Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Royal Station Hotel

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Former Royal Station Hotel, Hull, now the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel

Former Royal Station Hotel, Hull, now the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel

My Humber Heritage (September 5th-9th 2016) tour had to relocate from the Beverley Arms Hotel, which has ceased trading, to the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel, which had the advantage of being literally across the platform from the trains:  https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?page_id=4223.

This splendid traditional station hotel was completed in 1849, designed by George Townsend Andrews (1804-1855), house architect for the York & North Midland Railway, as part of the second terminal station into the centre of Hull, replacing an earlier station adjacent to the Humber Dock which then became a goods depot:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_House_Street_railway_station#/media/File:Railway_Street_Goods_shed_1905.jpg.

Andrews was also responsible for the original York railway station (1841) and other surviving stations including Whitby, Pickering and Beverley.

The new station was named Hull Paragon because it stood on Paragon Street, which was itself apparently named after a long-vanished pub.  Hull people thought it grossly over-ambitious and called it “Hudson’s Folly”:  the “Railway King” George Hudson was indeed guilty of more than folly, but his station and hotel remain in use, and both have been repeatedly extended.

Andrews’ career as a railway architect seems to have been eclipsed when George Hudson was disgraced for his unscrupulous financial dealings, and the Hull hotel was his final major commission.  At the time it opened it was the largest station hotel in the country, and Andrews’ largest building.

It became the Royal Station Hotel after Queen Victoria’s visit in October 1854, for which a throne room was contrived at the south-east corner of the first floor, along with a bedroom, drawing room and boudoir, and a bedroom and drawing room for the royal children.  The royal household lodged on the second floor.

The following morning she greeted an assembly of Sunday School pupils from the balcony, and then processed through the Old Town to the Corporation Pier, which was renamed the Victoria Pier, and boarded a launch to inspect the docks.

Additional wings to the hotel were designed by the North Eastern Railway’s company architect, the York-born William Bell (1844-1919) and constructed in 1903-5.  Both the station and the hotel were damaged in air raids in both the First and Second World Wars.

The Hull poet Philip Larkin, whose statue by Martin Jennings is on the concourse, found it a gloomy place in 1966 [http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4774] though he was apparently a regular customer.

The interior of the present-day hotel is mostly a tasteful pastiche by the Fisher Hollingsworth Partnership, following a fire which gutted the building in 1990:  http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/remembering-drama-hull-royal-station-hotel-25/story-27933477-detail/story.html.  The hotel reopened in 1992 and has traded happily ever after.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ 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.

Haven of quiet

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St Luke's International Hospital, Tokyo: Old Building

St Luke’s International Hospital, Tokyo: Old Building

When I visited Tokyo I found time to seek out St Andrew’s Cathedral and St Alban’s Church, two flourishing Japanese-Anglican churches with links to Bishop Samuel Heaslett (1875-1947), whose life story I’d discovered in the course of local-history research in Sheffield.

Relatively few buildings in central Tokyo predate the devastating bombing of 1945, but I read that the chapel of St Luke’s International Hospital was “one of the few original Anglican church structures in central Tokyo built prior to the Second World War”, and realised that it was located in Tsukiji, a couple of metro stops from where I was staying.

St Luke’s International Hospital was founded by an American physician and Episcopal missionary, Dr Rudolf Bolling Teusler (1876 – 1934), who began working in Tokyo in 1900.

His first hospital was ruined in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 and rebuilt to the designs of the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976), who had trained with Cass Gilbert, designer of the Gothic Woolworth Building in Manhattan, and with Frank Lloyd Wright.  (After the war Antonin Raymond designed the timber church of St Alban, Shiba-koen, Tokyo.)

The replacement hospital of 1933, now the administration building of the modern St Luke’s, contains the chapel, completed in 1936.

The first floor landing leads into a high, Gothic Revival nave with a raised chancel and, above the entrance, an elaborate organ case, installed in 1988.  The walls are ashlar and there is geometrical stained glass in the east window.  There is a font, pulpit, lectern and choir stalls, and a lamp indicates the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament:  http://hospital.luke.ac.jp/eng/about/chapel/index.html.

Notices forbidding photography were everywhere.  I was content simply to sit there.  It was the only place in Tokyo where I felt any sense of connection with the past.  It also provides, in the words of the hospital website, “quiet space to find comfort and strength in difficult times”.

Another more modern chapel, Teusler Hall, in the adjacent wing has the same sense of peace.  Indeed, the entire place is capacious, unhurried and dignified.  Corridors are embellished with flower arrangements and pieces of art.  Staff and visitors move about decorously.

Christianity is a minority religion in Japan:  its adherents amount to less than 1% of the population.  Nevertheless, St Luke’s carries an effective mission that has grown directly from the work of missionaries a hundred years ago.

Bishop Heaslett

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St Alban's Church, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Alban’s Church, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Andrew's Cathedral, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

St Andrew’s Cathedral, Shiba-koen, Tokyo, Japan

When I explored the material in Sheffield Archives about the parish of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, I came upon a complete run of parish magazines from before the church was consecrated in 1939 until the mid-1950s.

The bulk of these magazines were edited by the first vicar, Fr (later Canon, and latterly Bishop) Richard Roseveare SSM (1902-1972), charting the sprouting of streets and houses on what had been farmland, the establishment of one of the biggest parishes in the Church of England with three churches and six or seven clergy, and the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath on the initial high hopes and ambitious plans for Parson Cross and St Cecilia’s.

He was a powerful figure, with a finger on the pulse of Sheffield working-class people – he formally opened the Parson Cross Hotel in June 1939 and ended up in the News of the World for his pains – and also a strict Anglo-Catholic who exhorted his parishioners to worship with due decorum.

St Cecilia’s parish started out with high-status helpers.  Lady Mabel Smith, the socialist daughter of the Earl Fitzwilliam, was a strong supporter until her death in 1951, and Mary Jane, Dowager Countess Ferrers, built a house on Halifax Road so she could help in the parish.

When Lady Ferrers died in 1944 her house became the home of Bishop Samuel Heaslett (1875-1947), who was Bishop of South Tokyo from 1921.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 he was given a very hard time by the Japanese authorities, who couldn’t grasp the idea that a Church of England was not a government agency, and after four months’ imprisonment and interrogation he was expelled from Japan.

Back in England Bishop Heaslett was offered a role as Assistant Bishop of Sheffield and came to Parson Cross in 1944.  He returned to Japan with his opposite number, the Bishop of North Tokyo, an American Episcopal Bishop, Charles S Reifsnider, to help the reformation of the Anglican church in Japan, Nippon Seikōkai, in May and June 1946.

The cathedral that Bishop Heaslett knew had been obliterated in the bombing of Tokyo towards the end of the war.  A wooden replacement building, St Alban’s Church, opened in 1956, designed by the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976).  It stands alongside the more substantial St Andrew’s Cathedral (Hisao Kohyama 1996).

Samuel Heaslett is commemorated in Sheffield Cathedral by a wall-tablet, and he appears in the Te Deum window in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.

From the pages of dusty old magazines, a memorial tablet, a face in a stained-glass window, fascinating stories emerge of lives lived in times that feel very different from the present day.

Update on St Cecilia’s

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St Cecila's Parish Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield: Cousens organ console (2014)

St Cecila’s Parish Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield: Cousans organ console (2013)

A couple of years ago I went to some lengths to involve myself in the debate about the future of the practically redundant church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, Sheffield.

I’d seen the demise of a nearby parish church of the same period, St Hilda, Shiregreen, which slipped past the attention of members of the local community who would have wished to find a productive use for the building if they had been alert to the fact that it was threatened.

The latest development over St Cecilia’s is a draft pastoral scheme to appropriate the building for residential purposes and to dispose of its contents – a welcome alternative to the earlier proposal simply to demolish it, because it will, in the words of the Statutory Advisory Committee of the Church Buildings Council, “preserve the external envelope of the church and therefore preserve the townscape presence of the building”.

I researched the parish records held in Sheffield Archives to try to discover why this substantial building, completed in 1939, had presented such intractable problems of maintenance that its decreasing congregation abandoned it in favour of a smaller mission church, St Bernard of Clairvaux, elsewhere in the parish.

It seems that, in common with other buildings of its period, it was designed in the expectation that a large new parish on a vast housing estate could support regular, skilled maintenance.  The architect, Kenneth Mackenzie, did no other church designs, as far as I know.  He was the nephew of the Sheffield industrialist, Albert Reaney Heathcote, who contributed £13,000 towards its construction.

In fact, the Parochial Church Council minutes show that £600-worth of repairs were pending by 1953.  By 1961 the vicar described the building as “jerry-built”, which is perhaps unfair – it’s actually a substantial structure – but mortar was disintegrating from the stonework and plaster regularly fell away from behind the altar.

When I visited the building in 2013 it was like the Marie Celeste.  Although services had ceased three years before, there were vestments hanging in the vestry, hymn-books stacked in their cupboards, and music was still propped on the organ music-stand.

All the internal fittings must go, taking with them much of the history of seventy-seven years of parish life – the Stations of the Cross, given in memory of the Sheffield Coroner, J Kenyon Parker, the rood, the installation of which in 1949 caused a feline spat between the Vicar, Canon Roseveare, and the Chancellor of the Diocese, the reredos designed for Holy Trinity, Bolton (1923), and the huge Cousans organ, provided by the Church Burgesses in 1987 incorporating parts of earlier organs from the churches of St George, Sheffield, and St Luke’s, Crookes.

It’s a blessing that the small, cohesive congregation worshipping at St Bernard’s will be relieved of the responsibility for the much bigger building at St Cecilia’s.  The residents of Chaucer Close, which is in places within yards of the church, won’t have the noise and pollution of a brick-by-brick demolition.

And a fine mid-twentieth century building can survive in a part of Sheffield that has all too few significant pieces of architectural to enliven the sea of houses.

Wallace Collection

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Wallace Collection, London

Wallace Collection, London

My friend Eric and I, trapped by the rain in a Lebanese restaurant behind Selfridges, made a run for it to the Wallace Collection, which I’d never visited before.

This stunningly beautiful treasure house of art is the product of four generations, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marquesses of Hertford and the 5th Marquess’s illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace Bt (1818-1890), whose widow bequeathed it to the nation.

It’s located in Hertford House, Manchester Square, Sir Richard Wallace’s townhouse.  In the glazed-in courtyard there is a brasserie restaurant, the Café Bagatelle, named after Sir Richard’s French residence.

Like the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the Wallace Collection is a static collection reflecting the taste of its period.  Nothing may be added or subtracted, and nothing from the Wallace Collection can leave the building, even on loan.

You could visit the Wallace Collection every day for a year and still find fresh treasures.

I had always regarded Franz Hals’ ‘Laughing Cavalier’ as somewhere between an icon and a cliché until I stood in front of the original and marvelled at the minute detail of the textiles, particularly the lace, and the realistic treatment of his beard and moustache.

The breadth of the collection and the sheer volume – twelve Reynolds, nineteen Canalettos, several hundred pieces of Sèvres porcelain, nearly two dozen pieces of Boule furntiure  – provides a plethora of enjoyment.

The Wallace Collection is open to all, free of charge, 362 days a year:  http://www.wallacecollection.org/visiting.

Apostolic cessation

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Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury, London

Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury, London

The same walk across Bloomsbury that brought me to Mary Ward House also took me past Gordon Square, where stands the magnificent Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury, built 1850-1854 by the sad, unsuccessful John Raphael Rodrigues Brandon (1817-1877) for the Catholic Apostolic Church, a nineteenth-century sect that pinned their faith on prophecy and the imminent expectation of the Second Coming.

Their beliefs were based on an interpretation of the Book of Revelation promoted by Edward Irving (1792-1834).  They were so convinced that the end of the world was nigh that their founding Apostles, appointed by prophecy from a range of existing Christian denominations, saw no need to plan a succession.

Consequently, when the last Apostle died in 1901 it became impossible to ordain further clergy, and after the last priest and deacon died, in 1971 and 1972 respectively, the Church’s elaborate liturgy ceased, and members of the church were encouraged to worship with other established congregations, while the Church itself entered a “Time of Silence”.

A schismatic group, the New Catholic Apostolic Church (established 1863), thrives with some eight million worshippers worldwide.

Brandon’s magnificent cruciform church, was designed as a miniature version of Westminster Abbey though lacking the westernmost two bays of the nave and the planned 300-foot spire.

Originally intended for a staff of sixty-four clergy to manage its elaborate ritual, the building remains in use.  It was a chaplaincy of the universities and colleges of the Anglican diocese of London from 1963 to 1994, and it now accommodates the Euston Church [http://eustonchurch.com] and a congregation of Forward in Faith [http://www.forwardinfaith.com/EnglishChapel.php].

Mary Ward House

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Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, London

Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, London

It’s difficult to walk far in central London without spotting something remarkable.

One morning recently I walked from Russell Square to meet someone at the Churchill Hotel at the back of Selfridges, and came upon a quirky Arts-and-Crafts building that reminded me of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Two ladies who saw me stop to photograph it asked me what it was and I had to admit I hadn’t a clue.

It is in fact Mary Ward House [http://www.marywardhouse.com], built in 1898 for the philanthropist Mary Augustus Ward (1851-1920), better known as the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward.  Her writings are not much read now, but her breakthrough novel, Robert Elsmere (1888) secured her reputation in her lifetime.

She came from a distinguished family, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School;  she was the mother-in-law of the historian G M Trevelyan and the aunt of the biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) and the writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

She believed in bringing education and culture to people of limited means, though she was opposed to the idea of women’s suffrage.  She wanted to create an institution that would “stand perpetually between a man and a woman and the darker, coarser temptations of our human road”.

Her venture to provide “education, social intercourse, and debate of the wider sort, music, books, pictures, travel” derived from the vision described in Robert Elsmere and was financed by the prolific benefactor John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911).  The building on Tavistock Place, originally known as the Passmore Edwards Settlement, was designed by Arnold Dunbar Smith (1866-1933) and Cecil Claude Brewer (1871-1918).

Indeed, the Pevsner entry enumerates design influences from the major figures of the Arts and Crafts movement – W R Lethaby, Richard Norman Shaw and C F A Voysey, whose circle of friends contributed designs for the fireplaces.

It stands on the edge of the estate of Herbrand, 11th Duke of Bedford (1858-1940), who provided the land, and was intended to serve the deprived population of St Pancras.

Its provision included the Invalid Children’s School (1899) at 9 Tavistock Place, and a Vacation School (1902) to keep children out of mischief in school holidays, from which derived Evening Play Centres.  These developed into clubs for teenagers, and ultimately a School for Mothers complemented by a nursery.

The building originally functioned as a community centre and hostel, and the dramatically curved white stone surrounds to its doorways stand out from the plain brickwork.

The Settlement was renamed to commemorate Mary Wards’ life and work in 1921, the year after her death.  The work continues to the present day:  http://www.marywardcentre.ac.uk.

Trains to Looe

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Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

The train-ride from Liskeard (rhymes with “hard” not “heard”) to Looe is one of the most bizarre as well as attractive journeys on the British rail system.

Trains to Looe start from a platform at right angles to the Cornish main line, and the train sets off northwards, which is disconcerting because Looe is due south.

In the course of two miles the route drops 205 feet by turning 180°, diving under the main line at the 150-foot Liskeard Viaduct, then turning another 180° to face north once more at Coombe Junction Halt, the second least-used station in Britain.  This spectacular loop has a maximum gradient of 1 in 40 and a minimum-radius curve of eight chains (160 metres).

At Coombe Junction the train reverses and trundles down the East Looe valley, a particularly picturesque route past remote little stations, Causeland, Sandplace and St Keyne Wishing Well Halt [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Keyne_Wishing_Well_Halt_railway_station], until the river opens out into a wide estuary that divides the towns of East and West Looe.

It’s an idyllic piece of railway with a complex history.

The Liskeard & Looe Canal was opened in 1827-8 to develop a traffic carrying copper and tin ore down the valley, and lime and sea-sand for agriculture upstream.  In 1844 the canal linked end-on with the Liskeard & Caradon Railway, a mineral line serving the mines and granite quarries around Caradon Hill.

There was so much traffic that the canal was replaced in 1860 by the railway down the valley, which handled freight only and remained isolated from the Cornwall Railway main line above.

Passenger services began in 1879, running to the now-closed Moorswater station, a long walk and a stiff climb to the town of Liskeard.

The great loop up to Liskeard was installed in 1901, facilitating a boom in passenger traffic and enabling the development of Looe as a resort.

Somehow this eccentric train service has survived the decline in rail travel, probably because bus services to and from Looe are patchy and it’s not an easy place to reach by car:  http://www.looe.org/buses.html.

It’s a delightful part of the Cornish coast, though, and there’s a particular satisfaction in leaving a main-line express at Liskeard, hiking over to Platform 3 and riding down the valley to the sea.

Timbertop

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Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (west aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

Timbertop public house, Shirecliffe, Sheffield (east aspect)

When I came to live in north Sheffield in 1973, the pleasantest place to go for a couple of pints in the evening was Timbertop on Shirecliffe Road at the top of a hill looking out across the Lower Don Valley, then still an expanse of smoking steelworks.

Timbertop was the most exciting and innovative of three 1960s public-house designs by the versatile Sheffield practice, Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson.  The others were the Jack in a box, Silkstone Road, Frecheville (1966) and The Domino, Egerton Street (1967, demolished).

Timbertop was commissioned by Bass Charrington (North) Ltd, built in 1969 and opened early in 1970.  It was an adventurous design, taking advantage of its sloping site five hundred feet above sea level.

The load-bearing brick walls support a timber structure, with a roof that presents as a valley on the entrance front and as a pyramid when seen from downhill.

All the service facilities were located in the basement, along with the tenant’s bedrooms;  the tenant’s living accommodation was, unusually, on the ground floor rather than above the public areas.

Customers had a choice of social areas spread over an open-plan split-level space, with a snug at ground level leading to a sunken lounge with a 16ft natural stone fireplace and a chimney breast reaching to the roof, and an upper-level gallery floor with a bar and snack-preparation room.

In harmony with the timber structure, the internal walls were lined with pine, and the ceilings were of cedar wood.

Another interior feature, unusual in Sheffield pubs at the time, was a waterfall.

The building was completed in nine and a half weeks.

The pub was opened by Alderman J W Sterland, who drew the first pint.  As chairman of the city licensing committee, he’d visited a few hostelries in his time and declared it “one of the finest pubs I have seen”.

In later years Timbertop gained an unsavoury reputation and was not the sort of place you’d go for a quiet pint.

There were repeated reports in the local press of “a significant number of incidents on the premises” involving “reports of assaults and drug usage and dealing”.

On one occasion the premises supervisor was attacked when he confronted a customer attempting to serve himself.  Further incidents included a stabbing, paramedics attending a customer who was comatose, assaults involving bottles and “a damaged vehicle with a ‘strong smell of cannabis’”.  The final straw must have come shortly after a shooting that led to a court case in September 2015.

Now the place stands empty, and the chances of it reopening as licensed premises are probably nil.  A car-wash operation occupies the car park.

It’s an exceptional building, in a part of Sheffield that has already lost – or may lose – some of the few landmark structures it ever had – such as the Ritz Cinema (Hadfield & Cawkwell 1937;  demolished 2013) and St Cecilia’s Parish Church (Kenneth B Mackenzie, 1939;  redundant).

Bridlington’s hidden Art Deco gem

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Regal Cinema, Bridlington

Regal Cinema, Bridlington

The Cinema Theatre Association is understandably unhappy that Historic England has dismissed the proposal to list the Regal Cinema, Bridlington, for its fine and almost intact Art Deco interior:  http://cinema-theatre.org.uk/our-campaigns/cinemas-at-risk/regal-bridlington-1.  Bingo has kept the place going since films ended in 1971.

Opened on July 28th 1938, the building was designed by Charles Edmund Wilford (1895-1988).  Though the exteriors were different, the interior of the Bridlington Regal was identical to the demolished Regal Cinema, Walton-on-Thames, built at the same date by the same architect for the same owner, Lou Morris.

The façade is dominated by a long, horizontal window which lighted the first-floor café, above four shop units on the ground floor.

The café and the auditorium, which originally seated 1,500 (or 1,489, or 1,355, depending on the source), are distinguished by the ornate Art Deco plasterwork of Eugene Mollo and Michael Egan.

The splay walls on either side of the proscenium figure a filigree pattern of foliage, originally illuminated by concealed lighting, and the geometric shapes at the end of the splays and on the ceiling are decorated with stylised foliage.  The original decorative scheme in silver and gilt was more subtle than the present livelier palette of the bingo club.

The stage is 43 feet wide and deep, with a suite of four dressing rooms, and there was a 3-manual, 6-rank Compton organ which was removed c1968.

The CTA’s Bulletin (January/February 2015) bristles with indignation over the “unclear and unreliable… subjective standard used to adjudge this building” and the “factual errors” in the Historic England rejection of the listing proposal.

Bridlington Borough Council has made a magnificent job of the Spa complex down the road from the Regal.  Let’s hope that imagination, diplomacy and judicious financial management will keep the Regal intact if and when bingo becomes unprofitable.

There is footage of Florence de Jong playing the Regal Compton organ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Dg3LNYGyw.