Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

The Brideshead set

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Great Hall with murals by Scott Medd (1962-3), Castle Howard, North Yorkshire

Great Hall with murals by Scott Medd (1962-3), Castle Howard, North Yorkshire

Castle Howard is not Brideshead, though it owes a great deal to Brideshead Revisited.

It’s acknowledged that Evelyn Waugh’s wartime novel was based on the Lygon family who lived at the very different Madresfield Court, Worcestershire, which has its own stock of stories:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8270238/Madresfield-Court-The-Kings-redoubt-if-Hitler-called.html.

The scandal which envelopes Lord Brideshead is nowhere near as dramatic as that which overtook the 7th Earl Beauchamp, a man who always carried £100 in cash “in case I have to hire a train”.  When his brother-in-law, ‘Bendor’, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, maliciously outed him, Lady Beauchamp remarked absently, “Bendor says that Beauchamp is a bugler.”

The only connection between Brideshead and Castle Howard is through television, and it’s proved crucial to the fortunes of the house and its family, the Howards.

The house was built by their ancestor, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle (c1669-1738), who hired the multitalented playwright, John Vanburgh (1664-1726), to design a baroque palace on the site of the ancient castle of Henderskelfe.

The Great Hall is a stupendous space, seventy feet high and fifty-two feet square, surmounted by the great dome.  The paintings of the hall, dome and high saloon were by the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and the Huguenot Jean Herve.

In the period before the Second World War, canny country-house owners offered their properties to well-behaved girls’ schools:  the Duke of Devonshire, for example, saw to it by this means that Chatsworth was well looked after, but at Castle Howard an accidental fire on November 9th 1940 gutted much of the interior and destroyed Vanburgh’s dome.

The owner George Howard (1920-1984) spent much of his adult life breathing life back into Castle Howard.  The dome was restored in 1960 and the lost Pelligrini murals reproduced a couple of years later by the Canadian painter, Scott Medd (1911-1984).

George Howard, who was at the time Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC, was very glad to hire the place to Granada TV for their series-adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1981).  The proceeds enabled him to rebuild some of the rooms on the south front, to the designs of Julian Bicknell with paintings by Felix Kelly.

His son, the Hon Simon Howard, the present owner, similarly welcomed Julian Jarrold’s feature-film production in 2007 (released 2008).  This enabled further rooms to be brought back to use, and the story is told in an exhibition ‘Brideshead Restored: The Story of Restoration at Castle Howard and Brideshead Revisited’.

For thousands of visitors and millions of viewers, Castle Howard is Brideshead.  It isn’t really, but it might as well be.

Castle Howard deserves a day to itself, at almost any time of the year:  http://www.castlehoward.co.uk.  If the house is open don’t miss eating in the Fitzroy Room restaurant.

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.

The Rookery

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The Rookery, Chicago

The Rookery, Chicago

One of the most magnificent examples of the nineteenth-century revolution in construction is the Rookery Building in Chicago’s Loop, built by Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912) and John Wellborn Root (1850-1891) during the explosion of innovation that followed the great fire of 1871.

Under pressure to rebuild the city quickly, the group of architects we now call the “Chicago School” mastered the techniques of building high buildings on a swampy site, and in doing so virtually invented the skyscraper.

The Rookery is externally conventional:  above the second storey its outside walls are entirely load-bearing masonry.  On the inside, however, the central light-court is framed by cast-iron columns, wrought-iron spandrels and steel beams.

Its spectacular atrium, lit by a glazed skylight roof and embellished by dramatic staircases to and above the mezzanine balcony, is one of the architectural wonders of Chicago.

It was modernised in 1905 by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), who encased Root’s elaborately ornamental wrought iron and terracotta with gilded, incised white marble panels that picked up the carved ornament of Burnham & Root’s exterior.

Burnham & Root – before Root’s untimely death – and, later on, Frank Lloyd Wright each based their practices in the building.

A further, clumsy refurbishment in 1931 obscured much of the quality of the original designs, and in 1992 a careful restoration by McClier Architects brought back the full impact of its 1905 appearance.

Indeed, McClier left exposed one of Root’s cast-iron columns to show the contrast between the original design and Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical make-over.

The lobby of the Rookery Building is freely accessible to visitors, on regular tours, but the light court is less often seen:  http://www.therookerybuilding.com/building-features.html.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust offers tours of the Rookery Building on a regular basis –  http://gowright.org/visit/rookery.html – and the Chicago Architectural Foundation includes the Rookery in their rich programme of architectural experiences:  https://tickets.architecture.org/public/default.asp.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City: the architecture of Chicago please click here.

Right idea, wrong moment

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Oriel Chambers, Water Street, Liverpool

Oriel Chambers, Water Street, Liverpool

When I take groups around Liverpool city-centre, I pause in front of Oriel Chambers on Water Street, and invite people to guess the date of the building.  Most people get it wildly wrong, as I originally did, unless they’re sharp-eyed enough to spot the date high in the central gable.

Oriel Chambers is a tall, elegant office-block, its framework picked out in nail-headed stone mullions which frame the delicate cast-iron windows which give it its name.

It would do credit to an architect of the present generation:  in fact it was completed in 1864 by a virtually unknown architect, Peter Ellis Jnr (1804-1884), who for his pains was virtually laughed out of the profession.

Its inner courtyard (inaccessible to the public), faced with cantilevered iron cladding, even more uncompromisingly anticipates the Modern Movement.   Except for one other framed building a couple of streets away, 16 Cook Street (1866), Ellis built hardly anywhere else.

Oriel Chambers is also significant in engineering history because Peter Ellis installed the first ever example of a paternoster lift:  https://madeupinbritain.uk/Paternoster.

The Builder pompously dismissed Oriel Chambers out of hand:

The plainest brick warehouse in town is infinitely superior as a building to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles in Water Street termed Oriel Chambers.   Did we not see this vast abortion – which would be depressing were it not ludicrous – with our own eyes, we should have doubted the possibility of its existence.  Where and in what are their beauties [sic] supposed to lie?

Ellis’ obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post (October 24th 1884) describes him as an architect and surveyor “held in high esteem by the members of his own profession” without mentioning a single building or design.

It’s possible, however, that Ellis’ genius had a distant flowering.

After the fall of Atlanta in 1864, an American planter with Liverpool business connections, Simon Root, sent his son to Liverpool for the duration of the American Civil War.  The son was John Wellborn Root (1850-1891), who returned to the USA and became one of the leaders of the Chicago School of architects, responsible for the development of iron- and steel-framed buildings and the birth of the skyscraper in New York and Chicago .

1860s Liverpool wasn’t a big place by modern expectations.  It’s likely that the young Root noticed Ellis’ buildings and the fireproof warehouses that Jesse Hartley and George Fosbery Lyster had built along the river front.

There’s no proof, but there’s a strong likelihood that the magnificent achievement of the Chicago School of architects may have a root in the Liverpool buildings that contemporary architects didn’t give the time of day.

The first monograph on the life and work of Peter Ellis is Robert Ainsworth & Graham Jones, In the Footsteps of Peter Ellis (Liverpool History Society 2013).

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

Flat-pack churches

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St George's Church, Everton, Liverpool

St George’s Church, Everton, Liverpool

The idea of prefabricating architectural bits and pieces for export to the colonies predates the Victorian period.

There was a remarkable collaboration between Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), who became Professor of Architecture at the Liverpool Academy, and John Cragg (1767-1854), the owner of the Mersey Iron Foundry, who was described by a contemporary as “a remarkable man to whom I cannot find a single gracious allusion on anybody’s part”.

Rickman is the archaeological scholar who worked out the chronology of medieval churches, and gave us the expressions ‘Norman’, ‘Early English’ and ‘Decorated’:  [See ‘Buried Lives’ in Barton-on-Humber].

The pair collaborated on three pilot projects in Liverpool:  one, St Philip, Hardman Street, has long gone;  the other two survive as distinctive monuments to nineteenth-century innovation.

At St George’s Church, Everton (1812-14), though the external walls and the tower are stone, the whole of the interior structure – columns, roof-beams, braces and panels – and the window-tracery are of delicate, finely-detailed castings.

The same moulds were also used in Cragg’s own neighbourhood when they built St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Toxteth (1814-15), where the walls are brick (at one time stuccoed), and all the external architectural detail, such as pinnacles and copings, is also of iron.

Thomas Rickman felt confident that churches could be constructed on these lines for no more than £6,000 each.  In fact, when John Cragg built St Michael-in-the-Hamlet at his own expense, the total outlay using the moulds from St George’s came to £7,865.

Though cast-iron tracery and other ecclesiastical decoration is not uncommon in early-nineteenth century churches and other Gothic Revival buildings, I’ve never come across any reference to recognisable examples of Rickman’s designs for the Mersey Iron Foundry turning up anywhere outside England.

Perhaps somewhere, in a distant land, there’s a church or chapel built from the same kit as the two Liverpool churches.

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.

Victorian lace

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Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia

Victorian Society study-days are an excellent way of learning about architecture and art from acknowledged experts, and I particularly enjoyed Function and Fantasy:  decorative iron and Victorian architecture at the Art Workers’ Guild on March 24th 2012.

The leader, Paul Dobraszczyk, author of the fascinating book Into the Belly of the Beast (Spire 2009), fielded a high-performance team of specialists on iron-founding, railways, the seaside, prefabricated iron buildings for export and conservation.

From the outset, Paul made it clear that in the Victorian age cast-iron was particularly exciting because it was the first completely new building-material for several hundred years.  There were structural problems involved in using cast- and wrought-iron, many of which were eventually resolved as cheap steel became available towards the end of the nineteenth century.

When we recognise the innovatory qualities of a material we now take for granted it’s easier to understand the sheer exuberance of the Victorians’ use of decorative ironwork in every kind of structure from shop-fronts to fountains, bandstands to urinals.

I was interested to hear David Mitchell, who spoke about Scottish iron-foundries, firmly knock on the head the legend that the decorative ironwork which Australians call “lace” was exported from the UK as ships’ ballast.  No-one in their right mind would use such a material simply as dead weight.

The more likely truth is that the Australians used pig-iron ballast to cast the ironwork which embellished so many of their nineteenth-century houses, pubs and public buildings.

For details of future Victorian Society events, see http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/events.

 

Celebrating King’s Cross

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King's Cross Station, London: departures concourse roof

King’s Cross Station, London: departures concourse roof

At last the new concourse for London’s King’s Cross Station has opened, elegantly spanning the space between the west wall of Cubitt’s trainshed and the gentle curve of the Great Northern Hotel.

It’s a spectacular uninterrupted space, spanned by John McAslan’s semi-circular geometrically interesting roof, easy to navigate if you’re in a hurry, with space to sit and wait above the throng.

The considerable challenge of linking and respecting the contrasting architecture of the two Victorian stations, King’s Cross and St Pancras, is met in an unequivocally twenty-first-century manner.

It used to be so different.  Not that many years ago, nobody hung around King’s Cross unless they were deeply naïve or even more deeply dodgy.

It could have been so very different, if the best-laid plans of local authorities and commercial developers had ever been fulfilled.

Henry Porter, in an article in The Observer (March 25th 2012) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/henry-porter-kings-cross-new-concourse?INTCMP=SRCH], describes how a succession of financially-driven schemes came to grief in a succession of economic downturns, and how the persistence of local activists, led by the King’s Cross Railway Lands Group [http://www.kxrlg.org.uk], led the way towards a community-based solution.

His main message is that “the wisdom of citizens should routinely count for much more than it does in British planning, because it is always local people who understand the aspirations of their community and the way their particular public spaces work”.

The King’s Cross Railway Lands Group is monitoring what looks like a signal success:  the block across the Euston Road from King’s Cross Station is the subject of an incompletely thought-out proposal, and the Group continues to challenge the designs to replace the 1970s frontispiece of Cubitt’s station after the Olympics.

There is no final victory in the campaign to protect the environment, but there are successes.

And this is a moment to be grateful that groups such as the King’s Cross Railway Lands Group plug away for decades at a time, even when the chances of success look most slender.

Earlier blog-articles about King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations are Built around beer barrels, Midland Grand, King’s Cross and Midland Grand renaissance.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.

 

Resurgam

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St Martin's Church, Coney Street, York

St Martin’s Church, Coney Street, York

The church of St Martin, Coney Street (otherwise known as St Martin-le-Grand) is a familiar and much-loved York landmark because of its overhanging clock surmounted by the figure known as the “Little Admiral”.

The actual clock is mounted in the tower, and the hands are turned by a drive-shaft that runs the length of the building.

The clock, the dials and the Little Admiral were restored in order to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the “Baedeker” blitz which gutted the church and the Guildhall nearby, along with the railway station and the Bar Convent, and killed some 79 people on the night of April 28th-29th 1942.

St Martin’s is a mid-fourteenth century rebuilding of an earlier building, and it traditionally gained prestige from its proximity to the Guildhall and the Mansion House.

After the War, the decision was taken to rebuild only the south aisle of the gutted church, keeping the rest of the shell as a memorial garden.

The outstanding restoration was carried out by George G Pace (1915-1975) between 1961 and 1968, and the church was rededicated as “a shrine of remembrance for all who died in the two world wars, a chapel of peace and reconciliation between nations and between men”.

The stained glass of 1437, which had been removed from the west window before the bombing, was installed in the new north transept:  it depicts the life of St Martin.

The east window, in contrast, dates from c1965 and shows the night of the bombing.  It was designed by the artist Harry Stammers (1902-1969), instigator of the York School of Glaziers after the Second World War.

There is a well-illustrated description of the building at http://www.yorkstories.co.uk/churches/st_martin_le_grand_york.php and a detailed history of St Martin’s and its sister church, St Helen Stonegate, at St Helen with St Martin, York | Brief history of St Martin (sthelenwithstmartinyork.org.uk)

There are oral testimonies of the Baedeker Blitz in York at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-17872823.

The parish has a ministry of peace and reconciliation, affirmed by the coincidence that the feast day of St Martin is November 11th.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York 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.

Lead, Kindly Light

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All Saints' Church, Pavement, York

All Saints’ Church, Pavement, York

York has churches to spare.  There were forty-five of them in 1300.  Nineteen of these still stand, though only eight are used for worship.

They’re worth seeking out, because most have hidden treasures, and many have been so much altered that they are fascinating archaeological jigsaws.

Perhaps the most distinctive is All Saints’, Pavement, which stands higher than the surrounding streets, directly aligned on the Ouse Bridge.  Its lantern tower was an inland lighthouse, guiding travellers through the Forest of Galtres towards the city.  Now it’s lit as a war memorial.

Though the present building dates from the fourteenth century, the site has been used for worship for much longer – possibly back to the time of St Cuthbert c685 AD.  There was certainly a church in existence by the time of Domesday Book (1086).

This was an imposing cruciform church, with transepts and an aisled chancel, until the east end was demolished for road-widening in 1782.

It now contains the 1634 pulpit from which John Wesley once preached, as well as the fifteenth-century lectern and the 1688 Royal Arms from the nearby lost church of St Crux, which became structurally unsound and was demolished in the 1880s [http://allsaintschurchpavementyork.co.uk/StCrux.aspx].

The stained glass ranges in date from the fourteenth-century west window (transferred from the church of St Saviour), to four Victorian windows by Charles Kempe and a modern addition of 2002.

All Saints’ is the Guild and Civic church, with a ministry for the shops and businesses of the city-centre, and the regimental church of the Royal Dragoon Guards.

The parish clergy and congregation take pride in welcoming visitors.  There is a website at http://allsaintschurchpavementyork.co.uk/default.aspx, but it’s not necessarily up to date:  current services are posted at http://www.achurchnearyou.com/venue.php?V=18961.

There’s a positive “mystery worshipper” report at http://ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2009/1686.html.  The choir and the chocolate biscuits are particularly commended.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York 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.

Unfinished symphony

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York Minster (1979)

York Minster (1979)

York Minster is a symphony in stone – Tadcaster stone, actually.  The great church dominates the city from a distance and when you glimpse it through the streetscape.  It tells you where you are as you walk round the city walls, and it tells you where you’ve arrived when you pass north on the train.

The Yorkshire:  York and the East Riding volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of England comments, “it tells us a more consistent and complete story of the Gothic styles in England than any other cathedral”.

Throughout what we now call the Middle Ages it was a building site, rebuilt not once but twice between c1230 and c1472.  That’s as if we were now to see the completion of a building begun the year Captain Cook discovered Australia.

It’s likely that its builders at some point intended it to be bigger and even more dominant than it is.

Misjudgements in rebuilding work in 1407 caused the collapse of the central tower, which contained a belfry.

The replacement central tower is an oddity.  It’s only two feet higher, at 198 feet, than the western towers, which were built in the same period (south-west, 1432-56; north-west, 1470-4).

It has an oddly truncated appearance, abruptly cut off above the great windows which light the crossing within.

It seems unlikely that this huge structure would have been built simply to act as an empty lantern, but it’s never had a belfry:  the Minster’s bells have hung in the south-west tower ever since it was built.

Perhaps the fifteenth-century builders got nervous about the foundations, and decided that a peal of bells swinging around two hundred feet up might not be a good idea.

If so, their judgement was sound, as became clear in the mid-twentieth century when active settlement around the central crossing required a vast stabilisation programme, directed by Dr Bernard Feilden, between 1967 and 1972.

Huge medieval spires had a poor track-record.  Lincoln Cathedral used to be the tallest building in the world:  it had a 524-foot spire until it blew down in a storm in 1549.  The 493-foot spire of London’s Old St Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed by lightning in 1561.

It’s interesting to gaze at York Minster from a distance and visualise it with a taller central tower and perhaps a spire.  Even if they had been built it’s unlikely they would have lasted.

As with Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony”, we must be grateful for what we have.

Tourists are charged admission to York Minster [see http://www.yorkminster.org/visiting/opening-times-prices/], with the customary concession that you can enter free of charge to pray or light a candle.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York 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.

Flicks in the sticks

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The Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

The Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire

Photo:  Janet Miles

The March/April 2012 edition of the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin mentions the then forthcoming ninetieth anniversary of the Kinema-in-the-Woods, Woodhall Spa – one of the most eccentric and evocative film-going experiences in England.

The Pavilion Cinema opened in a converted cricket pavilion in 1922 and only later became known as the Kinema-in-the-Woods.  It has always retained the original Greek spelling, derived from the word for ‘motion’.

The building started out as a cricket pavilion, and because the roof supports are integral to the structure, films have always been shown by back-projection of surprising clarity.

According to a 1937 advertisement, “while furnished with comfortable plush seats, deck chairs and cushions are provided for those who appreciate them”.  The deck chairs on the front six rows were priced at 1s 6d, threepence dearer than the best fixed seats in the house.

The Kinema was operated for half a century by its founder, Major C C Allport:  when he applied for his fiftieth licence in 1972 the magistrates waived the fee.

By the 1980s it had become a precious survival, and its next owner, James Green, installed the Compton organ from the Super Cinema, Charing Cross Road, to provide concerts in addition to current-release movies.  Its console is mounted on the lift from the former Regent Cinema, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent.

Now there is a second screen, Kinema Too, opened in 1994, to complement the original auditorium and offer a wider variety of films.

Woodhall Spa is an unlikely spot to see first-release movies.  But after all, Woodhall Spa is an unlikely spot.

The history of the Kinema-in-the-Woods can be found in Edward Roy Mayor, The Kinema in the Woods: the story of Woodhall Spa’s unique cinema (J W Green Cinemas 2002) and at http://www.thekinemainthewoods.co.uk/history.