Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Horseless garage

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Cavendish Buildings, West Street, Sheffield

Cavendish Buildings, West Street, Sheffield

It’s remarkable how much built history is literally invisible.

Among John Minnis’ slides when he talked to the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group about ‘Early Automobile Architecture’ was one image of my native Sheffield that made me double-take.

John knows Sheffield because he co-authored the Pevsner Architectural Guide on the city.

He pointed out Cavendish Buildings on West Street as an example of an early purpose-built motor-sales and repair shop.  I thought it was a wine-bar, until I remembered that it used to belong to the Kenning Motor Group.  In fact, I once hired a car there.

Cavendish Buildings has a very fine, imposing terra-cotta façade, obviously designed in one piece but actually, by the date-stones on the semi-circular pediments, built in three stages, 1907, 1910 and 1919.

It was built for the Sheffield Motor Company Ltd with, according to Ruth Harman and John Minnis’ guide, showrooms at street level and, on the upper stories, one of those repositories of misspent youth, a billiard hall.

Contributors to the history forum http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=5408 relate that during the Second World War part of the upper level was occupied by the apparently lively Central Labour Working Men’s Club, and later the space was used by the Cavendish Dance Studio.

Until at least the 1970s there was a car hoist within the building, presumably serving repair shops on the first floor.  To passers-by, of course, its original use had long been forgotten.

Now you can eat and drink at the Cavendish:  http://www.screampubs.co.uk/thecavendishsheffield – even if you don’t qualify for student ID.

And you can see it in 3D at http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=6a8d33f318df7d744522e2cc67bda51&ct=mdsa.

Amazing.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/south-yorkshire/forthcoming-events.  Guests are welcome.  The biscuits are excellent.

 

Westminster Coach & Motor Car Works

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Former Westminster Coach & Motor Car Works, Chester

Former Westminster Coach & Motor Car Works, Chester

Just before Easter 2011 I listened to John Minnis give a talk on ‘Early Automobile Architecture’ to the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group.  John is already known to the Group because some years ago he was the joint author, with Group member Ruth Harman, of the Pevsner City Guide Sheffield.

Now he’s working on an English Heritage project surveying the architecture of the motor trade from its inception in 1896 – garages to repair cars, garages to store them, salesrooms to sell them and accommodation for the chauffeurs.  Like the contemporary development of the cinema, architects responded to a new technology with astonishing speed, which is why it’s a suitable subject for a Victorian Society event, even though the Society’s remit ends in 1914.

Motor cars were, of course, originally thought of and designed as horseless carriages, and John’s illustrations showed how ways of marketing and stabling the new vehicles grew directly from the existing practices of horse-drawn transport.  There were significant distinctions, however:  cars do not produce tons of manure, and their fuel is even more inflammable than hay.

(The famous requirement that London taxis should carry a bale of hay in the boot was only repealed in 1976.)

The Group Chairman, Valerie Bayliss, suggested in her vote of thanks that all the components of the motor trade – including dodgy second-hand dealers – were in existence by the 1820s, apart from the internal combustion engine.

One of the best known and most distinctive examples of early motor architecture is the Westminster Coach & Motor Car Works on Northgate in Chester, very near to the Town Hall. This elaborate terracotta façade is dated 1914, but appears to be based on an earlier building for the carriage-builders J A Lawton & Co that was burnt down on July 1st 1910.  Their building was two storeys high, but otherwise apparently similar to the existing design.

Cars were sold on the site until the 1970s, and a new library was built behind the façade to an award-winning design by the Cheshire County Council Department of Architecture in 1981-4. The library itself will move on soon, apparently, and the Car Works site will become a market.

Future meetings of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group are advertised at http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/south-yorkshire/forthcoming-events.  Guests are welcome.  The biscuits are excellent.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic Chester tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Tram terminus

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Blackpool North Shore (2008)

Blackpool North Shore (2008)

I had occasion to drive the length of the Flyde coast from Fleetwood to Lytham in the summer of 2011, and discovered – as any tram enthusiast could have told me – that major changes were afoot on the Blackpool tramway.

The line from Fleetwood to Little Bispham was in a state of upheaval, and there were no trams south of Pleasure Beach.  The entire line from Starr Gate to Fleetwood was upgraded to a modern light-rail system, with sixteen brand-new low-floor vehicles, built by that great British rolling-stock builder Bombardier, operating out of a brand new depot.:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-12151400]

That means that the summer of 2011, until the end of the Illuminations on November 6th, was the very last time a public-service tramway will operate in Britain with technology that is essentially Victorian.

Blackpool’s proud history of electric trams back to 1885 encompasses a traditional first-generation tram system which was comprehensively upgraded from 1932 when the transport manager, Walter Luff, introduced a fleet of streamlined luxury vehicles, in four different models, alongside a parallel fleet of streamlined centre-entrance buses.

When all other mainland British electric tramways were replaced by diesel buses after the Second World War, Blackpool still needed the promenade trams because there was no other practicable way of shifting the crowds that visit Blackpool for the Illuminations.

Over decades the system has struggled on, rebuilding 1930s trams in various guises, buying in one-off designs from the local bus manufacturer and patching the track and overhead time and time again.

Eventually, in 2008, a package was agreed between local, national and European authorities to convert the tramway to the standards now familiar in Manchester, Sheffield, Croydon, Nottingham and Edinburgh.

In Blackpool the heritage fleet, as it is now called, continues – discreetly modified to comply with the new traffic signalling, operating out of the original depot at Rigby Road.

But when the older cars are trundled out it’s for show.

This was the very last time, after a century and a quarter, that ordinary passengers clambered aboard traditional British tramcars to go to work, to shop or to get home.

In the 1880s the borough first introduced electric trams and electric street lighting:  then and now Blackpool’s civic motto is “Progess”.

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.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Essentially Victorian Blackpool

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Blackpool Promenade (2003)

Blackpool Promenade (2003)

When I last stayed in Blackpool for a birthday celebration we took a walk along the North Pier at dusk.  On the way back to the promenade I ended up in conversation with two siblings, Richard, who was twelve but looked sixteen and had lost a tooth in a rugby match, and Natalie, eighteen, who was about to read medieval history at a university of her choice.

Natalie, who’s grown up down south and whose immediate family usually holidays abroad, was fascinated by the unfamiliarity of being in the great working-class resort of the north-west.  I pointed out that the Tower is a vertical pier – sturdy engineering topped with a fairy-tale structure five hundred feet above the sea.  When it opened in 1894 anybody with a few pence in their pocket could stand nearly five hundred feet in the air, an experience otherwise only accessible by balloon.

When we returned to the promenade a tram glided past, one of those huge double-deckers gleaming with light.  I mentioned that Blackpool had one of the first electric street tramways in the world, dating back to 1885.  At least as important, in historical terms, is the fact that the Corporation tramway department pioneered the development of Blackpool’s greatest stroke of municipal acumen.

To mark a royal visit in 1912, the tramway electricians were asked to festoon the promenade with coloured lamps, which drew so many extra visitors that from 1913 onwards, interrupted only by two wars and the General Strike, the Illuminations, as they were called, extended the Blackpool season by anything up to two months, adding to the prosperity of landladies, hoteliers and shopkeepers, enhancing the profits of the railway companies and subsidising the municipal rates from the increased profits of the trams themselves.

It made practical sense, during the busy summer season, for tram engineers to work on the Illuminations, while all their vehicles were needed on the road, and the autumn visitors kept the trams busy to the end of October.  Eventually, a separate Corporation department was established to run the Illuminations, and until the establishment of the National Grid, Blackpool had to buy additional power from Preston Corporation, because their own generating works couldn’t cope with the extra load.

As I pointed out to Natalie, when people go to see the Blackpool Illuminations, they’re doing something essentially Victorian – admiring electricity.

Details of this year’s Illuminations are at http://www.blackpool-illuminations.net.

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.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage 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.

Christchurch by bus

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London Transport RTL68, operated by Hassle-free Tours, Christchurch, New Zealand, February 2011

London Transport RTL68, operated by Hassle-free Tours, Christchurch, New Zealand, February 2011

I wrote this piece while I was staying in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the week before the February 2011 earthquake.

On my first morning in Christchurch I spotted the familiar and unmistakable shape of a London Transport red double-decker, and booked a tour that afternoon.  My friend Doug, who likes buses, would have been miffed not to ride on the roof-box RTL that I’d seen;  I rode in a common-or-garden Routemaster, but I’m easy to please and a red bus is a red bus.  I’m only concerned that it has a top deck and windows that open in hot weather.

The conductor, for so he called himself though he didn’t ring the bell or shout “Hold tight”, was Paul, who quickly entered my pantheon of tour-guides I wish to emulate.  He was adept at the fortissimo bonhomie required by cruise-groups and loud American ladies who chirp and squawk fit to drown the PA system.  When they stopped talking and listened it was quickly apparent that Paul knew his way round Christchurch, and that his presentation was as sharp as a pin.  He could fill in time when stuck in traffic, yet never missed a cue to point out sites, and if he said look left he meant left not right.

The bus company is aptly named Hassle-free Tours [Christchurch Double Decker City Tour – Hassle-free Tours (hasslefreetours.co.nz)].  The logo and web-address on the side panels of the Routemaster use the elegant, authentic London Transport Johnston font.  It’s a quality outfit:  the entire fleet runs on biodiesel fuel from restaurant cooking-oil.

As an introduction to Christchurch the itinerary was ideal – a quick spin round the city centre for orientation, a walk in the park to Mona Vale Mansion (designed by Joseph Clarkson Maddison 1899-1900), a walk in another park to Riccarton House (1856 onwards) and the transplanted Deans Cottage, the successive homes of the Deans family who first settled the site of Christchurch, and a look at the Riccarton Bush, a preserved area of the vegetation that filled the Canterbury Plain before the Deans tamed it, now used as a kiwi nursery.

Then the bus headed out of town for an ice-cream at the seaside resort of Sumner – Christchurch’s answer to Bondi Beach (though no-one with sense would surf around Cave Rock).

And then Steve the driver came into his own as the bus crawled up the precipitous road over the Port Hills to the port of Lyttelton, where cruise liners sit alongside the wharves from which west-coast coal is loaded for shipping to China, Japan and South Korea.

There’s no finer introduction to Christchurch and its surroundings than the precipitous ride back over Mount Pleasant Road, savouring the views from the top deck of a vehicle built to chug down Oxford Street, driven with care and precision and much horn-sounding on the hairpin bends by Steve.

Christchurch earthquakes

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Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand: Wednesday February 16th 2011

Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand: Wednesday February 16th 2011

On Tuesday February 22nd 2011 I left Christchurch airport on the 1100 flight to Auckland.  Less than two hours later the most destructive of a succession of earthquakes hit the city [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMAT7jaEYEg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynOX9fj07o].

I was tremendously lucky.  Apart from avoiding the danger, the trauma and the disruption, I had the good fortune to experience Christchurch, which had already endured two major tremors almost without casualties, immediately before it was wrecked.

New Zealanders kept reminding me that Christchurch is their most English city, and asking if I agreed.  Up to a point, I said:  its nineteenth-century architecture grew directly from Victorian architecture in England.  The gridiron street-pattern, however, reminded me inevitably of America – and of Adelaide.

In the days before February 22nd, local people told me how lucky they’d been that the previous, more powerful earthquake, on September 4th 2010 at 4.35 am, had caused so few casualties, but that they were unsettled by the succession of aftershocks and the continuing disruption caused by damage to buildings.

The February 22nd disaster was altogether more destructive of life and property.  New Zealand has a population of a little under 4½ million, a quarter of whom live in the South Island, where Christchurch is the biggest city (pre-earthquake population just over 390,000).  Consequently, every New Zealander was affected by the tragedy, either directly, through acquaintances or by association with the city.

Most of the 181 fatalities on February 22nd occurred in buildings designed in the 1960s and 1970s, but many of the city’s heritage buildings will not survive.  Traditionally-built masonry structures with load-bearing walls react badly to being violently shaken.

Astonishingly, no-one was taking a tower tour at the moment when the Christchurch Cathedral tower collapsed.  The spire had been damaged in three previous earthquakes, 1881, 1888 and 1901, after which the tip was replaced by a hardwood structure covered in copper.  This time the entire spire and the belfry came down.

Further damage in subsequent aftershocks, including the collapse of the west rose window, has led to speculation that the entire cathedral will have to be demolished and reconstructed, possibly on another safer site.  If so, it is unlikely to be a slavish reproduction of George Gilbert Scott’s 1864 design:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6S4EZPCIfg,

According to a recent press report, http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/5150179/Cathedral-future-now-uncertain, the decision hinges on the wider question of whether the entire city-centre needs to be shifted.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, in general or in detail, what the inhabitants of Christchurch have to put up with as the slow process of recovery gathers momentum.  The journalist Pam Vickers has contributed a series of dispatches to the BBC News website:  see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13141491, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12805131, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12664290 and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13452122.  BBC news provided a nine-month update at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15786697.

Christchurch will never be the same.  A huge debate about its future is under way among the citizens of Christchurch and with the national government:  well-wishers from outside can only hope that the resurgent city gains new beauty to replace what is lost.

Update:  Despite some popular outcry, it seems inevitable that the ruins of Scott’s Cathedral must be demolished.  Its planned temporary substitute, on a nearby site, is innovative:  http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-zealand-cardboard-cathedral-approved-1334.

Further update:  The new cardboard Christchurch Cathedral opened in August 2013:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23698795.

Another update:  Eventually, the decision was taken to rebuild Christchurch Cathedral as it was before the earthquake.  This drone footage shows the start of its restoration:  New Zealand: Fixing the ruined Christchurch Cathedral that’s frozen in time – BBC News.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Antipodean Gothic:  English architecture “down under”, please click here.

Arrested decline

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Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire, is remarkable because the entire house and garden were built and furnished within a short period, 1861-70, and have hardly been changed since.  It was designed by an Italian architect, the Chevalier Casentini, who appears never to have visited the site.

The money to build it came from the proceeds of the Thellusson will of 1797, which distributed the bulk of a £700,000 fortune in trust to the surviving descendants after three generations (or, in the absence of such survivors, to pay off the National Debt).  The protracted litigation that arose among Thellusson’s descendants is recognisably portrayed in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3).

When the last descendant of the original builder gave Brodsworth Hall to English Heritage in 1990, the decision was taken to restore the house as found, in “arrested decline”, rather than return its decoration and contents to their appearance when new.  This is not a “house that time forgot”, like Erddig or Calke Abbey or Mr Straw’s House at Worksop;  it retains evidence of each of its occupiers from the date of building to the late twentieth century, and chronicles the increasing difficulty of maintaining a home on the scale that was common among prosperous landed families before the First World War.

Walking through the front door, crossing the hall and glancing up the impressively grand staircase gives a very powerful feeling of stepping into the 1970s on some errand to meet Mrs Grant-Dalton.  The light, the colours, the patina of the furniture and walls look exactly as if the place has been untouched for decades.

On the route through the principal rooms it’s easy – apart from the apparently new carpets – to imagine oneself into almost any decade since the house was built.

But further into the tour, upstairs, bleak bedrooms with folded bed-linen on bare mattresses, presumably unoccupied since early last century, are interspersed with spruced-up facilities for visitors, complete with interactive computers belting out canned historic voices.

And there are several rooms simply displaying found objects, like a lugubrious version of a trip to Ikea.

Here English Heritage is playing to the crowd, as perhaps it must in economically straitened times, where visitor footfall is the name of the game.

That said, Brodsworth is worth exploring:  the long-neglected gardens are well on their way to recovery, and the café deserves more than one visit per visit.

Details of opening arrangements at Brodsworth Hall are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/brodsworth-hall-and-gardens.

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.

Strawberry Hill forever

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Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Horace Walpole (1717-97) didn’t expect his house at Strawberry Hill to last much longer than he did:  he built in plaster and papier-mâché and decorated his “little plaything-house” with wallpaper.

The house that gave its name to a style, “Strawberry Hill Gothic”, was for amusement only, so small that one of his visitors, Lady Townsend, declared, “Lord God!  Jesus!  What a house!  It is just such a house as the parson’s where the children lie at the end of the bed.”

As a reaction to the stern mansion at Houghton in Norfolk built by his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, and indeed to his own town house off Piccadilly, Walpole extended Strawberry Hill between 1749 and 1776 asymmetrically, as if built over centuries, because he was “fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry”.

He commissioned a group of friends as his “committee of taste” – among them John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1708-1782) – to advise on designs based on medieval originals.  This is why the chimneypiece in the library imitates John of Eltham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, and that in the Holbein Chamber is based on Archbishop Warham’s tomb at Canterbury, while the gallery ceiling is derived from the side aisles of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey.

The house was a cabinet of curiosities, a Schatzkammer, filled with every kind of object from Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat to the gilded armour of the French King Francis I, James I’s gloves to a lock of Edward IV’s hair “cut from his corpse in St George’s Chapel at Windsor”.    Stripped of Walpole’s collections in a sale of 1842, its rooms currently stand virtually empty.  Yet they have the unmistakable feeling of what Walpole called “gloomth”, which inspired his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), an important milestone on the road which leads to Frankenstein, Dracula and Hogwarts.

For a building that was outrageously against the prevalent architectural fashion, it was the object of insatiable curiosity.  Walpole was so pressured by visitors that he issued timed tickets.  “Never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court,” he wrote to a friend.  “Everyone will live in it but you.”  He declared that he should marry his housekeeper, because her gratuities were such that she had more money than he did.

Strawberry Hill, for many years the core of a Catholic teacher-training college, is now – at a cost of £9 million – as bright and crisp as Horace Walpole would have remembered it.

Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, is open to the public by timed ticket:  see http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/visit.php.  The café, called The Committee of Taste, is superlative:  I couldn’t bring myself to eat the cheesecake until I’d photographed it:

Cheesecake

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

Wasting asset

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Queen's Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2011)

Queen’s Pier, Ramsey, Isle of Man (2011)

The Isle of Man used to have a thriving holiday industry.  Well into the twentieth century the island was regarded as more exclusive than the Lancashire resorts of Blackpool and Morecambe, not least because it cost more to reach it.

The Manx holiday economy disappeared astonishingly quickly at the end of the 1960s, and the island economy has since been reinvented.  Tourism survives, up to a point, and many visitors to the island bring their motor-bikes.

It’s a pity that one of the grandest mementos of the Manx seaside, the Queen’s Pier at Ramsey, has been steadily neglected for twenty years.

Designed by Sir John Coode and constructed by Head, Wrightson & Co of Stockton-on-Tees between 1881 and 1886 at a cost of £40,752, it extended 2,241 feet out into the bay.

A new landing-stage was added in 1899, and before the First World War the pier brought around 35,000 visitors a year from what Manx people call “across”.

It ranks highly as a historic and engineering monument among the surviving seaside piers of the British Isles, particularly for its unusual cruciform steel piles.  There is a collection of images of the pier at http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php?i=21927278.

The contractors’ three-foot gauge tramway was kept for a hand-propelled baggage van to load and unload passenger steamers.  In 1937 a small petrol locomotive was introduced, and in 1950 this was supplemented by a passenger railcar.

The steamer service stopped in 1970 and though the tramway continued until 1981, after repeated vandalism the pier closed completely in 1991.

In 1994 Tynwald, the Manx Government, decided to mothball the pier, and in the same year the Friends of Ramsey Queen’s Pier was formed to safeguard and promote the pier as an asset and a national monument.

It’s no accident that on the Friends’ website [http://www.queenspier.org], three quarters of the chronological history is given over to the post-1994 controversies over whether to restore the pier or demolish it.

In 2011, as an indication of positive intent, Tynwald has voted £1,800,000 for minimal maintenance to safeguard the structure for future restoration.

It’s a start…

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology 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.

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.

Corpulent feline

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The Fat Cat (former Alma Hotel), Alma Street, Sheffield

The Fat Cat (former Alma Hotel), Alma Street, Sheffield

The Fat Cat is a Sheffield legend:  https://www.thefatcat.co.uk/.  It’s not the only award-winning real-ale pub in the city – there’s another round the corner on the next street – but it was the first, and it has a special place in the affections of beer-drinkers.  It welcomes anyone who enjoys civilised traditional conviviality and home-cooked food within easy access of public transport – so you don’t have to drive home (though there’s ample car-parking if you do).

There was a Kelham Tavern on the site by the 1830s.  After the street was named Alma Street to commemorate the Crimean battle of 1854, the pub was renamed the Alma Hotel.

The exact date of the present building is unclear:  it’s of straightforward artisan construction, with a traditional bar inside.  Though it has been extended, the only significant architectural alteration is the blocking of the original corner entrance door.

For many years it was crowded by surrounding housing and the noise and dirt of heavy industry.  Now it’s much quieter.

The saving of the Alma Hotel was Stones’ Brewery’s failure to implement 1952 planning permission to extend the building, doubling the number of bedrooms to eight and creating an open-plan interior.

Because the building survived intact while the local community contracted, it was an ideal location for Dave Wickett and Bruce Bentley’s scheme to reintroduce traditional beers to Sheffield.  They gave the building its current name when they opened in 1981 serving beers from independent breweries.  The first pint was pulled by the much-loved Sheffield football legend, Derek Dooley.

Their policy has proved durable and enormously successful:  good beer well served, home-cooked food ranging from carnivore to vegan, no piped music or gaming machines.

Dave Wickett became sole owner in 1989 and began brewing beer behind the pub the following year.  Within ten years he built the Kelham Island Brewery next door, and now you can find his beer in real-ale pubs across the country, and buy bottles in Waitrose.

Dave Wickett died, aged 64, on May 16th 2012:  Dave Wickett obituary | Beer | The Guardian.  The Fat Cat is a memorial to a man who added a great deal to the sum of human happiness.