Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Tunnel under the Mersey

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Mersey Tunnel Queensway: Central Avenue

Mersey Tunnel Queensway: Central Avenue

When you drive through the two Mersey tunnels, the 1934 Queensway and the 1971 Kingsway, you’re being watched – and cared for – by a small team of professionals, many cameras and, in Queensway, a great deal of 1930s over-engineering.

The Mersey Tunnel Tour is the public’s opportunity to see behind the scenes of Queensway, and to understand that it’s much more than a hole in the ground.

The tour takes visitors from the top of the George’s Dock Building, which is essentially an elegant Art Deco fan-assisted chimney with an office block attached, to the safety refuges below the road-deck.  And, of course, back to the surface.

It’s a moderately strenuous two hours, and because the ventilation station is a dusty, though not dirty working building, it’s a good idea to go dressed for gardening rather than tourism.  (On the 2011 Liverpool’s Heritage tour, we came straight from St George’s Hall and may have been a little over-dressed.)

The 1920s designers couldn’t be sure how the finished tunnel would work practically.  At the time it was the longest under-river bore in the world.  Furthermore, traffic was changing as horse-drawn carts and electric trams began to give way to motor vehicles.

In these circumstances, especially in a two-way tunnel, ventilation was crucial, and could not be skimped.  The later Kingsway is in fact two unidirectional bores, so the traffic itself acts as a piston, pushing foul air through.  Queensway has six ventilation stations;  Kingsway needs only two.  In each case, the fresh air has to be pumped in at either end:  after all, there’s a river in the middle.

The party-piece on the tour is to see one of the 22ft-diameter fans start up, high in the George’s Dock building.  These are the original 1934 fans, built into the building.  Even at the lowest of four speed-settings, they’re distinctly draughty.

And they work.  When you stand beside the traffic lanes below the river, the air is remarkably fresh.

Another resonant experience is to stand below the road-deck on Central Avenue, an empty corridor intended for double-deck electric trams to connect the Liverpool and Birkenhead systems.

The original specification assumed that the road tunnels would carry 3,000 vehicles per hour, travelling at an average speed of 15mph while maintaining a distance of 100ft apart in four lanes.  Down below, an endless procession of double-deck trams, each carrying perhaps sixty people, could have shifted many more thousands.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

In a different age of faster, cleaner road vehicles with far better brakes than between the Wars the ventilation system has a much easier time, yet carries enough capacity to cope with any foreseeable emergency such as a blockage or fire.

One of the benefits of the Mersey Tunnel Tour is the reassurance of seeing how efficiently motorists are looked after if the traffic in the tunnel stops in its tracks.

Not that most people give an emergency a second thought as they breeze between Liverpool and the Wirral, listening to their car radios.  And not realising why they can use their radio in the tunnel.

Booking a Mersey Tunnel tour requires premeditation:  e-mail to tours@merseytravel.gov.uk.

For further background information on the Queensway Tunnel, see http://www.cbrd.co.uk/indepth/queenswaytunnel.

Eat your way round North Yorkshire

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High Street, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire

High Street, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire

When my mate Richard and I have a day out we take it in turns to choose the itinerary.  He took it into his head he’d never been to Pateley Bridge, west of Ripon:  in fact he had, as he realised when we got there, and it’s a delightful little town, the geographical centre of Nidderdale, with a few historic buildings and more to eat than you could possibly ever consume.

We had lunch at the Crown Hotel [http://www.nidderdale.co.uk/crownhotel], where the Persian lamb turned out to be Persian beef and was none the worse for the metamorphosis, though I wonder how many cows there are in what used to be Persia.

Richard’s wife Janet had asked him to bring her back “something interesting”, and we were spoiled for choice.  At Kendall’s butchers [http://www.kendallsfarmbutchers.co.uk/Contact] he found pork, turkey, stuffing and apple pie (all in one pie, naturally), and I treated myself to the pork and blue cheese alternative.  I’d have had the pork and mushy peas pies that we saw on our way up the hill, but by the time we came down again they’d all been snaffled.

Down the hill, at Weatherhead’s butchers [http://www.nidderdale.co.uk/weatherheads], I couldn’t resist the pork, chilli and chocolate sausages, the pork, spring onion and ginger burgers and a batch of chicken cushions with cream cheese and chorizo filling.

We admired the Oldest Sweetshop in England [http://www.oldestsweetshop.co.uk – the building dated 1661 and the shop founded in 1827 – but we didn’t indulge:  Richard is an ex-dentist and I decided I’d done enough present and future damage to my waistline.

Pateley Bridge is bristling with red plaques pointing out the local history features, and the Nidderdale Museum is based in the former workhouse:  http://www.nidderdalemuseum.com/index.asp.  Neither of the two churches, the older, ruined St Mary’s or its 1825-7 replacement, St Cuthbert’s is remarkable;  indeed, the most exciting building is the former Board School of 1875, now St Cuthbert’s Primary School, dominated by a tower bristling with turrets and gargoyles.

We chose to resist the temptation to visit the Old Bakehouse [8 High St – 01423 711189], though the piles of pastries looked well worth sampling, and drove across to Ripon to work up an appetite for tea.

There we fell upon the Wakeman’s House Café [http://www.ripon-internet.com/local-businesses/858/the-wakemans-house-cafe.html] where we calculated it’d take a fortnight to get through the cake cabinet.

I completed my Christmas shopping at Drinkswell [http://www.drinkswell.co.uk], which stocks every imaginable sort of alcohol from bottles of quality beer to malt whisky at silly prices.  I chose three-packs of beer.

To end the day we wandered around Ripon Cathedral [http://www.riponcathedral.org.uk] in the dusk – quiet, welcoming, virtually empty and beautifully lit.

Magic.

 

Thanks to bingo

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Former Regent Theatre, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Former Regent Theatre, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

I’m indebted to Ian Hardy, of Great Yarmouth Borough Council, for prompting me to seek out the former Regent Theatre on Regent Street, now Mecca Bingo.

Tracy Utting, the Manager, was very willing to allow my Norfolk’s Seaside Heritage tour-group to visit before the club opened, and her colleague Kerry took great trouble to show us as much as possible of the historic parts of the building.

The Regent has a sophisticated classical façade, with huge Ionic columns and a Diocletian window;  within is an impressive staircase, now altered, the former café with an extensive plaster frieze of putti and garlands, and the auditorium which is decorated with rococo plasterwork, with boxes supported by cast-iron columns.

It was built in 1914 for Francis Holmes Cooper, a Wisbech estate-agent who owned a chain of theatres and cinemas across East Anglia, most if not all of them designed, like the Yarmouth Regent, by Francis Burdett Ward.  It closed as a cinema in September 1982, and ever since has operated as a bingo club.

The bingo industry has proved a magnificent custodian for so much of Britain’s entertainment heritage.  From the Blackpool Grand Theatre to the Wakefield Opera House, from the Grade I Tooting Granada Cinema in South London, still operating as a bingo club, to the magnificently restored Stockport Plaza Cinema – any or all of these might not have survived without the proceeds of bingo to keep the building going.

Kerry, as she showed us everywhere from the boxes to the basement (still containing an industrial-sized stove for the café above), remarked that very few people other than club members ever set foot in the building.

Yarmouth people may have forgotten it exists.  If and when the bingo moves on, the Regent will need a new purpose.

It’s too good to lose.

Update:  Mecca closed their operation at the Regent “at the end of 2011”.  It reopens as Stars Showbar and Nightclub in April 2014:  http://starsgy.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Fishy business

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Former Royal Aquarium, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Former Royal Aquarium, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

The Hollywood Cinema on Great Yarmouth’s seafront commemorates a time when local businessmen hoped to make money out of people watching fish.

Yarmouth entrepreneurs hoped to build on the success of the Brighton Aquarium of 1872 by offering “aquaria exhibitions, combined with attractions of a more special and amusing nature” which meant restaurants, billiard rooms, croquet lawns and a skating rink in what a modern journalist described as “a grotesque mock Gothic cathedral of leisure”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, less than half the required £50,000 capital was forthcoming, and the London promoters of the Great Yarmouth & Eastern Counties Aquarium Company pulled out, leaving local shareholders to lower their sights and open a more modest facility which failed to attract visitors.

A contemporary commented that “wretched management was not an unimportant factor”:  the magistrates’ refusal of a drama licence was unhelpful;  apart from watching the fish which – to be fair – included sharks, giant crabs, conger eels, turtles, porpoises and octopi, with crocodiles, alligators and seals in large ponds, the entertainments on offer were the skating rink, military bands, refreshments and a reading room.  The Prince of Wales visited in 1881.  The place closed down in 1882.

The building reopened as the Royal Aquarium, extended at the cost of a further £10,000, in 1883.  The major asset of the reopened building was its new manager, an Edgware Road caterer, John William Nightingale.  He engaged such crowd-pulling celebrities as Sir Ernest Shackleton, Oscar Wilde, General William Booth and David Lloyd George.

There’s clearly limited demand for gazing at fish.  The Scarborough People’s Palace & Aquarium of 1875-7 [see Scarborough’s Rotunda] ultimately became an amusement arcade.

J W Nightingale became a power in the Great Yarmouth entertainment industry:  by the time of his death in 1911, he had purchased the Royal Aquarium, bought and replaced the old wooden Britannia Pier and also owned the Theatre Royal, the Royal Assembly Rooms and the Royal and Victoria Hotels.

In 1925 the Aquarium tanks were stripped out and a second “Little Theatre” auditorium added.

In a further refurbishment in 1970, the remaining evidence of the original Aquarium decoration briefly came to light.  In what had been the Grand Saloon, 193 feet by 60 feet, Doulton tiling depicting freshwater birds on one side and sea-birds on the other was found in situ, and a bread-oven was discovered in the basement, extending thirty feet under Euston Road.

When I ran the Norfolk’s Seaside Heritage tour in September 2011 I asked the manager, Paul Allen, if there was any possibility of seeing these remains.

Understandably he was disinclined to rip up the floorboards on a Saturday morning.

One day in the future, when this long-lived building is adapted to yet another use, vestigial remains of its original purpose will once again see daylight.

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.

Canterbury tolls

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Canterbury Cathedral, Kent

Canterbury Cathedral, Kent

I visited Canterbury for the first time in my life last month, and the only reason I didn’t visit the Cathedral was because it would have cost me £8.00 to get in and I had less than an hour.

Charging people to visit places of worship turns them into tourist shrines.  Originally they were shrines for believers.

The huge cost of building the great churches and monasteries in the Middle Ages was covered by milking pilgrims to supplement donations from the great, the good and the not-so-good.

According to the journalist Alex Kirby, writing in The Times (February 4th 2012), twelve of the forty-four major places of worship in the Association of British Cathedrals charge the public for entry outside service times.

Mr Ben Fuller, in a letter to The Times following Alex Kirby’s article (February 6th), makes the suggestion that the Association (which embraces major Anglican, Catholic and Methodist places of worship) should operate a membership-card scheme like the National Trust and English Heritage.

He points out that Church of England members are irked at having to pay to visit their own diocesan cathedral.

They could receive cards as evidence of their subscribing membership of the Church, while other believers as well as faithless tourists would have a ready means of contributing to the upkeep of these venerable and expensive buildings.

This in turn might increase what retailers call “footfall”, which would swell the takings in the restaurants and souvenir stalls that places of worship generally provide.

And those of us who like sometimes to sit in a church to think and reflect – without taking part in a service or making any fuss – could do so with a clear conscience.

Update:  Mr Brian Gant followed up Ben Fuller’s letter in the February 7th edition of The Times, pouring cold water on the idea of a National Trust-style membership card because it “would probably not contribute a large enough sum of money to individual buildings to enable them to abolish entry charges unless there was a very considerable take-up of membership”.  Of course!  The whole idea is to get more people into churches.  Charging them nearly £10 a time isn’t a particularly promising approach, especially for families and the less affluent.

The Church of England isn’t noted for its success in encouraging increasing numbers of worshippers through its doors in recent decades.  The National Trust, on the other hand, has proved to be a roaring success.  Both institutions add immeasurably to the spiritual and emotional wealth of the country, uplifting citizens and visitors alike.

It’s a pity the Church isn’t as enterprising as the Trust.

Further update:  In the February 9th edition of The Times there were two further letters, from the Very Rev Charles Taylor, Dean of Peterborough, showing that it is possible to maintain free public access to a great religious building and from Scirard Lancelyn Green providing figures suggesting that the economic cost of a casual visit to a cathedral, stripped of parochial subsidy, is in the region of £10 per head.

 

Drift into Dent

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Dent Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria

Dent Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria

Dent Station on the Settle & Carlisle railway is the highest main-line railway station in England.  It stands 1,150 feet above sea level.  Its remoteness is such that it lies four miles from the village of Dent, six hundred feet below in the dale.  The site is so bleak that the stationmaster’s house was built with integral double-glazing.

The stretch of line to beyond the summit at Ais Gill (1,168 feet) was notoriously difficult to keep open in snow.  The trackside snow-fences of wooden railway sleepers are a gaunt reminder, even at the height of summer, of conditions in the worst of winter.

In 1947 the drifts reached to the road bridge north of the station platforms and took three weeks to clear.

There is a story, related in the Settle-Carlisle Partnership website [http://www.settle-carlisle.co.uk/stations/dent/storyinfo.cfm?c_Stn=004] of a signalman dying in the Dent signalbox, and his relief laying him on top of the locker until they were relieved at the end of the shift.

After the station buildings were sold in 1985 Neil Ambrose spent twenty years restoring the down-side building.  In 2006 a quantity surveyor, Robin Hughes, bought it for £250,000 and spent a further £150,000 upgrading the interior as holiday accommodation for six.

The adjacent Snow Hut, provided as a base for the track workers who battled, often unsuccessfully, to keep the line open in winter, is now a studio bunk barn for two (or, at a pinch, three).

Details of Dent Station and the Snow Hut are at http://www.dentstation.co.uk/index.php.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Get off at Garsdale

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Garsdale Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria: Ruswarp statue

Garsdale Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria: Ruswarp statue

There’s really no other reason to get off the train at Garsdale except to go walking in the wild scenery.  There are numerous round walks of varying degrees of difficulty starting from the station.

Nevertheless, Garsdale Station has numerous claims to fame.

Opened with the Settle & Carlisle Railway in 1876, it was originally known as Hawes Junction, because it was the starting-point of the branch line up Wensleydale to Hawes and onwards to Northallerton.  The branch closed to passengers in 1964 and was dismantled west of Redmire.  There are plans eventually to reopen the entire line.

A locomotive depot was planned at Garsdale but never built.  It proved easier to bring banking engines up the line than to service them in such a remote spot:  indeed, the locos would routinely have frozen solid.  The 40,000-gallon water-tower that fed the highest railway water-troughs in the world was steam heated, and its base was used as the village hall with a 200-volume library.  The waiting room was regularly used for church services.

Garsdale was also the location of a legendary incident in 1900 when the wind caught a locomotive on the turntable and spun it uncontrollably until the crew poured sand into the pit.  As a result, a timber stockade was afterwards built round the turntable.  The actual turntable is now installed at Keighley.

Hawes Junction was the site of a collision between a northbound express and two light engines on Christmas Eve 1910, caused by a signalling error, which killed nine people.  The signalman, when he realised the collision was inevitable, instructed his colleague, “Go and tell the station master that I am afraid I have wrecked the Scotch Express.”

The station closed, along with almost all the others on the line, in 1970, and reopened from 1975 to serve the Dalesrail trains by which the Yorkshire Dales National Park and other bodies regenerated the line in the face of government opposition.

The up platform of Garsdale Station has a memorial to Ruswarp (pronounced “Russup”) the border collie which along with 22,265 people registered an objection to the closure of the railway in the 1980s.  As a regular fare-paying passenger the dog was permitted to register an objection with a paw-print.

Named after a railway viaduct and a station near Whitby, Ruswarp was the companion of Graham Nuttall, one of the founders of the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line.  Graham and Ruswarp went walking in the mountains above Llandrindod Wells in January 1990 and did not return:  Ruswarp was found, guarding his master’s body, eleven weeks later.  The fourteen-year-old dog was so weak he had to be carried from the mountain:  cared for by a local vet, Ruswarp lived long enough to attend Graham Nuttall’s funeral.

On April 11th 2009, twenty years to the day after the line was reprieved, the statue of Ruswarp, by the sculptor JOEL, was unveiled.  Ruswarp is shown gazing across the line to the bench that commemorates his master.

Mark Rand, chairman of the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle line, told the Daily Telegraph [August 29th 2008], “Having a statue there of Ruswarp will symbolise not only the successful fight to save the line but also the loyalty of man’s best friend…This is the silver lining to a very bitter-sweet story.”

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Halfway to the clouds

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Great Orme Tramway, Llandudno: car 6

Great Orme Tramway, Llandudno: car 6

Llandudno’s Great Orme Tramway [Tramffordd y Gogarth] is the only British example of a street-running funicular railway.  It is completely unlike the San Francisco cable-cars, because its trams work in two pairs, permanently fixed to a winding cable.

It opened in two sections, the lower half on July 31st 1902, and the summit section on July 8th 1903.  The winding house was steam-powered from 1902 to 1958, and since then the cables have been electrically hauled.

The lower section of the Great Orme Tramway looks like its San Francisco cousins, because the cable is concealed for much of its length under the roadway in a conduit slot between the running rails.  The upper section, above the half-way winding house, runs on railway track, and the complex arrangement of cables and rails is visible.

Until 1991 the tramway had an overhead trolley-wire solely to carry the telephone-system so that tram-drivers could communicate with the engineman.  Now the communication-system is radio-operated and the trolley poles, which convinced some visitors that this was an electric tramway, are entirely cosmetic.

The line is operated by four trams, 4 and 5 on the lower section and 6 and 7 on the upper:  the first three numbers were taken by jockey-cars, propelled by the cable-connected trams and manhandled along loop tracks between the two sections.  Cars no 1, 2 and 3 were wagons for carrying coal for the boiler house and coffins to St Tudno’s Church:  all three disappeared before 1930.

There has been only one fatal accident:  the drawbar on No 4 snapped on August 23rd 1932, killing the brakesman and a little girl he tried to rescue by jumping from the car.  In 1963 a retired GOT employee revealed to Ivor Wynne Jones [Llandudno:  Queen of Welsh resorts (Landmark 2002)] that the Board of Trade inspector was deceived into thinking the emergency brake worked at the time of his inspection on July 30th 1902.

As a result of compensation claims amounting to £14,000, the original Great Orme Tramway Company went bankrupt, and after a completely new and still effective safety system had been designed for the lower section, a new Great Orme Railway Company was formed in 1934.

The Llandudno Urban District Council compulsorily purchased the tramway in 1949;  the UDC was absorbed by Aberconwy Borough Council in 1974.

After a collision between cars 6 and 7 on April 30th 2000, when the facing points at the loop malfunctioned, injuring seventeen passengers, the entire tramway was closed and refurbished, with an induction-loop system that electronically locates each car on a monitor in the central control-room, and the system was fully operational in time for its centenary in 2002.

Another accident occurred in 2009, when cars 6 and 7 collided as a result of a further points failure on the passing loop:  http://www.raib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/100816_R132010_Great_Orme.pdf.

It’s worth the ride, not only for the vintage travel-experience but also for the views from the top of the Great Orme.  Having blown away the cobwebs at the summit, the smart advice is to return to the Victoria Tram Station and visit Fish Tram Chips alongside:  http://www.thebestof.co.uk/local/llandudno/business-guide/feature/fish-tram-chips/24034.

The most recent history of the tramway is Keith Turner, The Great Orme Tramway – over a century of service (Gwasag Carreg Gwalch 2003).  The tramway website is at
http://www.greatormetramway.com.

 

Where Gladstone became dizzy

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Great Orme, Llandudno

Great Orme, Llandudno

The connection between Llandudno and Alice in Wonderland is never knowingly undersold – http://www.wonderland.co.uk/llandudno and http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/tauspace/llandudno.htm and http://www.attractionsnorthwales.co.uk/news/324/llandudno-s-connections-with-alice-in-wonderland – even though it’s entirely spurious.

Dean Henry Liddell, father of the real Alice, purchased an unpromising plot on the West Shore from the Mostyn Estate and built an elaborate Gothic villa which he called Penmorfa, “the end of the shore”.

The house was completed in 1862:  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was inspired to write Alice in Wonderland by a boat-trip on the River Isis near Oxford on July 4th 1862, and completed his manuscript in February 1863;  there is no record of him visiting Llandudno during that period.

This didn’t prevent the construction of the white-marble statue of Alice, unveiled by David Lloyd George in 1933.  Strenuous attempts to protect this twee souvenir from vandalism eventually led to its removal to the middle of a lake:  http://www.northwalesweeklynews.co.uk/conwy-county-news/local-conwy-news/2011/06/30/llandudno-s-alice-in-wonderland-statue-to-moved-to-a-safer-location-55243-28963871.

There’s a much better story about Alice Liddell than anything to do with Lewis Carroll.

When the Liddells first came to Llandudno the only route around the Great Orme was a precipitous walkway called Cust’s Path, built in 1856-8.  This was so vertiginous that when he came to stay at Penmorfa W E Gladstone had to be blindfolded and led to safety by Dean Liddell and his family, including Alice.

Cust’s Path was adapted for road vehicles between 1872 and 1878 as the four-mile Marine Drive.  Building it wiped out the last remaining cave-dwelling on the Great Orme, occupied by Isaiah and Miriam Jones.  Isaiah was famous for having attempted to fly using seagull’s wings attached to his arms:  his wife nursed him to a full recovery and he lived into his eighties.

She lived to the age of 91, dying in 1910, and protested that having brought up thirteen children in a cave she disliked the more modern accommodation she was given in compensation for her eviction.  From her Welsh name, Miriam yr Ogof, “Miriam of the Cave”, her many descendants are still nicknamed ’R’ogo.

You can ride round the Marine Drive in a vintage coach [http://www.alpine-travel.co.uk/vintagecoaches.htm], drive round it on payment of a toll, or walk.  Half way round is the Rest-and-be-thankful Café:  http://www.restandbethankful.net.

You can even stay at the Lighthouse, built by the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board in 1862 and now a sumptuous bed-and-breakfast guest-house:  http://www.lighthouse-llandudno.co.uk.

Near the western end are the fragmentary remains of what was called Gogarth Abbey but is in fact the thirteenth-century palace of the Bishop of Bangor, Anian, his reward from King Edward I for baptising his eldest son, the first English Prince of Wales and later King Edward II.

Dean Liddell’s Penmorfa, which for years was the Gogarth Abbey Hotel, was demolished, despite protests, after a botched restoration attempt, in 2008:  see http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2008/11/20/llandudno-s-alice-in-wonderland-house-to-be-demolished-55578-22298706 and http://www.greatorme.org.uk/Trail13.html.

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.

Pier excellence

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Grand Hotel & Pier, Llandudno

Grand Hotel & Pier, Llandudno

Llandudno Pier is one of the finest unspoilt British piers, and it’s always been my favourite because it’s the one I remember, as a child, still in use for its original purposes.

Seaside piers were, after all, primarily landing stages, which quickly gained an entertainment function because they offered landlubber holidaymakers the experience of being out at sea without the inconvenience of sea-sickness.

The main section of the Llandudno Pier by the engineer James Brunlees, 1,200 feet long, opened on August 1st 1877.  The Baths, Reading Room and Billiard Hall alongside were reopened as the Baths Hotel in 1879, and a spur was added linking the Pier to the promenade in 1884.  Alongside this the Pier Pavilion, a huge glass structure 204 feet long and between 84 and 104 feet wide, was opened in September 1886.  Its basement contained a swimming pool 160 feet by 48 feet, then one of the largest in existence.

The Baths Hotel was replaced in 1900 by the existing Grand Hotel, designed by James Francis Doyle.  The Pier Pavilion, having stood derelict in the ownership of a developer who famously didn’t develop, was destroyed by fire on February 13th 1994:  [See http://llandudnoandcolwynbay.blogspot.com/2009/07/pier-pavilion-llandudno.html and http://llandudnoandcolwynbay.blogspot.com/2009/08/exploration.html].

When we stayed in Llandudno in the 1950s one of the highlights was a paddle-steamer trip from Llandudno Pier to Menai Bridge and back on one or other of the Liverpool & North Wales Steamship Company steamships, St Tudno or St Seiriol [http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/LNWSS3.html].

The trip, which we did on more than one occasion, included chugging round the enigmatically inaccessible Puffin Island, with its mysterious hill top tower, and gazing from Telford’s suspension bridge at the beached wreck of HMS Conway.

Puffin Island [Ynys Seiriol] was part of the Bulkeley family’s Baron Hill estate, of which the derelict Palladian house by Samuel Wyatt is illustrated at http://www.welshruins.co.uk/photo2076816.html and http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/10992-Baron-Hill-Mansion-Beaumaris-Jan-2011.

The tower forms part of the remains of one of the stations on the semaphore telegraph system that brought news of incoming ships from Holyhead to Liverpool [see Frank Large’s detailed study, Faster Than the Wind: A History of and a Guide to the Liverpool to Holyhead Telegraph (Avid 1998)].  More details of the island, and the opportunity to take a close look at it, are at http://www.photographers-resource.co.uk/locations/Routes/Islands/LG/Anglesey/Puffin_Island.htm.

What we knew as HMS Conway was originally HMS Nile, launched in 1839 and used as a Liverpool-based training vessel until, while being towed through the Menai Strait in 1953, she grounded and broke her back.  She was eventually destroyed by fire three years later.  A detailed account is at http://www.hmsconway.org/RootFolder/Assets/Home_Page.htm.

The Isle of Man Steam Packet Company maintained a tenuous steamer service to and from Llandudno Pier, and the celebrated PS Waverley and MV Balmoral made occasional visits until the landing stage was declared unsafe in 2007.

Nevertheless, the Pier itself appears to be in good order, and it’s an essential part of the Llandudno experience to stroll to the end of the pier, watch the fishermen and have either a cup of tea or an alcoholic drink in the bar, very much as the Victorian patrons would have done 130 years ago.

Descriptions of Llandudno Pier are at http://www.piers.org.uk/pierpages/NPSllandudno.html and http://the-pier.co.uk/llandudno-pier.

Blog-articles about other piers are at Lost resort in Yorkshire, Stars on the street, End of the pier show, Exploring Australia 10:  St Kilda and Wasting asset.

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.