Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

If it moves, charge it

Avoncliff Aqueduct, Kennet & Avon Canal, Wiltshire

Avoncliff Aqueduct, Kennet & Avon Canal, Wiltshire

It’s not easy to reach Avoncliff except, of course, on a boat.

South of Bradford-on-Avon the Kennet & Avon Canal follows the narrow valley of the River Avon.  Brunel’s Great Western Railway squeezes alongside John Rennie’s waterway and there are two tiny roads on each side of the valley, with no connection across the river.

Rennie carried the canal over the river on the stately Avoncliff Aqueduct, not perhaps his best advertisement because the sixty-foot main arch sagged very shortly after it was finished in 1798, yet it has stood ever since.

As early as 1803 heavy repairs were needed.  It seems that Rennie’s advice to use brick was disregarded to retain the goodwill of local quarry-owners who would bring trade to the completed canal.

In the course of restoring the entire canal, the aqueduct was made securely watertight with a concrete bed in 1980.

It’s not a good idea to take a car down the valley, especially on summer weekends.  Indeed, it’s inadvisable to take anything much bigger for lack of turning space.  There is a railway station, with a two-hour service between Bristol, Bath and Bradford-on-Avon, which is particularly useful if you want to walk the couple of miles along the canal from Bradford-on-Avon and then ride back.

Once you reach Avoncliff it’s a pleasant spot to while away the hours.  There’s an excellent historic pub, the Cross Guns [http://www.crossguns.net], which provides meals and refreshments, and usually something passing by along the canal.

This was not the case between the wars when, according to Kenneth Clew, the canal’s historian, most of the tolls collected at Bradford-on-Avon were cycle permits.  The toll-book also records a shilling toll “for carrying a corpse across the aqueduct at Avoncliff”.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn 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.

Live from Ferrymead

Radio Ferrymead, Christchurch, New Zealand

Radio Ferrymead, Christchurch, New Zealand

Ferrymead Heritage Park, Christchurch, New Zealand, portrays an early twentieth-century township, complete with trams, trolleybuses, buses, trains, a working cinema, shops and houses, populated with volunteers in costume.

It’s in the same genre as the British museums at Beamish [http://www.beamish.org.uk], the Black Country [http://www.bclm.co.uk]  and Blists Hill [http://www.ironbridge.org.uk/our_attractions/blists_hill_victorian_town], and reminds me of Old Sturbridge in Massachusetts [http://www.osv.org].

Its constitution is interesting:  because of its historical development [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrymead_Heritage_Park], Ferrymead is run by an umbrella trust and provides a home for a fascinating variety of independent societies, in the same way that some British rail and tramway museums offer homes to subsidiary groups [see Shunter Hunters].

Its transport exhibits include steam, diesel and electric trains, running on the trackbed of the first railway in the South Island (opened 1863, closed 1867, restored 1964 onwards), as well as tram and trolleybus services [http://www.ferrymeadtramway.org.nz/index.htm] and a magnificent aircraft display [http://www.ferrymead.org.nz/societies/aeronautical].

The museum has a convincingly scaled tiny picture house, a post office which accepts mail and a practical radio station that broadcasts on AM, using 78rpm, vinyl and cassette recordings for mature listeners.  When the station is on air, it’s possible to listen online at [http://www.radioferrymead.co.nz].

The museum escaped serious damage in the February 2011 earthquake [http://www.ferrymeadtramway.org.nz/news.htm], and is back in operation:  http://www.ferrymead.org.nz/index.html.

 

Do-it-yourself castle

Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, was furious when he failed to inherit the estate of Wentworth Woodhouse.

He bought the nearby Stainborough estate and had the family earldom revived in his favour.

Even after he’d tacked on to the existing house a grand baroque wing gazing east towards Wentworth Woodhouse he felt a need to impress his superiority over his Watson neighbours, so he built himself a ruined castle, Stainborough Castle, which its inscription describes as “rebuilt” in 1730.

Mining subsidence has made it even more of a ruin than Lord Strafford had intended, and it has in recent years been tidied up.

It’s the literal high spot of the longest walk round Wentworth Castle Gardens [http://www.wentworthcastle.org/view.asp?id=145], which takes in a sample of the other garden buildings that Lord Strafford and his son scattered about the estate – the Corinthian Temple, Archer’s Hill Gate and Lady Mary’s Obelisk which commemorates the bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her encouragement of inoculation against smallpox.

The restored garden has outstanding interpretation boards at regular intervals, so that it’s possible to understand the significance of near and distant features at leisure, strolling through a succession of small gardens, informal wildernesses and formal linear walks.

At a greater distance – up to four miles – there are walks around the park, taking in a greater series of monuments, including the Queen Anne Monument (1734), the Rotunda (1742-6) and the Duke of Argyle Monument.

Wentworth Castle Gardens has a superb visitor centre with a café and a programme of events throughout the year:  http://www.wentworthcastle.org/diary.asp.  Christmas is particularly attractive:  Santa feeds the deer, answers letters and hands out presents in his grotto, while parents are kept occupied with mulled wine.

There’s something for everybody, almost every day of the year.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  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.

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

Keeping up with the Wentworths

Wentworth Castle, South Yorkshire:  east front

Wentworth Castle, South Yorkshire: east front

Wentworth Woodhouse is but one of the great estates of South Yorkshire.  Its literal neighbour, Wentworth Castle, is the result of a saga of gargantuan rivalry between distant relatives, expressed in grand architecture, extensive landscapes and demonstrative garden buildings.

Thomas Wentworth (1672-1739), Lord Raby, had what might now be called “issues” because he had expected to inherit the great estate of Wentworth Woodhouse from his cousin, the 2nd Earl of Strafford.  James Lees-Milne pinned him down as “an unbending Tory, an arch snob…and remarkable for ‘excess of bloated pride’ in his own descent”.

Lord Strafford chose to bequeath Wentworth Woodhouse to his sister’s son, Mr Thomas Watson, who took the name Wentworth and liked to be known as “His Honour Wentworth”.

Lord Raby, who had other names for the man he regarded as the usurper of his birthright, bought the neighbouring estate of Stainborough in 1708, and built a baroque wing, designed by the Huguenot Jean de Bodt, on to the existing house (1710-20).

He also persuaded Queen Anne to revive the Earldom of Strafford for him in 1711, while “His Honour” remained a commoner.

Thomas Watson Wentworth’s son, also Thomas, accordingly built a brick baroque wing at Wentworth Woodhouse, the so-called “back front”, and in 1728 took the title Baron Malton.

Then, six years later, he began the huge Palladian east front of Wentworth Woodhouse, back to back with the baroque wing, designed by Henry Flitcroft.  This huge project, later enlarged by John Carr of York, was still being completed at the start of the nineteenth century.

In 1746 Lord Malton became the first Marquess of Rockingham – in fact, the first marquess in the British peerage, and superior to an earl.

Quietly determined not to be outdone, William, 2nd Earl of Strafford of the 2nd creation, built the Palladian south wing at Wentworth Castle (1759-62).

And in between times this ludicrous competition in houses and titles was maintained by a descant of monuments – obelisks and columns, temples and follies.

The whole area is dotted with the mementoes of this rivalry, and there is much to see.

Wentworth Castle is now the Northern College, and though the tours of the house are available, the building is in active educational use throughout the year:  http://www.northern.ac.uk.  Wentworth Castle Gardens, however, are open to tourists almost every day of the year, and are well worth an extended visit:  http://www.wentworthcastle.org/view.asp?id=145.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  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.

Labour’s home

Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire:  south front

Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire: south front

In the uncertain times after the Second World War, when many country-house owners had to decide whether they could ever live in their big houses again, Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire became a socialist stately home, and for seventy years now has been a home for stately socialists.

In 1950 Archibald, 3rd Earl of Wharncliffe (1892-1953) leased the much-battered house to a consortium of Labour organisations under the leadership of Vin Williams, the South Yorkshire organiser for the National Council of Labour Colleges.

Trade union organisations have unusually good access to craftspeople, and in May 1951, powered by the efforts of a small army of volunteers, Wortley Hall opened as a conference centre under the title Wortley Hall (Labour’s Home).  Even with masses of goodwill from the Labour movement, the initial conversion cost the then huge sum of around £10,000.

John Cornwell’s account, The Voices of Wortley Hall: the sixtieth anniversary history of Labour’s home, 1951-2011, tells this remarkable story in detail.

Ever since, Wortley Hall has grown and thrived, hosting groups from Britain and abroad, from the Workers Music Association Summer School to the Clarion Cycling Club, and providing an entertaining series of public events from car rallies to comedy nights.  Friends of mine count themselves lucky if they are quick enough to book the Wortley Hall New Year’s Eve celebration.

Wortley Hall Ltd, as it’s now called, is a shining example of the spirit of co-operation which traces back directly to the Rochdale Pioneers.

It’s a very beautiful place – a Palladian show-house by John Platt of Rotherham on a more modest scale to the nearby Wentworth Castle and the gargantuan Wentworth Woodhouse, vigorously extended in Victorian times, and surrounded by elegant grounds with a panoramic view to the east across the Yorkshire countryside.

In the days when I ran senior-student training at Wortley Hall for a local comprehensive school, the younger kids aspired to become senior students so they could go to “that mansion”.

There is a detailed photograph-album of Wortley Hall at http://www.flickr.com/photos/59839574@N05/5981134438/in/photostream.  The conference-centre website is at http://www.wortleyhall.org.uk/wortley-hall.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  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.

God’s Wonderful Railway

Didcot Railway Centre, Oxfordshire

Didcot Railway Centre, Oxfordshire

Didcot Railway Centre [http://www.didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk] celebrates the Great Western Railway – known to its aficionados as “God’s Wonderful Railway” and to its weary Victorian customers as the “Great Way Round”.  The Centre is built round the 1932 engine shed, itself a remarkable piece of social and transport history, funded in the midst of the Depression by a National government desperate to reduce unemployment by priming cash-strapped private enterprise.

The engine shed has much of the patina of a working loco depot, with odd nooks and crannies in which engineering wizards deal in steel, brass and oil while brewing strong tea and putting the world to rights.

The GWR Chief Mechanical Engineer at the start of the twentieth century, George Jackson Churchward, developed standardised features in locomotive design so successfully that his signature can be seen in the locomotives of the LMS Railway, those of his pupil Sir William A Stanier, and in the final series of post-war British Railways designs by Stanier’s own pupils.

Immediately recognisable features of Churchward’s designs – tapered boilers, copper-capped chimneys and brass valve-cases – meant that Great Western engines were among the most elegant on British railways.

Didcot proudly shows more than twenty of these magnificent locomotives, and Churchward’s use of standard components means that the Great Western Society can reconstruct long-vanished designs to complete the sequence.  Whereas the LNER A1 locomotive Tornado had to be constructed expensively from scratch, the GWS plans to reproduce a ‘Saint’ from a ‘Hall’, and a ‘County’ from another ‘Hall’ using an LMS boiler.

The Centre astutely makes a virtue of its limitations:  its two short branch-lines offer frequent out-and-back steam-train rides “so there is always something to watch”.  The publicity-material makes the point that all train-rides are in vintage carriages not (as in some Johnny-come-lately steam railways) using late-1960s stock from the age of diesel, and visitors have freedom of movement to explore such features as a working turntable, a reproduction broad-gauge track and train and a surviving example of Brunel’s atmospheric railway track.

For nearly ten years, museum development at Didcot was held back by uncertainties over the lease for the site, until October 2011, when the Centre obtained a further fifty-year lease from Network Rail.

The Centre stands at the apex of a junction between the GWR lines from Paddington to Swindon and Oxford.  That is the point of the place:  it provides the sounds and smells of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century rail travel while twenty-first century trains whizz past on either side.

There’s an echo of this contiguity in Kensal Green Cemetery, where lie both Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who virtually invented the Great Western, and his great friend and rival, Robert Stephenson, son of George, within earshot of trains which still speed on opposite sides of the cemetery from Paddington and from Euston.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn 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.

STEAMed up

STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, Wiltshire

If you must drive, don’t go to Swindon.  Just don’t go there.  Get someone who already lives there to come out and fetch you.

The place is a nightmare of bad signage and confusing road layouts.  It’s the location of the notorious Magic Roundabout, designed by Frank Blackmore, claimed to be safer than any alternative because drivers are so terrified they go slowly:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon).

The sensible way to reach Swindon is, of course, by train.

Walk from the station to the surviving Railway Village, built in the early years of the Great Western Railway as a company town, New Swindon, alongside the line and the works, away from the original market town, Old Swindon.

The rows of terraced houses, with gardens, are now carefully looked after, unlike the desperately neglected, historically important Mechanics’ Institute (1855;  extended 1892) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/image_galleries/swindon_mechanics_institute_gallery.shtml?1, http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=41501 and http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=3228].

Walking through the subway under the railway tracks into the area that was the great railway works is a poignant experience.  On the other side of the tracks, sturdy stone buildings from the days of Gooch, Dean and Churchward stand alongside modern structures with names such as ‘Heritage Plaza’.  Some of the site is occupied by those great wealth-generators, English Heritage and the National Trust.  Walk through the door of one building and you’re immediately in the midst of John Lewis’ furniture department:  this is the Swindon Designer Outlet [http://www.swindondesigneroutlet.com], which has the GWR locomotive 7918 Hinton Manor as a backdrop to the food court.

Across the way, STEAM – the Museum of the Great Western Railway [http://www.steam-museum.org.uk] is superb, capturing the noise and busy-ness of the great works in a restricted space, and telling its story with breadth and wit.  It’s a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours, with plenty to occupy children and big kids.  I worked the signals and points to let the Royal Train past, because there was too much of a queue to drive an engine.

That said, there’s nothing much to eat inside the Museum, though there is a National Trust café, more department-store than country-house, in Heelis, their headquarters across the way which is named after the author Beatrix Potter, Mrs William Heelis:  [Heelis | National Trust head office | National Trust].

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn 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.

Manningham Mills

Lister's Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Lister’s Mill, Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Bradford, like Halifax and Sheffield, sits in a spectacular bowl of hills.  When you gaze across Bradford from Undercliffe Cemetery or Peel Park, the structure which dominates the entire cityscape is not the Town Hall or the Cathedral, but the Italianate bulk of Samuel Cunliffe Lister’s Manningham Mills (1873).

Lister, the son of a mill-owner, prospered by three successive inventions – the Lister Comb (1843), which mechanised the last remaining hand-process in the production of woollen cloth and condemned a substantial class of local independent craftsmen to penury, the silk comb (1857-65) which nearly bankrupted him in development but enabled him to turn waste silk into fabric for fashion-wear, and the self-acting dressing-frame, which gave him domination of the velvet trade.

The existing mills designed by Andrews & Pepper were built on the site of an earlier mill which burnt down in 1871.  The Italianate chimney is 225ft high and is said to weigh 8,000 tons.  This vast complex, comprising 16 acres of working floors, employed 11,000 people at its peak, but closed entirely in 1992.

For a decade the building stood empty and vandalised.  The late Jonathan Silver’s proposal to house the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection in part of the mill complex fell through.

Eventually, the great rescuer of great buildings in distress, Urban Splash, began to bring Lister’s Mill back to life in 2004.

The initial phase, providing 95 flats and 36 duplex apartments in the Silk Warehouse, sited around a full-height atrium to provide light and circulation-space, is designed by Latham Architects.

The second phase, Velvet Mill, by David Morley replaced the existing roof with glass and steel pods containing two-storey apartments.

The huge grass space to the west of the mill complex was once filled with dense terraced housing.  Two of the streets were named, with blunt Yorkshire gratitude, Patent Street and Silk Street.

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.

Antique floorshow

Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire

Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire

Samlesbury Hall is only a couple of miles away from Hoghton Tower and can easily be visited on the same day.  It too is a palimpsest, though its architectural significance is completely different:  the current volume of Pevsner describes it as “one of the outstanding Lancashire halls of the timber-framed variety”.

The chapel was licensed in 1420 and was probably built around that time;  the hall is of a similar date, and the south range dates from around 1545, except for the west end which is 1862.  Originally the home of the Southworth family, the hall was apparently an inn by the 1830s.

There are all sorts of fascinating details.  The traceried window in the chapel, and presumably others, were imported from Whalley Abbey after the Dissolution.

The great hall had a movable screen like the one at Rufford Old Hall, and the bizarre carved finials were later incorporated in the minstrels’ gallery.  The hall fireplace is Victorian, probably dating from 1845.  The oriel at the dais end houses a magnificent Bechstein grand piano.

A frankly modern bridge leads visitors over to ancillary buildings in the courtyard.

The place was threatened with demolition in the 1920s and was bought by a group of Blackburn businessmen who established a Trust to preserve it for public enjoyment.  As such, the building has to earn its keep.

Consequently, several rooms are given over to the sales-floor of an antiques emporium and there are regular exhibitions of art, ceramics, sculpture and jewellery.  There is a wonderfully relaxed coffee-shop, stuffed with sofas, and a restaurant.  You can hire the place for many kinds of events, from a funeral to a hog roast.

For the casual tourist the presentation experience is completely different to Hoghton.  Visitors wander at will, guided by display panels which the lady greeter made no bones about declaring were incomplete.

Is it worth paying £3.00 admission to see?  Most definitely.  But I think I’d take exception to paying £3.00 for the privilege of buying antiques.  Perhaps they knock the admission charge off the price of the chaise-longue or whatever.

I think they would in Yorkshire.

Card-carrying Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free to Samlesbury Hall:  see http://www.samlesburyhall.co.uk.

 

Jumbled chronology

Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

I visited Hoghton Tower (pronounced ‘Horton’) in Lancashire because I happened to be passing on my way to Poulton-le-Fylde.  Consequently I drove up the steep avenue knowing nothing at all about the place;  I left knowing little more and considerably confused.

Most country houses are palimpsests, and Hoghton Tower more than most – a document repeatedly erased and rewritten.  Layout and chronology matter in understanding how the building fits together.

According to our guide, one particular room was apparently completed for the present owner’s father’s twenty-first birthday and had been a schoolroom when William Shakespeare was tutor to the family.  The panelling, I was told, was by “young Mr Gillow” (which must be eighteenth century, though it depends which Gillow).  There were two marble fireplaces of obviously different periods, but I decided not to ask.

The current volume of Pevsner identifies this room as “pure Victorian Jacobean, the work of R D Oliver”.  Indeed, the whole house is a fascinating concoction by different generations, all of them aiming to suggest an earlier history.

There may well have been a medieval building here, perhaps on the site of the Well House in one corner.  The earliest standing remains are known to have been begun in a conservative manner by Thomas Hoghton in 1561-2.  Civil War damage was made good by Sir Christopher Hoghton at the end of the seventeenth century.  Planned modifications by Lewis Wyatt (1816) and George Webster (1835) were unbuilt.  Sir Henry Hoghton, 9th baronet, commissioned a careful, scholarly restoration in the 1860s, and his next two successors continued the work until 1901.

This makes for a fascinating structural and decorative jigsaw which illustrates country-house lifestyles as well as attitudes to the past over four centuries.  I simply don’t believe that members of the general public are so dim that they can only cope with disconnected anecdotes about kings and banquets.  I think visitors to historic places value being allowed to think.  It’s more interesting, if skilfully presented.

The interiors now have an atmosphere of a museum and a wedding and conference centre, which is what the place is.  The extensive underground service area is littered with dummies and skeletons, as if it’s not interesting enough without artificial aids [cf Finding a secret tunnel:  Stoke Rochford Hall and More country-house railways].

If you visit Hoghton Tower, read it up first.  Or, as our guide disarmingly suggested, buy the guide-book.

Or, better still, go and stay there.  The Irishman’s Tower is available as a self-catering let for two:  http://www.hoghtontower.co.uk/accommodation.html.  I rather fancy that as a base for seeing Blackpool Illuminations.

Card-carrying Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free to Hoghton Tower.