Monthly Archives: January 2022

Bennerley benefactors

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Bennerley Viaduct, Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire (2022)

On January 14th 2022, fifty-four years after the last train crossed Bennerley Viaduct, the “Iron Giant” reopened, providing public access to magnificent views across the Erewash Valley on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border.

This remarkable structure, built to cope with the likelihood of subsidence in a heavily mined coalfield has survived because of three lucky circumstances.

Its wrought-iron construction made demolition inordinately expensive;  the demise of most similar viaducts ensured its listing at Grade II* and, most important of all, its location near to the Derbyshire town of Ilkeston meant that local people held it in their hearts.

The novelist D H Lawrence (1885-1930), born in nearby Eastwood, mentions it repeatedly in Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow.  For local youths, clambering in the girders as the trains rumbled overhead was an adolescent rite of passage.  Its distinctive shape told local travellers they were nearly home.

After the railway closed the viaduct survived a succession of vicissitudes until Sustrans, the charity which oversees the National Cycle Network, devised a scheme to fund its renovation.

When Sustrans backed away from the project in 2018, the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct worked with Railway Paths Ltd, the owner of the viaduct, to find the means to make it accessible as a community asset. 

I visited the viaduct within a week of its opening with my mate Richard, who often rides shotgun on my history explorations.

We took a train to Ilkeston Station, from where it’s an easy walk up the Erewash Canal towpath to cross the viaduct by a newly-constructed ramp at the west end and steps at the east, returning by the Nottingham Canal towpath to the station.

There must have been at least fifty people on the deck on a cold January midday, enjoying the new experience and full of curiosity.

The Friends of Bennerley Viaduct have brought long-term benefits to local people, dog-walkers, joggers and cyclists, bird-watchers and nature lovers, as well as rail enthusiasts and industrial archaeologists.

The restoration cost of £1.7 million was met in part by railway heritage organisations (the Railway Heritage Trust, Railway Paths and Railway Ramblers), national heritage organisations (Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund) and the local authority, Broxtowe Borough Council.

Richard was intrigued by the sheer variety of other charities that had contributed to the restoration, and back home he researched the less obvious ones:

© Richard Miles

  • the Charles Hayward Foundation, set up in 1961 by Sir Charles Hayward (1892-1983), a Midlands-based businessman whose engineering company Electrical & General Industrial Trusts Ltd eventually became part of the Firth Cleveland group
  • the World Monuments Fund, a New York-based non-profit organisation founded in 1965 to preserve architectural and cultural heritage sites around the world
  • the Headley Trust, a division of the Sainsbury Family Trust, which makes awards to projects both in the UK and overseas supporting causes from arts and heritage to education, health and social welfare and overseas development
  • the Pilgrim Trust, established in the UK in 1930 by an American philanthropist Edward (‘Ned’) Harkness (1874-1940), son of one of the founders of Standard Oil, and dedicated to the UK’s “most urgent needs” and for “protecting its future well-being”
  • the H B Allen Charitable Trust, founded in 1987 by Miss Heather Barbara ‘Mickie’ Allen (d 2005), a descendant of James Burrough, the founder of Beefeater Gin
  • the Sylvia Waddilove Foundation UK, a trust bequeathed by the Bradford-born textile heiress Miss Sylvia Waddilove (1911-2001) which provides grants for a variety of causes, including the preservation of buildings of architectural or historical significance

I admire the Friends of Bennerley Viaduct for three particular reasons:  they are clearly rooted in an energetic local community;  they manage mainstream and social media extremely well, and – as Richard discovered – they are adept at finding financial support from eclectic sources.

The result is, as the Friends’ spokesman Kieron Lee told the BBC, that there are Bennerley Viaduct supporters as far away as Australia, Canada and Hawaii:  Bennerley Viaduct reopens to public after £1.7m repairs – BBC News.

No-one much under seventy can now remember travelling in a train over Bennerley Viaduct, but there is footage of a journey from Derby Friargate to Nottingham Victoria shortly before the passenger service ended on September 7th 1964:  A short film of the Friargate Line – YouTube.

Additional research by Richard Miles

Soane’s hidden house uncovered

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Moggerhanger Park, Bedfordshire

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the greatest English architects who ever lived, but he’s relatively little known because many of his major buildings have been destroyed or mutilated.

His father and brother were bricklayers, and John used their connections to train with the architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) and later with Henry Holland (1745-1806). 

From the start of his career he was fortunate to know the right people and to travel to the right places.

On a Royal Academy travelling scholarship he undertook a comprehensive Grand Tour from London to Malta, centred on Rome, seeing and drawing a huge range of classical buildings between 1778 and 1780.  During his travels he encountered numerous people of influence who would eventually help to advance his career.

After a slow start on his return to England, his reputation grew on the strength of country-house commissions, leading to official posts such as Architect and Surveyor to the Bank of England, architect to the Office of Works, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy and clerk of works to the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, St James’s Palace and the Palace of Westminster.

As a member of the United Grand Lodge of England he extended the Freemasons’ Hall in London (1821-31) – and, no doubt, his client-base.

The most distinguished of his surviving public buildings is the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1817), and his abiding legacy is the row of three terraced houses, 12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, filled with his collections of drawings and sculpture and now known as Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the destruction of much of Soane’s Bank of England structures after the First World War as “the greatest architectural crime, in the City of London, of the twentieth century”.

Only three of his country houses had remained intact – Pitzhanger Manor, Middlesex, Tyringham Hall, Buckinghamshire and the decayed but restorable Pell Wall Hall in Shropshire – but one, Moggerhanger Park, Bedfordshire, underwent an astonishing rediscovery at the turn of the twentieth century. 

It was commissioned by Godfrey Thornton, deputy governor and latterly governor of the Bank of England in the 1790s, and further altered for his son Stephen in 1806 and 1811.  His close friendship with Stephen Thornton and his brother and cousin meant that Soane used Moggerhanger Park as a test-bed for architectural innovations.

The house was sold to Bedfordshire County Council in 1919 for use as a TB hospital, which inevitably required extensive alterations and extensions.  In the late 1950s it became an orthopaedic hospital which closed in 1987.

It was bought by a developer who intended to build houses in the gardens, but it remained untouched for ten years until it was acquired by the Harvest Vision charity as a Christian Conference and Retreat Centre.

Harvest Vision worked with the Moggerhanger House Preservation Trust, which was led by a neighbour, Isabelle Hay, Countess of Erroll, to restore the building – a process of fascinating rediscovery that stretched over several years and repeatedly expanded the original budget – aided by designation as a Grade I listed building and support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

The cheap hospital extensions were stripped away, and a forensic archaeological examination of the original fabric, assisted by the rich archive of the Soane Museum, showed that Moggerhanger could be substantially returned to its 1812 condition, revealing the architect’s command of proportion and spatial planning, the ingenious use of light and colour, and the inventive use and reuse of earlier structures.

Described by the architect Peter Inskip, who was involved in its restoration, as “a great work of art which has been ignored for a hundred years”, Moggerhanger Park could not have a better modern use. 

Alongside their mission work, Harvest Vision opens the house to the public, provides accommodation for individuals and groups and offers outstanding wedding facilities, for which purpose Mrs Thornton’s Dressing Room has become a chapel:  Moggerhanger Park.

It’s loved, it’s lived in, and it’s secured for posterity.  Sir John Soane would approve.

Moggerhanger Park features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘English Country Houses – not quite what they seem’. For further details, please click here.

Tramtown

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Blackpool Tramway, Rigby Road Depot

The Blackpool Tramway is a monument to the entire history of railed street transport in Britain.

Blackpool had the very first electric street tramway in Britain, opened in 1885, and it now runs a modern light rapid-transit (LRT) service, alongside a varied collection of heritage trams for tourists and enthusiasts.

Until after the First World War three tram operators between Fleetwood and Lytham St Annes each ran two fleets – entirely conventional trams for local traffic alongside a range of designs to cater for crowds of holidaymakers who wanted to ride around enjoying themselves, preferably in the open air when the weather was favourable.

In the 1930s when a new transport manager, Walter Luff, was appointed he quickly realised that it would be impossible to handle the Promenade crowds with buses, particularly in the autumn Illuminations period.

He commissioned a suite of four ultra-modern tram designs primarily to work the Promenade service – luxurious, streamlined single- and double-deckers, some of them open to the fresh air for summer services.

After the Second World War, while every other tram operator in the country went over to electric trolleybuses or diesel motor buses Blackpool still needed the segregated Promenade tracks, stretching from Starr Gate in the south to the outskirts of Fleetwood in the north, to shift the crowds up and down the Promenade efficiently with the best possible view of the Illuminations.

New trams were far more expensive than new buses, however, so the 1930s fleet soldiered on, patched, repaired and many of them rebuilt in new guises. 

The only completely new trams to be added to the fleet after the 1950s were eight Centenary cars, built around the time of the tramway’s hundredth anniversary in 1985, when Government subsidies became available for new trams as well as buses.

Eventually the game was up, and the Victorian tramway was upgraded to modern LRT standards, with a fleet of sixteen sleek articulated trams which took over the basic service in 2012.

Nowadays, the Blackpool Tramway has three fleets:  the LRT cars are the “A” fleet, nine modified 1934-35 double-deck Balloon cars are the “B” fleet with widened doorways so they can stop at the raised LRT platforms, and the “C” fleet is a huge and varied collection of rolling stock dating back to, and before, the 1930s modernisation. Some of these trams are operational; others await repair or restoration.

The “C” fleet’s traditional home, Rigby Road depot, had an uncertain future in the period when the LRT fleet was planned and installed.  The new fleet eventually went to a purpose-built depot at Starr Gate, and Rigby Road was designated the base for the heritage fleet, despite a long-standing backlog of building maintenance.

It’s now intended to double as a working tram depot and a museum, branded as Tramtown.  The building needs attention to make it weatherproof, and some at least of the relics on wheels that have fetched up there need to move elsewhere to increase display space.

At present Rigby Road is a uniquely fascinating treasure-house of transport history, open to the public on bookable tours led by enthusiastic volunteers.

If you enjoy rail transport, it’s not to be missed.   

Exploring Canberra: one cathedral short…

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St Christopher’s RC Cathedral, Manuka, Canberra, Australia
St Paul’s Church, Manuka, Canberra, Australia

I knew from a tablet at St John’s Church, Reid that there is no Anglican Cathedral at Rottenbury Hill in Canberra, though its site has been held since 1927 [View from the platform constructed for the dedication ceremony for the site of St. Marks Anglican Cathedral on Rottenbury Hill, Canberra, 8th May 1927 [picture] (nla.gov.au)], and I discovered that Canberra has a Catholic cathedral in a suburb called Manuka (named after the flower, Leptospermum scoparium). 

On the way to the Catholic cathedral through the Canberra suburbs, misdirected by a bus driver, I came across the Anglican Church, St Paul’s, an immaculate brick essay in Art Deco with Gothic hints by the Sydney architects Burcham Clamp & Son, begun in 1939 and most recently extended in 2001.  The Anglican diocese remains based in Goulburn, where there is a particularly fine cathedral of St Saviour (1884) by Edmund Blacket, one of his best works.  As a result, St Paul’s, though only a parish church, often hosts civic and government services.  St Paul’s has Canberra’s only ring of eight bells for change ringing and its largest pipe organ.

St Christopher’s Catholic Cathedral is a few hundred yards away, a Romanesque design by Clement Glancy Snr, begun in 1939 and extended by his son, also Clement Glancy, in 1973 when the previous Catholic cathedral in Goulburn was demoted.  St Christopher’s is the largest place of worship in Canberra, so it vies with St Paul’s Church to receive major services and events.  This building is not the intended design and doesn’t stand on the intended site of the planned Catholic Cathedral for Canberra:  GC447YC Canberra Cathedrals (Multi-cache) in Australian Capital Territory, Australia created by Pacmania (geocaching.com).

Meanwhile Rottenbury Hill, the site designated in 1927 for an Anglican cathedral in the national capital, has never been used for its intended purpose.  Instead, there are plans, apparently, for a Southern Cross Sanctuary:  Southern Cross Sanctuary | civicarts.

The story is one of masterly clerical inactivity:  http://anglicanhistory.org/aus/campbell_canberra2002.pdf.  Successive synods of the Church of England in Australia (since 1962 the Anglican Church of Australia) have repeatedly kicked into touch discussion of how a bishopric for the capital would fit into the Australian hierarchy, as well as the practical question of how an actual cathedral would be financed and built.

At the outset it fell to the then Bishop of Goulburn, Lewis Bostock Radford (1869-1937), to raise questions about this project in Synod because the New Capital Territory lay within his vast diocese.

He spent much of his career as bishop urging his fellow clergy to decide what to do while distancing himself from taking responsibility for a nebulous and unwieldy scheme that was beyond his capacity as an individual.

He retired at the end of 1933 and died in England four years later.

His ashes lie in St John’s Church, Reid, waiting to be interred in the new national cathedral if and when it is built.