Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Thornton Gate

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire:  Blackpool locomotive 717

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Blackpool locomotive 717

Alongside their sleek new LRT vehicles, Blackpool Tramways has retained some of its previous fleet – a few double-deckers adapted to fit the new disability-compliant boarding platforms and some authentic heritage trams surreptitiously fitted with transponders to operate the new traffic signalling.

In order to rescue some of the others, the Lancastrian Transport Trust is planning a retirement home for superannuated Blackpool trams at Thornton Gate, on the way to Fleetwood:  http://www.ltt.org.uk/thornton-gate-project.

This location was last used by the contractors upgrading the line to light rapid-transit standards.  Before that it was used as the permanent-way yard for the tramway.  Originally it was a coal-delivery yard.

Apparently, to forestall a 1919 plan to build a railway line from Thornton to Cleveleys, Blackpool Corporation Tramways agreed to run railway wagons of coal along the Fleetwood tramway, and acquired an electric locomotive for the purpose.

The coal deliveries started in 1927 but were ultimately unprofitable and ended in 1949.

The locomotive was useful and survived, and now serves as a shunter at the National Tramway Museum at Crich, Derbyshire:  http://www.tramway.co.uk.

 

New Blackpool trams

Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

The new Blackpool trams began operating on April 4th 2012 – sleek, smooth articulated LRTs in a funky purple-and-white colour scheme.

It’s a superb service, all the way from Starr Gate to Fleetwood and back with space, comfort and ease.  It cost £100 million.

The demise of the old fleet is regretted by some, but it really was past its sell-by date.  Some trams dated back to the 1930s, and many had been rebuilt and patched like the hammer with three new handles and two new heads: [see Essentially Victorian Blackpool and Tram terminus].

The beauty of the promenade tramway, and the reason it survived, is its ability to shift holiday crowds, most of all at the illuminations.  Blackpool trams have always been much bigger than buses, and they take up less road space because they mostly run on their own private tracks.

And the new ones, like the old ones, appear to be crewed by committees.

And if you want a nostalgia trip, you can pay buy a day-saver to use the heritage fleet, when it’s running:  Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours – Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Exploring Melbourne: Madame Brussels

Tomb of Sir Samuel Gillott (1838-1913), General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

Tomb of Sir Samuel Gillott (1838-1913), General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

Dave is one of the half-dozen brightest people I ever taught.  When I told him that he asked for it in writing.  QED.

I hadn’t seen him for ten years when we met up in Melbourne, where he’s worked for the past few years and is happily settled.

We acted out the Australian dream drinking beer in the sunshine at the Beachcomber at the St Kilda Sea Baths:  http://www.beachcombercafe.com.au/www/home, and then we hopped on a tram to sample the fleshpots of central Melbourne.

I recall, with diminishing coherence, the Palmz roof bar at the Carlton on Bourke Street [http://www.thecarlton.com.au/functions/palmz-rooftop-bar-melbourne], Penny Blue (in the former Money Order Building next to the GPO) [http://www.pennyblue.com.au], before eating at the Golden Monkey [http://www.goldenmonkey.com.au] where Dave’s marital-arts experience came in useful tussling with the Japanese menu.

On a second evening out we drank at the Gin Palace [http://www.ginpalace.com.au] where the gents has a set of urinals for use and another for lighting, and ate at Sarti [http://www.sartirestaurant.com.au].

At some point I regaled Dave (who is at heart a Sheffield lad) with the story of Sir Samuel Gillott (1838-1913), a Sheffield lad who emigrated to Melbourne at the age of eighteen, trained as a lawyer and operated as a politician, became Melbourne’s first Lord Mayor and was eventually exposed for his financial dealings with a lady called Caroline Hodgson, who traded as Madame Brussels and ran brothels like banks, with branch operations scattered around the city-centre.

Without a word Dave led me into a strange rooftop bar with artificial grass instead of a carpet and waitresses in maids’ outfits with white ankle socks, where only after I’d ordered St George Ethiopian beer and turned to the menu did I discover the name of the place:  http://www.madamebrussels.com.

 

Eat your way round central Melbourne

City-centre skyline from Kew, Melbourne, Australia

City-centre skyline from Kew, Melbourne, Australia

During my weekend’s rest and recuperation in St Kilda, one of my hosts was Gabriel, the guy I’d met on The Ghan on my previous visit to Australia [Exploring Australia 5:  The Ghan].

I took to Gabe immediately when we met because we introduced ourselves as Gabriel and Mike, and he immediately said, “Ah! two archangels!”.  This guy’s sharp, I thought, and then cottoned on that he’s Romanian, and unlike me capable of wit in more than one language.

It fell to Gabe to help me find clean clothes to buy in Melbourne, in the course of which he felt compelled to buy a couple of T-shirts out of a sense of solidarity.  Our salesman was a Botswanan guy called Ojee, with a Singaporean degree studying media in Melbourne as a postgraduate.

Gabe also showed me where to eat:  the French Brasserie [http://www.thefrenchbrasserie.com.au/site] is architecturally exciting, gastronomically satisfying, and tucked out of sight of Flinders and Exhibition Streets;  Mecca Bah [http://www.meccabah.com.au], out in the wide-open spaces of Melbourne’s Docklands, is elegant, comfortable Moroccan cuisine with an Australian accent.

Once I was properly clothed, fed and watered, and after we’d drunk white beer on his balcony with a magnificent view across the centre of Melbourne, Gabe gave up his precious time off while his wife Cordelia was at work to show me some fascinating Victorian buildings that I would never have found unassisted.

I’ll describe them in a short while, but first comes an article that could be entitled ‘Drink your way round Melbourne’, but isn’t.

 

Eat your way round St Kilda

Cake shop 1

When I first visited Melbourne I decided that on my second visit I would stay in St Kilda, the beach resort twenty minutes away by tram from the Central Business District.

True to his word as ever, Malcolm the genius Co-op travel-agent found me a minimalist suite at the Medina Executive Hotel, St Kilda [http://www.medina.com.au/medina-executive-st-kilda/hotel], one of a chain of apartment hotels – the sort which provides a kitchen capable of roast Sunday dinner, and a patio big enough to host a dozen people.

All of which was ironic because I arrived there with only my laptop and the clothes I stood up in after Air New Zealand left my luggage in Nelson.

The beauty of St Kilda, even away from the beach, is that you can eat, drink and do most things al fresco.  On my first night I had chicken risotto on the street outside the hotel, and every morning I had breakfast – eggs Benedict and or a big fry-up, with flat white coffee – at 2 Doors Down [http://www.2doorsdown.com.au], and the only time I ate lunch in the apartment I had a salami sandwich from the baker Daniel Chirico [http://bakerdchirico.com.au (website half-baked, so see the reviews http://www.yourrestaurants.com.au/guide/?action=venue&venue_url=baker_d_chirico and http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/71/760129/restaurant/Melbourne/Baker-D-Chirico-St-Kilda)].

There is, of course, much more to eat in St Kilda:  my earlier explorations are described at Exploring Australia 10: St Kilda.

But the real deal in St Kilda is one or both of the cake shops on Acland Street, Le Bon Continental Cake Shop [http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/71/1485350/restaurant/Melbourne/Le-Bon-Continental-Cake-Shop-St-Kilda] and Monarch Cakes “exquisite since 1934” http://www.monarchcakes.com.au/index.htm.

The only way to decide between them is to try both.

Let the train take the strain

Replica GWR locomotive 3031 The Queen, as decorated for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, 1897, depicted at Madame Tussauds’ Royalty & Railways exhibition, Windsor & Eton Central Station (1983)

Replica GWR locomotive 3031 The Queen, as decorated for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, 1897, depicted at Madame Tussauds’ Royalty & Railways exhibition, Windsor & Eton Central Station (1983)

While I was waiting for a book to come up from the stack in Sheffield Reference Library, I came across a reproduction of the first issue of Railway Magazine, a periodical that continues to serve industry professionals, enthusiasts and general-interest readers:  http://www.railwaymagazine.co.uk.

In June 1897 the dominant rail news was the construction of the Great Central Railway, then burrowing under Lords Cricket Ground on the approach to its new terminus at London Marylebone.

The lead interview, however, was with Mr Joseph Loftus Wilkinson, the General Manager of the Great Western Railway, who was profiled because the GWR prided itself as the “Royal Railway”, and was about to unveil a new Royal Train in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

The magazine duly included a detailed description of the new royal carriages and locomotives, noting that the Queen’s original saloon had been meticulously incorporated into the new coachwork without any alteration whatsoever:  it was the only part of the new train that remained oil-lit.

The Chief Mechanical Engineer, William Dean, intimated to the reporter that though Her Majesty insisted on a speed limit of 40mph for her travels, she sometimes unwittingly approached nearer sixty.  Presumably she was not expected to read the Railway Magazine.

Mr Wilkinson, in what nowadays would be seen as undisguised PR, remarked that at the Great Western “we firmly believe in speed.  In these high-pressure days everybody is in a hurry.”

 

Scott’s best church

All Souls' Church, Haley Hill, Halifax, West Yorkshire

All Souls’ Church, Haley Hill, Halifax, West Yorkshire

At the same time that Colonel Edward Akroyd set out his model village of Akroyden in 1855-6, he began work on his greatest gift to the locality, All Soul’s Church, Haley Hill.

He employed George Gilbert Scott, who also provided the original layout for the village, to design the grandest possible statement of High Anglican pride, a fourteenth-century Gothic church with a tower 236 feet high, one foot higher than that of his carpet-manufacturing rivals, the Crossleys’,Congregational Square Church down in the valley below.

Scott was and is generally regarded as the best architect alive at the time, and Scott himself described All Souls’ as “on the whole, my best church”.

As might be expected, the finest decorative materials were used – Minton tiles, glass by Clayton & Bell, Hardman & Co, and William Wailes, ironwork by Skidmore & Co, the font of Lizard serpentine marble standing on an Aberdeen granite base, Caen stone for the pulpit, alabaster for the reredos.

The tower houses a ring of eight bells by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and the four-manual Foster & Andrews organ of 1868 was the biggest in Halifax.

This huge church became redundant in 1979, and stood neglected until 1989 when the Churches Conservation Trust took it over.

Unfortunately, the Steetley limestone Scott chose for the structure reacted badly to atmospheric pollution, and the twin tasks of conserving the fabric and securing it against vandalism are prodigious.

Details of access and coming events at All Souls’ are at All Souls’ Church, Halifax Haley Hill, West Yorkshire | The Churches Conservation Trust (visitchurches.org.uk)

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

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Akroyd town

Salisbury Terrace and former co-operative store, Akroydon, Halifax (1992)

Salisbury Terrace and former co-operative store, Akroydon, Halifax (1992)

When Colonel Akroyd came to build his second model village in 1855 (the first was Copley), he went upscale, as the Americans say.

Influenced by the growing permanent building society movement, he planned housing for his Haley Hill Mills, overlooking the centre of Halifax, to be purchased rather than rented by his workers.  He donated the land, adjacent to his own residence, Bankfield, and arranged for the cost of building to be underwritten by the Halifax Permanent Building Society.  The community was named Akroydon and all the streets were named after Anglican dioceses.

He hired George Gilbert Scott, the greatest Gothic Revival architect of the day to design 350 houses in terraced blocks of eight to ten in the style they called domestic Gothic, “the original style of the parish of Halifax”.  Akroyd considered that “intuitively this taste of our forefathers pleases the fancy, strengthens house and home attachment, entwines the present with the memory of the past, and promises, in spite of opposition and prejudice, to become the national style of modern, as it was of old England.”

However, he found that potential freeholders are not so pliable as prospective tenants.  Being Yorkshire people, they first regarded the whole thing as a speculation, and shunned it.

Then they objected to the Gothic style:  “…although they liked the look of it, they considered it antiquated, inconvenient, wanting in light, and not adapted to modern requirements.  The dormer windows were supposed to resemble the style of almshouses, and the independent workmen who formed the building association positively refused to accept this feature of the Gothic, which to their minds was degrading.”

Scott’s former pupil, W H Crossland, later the architect of St Stephen’s Church, Copley, recast the scheme as 92 houses “clustered around a market cross in a toned-down Gothic style ‘simple, yet bold in detail’”.

These were duly built, and still remain.  The original owners, long gone to their rest, left their mark as a result of an inspired appeal to their vanity:

The occupiers find their new homes commodious in every respect, with abundance of light;  and their prejudices against the pointed style are now finally uprooted.  They are much gratified by one feature recently introduced, viz, the insertion of the owner’s monogram or device, on a stone shield, placed over the door, with the intent to give individuality and a mark of distinction to each dwelling.

These Englishmen’s homes were indeed their terraced ancestral castles.

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

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The church across the water

St Stephen's Church, Copley, West Yorkshire

St Stephen’s Church, Copley, West Yorkshire

I find it hard to imagine the sheer power of churches in nineteenth-century England.

There’s a specific reason why the magnificent parish church of St Stephen, Copley, West Yorkshire, was built on the opposite side of the River Calder from Colonel Edward Akroyd’s model village beside the mill.

The vicar of All Saints’, Dudwell, objected having a new church so near his own, so the site was moved from the main road to the woods beyond the village.

The £4,000 cost of the building was raised by public subscription, and Colonel Akroyd spent a further £5,000 of his own money on the furnishings, stained glass, and building the chancel and sacristy.

Consecrated in 1865, it’s a complete essay in Victorian church design by the Huddersfield architect William Henry Crossland (1835-1908) – rich in stained-glass, some of it by Hardman & Co, carving, mosaic and painted decoration.

Furthermore, according to Malcolm Bull’s informative Calderdale Companion website http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~calderdalecompanion/qq_12.html, Colonel Akroyd contributed to the vicar’s stipend.

In 1872 Colonel Akroyd took against the practices of the vicar he’d appointed, Rev J B Sidgwick, and stopped paying his voluntary contribution.  A group of parishioners promptly made up the deficiency, while others decamped to the local Methodist church.

St Stephen’s, which is big enough to seat a third of the village, is now redundant, and is maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust:  http://www.visitchurches.org.uk/Ourchurches/Completelistofchurches/St-Stephens-Church-Copley-West-Yorkshire.

Graham White has an admirable series of photographs of the interior at http://www.flickr.com/photos/strabod72/sets/72157627628722184/with/6227123155.

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

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Housing the workers

Copley, West Yorkshire

Copley, West Yorkshire

Tucked by the river Calder, the village of terraced houses at Copley, West Yorkshire, looks a pleasant place to live.

That was exactly the intention of its builder, Edward Akroyd – always known as Colonel Akroyd – when his family firm transferred the business and employees to their new mill at Copley in 1846.

In the political conflicts of the time, Colonel Akroyd became one of the driving forces in the movement to reconcile the interests of workers and capitalists.

To house the workforce at this unpopulated spot beside the River Calder he began a small community which eventually consisted of 136 houses, accommodating by the 1870s a population of about seven hundred.

This was anything but cheap housing, but the village provided excellent facilities, including allotments, a co-operative store, an employees’ canteen-shed seating 600 and serving dinners of meat and potatoes at three-halfpence or twopence each, boys’ and girls’ schools (1849), a burial club (1849), a lending library (1850 – free until 1863), a branch of the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank (1862) and a clothing club (1863).

Colonel Akroyd admitted he didn’t make much money out of renting houses to his workers, but he believed his business gained “from a more attached and contented population”.

It’s tempting to think of the building-society movement as a nineteenth-century workers’ enterprise, sponsored by radical politicians, but in some cases it was the product of employers’ enlightened self-interest.

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.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.