Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Little Germany

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66 Vicar Lane, Little Germany, Bradford

66 Vicar Lane, Little Germany, Bradford

Bradford’s Victorian prosperity was boosted by the dyeing trade led by the firm of Edward Ripley & Sons, and the invention of mechanical combing by Samuel Lister of Manningham Mills – and from the remarkable influx of German immigrant merchants, such families as Schuster, Behrens, Zessenheim and Moser, whose warehouses clustered on the hill that is now known as Little Germany within the tight network of streets above Leeds Old Road.

Most of these companies were already established in Bradford before they moved into the grand warehouses in the 1860s and early 1870s. They were encouraged to diversify when trade was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, only to suffer a sudden economic downturn from 1875 onwards with the introduction of tariff barriers by France, Germany and Austria.

At the same time unexpected changes in female fashions caught manufacturers unprepared, and though the Bradford wool trade eventually adapted, no further buildings were constructed in Little Germany until 1902.

The impressive architectural display of the Little Germany stuff- (ie, worsted) warehouses masks a tightly-organised functional building-type, comparable with the cotton warehouses of central Manchester.

John S Roberts, in Little Germany (Bradford Art Galleries & Museums 1977), describes in detail how “grey” cloth was brought into the ground-floor receiving bay, promptly sent out for dyeing and, on its return, hoisted by steam-power to the top floor for inspection and sorting, stored and then after sale sent to the ground-floor packing area for dispatch.

Only wholesale customers and senior staff used the front entrance and the show staircase to the upper floors.

Many of the Little Germany buildings were designed by the local architect Eli Milnes (1830-1899), in some cases as speculative developments. Milnes was in partnership with Charles France (1833-1902) from 1863 onwards. The other local architectural practices – Andrews & Delauney, Lockwood & Mawson and Milnes & France, together with the Leeds architect George Corson, participated in the short-lived building boom.

After the decline of the Bradford woollen industry in the 1960s and early 1970s almost all of the Little Germany buildings were redeveloped: many warehouses became offices, and a former temperance hall was converted into a theatre, initially known as The Priestley after the novelist who was its first president, and eventually in 2012 relaunched as Bradford Playhouse: http://www.bradfordplayhouse.org.uk.

In 2012 the mail-order clothing company Freeman Grattans Holdings, an amalgamation of the London-based Freeman Company and the Bradford-based Grattan, moved into 1860s offices at 66-70 Vicar Lane within Little Germany.

FGH has a German owner, Otto UK.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  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.

No expense spared 4: Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Liverpool

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Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Park Lane, Liverpool

Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Park Lane, Liverpool

One of the most original churches in Liverpool is the Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, the Scandinavian Seamen’s Church, a rendering in brick of the Nordic stave church [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stave_church].

It was built to minister to the pastoral needs of the transitory population of around fifty thousand Scandinavian seamen and emigrants in Liverpool in the early 1880s. It was completed at a cost of 50,000 Swedish crowns in 1884.

Designed by William Douglas Caröe (1857-1938), who was the son of the Danish Consul in Liverpool and a pupil of the architect John Loughborough Pearson, its octagonal form and pyramidal roof with stepped gables and a spectacular concave lead and timber spire highlight its Scandinavian associations.

The minister’s house adjoins the church.

The original worship space was up a half-flight of stairs and consisted of a galleried octagonal space with an open timber vault.

This was floored at gallery level in 1956-61 to create social and recreational space, and as the numbers of seamen visiting Liverpool declined the congregation adapted to serve the needs and welfare of the Scandinavian community in the city and its surrounding region.

Four plaster reliefs, originally part of the reredos and now relocated to the staircase, are by Robert Anning Bell.

Two sculptures, the Madonna and Christ, are by the Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley.

The bell from the former Norwegian Seamen’s Church at St Michael-in-the-Hamlet hangs beside the altar.

The Gustaf Adolf Nordic Congregation in Liverpool operates as the Nordic Church and Cultural Centre, providing a base for Danes, Finns, Icelanders, Norwegians and Swedes in the district and maintaining their unique building for future generations.

Visitors are made welcome, particularly at events: http://nordicliverpool.co.uk. The buffets are memorable.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

No expense spared 3: Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Liverpool

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Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Princes Road, Liverpool

Among the many fine Victorian buildings in and around Liverpool 8, the Old Hebrew Congregation Syngogue is a particular jewel.

Built 1871-4 to the designs of the brothers William James and George Ashdown Audsley, it is constructed, like St Margaret’s Church on the same side of Princes Road, of red brick dressed with red sandstone.

Its façade combines elements of Gothic and Moorish styles, the pointed west door and the rose window contrasting with the oriental arches of the doorframes and the minarets that once surmounted the turrets.

The spectacular galleried interior has a tall arcade, supported by cast-iron columns with acanthus capitals. The horseshoe arches of the arcade lead the eye to the much more elaborate arch at the east end, which frames another rose window above the marble Ark with painted domes and gold stars.

The initial total cost was £14,975 8s 11d.

The marble pulpit, given in 1874 by the widow of James Braham, faces the bimah, the platform from which the Torah and haftarah are read. This was the gift of David Lewis, founder of the Liverpool department store, “in gratitude to Almighty God for His great goodness”.

The Ark is a replacement of the original which with its holy scrolls was destroyed by arson in May 1979: it was reconstructed and the synagogue restored and reopened in December 1980.

This spectacular place is open to group tours, which feature an exhibition about the history of the congregation: http://www.princesroad.org/#!tours/cfvg.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Petra rocks

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Al Khazneh or The Treasury, Petra

Al Khazneh or The Treasury, Petra

It was the picture of Petra on the front of the holiday brochure that attracted me to book Christmas in Jordan.

In fact, there’s a great deal more to see across Jordan – the Roman city of Jerash, where you can visualise the proportions of streets and buildings and temples and climb to the top of the theatre and look down to the stage and the frons scenae like sitting in the gods at the Hackney Empire, the great Crusader castle of Kerak, and the Omayyad desert castles, none of which are actually castles – Qasr-al- Kharana (which is a 7th-century hotel for caravanserai), Qasr Amra (which is a bath-house, of all things, in the middle of nowhere) and Qasr Azraq (not so much a castle as a fort, Roman, even to its stone doors, last operational when T E Lawrence was about).

But Petra is what I’d come for, and Petra is what it’s all about – “the rose-red city, half as old as time”.

(It’s often said that Guy Burgess, the Cambridge spy, maliciously picked up Rev John William Burgon’s poetic phrase about Petra and twisted it mischievously to describe Harold Nicolson as “a rose-red sissy, half as old as time”. In fact L A Brooke of Wolverhampton, writing in The Sunday Times (August 10th 1997), refers to a slim book of poems by William Plomer, entitled The Dorking Thigh…published either in the late 1940s or the early 1950s. The poem begins: “Aloft in Heavenly Mansions W1. / Heavenly? well certainly sublime, / one finds the abode of D’Arcy Honeybun, / a rose-red sissy half as old as time.”)

You set off down a ravine, through a cleft in the rock, called a Siq, barely ten feet across in places and anything up to a couple of hundred feet high.

And there at the end – though you know it’s coming from the travel-posters, it’s still a surprise – peeps the pink stone façade of what is called the Treasury. It’s bigger than a two-storey building, in crisp clean Classical lines, dating from the 1st or 2nd century AD: it’s actually a tomb, carved from the rock from top to bottom, with three huge chambers behind, which are plain and completely without decoration.

From that grand-slam aesthetic experience the walk down into a widening valley, impregnable from the outside world, is punctuated by lesser but still remarkable surprises – a rock-cut theatre, the Urn Monument, the Corinthian Monument, a gigantic temple to some Nabatean (pre-Roman) god.

The sandstone is not all pink, but in some places has so many different colours in the sediments that it has a rainbow effect. (So the Bedouins make sand-bottles, rather like the Isle of Wight but with camels in the design. I endlessly refused to buy, because not only did the concept feel unutterably naff but some of the bottles were HP.)

The loos were surprisingly salubrious. We stopped for coffee at a tent where the Bedouin in charge turned out to have the most outrageously accurate East London accent, which he claimed to have learnt from a tourist. I didn’t see a fraction of what there is to explore, though I stayed long enough to see the Bedouin souvenir-sellers climbing into their Toyotas at the end of the afternoon, ostensibly to return to their houses on the hills behind. So I’ll have to go back again one day.

Christmas in the desert

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Wadi Rum, Jordan

Wadi Rum, Jordan

In the autumn of 1997, well before I was up to speed with the internet, I tried to book a Christmas holiday in Florida, only to find that Florida was full.

So instead I gazed at the travel agent’s display of brochures, pointed to a picture of Petra, and said, “I’ll go there instead.”

After a lifetime of running tours of one kind or another, I like an occasional mystery tour, so I declined to read up on Jordan beforehand. I was entirely content to trust the tour-company, Bales [http://www.balesworldwide.com], and they lived up to their reputation.

My Uncle Frank, who’d been to Jordan on his National Service, warned me it’d be cold. I didn’t really appreciate that, though the sun is bright, the December wind across the desert is chilly, and each day I wore the one sweater I’d brought on top of layers of T-shirts.

I was particularly glad of my keffiyeh scarf, especially when I realised that while the Egyptians use them as headgear to keep off the desert sands, the Jordanians use them as multi-purpose scarves à la Pavarotti.

On Christmas Day we went to Wadi Rum, the desert area which is not only associated with the real T E Lawrence but was a prime location for David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.

Noël Coward thought Peter O’Toole too pretty for the part: “It should be called Florence of Arabia,” he said. Noël Coward knew Lawrence personally, and when the hero of Arabia went into hiding in the Royal Air Force as Aircraftsman T E Shaw No 338171, famously wrote to him beginning, “May I call you 338…?”

Wadi Rum was magnificent: I could watch the colours changing on the hills and the sand all day and into the night. We drove about in 4×4 open trucks, me wrapped up in my woolly sweater and Yasser-Arafat/Pavarotti gear.

The desert air made me ravenous. Three times a day I said to myself I must not eat such insane amounts of food, and at the next opportunity there I was tucking into yet another enormous buffet – salads awash with olive oil, meats cooked in interesting things like yoghurt, astonishing sweets such as Om Ali which is an Arabian bread-and-butter pudding beyond any Briton’s wildest dreams of custard.

I seriously feared for my waistline but I found on my return that I hadn’t gained a pound. As I met my familiar friends they declared without exception how well I looked, so I concluded my trousers must have shrunk at the dry-cleaner’s.

Burning issue

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Woking Crematorium

Woking Crematorium

In Victorian times there was huge controversy about cremation.  Utilitarian and sanitary arguments against burial were opposed by intransigent clergy. The Bishop of London, John Jackson, complained that cremation would “undermine the faith of mankind in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and so bring about a most disastrous social revolution”. The Bishop of Manchester, James Fraser, responded that God would have no more difficulty resurrecting ashes than dust, or “bodies which had passed into the structure of worms”.

The very occasional cremations that came to public knowledge caused great scandal – Honoretta Brooks Pratt illegally cremated in 1769, Captain T B Hanham who built a private cremator for his wife, his mother and ultimately himself in Dorset – until the wildly eccentric Dr William Price’s cremation of his five-month-old son Iesu Grist in 1884 led to Mr Justice Stephen’s ruling that cremation was not an offence “provided no nuisance was caused”.

The Cremation Society built the first cremator in Britain at Woking in 1879, originally little more than a furnace with a 42ft chimney. They hesitated to use it until the legal ambiguities had been resolved, and the first cremation on the site, 71-year-old Mrs Jeanette Pickersgill, took place on March 26th 1885.

Thereafter a small number of cremations were carried out each year, and in 1891 a chapel and reception rooms designed by Edward Channing Clarke were added in a comfortable thirteenth-century Gothic style that was intended to reassure mourners and hide the functionality of the machinery within.

The relationship between Woking Crematorium and the nearby Brookwood Cemetery was fraught with ambiguity. The Cremation Society bought the land from the London Necropolis Company, but through a third party so that the cemetery company could dissociate itself. Yet in due time the London Necropolis Company provided funeral facilities, including trains from Waterloo, and sold plots for the burial of ashes.

Similarly, the vicar of St Peter’s Church, Woking, Rev Frederick J Oliphant, made an enormous fuss when the crematorium was first proposed, yet by 1889 the Rev William Hamilton, vicar of St John the Baptist, Woking, was conducting frequent funeral services at the crematorium for a fee of one guinea a time and also burying cremated remains in the churchyard at St John’s.

Woking Crematorium is still in use, its buildings cherished for their atmosphere and historical significance, its grounds a beautiful and extensive garden of remembrance:  http://www.thelondoncremation.co.uk/woking-crematorium.

Cremation is now by far the most prevalent form of disposal of the dead: in 2012 only a quarter of disposals were burials.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, 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.

Porth-y-Nant

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Porth-y-Nant, Gwynedd (1979)

Porth-y-Nant, Gwynedd (1979)

Way back in 1980 I had a holiday in North Wales with a bunch of mates and someone mentioned a lost village on the coast of the Llŷn Peninsula.

With no more information than an Ordnance Survey map we located the unbelievably steep valley of Nant Gwrtheyrn and trekked in the afternoon sun down the precipitous road to the abandoned terraces of the quarry village of Porth-y-Nant.

The granite quarry which overlooks the wide bay was opened in 1861 by a Liverpool company, Kneeshaw & Lupton. In its heyday the place provided granite setts for roadways; latterly it produced larger blocks for civil engineering works and ballast for railways.   All of the output and many of the supplies were transported by sea; the roadway was unfit anything but pedestrians and horse-drawn sledges.

The initial small group of quarrymen’s houses was supplemented in 1878 by two larger terraces, Sea View and Mountain View, which housed families. The chapel, which bears the same date, accommodated a school which in the 1930s consisted of around twenty pupils and one teacher.

The quarry closed early in the Second World War and by 1954 only three inhabitants remained.

Thereafter the village buildings fell derelict, and this is what we stumbled on in 1980. The walk back, up one-in-three gradients and round hairpin bends in the gathering dusk, was not pleasant.

At the time only a notice on a ruined building told us that the place had been purchased by a trust, pioneered by a local GP, Dr Carl Clowes, which transformed the ruins into a thriving Welsh-language teaching centre, Nant Gwrtheyrn: http://www.nantgwrtheyrn.org/default.aspx.

There is an outline of the gestation of this enterprise at http://www.forachange.net/browse/article/1950.html.

There is remarkable film footage of the first motor-car ever to traverse successfully the steep access road (now, thankfully, much improved) in 1934: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/climbing-the-unclimbable/query/wales+hill.

Look, no hands

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Violana, Musical Museum, Brentford (detail)

Violana, Musical Museum, Brentford (detail)

A couple of hundred yards down the road from the London Museum of Water & Steam (formerly Kew Bridge Steam Museum) stands the modernist home of the Musical Museum, Brentford: http://www.musicalmuseum.co.uk.

This rich collection of mechanical musical instruments deserves at least a couple of hours.

I was taken round by Ron, who’s been involved in collecting these intricate and temperamental machines for six decades. He’s a mine of information, and tells you more if you ask relevant questions.

The collection, which was started in 1963 by Frank Holland MBE (1910-89) as the British Piano Museum, extends from tiny clockwork musical boxes, through barrel organs and player pianos to vast orchestrions – pipe-organs that were designed to reproduce the effects of a full orchestra.

I learned a lot. A pianola, for example, was not an entire musical instrument but rather the interface between the player roll and the keyboard of a piano or organ.

Eventually the recording of performances became sufficiently sophisticated to reproduce the playing of great musicians. Ron allowed us to listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ on a grand piano.

A particularly fascinating rarity on show is the violana (or violano), a mechanical violin-player which self-rosinates: http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_violano.html.

The Brentford collection also covers sound recordings from the earliest phonographs onwards. I learned that the only way to quieten the sort of machine that Nipper the dog listened to was, literally, to put a sock in it.

The climax of this collection of mechanical music-making is a mighty Wurlitzer, formerly installed in the Regal Cinema, Kingston-on-Thames. Now it is installed in an upstairs theatre, where it can be hooked to a paper-roll player.

One of the participants in the visit I joined was an accomplished Wurlitzer player, who gave us a quick tour of the instrument.

The Wurlitzer is hired out for £30.00 an hour – an ideal Christmas present for an organist: http://www.musicalmuseum.co.uk/page/30-wurlitzer.

Going to Scarborough Fair

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Scarborough Fair Collection, Lebberston, North Yorkshire

Scarborough Fair Collection, Lebberston, North Yorkshire

There is a pattern of successful entrepreneurs with a weakness for steam engines collecting historic artefacts as an adjunct to their main business.

George Cushing (1904-2003) at Thursford and Alan Bloom (1906-2005) at Bressingham are fellows in spirit with Graham Atkinson, whose Flower of May Caravan Site at Lebberston, near Scarborough, is the home of the Scarborough Fair Collection, an enjoyable assembly of fairground rides, steam engines, cars, motorbikes and commercial vehicles, embellished with a fine café and a dance hall with two mighty Wurtlitzer cinema organs: http://www.scarboroughfaircollection.com.

Unlike Thursford, which is dark and theatrical, the Scarborough Fair Collection is top lit in daylight. Its rides – including a set of gallopers (c1893), a Noah’s Ark, a set of dodgems and a ghost train – are spread around the building, with helpful notices indicating what time they run. The vehicles and other artefacts are thoroughly labelled, so that it’s possible to understand their significance – and in some cases, considerable rarity – even if you’re not an aficionado.

Among its treasures it boasts four showmen’s engines (one of them The Iron Maiden, star of the 1962 film of the same name), a Foden steam wagon, a magnificent 1937 Scammell showman’s tractor, The Moonraker, and a fully restored showman’s caravan.

There are several mechanical organs,–

  • a 72-key Verbeeck concert organ
  • the 89-key Marenghi organ of Irvins of Ashford, Middlesex
  • the 97-key Gavioli/Voigt Die Münchner Oktoberfest-Orgel
  • a 100-key ‘Condor’ organ (originally 97 keys) by the Hooghuys family

– as well as a small example of a calliope, originally a fearsome contraption that could be heard for miles made for riverboats from locomotive whistles.

Tea dances take place on Wednesday afternoons, using the two Wurlitzers. They are an interesting pair, respectively from the Granada cinemas at Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (1936) and Greenford, west London (1937).

Both are the same size – 3 manuals, 8 ranks – but with contrasting specifications. The voicing of the Mansfield instrument is close to the usual specification of a contemporary church organ (Style ‘D’ Trumpet, Diapason, Tibia Clausa, Clarinet, Violin, Violin Celeste, Vox Humana and Flute) while the Greenford organ is altogether more theatrical (English Horn, Tuba, Diapason, Tibia Clausa, Saxophone, Gamba, Gamba Celeste and Flute).

The Scarborough Fair Collection has much to fascinate enthusiasts for steam, motor vehicles, mechanical music, organs and all the fun of the fair, while at the same time entertaining those who enjoy wallowing in nostalgia over a cup of tea and a cake.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside 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.

Big boys’ toys

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Bressingham Steam & Gardens, Norfolk: 2ft-gauge loco 'George Sholto'

Bressingham Steam & Gardens, Norfolk: 2ft-gauge loco ‘George Sholto’

If you’re going to have a train set you might as well have a big one. And if you can afford it, why not have three?

Alan Bloom MBE (1906-2005) was a significant figure in the world of horticulture, the son of a market gardener, an innovator who developed new plants and new ways of planting after he bought the 228-acre Bressingham Hall estate in Norfolk in 1946.

By the 1960s his nursery business and associated display garden were sufficiently successful for him to indulge his other love – live steam. He initially bought a traction engine to assist garden construction:  he ended up with fourteen.

Unlike his distant neighbour and near contemporary George Cushing (1904-2003), who concentrated on collecting road engines and showmen’s equipment at Thursford, Alan Bloom had a particular liking for rail-borne steam.

He subsequently built a miniature railway around the periphery of the garden. Then, in the late 1960s he installed a fine set of gallopers and began to collect standard-gauge steam locomotives.

By the time of his death, the Bressingham Steam Centre, now Bressingham Steam & Gardens, had three separate narrow-gauge railways, the 10¼-inch gauge Garden Railway, the fifteen-inch Waveney Valley Railway, and the 2½-mile two-foot gauge Nursery Railway.

The standard-gauge collection includes some significant items loaned from the National Collection including Great Northern Railway 990 Henry Oakley, London, Tilbury & Southend Railway 80 Thundersley and a London, Brighton & South Coast Railway “Terrier” tank, Martello, in its guise as British Railways 32662 – all of them static.

The museum also owns the last surviving standard-gauge Garratt locomotive in Britain and a vast German post-war Class 52 Kriegslokomotiven (“war-locomotive”), found mothballed in a Norwegian railway tunnel, with a cab the size of a small bedsit.

Like George Cushing, Alan Bloom safeguarded his legacy by establishing a charitable trust, with few employees and many volunteers, but Bressingham has none of the pizazz of the Thursford Collection, with its Wurlitzer, its dancing penguins and roller-skating milkmaids.

Bressingham downplays its commercialism. It’s a relaxed affair of trains and gardens, a honeypot for families where you can wander at will. It’s an admirable place for a picnic.

And it’s a memorial to a man whose legacy is to give pleasure to people: http://www.bressingham.co.uk/home.