Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

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.

Deer little house

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Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

When you look out of the upstairs windows of the south front of Scampston Hall your eye is caught by a red-brick castellated lodge in the distance.

This is Deer Park Lodge, built by John Carr of York in Gothick style c1768 as an eye-catcher across the lake.  Originally, it was stuccoed in white, so that it stood out from the now-vanished forest behind it.

As well as being an ornament to the view, the lodge served a practical function.  To each side of the central bay were arcades to provide shelter when the deer came to feed.  Behind the building was a modest cottage in which the deer-keeper and his family lived.

The three-sided bay, with its castellated gable embellished with a trefoil, contains two grand rooms, connected by a steep, straight staircase.  Both have marble fireplaces and were decorated, apparently, with marbled paper.  The upper room, where visitors from the great house would take tea and admire the view, has a delicate plaster ceiling decorated with hunting horns and sheet music.

The current owners, David and Jane Crease, have carefully restored the lodge, and Jane explains how the three sides of the bay offered completely different views – the forest to the right (nature), the house straight ahead (culture) and the mill to the left (commerce).

Mr & Mrs Crease entertained the members of the Art Fund South Yorkshire to tea on their way back from an art day in Scarborough.  It’s a rare privilege to enjoy a sumptuous afternoon tea sitting outside the lodge gazing across the lake towards Scampston Hall in the distance.

One of the ironies of an eye-catcher is that it commands at least as good a view as the view it belongs to.  No doubt that’s why the St Quentins and their descendants, the Legards, drove over to admire the big house in its setting.

Scampston Deer Park Lodge is a private residence and is not open to the public.

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

 

Stop short of Scarborough

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Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Motorists hammering along the A64 to the coast have little chance of noticing that they fly through the Capability Brown park of Scampston Hall.  An understated road-sign indicates ‘Scampston only’.  It’s worth following.

Apart from its historic interest, Scampston Hall has a superb restaurant, offering better lunches than you’ll find within sight of the A64.

Its historic interest is considerable.  Five St Quintin baronets, all of them called William, developed this estate.  The 3rd baronet built the original house, parts of which are still visible at the back, in the 1690s.  The 4th baronet brought in Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape the park.  The 5th baronet accumulated a significant art collection.  His heir, William Thomas Darby St Quintin, employed the architect and interior designer Thomas Leverton to transform the house in 1800-3, so that it looks – inside and out – Regency in style.

The man who takes your ticket when you start a house tour is, in fact, the current owner, Sir Charles Legard, 15th Bt.  He and his wife Caroline took on the place in 1994 when it was, as Sir Charles puts it, “tired”, reroofed, rewired and replumbed it, and welcome the public on a limited number of days each year.  Their son Christopher’s family now lives there.

Lady Legard had, through her voluntary involvement in the National Trust, gained an invaluable apprenticeship from the interior designers John Fowler and David Mlinaric, planning the restoration of Beningborough Hall, Nostell Priory (after a fire) and Nunnington Hall.  She was more than qualified to take on the challenge of managing the restoration of her family home to the highest standards.  Scampston Hall was the Country Life House of the Year in 2000:  John Cornforth’s account of the house and family appeared in the January 27th and February 3rd 2000 issues.

Lady Legard then set about finding a purpose for the former kitchen garden.  She commissioned the internationally renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf [see http://www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf/references] to create a flower garden to attract public visitors, and engaged the local architects Mark Bramhall and Ric Blenkharn to design the restaurant.  The Walled Garden opened in 2004.

The result is an utterly delightful visiting experience.  Sir Charles shows groups round his house in relaxed style:  visitors are encouraged to ask questions and to sit on the furniture.  Outside, a half-hour walk around the inner park, the Cascade Circuit, passes the Pump House with its plunge bath, the Palladian Bridge and the ruined ice-house.  The Walled Garden is a fascinating essay in contemporary garden design.  And the restaurant offers the sort of menu you need to return to.

You can always go to Scarborough another day…

Details of all that Scampston Hall has to offer are at http://www.scampston.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?id=0.  Card-carrying members and Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free.

 

Scarborough’s Rotunda

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The Rotunda, Scarborough, North Yorkshire: interior

The Rotunda, Scarborough, North Yorkshire: interior

On a plot of land below where the Crescent was later built the Rotunda Museum, designed for the Scarborough Philosophical Society by Richard Hey Sharp in collaboration with the geologist William Smith “the father of English geology”, was opened in 1829.  It was one of the first purpose-built museums in the country, and its shape specifically assisted the display of geological specimens in chronological order.  Sharp’s design provided for lateral wings which were built in the 1860s and extended in 1881.

Other planned but unbuilt embellishments to the Sharps’ scheme included a columned and pedimented Bazaar and Saloon alongside the Rotunda and a monumental column in the middle of the Crescent Gardens.

In 2008 the Rotunda was ambitiously restored and modernised, and now provides a better-than-ever introduction to the geology and local history of the area.  In a relatively small space there is a surprising amount to read and examine.  It’s an excellent place to pass the time when the weather’s unpleasant.

Across the road, you can leave your car at the scene of a particularly crass piece of 1960s municipal vandalism.

Eugenius Birch, the pier-designer, constructed the People’s Palace and Aquarium, which extended underneath Ramshill Road, providing three acres of underground entertainment facilities at a cost of £100,000 in 1875-7.  Conceived by the director of the Brighton Aquarium, it was taken over by Scarborough Corporation in 1921:  it became a wonderful and elaborate amusement arcade, latterly known as Gala Land, and was eventually demolished in 1968.

The site became an underground car-park – and a missed opportunity.  Scarborough is not well-blessed with under-cover entertainment facilities.  Hindsight is easy, but so is myopia.  The Sixties preoccupation with accommodating the private car led to the destruction of an indoor entertainment facility in a prime location, in favour of a car park that could have been cheaply located elsewhere.

Details of opening arrangements and activities at the Rotunda Museum are at http://www.rotundamuseum.co.uk.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  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.

Scarborough’s Crescent

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The Crescent, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

The Crescent, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Before the railway came in 1845, Scarborough was entirely an elegant, exclusive resort for visitors who could afford to stay for a substantial season and would require appropriate housing.  The Crescent was begun in 1833, designed by Richard Hey Sharp and Samuel Sharp of York.

This ambitious residential scheme proceeded slowly:  the smaller Belvoir Terrace was complete by 1837, but only four more houses had been built by 1850, and construction was not fully completed until 1857, by which time the arrival of the railway had permanently changed Scarborough’s character.

The Sharps originally envisaged seven villas overlooking the South Cliff:  eventually four were built – Wood End (1835, extended c1902, latterly the Museum of Natural History), Crescent House 1835-6, enlarged 1845-6, later Broxholme, now the Art Gallery), Warwick Villa (1837, later Londesborough Lodge after purchase by the first Lord Londesborough) and East Villa (1830s, later Belvoir House and eventually the White House).  These residences brought style to the locality:  Sir Osbert Sitwell, whose family occupied Wood End from 1862 until 1925, tells of his grandfather, the 1st Earl of Londesborough, taking his visitors from Londesborough Lodge across the bridge to the Spa on foot along nearly a mile of red carpet.

When I’m in Scarborough I like to call at the Art Gallery to revisit the atmospheric moonlight paintings that Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893) painted while living at the Castle-by-the-Sea in the late 1870s.  The Gallery has a strong tradition of interesting visiting exhibitions, and excellent coffee, which you serve yourself and then settle up with the welcoming and informative reception staff.  Even if there weren’t many other reasons to visit Scarborough, the Art Gallery would be worth a detour.

For details of the opening-times at Scarborough Art Gallery, see http://www.scarboroughartgallery.co.uk.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  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.

Two towers

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World Trade Center, New York City (1981)

World Trade Center, New York City (1981)

Anyone who was sentient at the time recalls where they were on September 11th 2001.  I was taking a class of sixteen-year-olds through the text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and we were discussing – in relation to the three Witches – whether there could be an independent force of evil, or whether it existed only in the hearts and minds of human beings.  We only realised later that during that time the planes were slamming into the World Trade Center.

The so-called “twin towers”, which were not actually identical, were developed in the late 1960s to revitalise the southern tip of Manhattan.  Their genesis was controversial, because they belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which was independent of city and state planning jurisdiction.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates in conjunction with Emery Roth & Sons, they were not universally liked.  These elegant modernist towers, clad in aluminium alloy, were dismissed by one writer, Lewis Mumford, as “filing cabinets”.

Inevitably, they grew to be an immediately recognised part of the cityscape.  Ed Vulliamy, in an Observer article [August 21st 2011] describes how they told the passing of each day:  “…deep gold at the eastern edge in the early morning, becoming paler towards midday and deepening again to a tangerine glow at dusk”.

They also contributed to New York legend.  Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker, walked from one tower to the other in 1974 and was, for his pains, arrested for trespassing.  Three years later George Willig climbed the outside of the south tower using suction-pads.

And they were celebrated by tourists.  Express lifts carried the public in slightly under a minute past ten million square feet of office space to the indoor observation deck on the 107th floor, from which escalators gave access to a surprisingly unvertiginous roof-deck.  Bizarre effects were experienced at this height, including upwardly mobile rain.

The towers attracted the attention of terrorists because of their particular design and their proximity.  A bomb which exploded in the basement on February 23rd 1993, destroying five floors, killing six people and wounding at least a thousand, was apparently intended to tip one tower over to demolish the other.

The final atrocity, which killed over 2,752 people in the buildings, on the planes and in the frantic rescue operation, was no random attempt to create a terrorist “spectacular”.

The people who perpetrated this massacre knew perfectly well that flying a plane into, say, the Hancock or the Sears Towers in Chicago would do great damage but might not engineer a collapse.

The World Trade Center towers were constructed with external load-bearing walls to provide open-plan office space.  Though they had been designed to withstand an accidental collision, the airliners’ wingspan of 156ft ripped through buildings only 209ft wide.

The height of the impacts was far beyond the range of ground or airborne firefighters, and the amount of kerosene on board aircraft at the start of transcontinental flights created enough heat to weaken the steel structure, causing the floors to implode with terrifying speed.

Among the 9/11 terrorists were individuals with civil engineering expertise, trained to build things.  This wasn’t only a violent and a perverse act.  It was calculated evil.

Everyman

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Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (2018)

Almost opposite Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral stands – for a short while longer – an undistinguished building of huge cultural importance.

The former Hope Hall, a nonconformist chapel of 1837, after many transformations, became the Everyman Theatre in 1964.  This was the cockpit of artists, writers and playwrights in the great wave of Liverpool’s prominence that followed the success of the Beatles.

The poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, the playwrights Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, and a cluster of actors including Bernard Hill, Anthony Sher, Julie Walters and the late Pete Postlethwaite were associated with the building before and after a further rebuilding in 1975-7.  The premieres of Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…and Bert (1974) and Shirley Valentine (1986) took place at the Everyman Theatre.

The building was also celebrated for its Everyman Bistro, founded in 1970 by Paddy Byrne and Dave Scott in the basement.  Here was as good a buffet as you could find in Liverpool, and a convivial atmosphere without rival.

Now the Everyman is to be replaced by an entirely new building, opening in 2013, and you can watch the process, day by day, at http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/content/Home/AboutUs/NewEveryman/LiveCam.aspx.  Sooner or later, you’ll see the queue for the reopening.

Sarah Horton and Ronnie Hughes’ film tribute to the Everyman Bistro is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EibgxJnWMKU&feature=player_embedded.

The opening season at the new Everyman begins on Saturday March 8th 2014 with Twelfth Night:  http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/show/Twelfth_Night/1031.aspx.