of which early industry utilised to power water mills.

The Don, which flows to Doncaster, is joined by the Rother in Rotherham.

The Sheaf is said to give the city its name, which explains the sheaves of corn on the city’s coat of arms.

The Loxley, which flows eastwards from the Pennine foothills through Bradfield to join the River Rivelin at Malin Bridge and then the River Don at Owlerton, brought the waters released by the Dale Dike Dam disaster thundering through these villages in March 1864.

On the northern side of the Loxley valley, a chapel was constructed in 1787 at a cost of £1,000 by members of the congregation of St Nicholas’ Church, Bradfield, who resisted the dismissal of the minister, Rev A Benjamin Greaves.

This fine, dignified building looks out above the road to Bradfield. Practically square in plan, it’s distinguished by its elegant Venetian windows. It could accommodate up to a thousand people and is surrounded by an extensive burial ground.

By 1798, after Rev Greaves had moved on, the building was leased to Dissenters and when they bought it for £315 it became Loxley Independent Church and, later, Loxley Congregational Church.

Through the nineteenth century the chapel and its surroundings were repeatedly improved – a schoolroom and minister’s house in 1855, the burial ground extended in 1875, and the chapel restored in 1890-91 – and in the twentieth century, with a depleted congregation, it continued to act as a focal point for the widespread farming community. In 1972 it was renamed Loxley United Reformed Church.

By 1985, when it was listed Grade II* [LOXLEY UNITED REFORMED CHURCH, Bradfield – 1314565 | Historic England] indicating its historical and architectural importance, it was also placed on the Buildings At Risk Register. After storm damage in 1989 it was extensively repaired and reopened in 1990, but two years later services ceased, though burials continued in the cemetery, and in 1996 the United Reformed Church sold the chapel and the cemetery to a private developer, now Ali Property Development.

The chapel continued to deteriorate until on August 17th 2016 it caught fire. The fire brigade had difficulty putting three tenders within reach, and the roof and interior was entirely destroyed, leaving only the outside walls which remain fenced off and abandoned.

Images from February 2015 show what the interior looked like before it was burnt out: Report – – Loxley Methodist Church, Sheffield – March 2015 | Other Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk. (Despite the URL, it was never a Methodist church.)

The Friends of Loxley Cemetery was founded in 2019 to maintain the graveyard, safeguard the ruined chapel and take responsibility for the congregation’s records. They’ve worked hard to clear the badly overgrown burial ground and reveal a remarkable collection of monuments and gravestones. The back page of the Friends’ publicity leaflet shows the impact they’ve had on the site: folc-publicity-leaflet-dec-202 (e-voice.org.uk).

At least twenty-two people who perished in the Great Sheffield Flood are buried at Loxley, and there are fourteen war burials – military graves from both World Wars and that of an air-raid warden killed in the Sheffield Blitz.

There are also two memorials to victims of the respective tragedies of the Titanic (1912) and the Lusitania (1915).

A bird’s eye view of Loxley Cemetery is available at Loxley Chapel and Cemetery filmed by drone in February 2023 – YouTube.

The Friends welcome visitors and volunteer helpers: News Events – Friends of Loxley Cemetery (e-voice.org.uk).

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: