Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Reawakening the Premier Electric Theatre

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.

Hepworth’s Arcade

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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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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).

Trams on the move

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s difficult to disagree.

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

Keeping clean and healthy in industrial Attercliffe

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Attercliffe Baths, Sheffield: staircase detail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V&A East Storehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birley Spa

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Birley Spa 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.

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