Category Archives: Twentieth-century architecture

The Abbeydale Picture House – Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema

My latest book, The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema, is now on sale. It’s a long story, but a short book, telling the history of a much-loved building, the people who worked there and the thousands whose lives were brightened by it from 1920 onwards.

The Abbeydale Picture House has always been exceptional among local cinemas. Its architect, Pascal J Stienlet, designed the auditorium and stage as a theatre, so the balcony embraces the proscenium and the stage has a fly-tower and a suite of dressing rooms which I’ve come to suspect were never completed.

The building sits on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the River Sheaf, so the space under the stage was fitted out as a billiard saloon, and the ballroom beneath the auditorium had a sprung floor and a disconcerting sloping ceiling to match the rake of the seating above.

Its original proprietors struggled in the face of post-war inflation and quickly handed the place over to a more experienced team who were involved in two other cinemas south of the city centre.

It took until the 1930s for the shareholders to receive a modest dividend, but from then till the late 1950s the Abbeydale brought in crowds to watch films, dance and play billiards. The Abbeydale offered warmth, comfort and style. A whole generation of local people met their life-partner under its roof.

As times changed and suburban cinemas went out of favour, it was the third last suburban cinema in Sheffield to close, in 1975.

It was quickly adapted as an office-equipment showroom, but since then attempts to find it a practical purpose have repeatedly failed, until True North Brew Co acquired it at the beginning of 2025 and made firm plans to restore and refurbish it as a multipurpose entertainment centre – which was exactly its function in the 1920s: Abbeydale Ballroom | Sheffield’s new social space | pool hall.

I’ve been involved in the Abbeydale’s heritage since the 1980s, and had the good fortune to build my knowledge on Dr Clifford Shaw’s extensive research, and on oral-history interviews carried out by a Sheffield University postgraduate student, Holly Dann, both of whom talked to people who remembered the Abbeydale since before the Second World War.

It’s arguably the only surviving first-generation cinema in Sheffield that’s physically intact, architecturally interesting and has an abundance of stories about the people for whom it was and is a landmark in their lives.

Of the fifty-two cinemas that were operating within the then city boundary in the first month of the Second World War, the Abbeydale is the only one that has so many tales to tell and has the potential to bring enjoyment to future generations of Sheffield people.

A participant on a recent Heritage Open Days tour remarked, “I’ve passed this place hundreds of times and never realised how beautiful it is.”

The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema has 56 A5 pages in full colour.

To see sample pages, please click here.

To purchase, please click here, or send a cheque for £10.00 per copy payable to Mike Higginbottom at 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ. Contact: 0114-242-0951 or 07946-650672 or mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk

Heinz Memorial Chapel

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The Philadelphia architect Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938) demonstrated how the Gothic architectural tradition could express the dignity and function of academic architecture in his Cathedral of Learning, completed in 1937 as part of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.

Alongside the Cathedral in the same years he applied the same blend of historicism and modernity to design two other neo-Gothic structures for the University.

The Stephen Collins Foster Memorial (1937) provided two theatre spaces for the Department of Theatre Arts and accommodation for the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum and the Stephen Foster Collection and archive, which is regarded as particularly important because Foster’s brother Morrison Foster destroyed or dispersed many of his papers after his death. It houses the twelve-sided Stephen Foster Shrine, which displays the composer’s sheet music and memorabilia.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is regarded as “the father of American music” as the composer of such minstrel songs as ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Old Folks at Home’ (‘Swanee River’) – a mixed legacy, in which well-loved melodies are tied to lyrics that are now regarded as racially-inflected and widely disliked.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel (1938) was initially conceived by Henry John Heinz (1844-1919), the Pittsburgh-born founder of the food-processing company, as a memorial to his mother, but was extended after his death by additional bequests from his three surviving children.

It was gifted to the University and “dedicated to culture, understanding response to beauty, and religious worship” as an interdenominational place of worship which is open to all members of the University community, employees of the H J Heinz Company and the general public.

Unlike the Cathedral of Learning, a tower which reaches 535ft into the heavens, the Heinz Memorial Chapel is a traditional cruciform church with tall, narrow proportions, many Gothic arches and pinnacles, surmounted by a fleche 256 feet above ground level.

The interior is a series of lofty French Gothic vaults, decorated with elaborate sequences of sculpture by Joseph Gattoni, and drenched in daytime by the light of predominantly blue stained glass by the prominent stained-glass artist Charles Jay Connick (1875-1945), who was responsible for the entire sequence of the chapel’s many huge windows.

The proximity of three ambitious neo-Gothic buildings in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus is remarkable, memorable and leaves an indelible impression, particularly on those fortunate enough to come to the city of steel and heavy industry to study.

Cathedral of Learning

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Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: Commons Room

The nineteenth-century Gothic Revival was influential in the USA and maintained momentum until the Second World War.

Nineteenth-century Gothic buildings were usually scholarly versions of European originals, like New York City’s Trinity Church (1846) and St Patrick’s Cathedral (1879/1888).

Subsequent neo-Gothic buildings in the States are more varied, grand and original, especially when their designs merged with the quintessentially American invention of the skyscraper.

I’ve been fortunate to enjoy the Woolworth Building (1913) and Riverside Church (1929) in New York City, Grace Cathedral (1924-64) in San Francisco and the Tribune Tower (1922-25) in Chicago, but the richest, most fascinating, downright peculiar example of American Gothic I know is the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.

This astonishing structure is a 42-storey tower containing lecture facilities, research and library areas and study and social facilities for the University of Pittsburgh. Its construction took from 1926 to 1937.

It was the brain-child of John Gabbert Bowman (1877-1962), chancellor of the university 1921-45, who envisaged a landmark building dominating the city: “…more than a schoolhouse; it was to be a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live”.

He commissioned Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938), one of the foremost American architects of his generation who continued to develop the neo-Gothic style in the age of Art Deco.

On land given by the banker and industrialist Andrew William Mellon (1855-1937), Charles Klauder created a monumental building that fulfilled all the requisite criteria – ample space for a multiplicity of purposes, a powerful impact on the Pittsburgh townscape and a rich source of imaginative art and craftsmanship.

The most awe-inspiring space in the Cathedral is the four-storey Commons [sic] Room, 52 feet high and covering half an acre of floor-space, where students are guaranteed quiet for private study. The Perpendicular Gothic columns and vaults are functioning masonry arches, independent of the steel frame which supports the higher storeys.

The first and third floors surrounding the Commons Room are largely given over to the Nationality Rooms that John G Bowman handed over in 1926 to representatives of the nationalities that made up Pittsburgh’s diverse communities. Each community was responsible for the entire cost of fitting out the rooms, after which the University undertook to maintain them in perpetuity.

The English Room, for example, is decorated with materials rescued from the bombed House of Commons at the end of the Second World War. It was dedicated in 1952, and contains portraits of Andrew Mellon and William Pitt, the Prime Minster after whom the city is named. Separate classrooms are dedicated to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Turkish Room includes a large ceramic portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, instructing his people about the Turkish alphabet introduced in 1928 in place of the Arabic script.

There are currently thirty-one Nationality Rooms, from African Heritage to Yugoslavia, of which all but two are functioning classrooms. Most of them still have blackboards, though the Korean Room, dedicated in 2015, was the first to instal an LED screen and central speaker system.

Detailed descriptions of all the Nationality Rooms can be found at Nationality Rooms – Wikipedia.

The highest level of the tower available to the public is the Federick Honors College on the 35th and 36th floors. The views are spectacular.

The Cathedral of Learning is freely accessible to members of the public. I ate chicken nuggets and fries in the student refectory in the basement. You can’t always do that at British cathedrals of learning.

Reawakening the Premier Electric Theatre

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Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (2025)

Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (1977)

The Premier Electric Theatre in Somercotes, Derbyshire, hasn’t screened a movie since Bonfire Night 1960.

It was built for the local wine-merchant, George Beastall, and opened on New Year’s Day 1912. At first it seated only three hundred, with a modest entrance between two shops, but was quickly enlarged to seat more than a thousand.

When sound was installed in 1930 an imposing brick façade replaced the shops and the seating capacity was increased to 1,180.

George Beastall sold the cinema in the mid-1940s and it changed hands repeatedly until it was bought by Ollerton Pictures Ltd which subsequently acquired the Empire Theatre opposite the Premier, as well as other small picture houses in the nearby villages of Pinxton, Jacksdale and South Normanton.

In contrast to these four modest cinemas, the Premier was equipped to show Cinemascope films in 1954, which attracted an audience from a wide area.

Its fortunes fell after the evening show on November 5th 1960 when a fire broke out. Earlier, teenagers had been seen outside throwing lit fireworks through the emergency exits. The manager, Mr Percy Dennis, told the Nottingham Evening Post (November 7th 1960), “Perhaps I’d better not say what I really think of teenagers.”

Ollerton Pictures clearly intended to reinstate the damage at a cost of £10,000. Their spokesman told the Nottingham Evening Post (Monday February 20th 1961), “Pull it down? Not at all. We are so sure that there is a demand in this area that we are turning it into a virtually new cinema.”

However, a year later the Birmingham Post (February 12th 1962) reported, under a headline “NEW CINEMA SEATS NOT WORTH WHILE”, that refurbishment was delayed because of an apparent shortage of second-hand seats. There must have been many cinema closures at the time releasing redundant seating but the Premier spokesman declared, “There was such a lot of seat-slashing by teenagers before the cinema closed that it would not be worthwhile to put in new seats.”

The building stayed dark until Walker’s Bingo Clubs made it comfortable for their purposes and opened it in 1974. An image on the Somercotes Local History Society website shows how it looked during “eyes down”. Walker’s Bingo eventually closed in 2013.

By 2018 the empty building had been converted to a cannabis farm, and in 2020 architects Windsor Patania submitted plans to demolish the auditorium and construct a three-storey block of twenty apartments, while restoring the 1930 foyer block.

This would have involved removing the fine “PREMIER ELECTRIC THEATRE” plasterwork from the blank wall facing Victoria Street.

Nothing came of this and the local community is making a heroic effort to revive the building and make it useful: Derbyshire community event to save historic theatre and cinema.

Images on the ‘Reawaken the Premier Electric Theatre’ Facebook page indicate the dire state of the interior, suggesting that Councillor Jason Parker’s estimate of £4 million to put the place in order won’t leave much small change.

Nevertheless, there are cinema buildings in Britain that have been restored by the commitment of volunteers backed by experts who know what they’re doing. The tiny Harwich Electric Palace became a lair for feral cats before reopening for film in 1981. The vast New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, rescued after a thousand supporters joined hands in a “Hug the Odeon” demonstration, is about to reopen as a live music venue, and the Stockport Plaza has been pulling in the crowds since it reopened in 2000.

Such schemes don’t always work out. The Bronte Cinema in Haworth is in the same state as it was when I found it in 2016, despite occasional local expressions of interest. And, of course, there have been disasters like the Derby Hippodrome Theatre.

But I’d never underestimate the potential of volunteers with energy and flair – and expert backing – to bring dilapidated buildings back into use.

Northwick Cinema, Worcester

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The Northwick Cinema is a fluke. It’s strange to find a superb Art Deco cinema in a quiet suburb of a cathedral city, designed by an independent architect who specialised in cinemas in random places such as Sheerness, Kettering and Walton-on-Thames, containing the only surviving interior-design work of an exceptional artist who worked mainly in the North-East.

The proprietors of Scala (Worcester) Ltd had operated a city-centre picture-house of that name since 1922, and it’s unclear why this small local company expanded in the late Thirties by building a brand-new 1,109-seat auditorium out of the city centre.

They chose as their architect C Edmund Wilford of Leicester. He designed the Regal Cinema, Walton-on-Thames and the Regal Cinema, Bridlington (both 1938 – the same year as the Northwick): Bridlington’s hidden Art Deco gem | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

The interior is by John Alexander (1888-1974), an artist of considerable talent whose watercolour perspectives are in the RIBA Drawings Collection and online at ‘ John Alexander (1888-1974)’ images and/or videos results. He not only designed but manufactured the plaster figures and motifs that distinguished his designs.

His innovative work, mainly located in Scotland and the north-east, has been so neglected that the Northwick contains his only design still surviving intact and in situ. For this reason, the Northwick was listed Grade II in 1985, and its Art Deco design is recognised as nationally important.

The auditorium is dominated by a fibrous plaster composition of mythical human figures, drawing the eye dramatically towards the proscenium. By the use of smooth curves, heightened perspective and strong geometric shapes, lit indirectly, the auditorium conveys a sense of excitement that heralds the entertainment it was intended to frame.

Unlike the Odeon house-architects’ use of Art Deco to create a streamlined interior that was smooth and literally dust-resistant, Alexander reinterpreted the baroque magnificence of the Victorian theatre in the larger-than-life scale of modernist architecture. Alexander’s work at the Northwick cost £1,138.

The cinema opened on November 28th 1938 and closed on October 10th 1966, reopening as a bingo club at the end of that month. Mecca, the unintentional saviour of so many such buildings, maintained it well and redecorated it abominably, until falling attendances led to closure in 1982.

There was much anxiety and some controversy about the building in the years it stood empty.

Ultimately a local property developer and entertainment impresario, Ian Perks, took over the building and engaged Martin and Nicolette Baines to refurbish Alexander’s interior, restoring the colour-scheme from his original water-colours and wherever possible utilising original fittings, lighting and carpet-fragments in the renewal.

The Northwick reopened as a theatre and concert venue on June 5th 1991, and hosted shows by – among others – the Drifters, Gene Pitney, Nigel Kennedy, Freddie Starr, the Searchers and Bernard Manning, but closed in 1996. The extent of its decline is portrayed in a 2024 article in the Worcester News: Worcester: The Northwick as a cinema, theatre and business | Worcester News.

The local council rejected a proposal to demolish in favour of an apartment complex in 2003, and the following year David and Helen Gray bought it to use as an antiques showroom, sympathetically preserving its external appearance including the “NORTHWICK” logo on the vertical fin above the entrance and featuring John Alexander’s interior design.

The Northwick opened in 2007 as Grays of Worcester, a company which has treated it well, making the most of its visual appeal to market their stock: HISTORY – Grays Of Worcester.

The auditorium rakes have been adapted to maximise horizontal display space, but circulation between levels is achieved using the original stairways. David Gray made a point of retaining the front-row seats in the circle so that it’s possible to appreciate the space as would a member of the cinema audience. The operating box at the top of the building serves as a workroom. The listed space is intact, and appears to be fully reversible.

The Northwick is currently up for sale, as Grays plan to downsize to smaller premises.

I hope it goes to an owner as enlightened and imaginative as David and Helen Gray.

Pride of Blackpool

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Basil Newby, the founder and proprietor of the Blackpool cabaret bar Funny Girls, has announced his intention to retire and has put the business on the market: Basil Newby: Blackpool’s pioneering drag bar owner to retire – BBC News.

He breathed new life into the resort’s declining tourist economy when he founded the Flamingo night club in 1979 before taking over the vast derelict Odeon Cinema and transforming it into Funny Girls in 2002: Funny Girls | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

He had difficulty gaining a licence for the Flamingo because he refused to conceal his sexuality [When Basil Newby opened Blackpool’s first gay club, his solicitor had one question – LancsLive], yet when he opened Funny Girls the guest of honour was Joan Collins.

Funny Girls was and is inclusive, offering high-quality dance-entertainment introduced by a sharp-tongued compère, alongside the option of a pre-performance dinner, to gay and straight patrons.

Staid Lancashire businessmen at one time found it hard to believe that the glamorous girls on stage and the waitresses who served dinner were in fact men.

Straight Sheffield footballers of my acquaintance, and their girlfriends, made repeat visits because they thought the show was “a reyt laff”.

It’s a measure both of Basil’s achievement and the transformation of British culture since the 1990s that he has collected tributes ranging from a private box at the Grand Theatre to an MBE for services to business and to the LGBTQIA+ community.

And it’s heartening to see that he’s appointed the auctioneers Christie & Co specifically to find a suitable buyer to continue the venue’s proud tradition intact: Funny Girls drag cabaret bar in Blackpool for sale | Christie & Co.

Long may the old Odeon continue to offer holidaymakers what Dr Samuel Johnson called “the publick stock of harmless pleasure [and] the gaiety of nations”: Our Story | Funny Girls.

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).

Brucciani’s, Morecambe

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Brucciani’s, Marine Road West, Morecambe

My friend John’s sixtieth birthday celebration was stylish and memorable – dinner in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, with the option of staying for the weekend in Art Deco splendour.

For me, the highlight was when we took his mother, Marjorie, for a morning cup of coffee at Brucciani’s on the seafront.

This celebrated and much-loved Italian milk bar is part of a family concern dating back to 1893 when Luigi Brucciani, aged thirteen, arrived with his family from Tuscany and settled in Barrow-in-Furness, across the bay from Morecambe.

Luigi’s son, Peter, opened the first of two Morecambe milk bars in 1932, followed by the current promenade location, almost next door to the Winter Gardens, the week before the start of World War II in 1939.

As war turned away the holidaymakers and killed the ice-cream trade, Brucciani’s prospered providing Italian coffee to military personnel. After the war, when the holiday crowds and the ice cream returned, so did artistes at the Winter Gardens, including locally-born Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe (né Bartholomew), and Brucciuani’s grew from a milk bar to a café.

In July 2022, the then Prince Charles, as well as unveiling a plaque to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Winter Gardens, popped in to sample Brucciani’s ice cream. He was served vanilla.

Luigi’s great-grandson, Paolo, speaks for his family at Spotlight on Bruccianis | Lancaster and Morecambe Ba y.

Brucciani’s sells only their own ice-cream to an Italian recipe in more than a dozen flavours. The décor has hardly changed, and is lovingly illustrated at B rucciani’s – Morecambe – Modern Mooch.

The Preston Brucciani’s, though it retains the name, has repeatedly changed hands since the 1970s: Review: The historic Preston City Centre cafe that fails to live up to its potential | Blog Preston.

When John and I took his mother for coffee at Brucciani’s in Morecambe on a Saturday morning in January 2015, she said that she could remember the place when it first opened in September 1939.

And, she declared, it hasn’t changed.

Sound café

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Calf Sound and the Calf of Man (January 2008)

My friend John marks decennial birthdays in considerable style.

For his fiftieth birthday, not long after he’d become a Manx resident, he hired the Sound Café, at the very tip of the island, and provided an entirely Manx buffet supper from lamb to queenies, so that guests from “across” (as Manx people refer to the other, larger island to the east) had the benefit of one of the finest of the many fine views around the island’s coast.

The café is a remarkable building, completed in 2002 to the designs of the Manx architects Kellett & Robinson. It’s entirely unobtrusive in its magnificent setting, dug into the hillside with a grass roof, so that it’s invisible until you’ve walked past it.

It’s one of my favourite Manx places to eat and drink.

The panoramic picture windows look across to the other “other” island to the south, the Calf of Man, accessible with difficulty, despite its four harbours, because of the unpredictable waters of the Calf Sound, a treacherous stretch of water in which the current runs at up to eight knots. (This didn’t dissuade a mid-nineteenth century owner, George Carey, a former London barrister, from attempting agriculture by swimming cattle across the Sound at low tide.)

Successive efforts to develop the Calf have had little success: farming, lead mining and tourism alike failed, and in 1937 F J Dickens of Carnforth bought the island and presented it to the UK National Trust for preservation as a bird sanctuary. It was leased to the newly-formed Manx National Trust in 1952, initially for twenty-one years, and is now vested in Manx National Heritage, and leased to the Manx Wildlife Trust.

The submerged Chicken Rock, 1½ miles south of the Calf, presented a hazard to shipping until the engineer Robert Stevenson built two lighthouses in 1818. These were superseded by the Chicken Rock Lighthouse in 1875. This was replaced with a new installation on the Calf in 1968, which was itself decommissioned in 2007: Calf of Man.

The population in 1851 was 51, including four lighthouse keepers, but in the twenty-first century it is virtually uninhabited: the wardens who maintain it as a wildlife sanctuary are resident between March and December, during which months the resident population is effectively two.

For the best of reasons, the Calf is not an easy place to visit: Wayback Machine. It’s much easier to chose a table at the Sound Café, and relax with a drink and a plate of Manx cuisine.

A brighter, purer and happier Sheffield

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The Victoria Hall, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

One of the admirable characteristics of the Methodist Church is its practicality. As its name suggests, there is a methodical streak in its mission and its traditions, which impels its members to move with the times.

When Hugh Price Hughes’ Forward Movement prompted Methodists to attend to social care alongside individual faith, the Sheffield Wesleyan congregation looked at the four city-centre chapels and promptly knocked one down.

The Wesley Chapel, opened in 1780 by John Wesley himself, had become out-of-date and unsuitable for the church’s needs, so it was closed in 1906 and replaced by the magnificent Victoria Hall two years later.

Although £6,000 had been spent on refurbishing Wesley Chapel in 1875, its replacement cost £40,000 and the debt was cleared within three years.

The original design was by the short-lived Manchester practice of Waddington Son & Dunkerley, modified and completed by the Sheffield architect William John Hale (1862-1929). The finished building is imposing, with an assertive façade and a huge tower with a baroque turret, built of brick and embellished with carvings by the brothers Alfred and William Tory. When it was built it rivalled the other tall buildings in the city centre, the two town halls and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches which are now both cathedrals.

Its main hall had three levels: visitors entered from the street at circle level; the floor of the hall was in the basement, and there was a balcony. It was the best concert venue in Sheffield until the City Hall opened in 1932; there are those that say it still is. Significantly, the Hall was designed with spaces to serve a range of functions.

The first minister, Rev George McNeal (1874-1934), was recruited from the hugely successful Manchester and Salford Mission, and at the inauguration he made a landmark proclamation of intent.

The Victoria Hall was to be –

a great evangelical preaching centre
the headquarters of a strong, vigorous and active Mission Church
a house of mercy in the centre of the city with an ever-open door
a people’s home, the social and religious centre of their thought and activity
a rallying ground for all kinds of philanthropic and religious enterprise in the city

His declared aim was to create “a brighter, purer and happier Sheffield”. Immediately – and for long after Rev McNeal moved in 1924 – the Sheffield Mission responded practically to the needs of local people.

He founded the Sheffield Mission Labour Yard near the Wicker which provided 5,903 days’ work to unemployed men by June 1909, chopping firewood, cleaning, whitewashing.

During the First World War the Hall offered a transient refuge for forces personnel travelling through the city.

Three days after the first night of the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940, the Victoria Hall staged a scheduled performance of Handel’s Messiah, though almost all the surrounding buildings were wrecked.

From May 1941 to the end of the Second World War the Hall ran a Forces’ Rest Hostel which provided food and shelter to 80,000 servicemen trapped overnight by erratic train services.

Eventually the carefully designed and expensively built Victoria Hall became outdated. Congregations dwindled so the place was taken apart. In 1965-66 a floor was inserted in the main hall at circle level to create a separate space in the basement, while maintaining capacity for large audiences and congregations on special occasions.

Five shops were inserted into the building on Chapel Walk, providing scope either for commercial rent or mission activity.

In 2003 Ablett Architects designed a refurbishment to the shops that harmonises better with the Edwardian original.

And yet again, in 2015, The Foundry Sheffield, which leases the building from the Methodist Church, is refurbishing and repurposing the Victoria Hall while joining the newly founded Sheffield Charitable Network.

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