Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Labour’s home

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

 

Not quite paradise

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Paradise Square, Sheffield

Paradise Square, Sheffield

For all its reputation as a gritty Victorian town, bombed and repeatedly redeveloped over recent generations, Sheffield is not short of Georgian buildings, but it has only one Georgian square – Paradise Square (1736 and 1771-c1790), down the hill from the parish church, now the Anglican Cathedral.

In fact, substantial parts of Paradise Square are neo-neo-Georgian, tactfully reinstated after World War II bombing by the long-established Sheffield architectural partnership, Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson in 1963-6.  According to Ruth Harman & John Minnis’ Pevsner Architectural Guide, Sheffield (Yale University Press 2004), nos 18 and 26 are almost entirely rebuilt and no 10 was refaced “in ill-chosen brick” c1985.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of this steeply sloping space, once a bustling market known as “Pot Square”, remains evocative of when Sheffield was a metal-bashing cutlery town, vibrant with religious and political dissent.

Here is where sermons and turbulent meetings took place, sometimes ending in violence.  In 1779 John Wesley preached here to “the largest congregation I ever saw on a weekday”. 

There are repeated claims of audiences of eight to twelve thousand people crammed into this space [http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=6534].

Really?  Twelve thousand is the capacity of the Sheffield Arena, an indoor space far bigger than Paradise Square with raked seating as well as a flat floor.

Who counts these crowds?  And how?

Let’s simply assume that when elections were much livelier affairs than nowadays, this elegant Georgian space, now the exclusive home of lawyers, surveyors and my accountant, would have been packed to capacity, and when the Chartists cut up rough and “the town was kept in great agitation the whole night” it would have been a dangerous place to hang around.

 

Court adjourned

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Old Town Hall, Sheffield

Old Town Hall, Sheffield (2011)

George Eliot remarked, in Middlemarch (chapter 20), that “…the quickest of us walk about well wadded in stupidity”.  It’s astonishing how much we miss while going about our daily business.

When Valerie Bayliss led an intriguing Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group walk around just three streets in the centre of Sheffield earlier this summer, she ended at the Old Town Hall on the corner of Castle Street and Waingate.

This huge building, dating back to 1807-8, was repeatedly extended through the nineteenth century.  After the E W Mountford “new” Town Hall opened in 1897, it became law courts, with a tunnel connection to the Police Offices across the road in Castle Green.  The Old Town Hall, as it’s long been known, ceased to be used as law courts in 1997 and has been practically abandoned ever since.

I – and thousands of other Sheffielders – go past it daily without giving it a second glance.  It has no street presence.  Even the tower clock doesn’t work.

A 2001 plan to turn it into a nightclub and offices came to nothing, and it seems as if the owner has simply walked away from it.

Valerie and her group have kept an eye on it and campaigned to arrest its decay for years now:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/articles/2008/10/20/old_town_hall_feature.shtml]

Now is not a good time to pump money into a dying building.  Yet it’s barely credible that such a huge and important public building has no use, and has had no maintenance for fourteen years.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at South Yorkshire Group Events | Victorian Society.  Guests are welcome.  

By rail across the Southern Alps

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Arthur's Pass, South Island, New Zealand: approach to Otira Tunnel

Arthur’s Pass, South Island, New Zealand: approach to Otira Tunnel

The TranzAlpine train-journey across the breadth of New Zealand’s South Island from Christchurch to Greymouth is not cheap, and it’s worth every cent.  Parts of the journey are spectacular, and the 4½-hour journey unfolds a variety of landscape across the divide between the dry eastern plains and mountains to the tropical, rainy west of the country.  The Midland Line depends heavily on its coal traffic.  The lengthy and heavily engineered route couldn’t possibly survive solely on passengers.

The most exciting part of the route traverses the Waimakariri and Broken River gorges through a series of tunnels and vertiginous viaducts including the Stair Case Viaduct, 240 feet high [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TranzAlpine_bridge_by_Waimakariri_River.JPG].

The line climbs continuously to Arthur’s Pass (population 54), in the heart of the aptly-named Southern Alps, and plunges downgrade into the Otira Tunnel, 5.3 miles long, with a gradient of 1 in 33.  Built between 1907 and 1923, this was originally only workable by electric locomotives;  since 1997 trains have been diesel-hauled with a system of airtight doors and fans at the tunnel mouths to enable trains to expel their foul air.

The line skirts Lake Brunner, itself strongly reminiscent of the European Alps, and terminates at Greymouth.  This is the nearest large town to the Pike River Mine, where 29 miners were killed in explosions in November 2010.

The long main street is well geared to the daily one-hour influx of tourist train-passengers, and provides coach links to places along the coast that might once have been rail-connected.
 
Since I rode in February 2011, the odd-looking yet extremely comfortable 1950s TranzAlpine rolling-stock has been replaced by new ‘AK’ panoramic sightseeing stock.  New Zealand railways run on 3ft 6in-guage, so the carriages, rebuilt from older stock, are compact, yet there’s room for two seats each side of a central aisle and more than adequate leg-room.  The rear coach is an enclosed observation car.

In the middle of the rake is a generator car, with viewing platforms at each end for fresh air and photographers.  A further observation platform, with less panoramic views, is built into the end of the baggage car.  As the train approaches the major viaducts these areas become a species of genteel, geriatric cage-fighting.

The on-board team-members are friendly and eager to please, and service is excellent – plenty of food and drink to purchase, pauses for fresh air at major stops and an informative, well-scripted commentary.  (I’m fully tuned to the New Zealand habit of turning most vowels to a short ‘i’, but one young man on the TranzAlpine insisted on turning the ‘i’-vowels to apostrophes, describing the route as the “M’dln’d Line” and referring to “licim’ves” and “trick m’nance crews”.)

The central Christchurch rail terminal, opened in 1960 [http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Photos/Disc10/img0041.asp], was sold off in the 1980s and demolished after the February 2011 earthquake, and the present rail station for South Island’s largest city is a one-platform affair in an industrial estate, a ten-minute drive from the centre.

My hotel promoted a so-called complimentary station shuttle.  There is no such thing.  Only at the end of the spectacularly relaxed journey out to the train does the driver reveal that it costs NZ$6 to return at the end of the day – the oldest con-trick in transport history.  The alternative taxi no doubt costs more, but nevertheless I didn’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride.

A detailed description of the route and advice about booking the TranzAlpine from outside New Zealand is at http://www.seat61.com/TranzAlpine.htm.

 

One notch after another

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Ultimate Driving Experience, National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire

My friend John from the Isle of Man had the time of his life learning to drive a tram at the National Tramway Museum, Crich.

The Ultimate Tram Driving Experience was a retirement present from his colleagues.  I had the privilege of being the photographer, which brought with it the challenge of working out how to capture someone driving a moving vehicle fitted with a windscreen.

John was superbly looked after from start to finish by his instructors Nigel and Paul.  Paul is a superlative driving instructor, and Nigel (nominally the conductor) kept us interested and informed and patiently answered our questions throughout the day.

The day starts, over a cup of coffee, with classroom instruction.  John needed to know one end of a tram from the other, as it were, and to be aware of the safety requirements of steering fifteen tons of tram along predestinate grooves.  (Nigel told us that a recent visitor actually asked him how you steer a tram.)

John’s chosen Blackpool tram was in the sick bay, so he was given a huge, bosomy Liverpool “Green Goddess”, a shiny powerful beast that hadn’t been out of the depot for some weeks and took a certain amount of getting going.  At one point we had to call the Crich equivalent of the AA when 869 mysteriously parked itself on the main line and refused to budge.

I was grateful to be allowed to listen in on the entire day so that I learnt a lot that I’d never realised about these ponderous vehicles.

The technology, for instance, is at once simple and complicated;  the machinery is both robust and extremely delicate.  Six hundred volts moving from wire to rail through a wood, steel and glass double-deck vehicle is not to be messed with.  Direct current behaves in a different way to the alternating current we use at home.

If you treat the tram properly, John was told, it’s really quite easy to move;  if you’re uncertain, there can be smoke and bangs and flashes – and you can cause damage that takes time and money to put right.  It very rarely happens.

I learned, watching and listening to Paul’s meticulous instruction and encouragement, that driving a tram is much more about coasting and momentum than I’d imagined.  As with a car, you keep your foot off the throttle as much as you can.

Making it move is one thing;  stopping it is another.  This is why the regular Crich tram-drivers have one or more of seven different licences, largely because of the variety of braking systems in the historic fleet.

We were hospitably received by this exceptionally professional museum – coffee in the morning, lunch, and then more coffee at the end of the day, constant friendly attention, the run of the museum both on foot and in our own big green tram.  We arrived at 10 am and left at 5 pm, and Paul and Nigel showed no haste to see us off.

I know more about trams and Crich than I’d have learned any other way, and – thanks to his former colleagues – John has another skill to add to his CV.