Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Steel workers’ resting place 2

Leave a Reply
Tinsley Park Cemetery, Sheffield

Tinsley Park Cemetery, Sheffield

I’ve known Tinsley Park Cemetery, Sheffield, all my life, because my maternal grandfather and a bevy of Salvation Army aunties and uncles lie there.  When you visit a cemetery for a funeral, or even simply to tend a grave, as my mother and grandmother did when I was little, you don’t take notice of the surroundings.

The cemetery was opened in 1882 by the Attercliffe Burial Board to supplement their earlier cemetery adjoining the burial ground of Christ Church parish church, a Commissioners’ church built in 1826 and demolished after it was ruined in the 1940 Blitz.

In recent years, when I’ve found my way to Tinsley Park Cemetery, I’ve been intrigued by the quality of the architecture of the funeral chapels, a typical pair – one for the Church of England, the other for the Nonconformists – with an archway, a timber loggia, a clock in the gable and twin bell-turrets.  Each of the arches of the carriageway is decorated with angel headstops carrying Biblical mottoes.

The superintendent’s house incorporated a boardroom for meetings.

The cemetery was designed by a local practice, Holmes & Johnson.  Samuel Furness Holmes (1821-1882) was essentially a civil engineer:  he had been a highway surveyor and was Borough Surveyor from 1864 to 1873.

It’s likely therefore that the architectural work was done by his partner, C H Johnson, about whose career and work I’ve so far been able to trace nothing of any substance.

The Burial Board was taken over by the city in 1900, and Tinsley Park Cemetery remains under the care of what is now called Sheffield Bereavement Services:  https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/caresupport/bereavement/cemeteries-directory.html?showdetails=Show&uuid=b11e9afa-d9d8-4ee6-b005-b3ef498370f7&isDirectorySearch=true.  The Anglican chapel is still available for funeral services, while the Nonconformist chapel is a store.

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

Steel workers’ resting place 1

Leave a Reply
Anglican Chapel, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield

Anglican Chapel, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield

The great company cemeteries of the early Victorian period attract a great deal of attention, but the major push to bring decent burial to Britain’s industrial towns and cities followed the Burial Acts of 1852-7, which recognised that most people couldn’t afford the fees of the cemeteries companies, and empowered local authorities to provide dignified burial facilities for all.

In most towns this led to the establishment of an elective Burial Board, backed by the power to levy rates and led by local figures who knew, and felt a responsibility to, their local community.

This meant that overcrowded, insanitary churchyards could be closed.  It also enabled Roman Catholics and Nonconformists to be interred by their own clergy, rather than by the local Church of England priest.

I recently visited my local Victorian municipal burial ground, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield, which has a small but active Friends’ group:  http://www.friendsofburngreavecemetery.btck.co.uk.

The cemetery was opened in 1861, and extended by Sheffield Corporation when they took over from the Burial Board in 1900.  It’s still open for burials in existing graves, and the magnificent chapels by Flockton & Son are intact and listed, but in urgent need of weather-proofing and restoration.

In more prosperous times a company called Creative Outpost devised a grandiose restoration scheme but it seems to have closed down:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Creative-outpost-sheffield-located-at-Burngreave-chapels/166750873081.

This leaves the Friends seeking fresh support, expertise and – most of all – funds.  They’ve digitised the cemetery records to provide an invaluable service locating graves for relatives and descendants, and they’ve begun a detailed study of some of their more celebrated “residents”:  http://www.friendsofburngreavecemetery.btck.co.uk/Residents.

They open the chapels as often as possible on Sunday mornings, and they serve as a link between the local community and the council’s Bereavement Services department.

Their existence is the vital factor that keeps Burngreave Cemetery safe and civilised, and encourages its use as a place to walk, jog and enjoy the fresh air in a built-up area that is not blessed with many amenities.

Every cemetery deserves friends like the Friends of Burngreave Cemetery.  The co-ordinating body for such organisations is the National Federation of Cemetery Friends:  http://cemeteryfriends.org.uk.

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

Steel barons’ Valhalla

3 Replies

Nonconformist Chapel, General Cemetery, Sheffield (1976)

Nonconformist Chapel, General Cemetery, Sheffield (1976)

When I first knew the Sheffield General Cemetery in the late 1960s it was an undignified, sometimes frightening eyesore.

It was hard to believe that when it was opened in 1836 the Porter Valley was Sheffield’s classical Elysium.  On the north side of the valley stood the classical terrace The Mount (William Flockton c1830-2), the Botanical Gardens (Benjamin Broomhead Taylor & Robert Marnock 1833-6) and the Palladian Wesley College (William Flockton 1837-40, now King Edward VII School).

Opposite, the General Cemetery was laid out in terraces by the designer and curator of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens, Robert Marnock, with Greek Revival buildings, the Lion Gate, the Nonconformist chapel and the Secretary’s House, all designed by Samuel Worth, the designer, with B B Taylor, of Sheffield’s Cutler’s Hall (1832).

The original nine acres were extended by a further eight in 1850 to provide a consecrated section, dominated by William Flockton’s fine Gothic Cemetery Church.

The valley became built up in the later nineteenth century.  The turnpike road became a tram-route and Cemetery Avenue, originally built across open fields, is now one of the very few streets of terraced houses in the city with trees on either side [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheffield_General_Cemetery_1830s.jpg].

The Cemetery is now recognised as one of the finest provincial company cemeteries in England, built in response to the 1832 cholera epidemic (which in Sheffield killed 404 people, including the Master Cutler), founded as a joint-stock company by Nonconformists, with picturesque landscaping and a fondness for Egyptian detail on otherwise classical buildings.

It is the resting place of many of the great names of Victorian Sheffield – Samuel Holberry (1816-1842), the Chartist leader;  James Montgomery (1771–1854), newspaper editor and hymn-writer – now reburied at Sheffield Cathedral;  Mark Firth (1819-1880), steel magnate and philanthropist and the brothers John, Thomas, and Skelton Cole, founders of the Sheffield department store.

Like almost all early-Victorian company cemeteries it fell into ruin as the income streams of plot-sales and burial fees dried up after the Second World War.

A development company bought the cemetery company, but gave up on the idea of building apartments on the site when they realised they’d have to exhume 87,000 corpses.

Eventually, in 1978, Sheffield City Council took it over, secured an Act of Parliament to extinguish burial rights, and perhaps ill-advisedly cleared eight hundred gravestones to create a green recreational space.

In 1989 a Friends’ group, now reconstituted as the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust [http://www.gencem.org/index.php], took on a voluntary role as custodians of the place, encouraging conservation, preservation and appropriate use of a fine amenity that at one time seemed an insoluble liability.

There is still much for the Trust and the City Council to do:  the Lion Gate and the Dissenters’ Chapel have been fully restored, but the Cemetery Church is an empty shell awaiting a creative and sympathetic use.

In the meantime, the Trust works constantly to “encourage everyone to enjoy this historical site by walking its paths, learning its history or simply as a quiet place to sit and contemplate”.

Without their voluntary labours, the place would simply slip back into dereliction.

The Sheffield General Cemetery features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The Chesterisation of Chesterfield

Leave a Reply

Knifesmithgate, Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Knifesmithgate, Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Chesterfield is mainly famous for the Crooked Spire of its medieval parish church.  Indeed, the borough motto is “Aspire”.

Its town-centre buildings would be unremarkable but for the work of the Borough Surveyor from c1904 to 1933, Major Vincent Smith.

He included in the Bill that became the Chesterfield Corporation Act of 1923 a provision for altering the building-lines in order to arcade the new shopping-streets.  This provided shelter for pedestrians and additional first-floor space for the buildings’ owners.

While admitting that members of Chesterfield Corporation had visited Chester, he flatly denied that his project meant to imitate Chester’s Rows.  He claimed the precedent of the eighteenth-century buildings on Chesterfield Market Place.

In fact, the closest similarity between Chesterfield’s 1920s shops and the black-and-white buildings of Chester is John Douglas’ Shoemakers’ Row of 1897.

So it is that Chesterfield visually resembles its near-namesake Chester, not because of Chester’s unique Rows, but of a link with a late-nineteenth century architect who was himself adapting the idea of the Rows to modern needs.

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

 

Quaint old Rows

1 Reply

1-4 Bridge Street, The Cross, Chester

1-4 Bridge Street, The Cross, Chester

The city of Chester is celebrated for its black-and-white architecture, particularly the distinctive Rows, a system of split-level street frontages along the four main streets, apparently created in the thirteenth century on the remaining rubble of the Roman city of Deva.

The Rows buildings contain visible remains of medieval and older structures, making shopping a distinctive experience.  In fact much of the black-and-white architecture is Victorian or later.

As far back as the 1850s, writers in the early volumes of the Chester Archaeological Society Journal drew attention to “the rich and lively façades, the curiously carved fantastical gables, which distinguished the brief but gay rule of the Stuarts” and campaigned vigorously for their restoration.

So, when buildings such as Bishop Lloyd’s House (1615), God’s Providence House (1652) and the Leche House (late-17th century) reached the point of physical collapse, their timbers were retained and incorporated in the rebuilding.

It was ever thus.  The magnificent classical brick façade of the Booth Mansion (1700) on Watergate Street conceals considerable remains of two timber-framed medieval houses dating back to c1260-80.

A succession of local architects, beginning with Thomas Mainwaring Penson (1818-1864) and his pupil, Thomas M Lockwood (1830-1900) and dominated by John Douglas (1830-1911) and his pupils, Edward A L Ould (1852-1909) and Charles Howard Minshull (1858-1934), created modern Chester, which superficially looks like ancient Chester could have done.

The buildings which celebrated Chester on the Royal Mail 7-pence stamps for European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975 at The Cross were in fact by T M Lockwood dating from 1888 and 1892.

John Douglas in particular built much in the same style from scratch.  His Shoemakers’ Row on Northgate Street was begun in 1897.  It is beautifully detailed, with an unusually proportioned figure of Edward VII that could pass for George V.

This process of sensitive preservation continued after the Second World War, focused by Donald W Insall & Associates’ survey of 1968 and energetically monitored by the Chester Civic Trust: http://www.chestercivictrust.org.uk.

Some conservation battles resulted in defeat, and Chester has its share of regrettable post-war architecture, but its ancient charm is remarkably intact, powered by an economic necessity that was obvious as far back as 1857:

But we earnestly warn our fellow-citizens, that if Chester is to maintain its far-famed celebrity as one of the “wonder cities” of England,– if the great European and Transatlantic continents are still to contribute their shoals of annual visitors to fill our hotels, and the not too plenteous coffers of our tradesmen, one course only is open to us.  We must maintain our ancient landmarks, we must preserve inviolate our city’s rare attractions,– our quaint old Rows, unique and picturesque as they certainly still are, must not be idly sacrificed at Mammon’s reckless shrine!

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

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic Chester tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.

Pan-Am’s London sibling

Leave a Reply

Portland House, Victoria, London

Portland House, Victoria, London

It’s a commonplace that, when walking round a city, we miss so much by not looking up.  We’re conditioned to survey the eye-level streetscape, while just above shop-fascia level there’s a wealth of history and architecture telling us stories.

Some time ago I read around the Pan-Am Building in New York City, and discovered that the design of 1963 Manhattan skyscraper was based on the 1959 Pirelli Tower in Milan, and was related to at least three UK buildings.

Months later I happened to walk out of London’s Victoria Station and found myself staring at the instantly recognisable London sibling of the Pan-Am Building – Portland House, by Howard Fairbairn & Partners (1960-3), built on the site of Watney’s Stag Brewery.

Its height of 334 feet is far lower than the 808 feet of the New York building, yet it towers over the messy streetscape around Victoria.  It was conceived as part of a comprehensive post-war redevelopment that was itself compromised from the outset.

Its tapered footprint is an attempt to reduce its overbearing impact at ground level and give it a degree of elegance.

The website http://postwarbuildings.com/buildings/portland-house points out that it probably wouldn’t get planning permission now, yet it’s far too lucrative a concentration of floorspace to be in any danger of demolition.

In fact it’s been refurbished twice in recent decades, by the T P Bennet Partnership in 1993-5 and by EPR Architects in 2001-6.

I must have walked past it many times without noticing, despite its huge scale.  Now that I recognise it I rather like it, for its own leviathan elegance and for its connection with Manhattan and Milan.

 

Water palace

1 Reply

Victoria Baths, Chorlton-cum-Medlock, Manchester

Victoria Baths, Chorlton-cum-Medlock, Manchester

Building projects overrun their budgets more often than not, and sometimes the reasons are heinous.  Sometimes, though, whether through blameworthy incompetence or honest accident, the results are priceless.

When the Victoria Baths at Chorlton-cum-Medlock on the south side of Manchester opened in 1906, the Lord Mayor, Mr J Herbert Thewlis, called it “a water palace of which every citizen of Manchester is proud”.

The building was designed by the Manchester City Architect, Henry Price, in exuberant red brick and yellow faience, contained three swimming pools, Turkish and Russian baths in the grandest surroundings municipal enterprise could contrive.  It’s a festival of tiles, mosaic and church-quality stained glass.

However, the Manchester Guardian, while lauding the splendour of “…probably the most splendid municipal bathing institution in the country…” added, “…But the cost has been heavy…”  The amount was reported to be £54,144 – double the average cost of such facilities at the time.

To the accusations of municipal extravagance the Chairman of the Baths Committee, Alderman Rothwell, retorted –

He would recommend the Baths Committee to do nothing that he would not do on his own account and he had gone so far as to say, in answer to these criticisms, that if Manchester City Council should happen to be dissatisfied with that institution and should pass a resolution to the effect that it was on sale, the City Council had a purchaser tomorrow who would pay them every penny it had cost.

It’s no accident that the Victoria Baths stood on the border between an increasingly densely populated working-class district and the more well-to-do but declining suburbs beyond.

It was actually three separate baths – the First Class Male Bath was designed with raked gallery seating for spectators, separate slipper baths, and a direct link to the Turkish Baths, the more functional Second Class Male Bath and, lastly, the Female Bath.

Fresh water was piped to the First Class Male Bath, from which it was filtered and transferred to the Second Class Male Bath, then passed finally to the Female Bath.  Oral testimony recalls that these changes of water took place on Thursdays and Sundays, and that local users tended to avoid swimming on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The Victoria Baths operated with few alterations until 1993:  its closure caused an immediate outcry and the formation of the Friends of the Victoria Baths and the Victoria Baths Trust.  Ten years later the Baths won the BBC Restoration competition, and since then £5 million has been spent making the place weatherproof and fit for further use.

There’s still some way to go before the Baths is fully operational again.  Details of the project and of opening-days and events can be found at http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/visit.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

Gothic New Zealand: Wellington 2

Leave a Reply

St Paul's Cathedral, Wellington, New Zealand

St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington, New Zealand

St Mary & the Angels Roman Catholic Church, Wellington, New Zealand

St Mary & the Angels Roman Catholic Church, Wellington, New Zealand

The city of Wellington stands on shaky ground, lying across a major geological fault in an area of constant seismic activity.  When I visited Wellington in February 2011, local people were particularly concerned at the tribulations in Christchurch, a city which had been considered much less vulnerable than their own.

Within a very few years of its first settlement in 1840, two major earthquakes occurred in 1848 and 1855, and as a result all Wellington’s early buildings were built in timber, including what are now called the Old Government Buildings (1875-6), the second-largest wooden building in the world, and the pro-cathedral, Old St Paul’s (1866).

The Anglican diocese of Wellington was about to start the replacement for Old St Paul’s when the Second World War intervened.  Influenced by the effect of the 1931 earthquake in Napier, North Island, the architect Cecil Walter Wood (1878–1947) decided against building a medieval-Gothic building in ferro-concrete and instead used reinforced concrete to create a design that uses Gothic forms, modernised under the influence of Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall (1911-23) and the Art Deco movement, and looking towards Sir Edwin Maufe’s Guildford Cathedral (1936-61):  http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w25/1/2.

(Similar influences are visible in Charles Towle’s uncompleted design for Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland.)

Cecil Wood never saw even the beginning of his St Paul’s Cathedral.  Queen Elizabeth II laid the foundation stone in 1954, and the first phase was opened ten years later.  The bulk of the nave was added in the second phase, 1970-2.  A historic Lady Chapel, formerly the 1905 timber St Paul’s Church, Paraparaumu, North Island, was added in 1991, and the westernmost bays of the nave, the narthex and the bell-tower were finished in 1998.

Though it was criticised from the start, and modified after his death, Cecil Wood’s design has retained its integrity.

I found it attractive – an architectural essay at the furthest edge of anything you could call Gothic – with a traditional layout, high round arches, subtle use of natural light and quirky arcades that reminded me of details from J R Leathart & W F Granger’s late 1920s cinemas, of which the Odeon, Richmond-on-Thames (1929) survives.

The glass entrance-screen is immediately familiar to British eyes, because the engraved angels are by New Zealand artist John Hutton (1906-1978), who also made the Screen of Saints and Angels for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (1962).  [See http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Cathedral_History.]

The Catholic Cathedral in Wellington is the opposite of Gothic:  the Sacred Heart Cathedral is an uncompromisingly Italianate basilica of 1901, replacing the Gothic St Mary’s, built in 1851 and destroyed by fire in 1898:  http://www.shcathedral.wellington.net.nz/history/index.htm.

However, Wellington has a rare example of modern Gothic, the Catholic Church of St Mary & the Angels, built 1919-22 in ferro-concrete by Frederick de Jersey Clere.  It’s a world away from Cecil Wood’s cathedral, yet hides its modern construction within traditional architectural forms:  http://www.historic.org.nz/TheRegister/RegisterSearch/RegisterResults.aspx?RID=36&m=advanced.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

 

Gothic New Zealand: Wellington 1

Leave a Reply

Old St Paul's Church, Wellington, New Zealand

Old St Paul’s Church, Wellington, New Zealand

I explained in Gothic New Zealand:  Auckland 2 that the first and only Bishop of New Zealand, George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878), brought to the antipodes the Ecclesiological idea that a church must have pointed arches and all the architectural paraphernalia of the Middle Ages.

He was an Anglican cleric operating in a context where, until a few years before he reached New Zealand in 1841, Australia had been an archdeaconry in the diocese of Calcutta.  By the time he returned to England for the last time in 1868, New Zealand had seven Anglican bishoprics.

A visible part of Selwyn’s legacy is the New Zealand tradition of building timber churches that have the shapes of masonry construction.

The first Anglican cathedral in Wellington, now known as Old St Paul’s, was designed by an architect-turned-clergyman, Rev Frederick Thatcher (1814-1890), who was closely associated with Bishop Selwyn.

It was the pro-cathedral for the Diocese of Wellington from 1866, when it was built, until 1964, when the bishop’s throne, the cathedra, moved to the new St Paul’s Cathedral.

To save it from demolition the New Zealand Government took on Old St Paul’s as a historic site, and it remains consecrated.

Like other “Selwyn” churches, it is a warm and welcoming place, the darkness of its walls contrasting with the brilliance of its stained glass windows.

I didn’t have the opportunity to join a service in my short stay, but I sat at dinner with a lady who told me she always visits St Paul’s at Christmas, and at other times, because singing hymns and carols there is “like singing inside a violin”.

For further details, see http://www.historicplaces.org.nz/placestovisit/lowernorthisland/oldstpauls.aspx.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

“A mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive”

Leave a Reply

Castle Howard: Mausoleum

Castle Howard: Mausoleum

Horace Walpole, a man not easily impressed, was bowled over by Castle Howard:

Nobody had informed me that at one view I should see a palace, a town, a fortified city, temples on high places, woods worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids, the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive;  in short, I have seen gigantic places before, but never a sublime one.

Charles, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, proclaimed in his inscription on an obelisk near the house that he –

…ERECTED A CASTLE WHERE THE OLD CASTLE OF
HENDERSKELFE STOOD, AND CALL’D IT CASTLE-HOWARD.
HE LIKEWISE MADE THE PLANTATIONS IN THIS PARK
AND ALL THE OUT-WORKS, MONUMENTS AND OTHER
PLANTATIONS BELONGING TO THE SAID SEAT.

Of all these out-works and monuments, the most sublime is undoubtedly the Mausoleum, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1728-9, begun in 1731, and completed substantially to the original design in 1742, six years after Hawksmoor’s death and four years after Carlisle’s.

This great domed rotunda, seventy-six feet high, its twenty slender Doric columns set deliberately narrowly together, sitting on a bastion of gargantuan proportions, is a noble monument not only to Lord Carlisle, whose remains were finally laid to rest there, but also to its designer, who never saw it.

Members of the Howard family continue to be interred in the Mausoleum, which is off limits to ordinary visitors.

But it is possible to see inside the Mausoleum, and to visit other inaccessible parts of the estate, on pre-booked walking tours which are detailed in the Castle Howard website at http://www.castlehoward.co.uk/Whats-On.html.

The walking isn’t strenuous, though the tour can take up to 2½ hours.  It’s worth every step.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Country Houses of North-East Yorkshire tour, with text, photographs, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 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.