Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site

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North Street, Belper

North Street, Belper

I spent part of my teenage years in the Derbyshire Derwent Valley, at a time when its industrial heritage was largely intact but about to disappear.  On my way to school I watched most of Jedediah Strutt’s late-eighteenth century mills knocked down;  I rode my bike the length of canal from Butterley Tunnel (now buried under the A.38 trunk road), past Bull Bridge Aqueduct (blown up for road-widening) and through Hag Tunnel (vanished between a dyeworks reservoir and a gas-treatment plant) all the way to Cromford;  I climbed George Stephenson’s ‘Steep’ inclined railway (largely destroyed by the same gas plant).  I watched the Blue Pullman go past as I delivered newspapers in the final years that expresses ran between Derby and Manchester via Miller’s Dale and Doveholes.

It was because so much of this internationally significant industrial heritage was disappearing, threatened or simply not understood that from the start of the 1970s local people and academics began campaign after campaign to safeguard the mills and industrial housing of Cromford, Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey.  The local authorities safeguarded the routes of the Cromford Canal and the Cromford & High Peak Railway, and volunteers helped to bring back to life the Leawood Pump and the Middleton Top Winding Engine.  Preserved railways have restored trains to surviving stretches of trackbed.  The National Tramway Museum thrives in a limestone quarry first developed by George Stephenson.  Sir Richard Arkwright’s Masson Mill is now a shopping centre;  his home at Willersley Castle is now a hotel.

This upsurge of interest, energy and enterprise was rooted in a vibrant collaboration between local people, industrial archaeologists and historians, enlightened local politicians, industrial leaders and leading public figures such as the late and present Dukes of Devonshire.  The nomination of the valley as a World Heritage Site in 2001 set the seal on these efforts and promised to attract visitors and relieve pressure on Britain’s first national park, the Peak District.

Yet there is so much yet to develop.  Many of the historic mills and empty or underused.  There is no coherent transport plan to allow tourists to get about the valley without cars.  The area lacks the coherent signage that makes the multiplicity of sites around Ironbridge coherent and navigable.

The language of the World Heritage News bulletin [www.derwentvalleymills.org] makes me wonder, though.  A masterplan is working to “develop the strategic vision” in Derby and Belper, and to define “how specific projects will be delivered”.  A feasibility study looks at “viable usage options” for the Darley Abbey Mills, which involves “access and public realm issues to consider”.  A river bus is proposed, and “completion of the masterplan will play a part in how this project moves forward.”

I wonder, do we actually need this plethora of plans?  Is the slow progress in developing the site the result of a lack of planning since the 1970s?  Or is it because the administrative mills grind slowly?

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Arkwright’s Mill, Cromford

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Arkwright's Mill, Cromford

Arkwright’s Mill, Cromford

We used Cromford Mill as a lunch-stop on the recent Waterways & Railways across the Derbyshire Peak tour.  The Cromford Canal starts – for significant historical reasons – alongside the mills, and it was the most logical location for a lunch break between exploring the canal in the morning and moving on to its dizzy adjunct, the Cromford & High Peak Railway, in the afternoon.

It also gave the group members a brief opportunity to experience one of the most remarkable conservation projects in a remarkable area, the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.

Turn up as a tourist, and Arkwright’s Mill [https://www.cromfordmills.org.uk] provides an excellent café, numerous shopping opportunities and a world-class historic site that will be better interpreted when the new £2.5 million interpretation centre is finished.

Here is one of the “cradles of the Industrial Revolution”, where Richard Arkwright, as he then was, came in 1771 looking for sufficient water-power to drive his newly-patented spinning frame, which eventually took its place as one of the inventions that transformed the British textile industry.  It wasn’t exactly the first water-powered factory in the world – the Derby Silk Mill started work in 1704 – but Arkwright’s mills at Cromford, and the community that grew around this remote spot, pioneered the development of cotton and woollen towns across Britain and the world.

Further down the Derwent valley Arkwright’s associates built the mills at Belper, Milford and Darley Abbey;  Arkwright himself extended his operations to Wirksworth, Bakewell and into Lancashire and Scotland.  Robert Owen’s New Lanark, Titus Salt’s Saltaire are in direct line of descent.  There is a version of Cromford at Ratingen in Germany, and another at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which was started by a Strutt apprentice from Belper called Samuel Slater (otherwise “Slater the Traitor”).

When I first knew Cromford well, helping out at the bicentennial Arkwright Festival in 1971, the cotton mills were a workaday, heavily polluted colour works, nobody visited Cromford except for occasional industrial archaeologists and, less than a decade before, Matlock Rural District Council had firm plans to demolish much of North Street (1776), one of the very first examples of planned industrial housing in the world.

That so much has been achieved to transform Cromford into an internationally significant tourist site is largely the work of the Arkwright Society, led for many years by Dr Chris Charlton, and still working hard to develop further one of the most fascinating stretches of historical clandscape in Britain.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Buxworth or Bugsworth?

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Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

Buxworth Basin, Peak Forest Canal

The little village of Buxworth, just to the north of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, is a highly significant historic site.  Here the wagons of the Peak Forest Tramroad, which was completed in 1800 and still in use after the First World War, tipped their limestone into kilns and narrow boats for transportation down the Peak Forest Canal to Manchester and beyond.

The tramroad is an example of the principle that “if it works, don’t fix it”:  it used flanged rails rather than flanged wheels, with loaded wagons descending by gravity and empties returned by horse-power, and a braking system that consisted of sticking a metal pole into the spokes of the wheels.  When the iron rails wore out in the 1860s, the railway company that owned it simply fabricated new steel rails to an eighteenth-century design.

The tramroad was ripped up in the 1920s, though the stone blocks that supported the rails are still found in great numbers.  The canal went out of use, leaked and silted up, so that when I first went to Buxworth in the early 1970s the basin was a barely recognisable jungle.

The proposal to build a Whaley Bridge and Buxworth by-pass would have ploughed straight through the middle of it, until the Inland Waterways Protection Society [IWPS – http://www.brocross.com/iwps] successfully argued for it to be designated an Ancient Monument in 1977 and the by-pass alignment was moved to the south where it was eventually built.

The basin is intact and now beautifully preserved, entirely because the volunteers of the IWPS contributed time, physical labour and expertise, and begged, borrowed and salvaged materials to reveal and restore the complex, intriguing layout of a location that was a busy, dirty, money-making industrial site until a little more than a hundred years ago.

Now it offers peaceful, attractive moorings for canal boats, and on the day the Manager of the site, Ian Edgar, took my Waterways & Railways across the Derbyshire Peak group round, schoolkids were learning to canoe in one of the basins.

At the head of the basin is the Navigation Inn [http://www.navigationinn.co.uk/index.php?option=home], once run by Pat Phoenix, the actress who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, and now operated by Jan & Roger, who provide excellent beer and anything from a fried breakfast to an à la carte meal in congenial pub surroundings.  Jan tells me that she’s rearranging the canal memorabilia that came with the pub, so that you can read the walls coherently, one room after another.

Buxworth Basin is well worth a look, and if you talk to Ian Edgar, call it Bugsworth, as they did in the eighteenth century.  If you talk to your sat-nav, it’s Buxworth.

Out of the strong came forth sweetness

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Markfield Beam Engine House, Tottenham

Markfield Beam Engine House, Tottenham

What could you possibly do with a redundant sewage works in the middle of north London?  The surroundings of the Markfield Beam Engine House [http://www.mbeam.org], which we’re visiting on the tour Cemeteries & Sanitation:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness (June 18th-24th 2015), show how to make an amenity out of the most unpromising situation.

Tottenham, formerly a genteel, salubrious, semi-rural place, suddenly expanded with the arrival of the railway to Liverpool Street in 1872.  The fields disappeared under housing, and with them the estate of Markfield House.

To deal with the inevitable problem of sewage disposal, the Markfield Engine was set to work in 1888.  It’s an elegant machine, free-standing rather than house-built, its superstructure supported by formal Doric columns.

Its surroundings were anything but elegant:  alongside the settlement tanks and filter beds was a slaughterhouse and a pig-farm.  This was the location of the famous “Tottenham pudding”, a wartime recycling project that transformed kitchen waste into pig food, and gained the approval of Queen Mary.

The site pumped sewage until 1964, when the local sewerage system was rearranged and the land transferred to the London Borough of Haringey.  The Borough took the enlightened decision to mothball the beam engine, bricking up the windows to protect it from vandalism.

In recent years, with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund and others, the Borough turned the area into a pleasant facility that you’d never guess had been a sewage works, and the restored engine was steamed in September 2009.

The heavy concrete of the settlement tanks and filter beds has been adapted as gardens and a BMX park.  The engine-house is now fully restored and volunteers run the engine half a dozen times a year.  The whole project has cost £3.8 million.  There is an attractive history of Markfield Park at http://www.markfieldpark.org.uk.

It’s a modest, understated place, where mums bring kids in pushchairs and youths play football and ride their bikes.  The nearest you see to sewage now is dog-owners with plastic bags over their hands.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Great Engines

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Kempton Great Engines

Kempton Great Engines

Of all the places that might be described as a “cathedral of steam”, the 1928 engine-house at Kempton, Middlesex, has a stronger claim than most.

When you walk up a flight of steps to the entrance and through the front door, you’re on a level halfway up the height of two magnificent pumping engines, 62 feet high, which lifted Thames river water on its way to supply much of North London .  These two giants are, in domestic terms, five storeys high, and climbing to the very top is a vertiginous experience.

When they were completed in 1929 they represented almost the ultimate in steam-engine design, gloriously over-engineered so that, if necessary, they could pump 24/7.  The space between the two triple-expansion engines was intended for a third, but in 1933 two much more compact water-turbine units were installed instead.  In a sense, that six-year period marks the point when technology moved on past the age of steam.

These huge machines were the last of their type when they ceased operating in 1980.  Electric pumps, delivering slightly less water with a tenth of the staff, took over.  In 1995 the Kempton Great Engines Trust [http://www.kemptonsteam.org] began to restore them with the support of Thames Water, and seven years later the northern engine Sir William Prescott was back in steam.  The southern engine remains cold, and enables tour-groups to inspect its working in detail while observing the twin in motion across the building.

It’s a sight not to be missed. The earth moves.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Where Florrie Forde spent her holidays

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Florrie Forde's cottage, Niarbyl, Isle of Man

Florrie Forde’s cottage, Niarbyl, Isle of Man

On the pretext of fish soup at the excellent café at Niarbyl http://www.isleofman.com/business/n/niarbyl-cafe/, on the west coast of the island, my Isle of Man host-with-the-most John insisted we walk down from the café to the beach to see the point where North America joins on to Africa (see http://www.manxgeology.com/dalbygrp.html) and Florrie Forde’s cottage.

I tried to sound as if I knew at least something about Florrie Forde, but in fact I had to consult the wisdom of Wikipedia to discover that she was one of the most interesting – and now too much forgotten – figures of British entertainment in its transition from music-hall to variety.

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in 1875, she ran away to the Sydney music-hall at the age of sixteen, and five years later came to Britain where she started her music-hall career, thrice nightly, on August Bank Holiday 1897, began her recording career in 1903, and appeared in the first Royal Command Variety performance in 1912.

What attracted my particular interest was the list of her “hits”:  these are the songs my grandmother sang as she did her housework – ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’, ‘She’s a lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’.  One of the most poignant songs in Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War is ‘Goodbye-ee’, originally made famous by Florrie Forde.  Most people would link the Blackpool organist Reginald Dixon with ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’, but it was Florrie’s tune first.

And this towering figure in British entertainment, whose summer season for much of the 1930s was in Morecambe, apparently sailed across the Irish Sea on the Steam Packet, and must have used a motor-car to reach this remote spot, virtually beyond even Manx bus-routes, to gaze across the sea at sunset.

She died on tour, entertaining the troops in Aberdeen, on April 18th 1940.

Florrie Forde’s cottage is strictly private property.  When visiting Niarbyl, please do not disturb the owners.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Manx Mighty Wurlitzer

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Villa Marina, Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man

Villa Marina, Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man

The Manx Government acquired their magnificent Wurlitzer organ in 1989 and initially installed it in the now-demolished Summerland centre.  At last it has been meticulously restored and rebuilt in the Villa Marina arcade, sandwiched between the Gaiety Theatre and the Villa Marina concert hall.  This 1929 instrument came originally from the City Cinema, Leicester, rescued by a wealthy organ-enthusiast, Allan Hickling, and installed in his home, Dormston House, Sedgeley [see http://www.villagaiety.com/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/villagaiety/allanhicklingand.xml&menuid=11570].

Len Rawle, who led the renovation project, demonstrated its range and power in a Saturday-evening concert in May after a week of maintenance work and before running a seminar for the island’s aspiring organists.  (Len’s website is at http://www.lenrawle.eu/scripts/Biography.html.)

You can’t argue with the power of the mighty Wurlitzer.  There is something unmistakable in the bravura playing-style that the instrument demands – accelerandi, rallentandi, arpeggii, swells and swirls and, as Len pointed out, early in his presentation, contrast.  People sometimes assume incorrectly that a theatre-organ is amplified, and Len showed how its core works perfectly well as a church organ playing classical pieces.  He gave an admirable conducted tour of the Wurlitzer specification – the stops designed specifically to create a “unit orchestra” to accompany silent movies, the additional keyboard links that provide bells, xylophone and vibraphone and the special effects for film accompaniment such as the motor-horn, the fire-engine and the birdsong which, he gently pointed out, should be used with discretion.

Noël Coward’s petulant line in Private Lives, “extraordinary how potent cheap music is” has the ring of truth.  Popular classics such as ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and ‘When I Fall In Love’ scrub up to a high polish on a Wurlitzer, and Len’s repertoire included less familiar music of the period.  He brought his evening to a close with both the Manx national anthems, the nostalgic ‘Ellan Vannin’ and the staunch ‘Arrane Ashoonagh dy Vannin’ [‘Land of our birth, gem of God’s earth, O Island so strong and so fair…’].

There’s no following that with an encore.  What Len actually did was to shoo the audience away so that a young girl could have privacy to try out the Wurlitzer on her own.  As he said, that was what got him started a few decades ago.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Walking the Manx Northern Railway

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Manx Northern Railway between St Germain's and Kirk Michael

Manx Northern Railway between St Germain’s and Kirk Michael, Isle of Man

If it’s not possible to ride a railway line – because someone removed the track – the best way to understand it is to walk it.  When the Manx railway-system was reduced to a single route in the 1970s, the Manx Government had the prescience to preserve much of the disused trackbed as footpaths.

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John and I walked the stretch of the former Manx Northern Railway from St Germain’s (where the station is now beautifully restored as a house) to Kirk Michael (where the railway station is now the fire station).

The Manx Northern was built to take mineral traffic from the Foxdale mines directly to Ramsey harbour, using the only route possible for steam locomotives round the west side of the island.  When the Foxdale mines eventually failed, the MNR became part of the Isle of Man Railway.  Meanwhile, passengers between Douglas and Ramsey had gained a more direct route when the Manx Electric Railway was built along the precipitous east coast of the island.

The Manx Northern route is spectacular.  Walking up to the summit at Ballaquine and down to Kirk Michael is not strenuous, but the gradients are palpable.  The ivy-covered piers of the major viaducts, Glen Wyllin and Glen Mooar, remain without the lattice deck that carried trains:  you feel the height involved while crossing from one abutment to the other by steep paths and flights of steps.

Travellers who are disinclined to walk the line can follow much of its course, and appreciate its spectacular views of the island’s west coast, on the Peel-Ramsey double-deck bus [routes 5 and 6], which is what John and I did – travelling in eight minutes the distance we’d walked in 2½ hours – when the pub in Kirk Michael proved unable to provide any kind of lunch.

Instead we went to the excellent Creek Inn in Peel [http://thecreekinn.co.uk/], where we were served by a star barman called Chris, and ate smoked salmon wrapped in asparagus and spicy chicken wraps with excellent beer and friendly service.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey

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Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

The eccentricities of the “burrowing” fifth Duke of Portland seem endless, and by no means all of the stories are true.  He was distinctive among his contemporaries for providing the very latest conveniences for his guests, even though he rarely entertained, and notoriously kept out of his guests’ way.  One of his most grandiose improvements to Welbeck Abbey was the vast ballroom 154 feet by 64 feet, entirely sunk below ground and top-lit by bull’s-eye domes, well-lit, centrally heated and not at all damp.  On arrival for a ball at Welbeck, guests were conveyed down to the ballroom, still in their carriages, by hydraulic lift to a gently-graded inclined tunnel leading them to the dance-floor.  However, the fifth Duke never gave a ball, and the gas-lit splendour only came into its own when the sixth Duke, a distant cousin who never met his predecessor, inherited in 1870.

The most recent, authoritative and succinct account of the fifth Duke’s life and works is Derek Adlam, Tunnel Vision:  the enigmatic 5th Duke of Portland (Harley Gallery 2013), which contains the full text of Elizabeth Butler’s Account of her life as a laundry maid at Welbeck, 1869-1879 (1931).

Nina Slingsby-Smith’s memoir of her father, George: Memoirs of a Gentleman’s Gentleman (Cape 1984 – out of print but available second-hand on Amazon), wonderfully captures the atmosphere of life above and below stairs at Welbeck in the sixth Duke’s time.  It includes a memorable story of an incident at dinner, when a luckless footman’s humanitarian dilemma nearly lost him his job, until King Edward VII saw the funny side:  the tale is far too good to spoil – seek it out on page 70 onwards.

Guided tours of the State Rooms (but not the underground rooms) are bookable in advance:  http://www.welbeck.co.uk/experience/visit/welbeck-abbey-state-room-tours.

Welbeck Abbey is one of the houses featured in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

 

More country-house railways

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Welbeck Abbey: basement railway

Welbeck Abbey: basement railway

The two railways at Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall are by no means the only examples of large country houses using rail transport to shift fuel, food, luggage and laundry around the capacious service wings.  Belton House [http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-beltonhouse.htm], on the other side of Grantham from Harlaxton and Stoke Rochford, has hand-propelled railways, installed in the 1930s, connecting the kitchen in the courtyard with the basement of the main house.

Haddon Hall [http://www.haddonhall.co.uk/], near Bakewell in Derbyshire, was made habitable from 1912 onwards by the then Marquis of Granby, later the 9th Duke of Rutland.  Bringing the fully-fitted seventeenth-century kitchen into any kind of modern use was impractical, so a new kitchen was constructed in outbuildings a couple of hundred yards away.  This is now the tearoom for visitors to Haddon:  one end of the cable-operated railway can be seen inside the tearoom entrance;  the other is customarily hidden behind a dresser opposite the entrance to the medieval kitchen which forms part of the house tour.  The tunnel itself is blocked as a fire-precaution, but interested visitors are invited to ask a room-steward to show the remains of the railway within the medieval kitchen.

Most celebrated of all, but least seen, is the 5th Duke of Portland’s rail system in the cellars of Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire.  The “burrowing” Duke went to enormous lengths to live his later life out of sight of his servants, visitors and the world at large.    The railway, with hand-propelled carts, operated in combination with the technologically up-to-the-minute hydraulic lifts to streamline domestic freight in the Abbey.

A heated cart, like a grand Victorian predecessor of a 1950s hostess trolley, enabled His Grace to order food fast.  To avoid speaking to his servants he customarily sent his orders – “I shall only want rice pudding at one” – by means of twin letterboxes on the door of his suite in the west wing.   When in residence he had a standing order for chicken to be roasting twenty-four hours a day.  This fast food could be delivered to his apartment without fuss by the grace of contemporary modern technology.

Welbeck Abbey and Harlaxton Manor feature in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.