Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Amazing Grace

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, up on the heights of Nob Hill above downtown San Francisco, is an uplifting space.

It’s a pure thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, built of concrete between 1928 and 1964 to the designs of Lewis Parsons Hobart (1873-1954) to replace a predecessor destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.  Hobart’s wife was a cousin of William H Crocker, the donor of the site.

In the tradition of much older churches, the interior of Grace Cathedral is an essay and a narrative, with murals by Jan Henryk De Rosen, and stained glass by Charles Connick of Boston and Gabriel Loire of Chartres, two of the greatest stained-glass designers of the twentieth century.  The bronze Ghiberti west doors are the reproductions that the Nazis made of the Florentine originals which they removed during the Second World War.  The 44-bell carillon in the north tower was built by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, and donated by a Methodist dentist from Penzance, Nathaniel T Coulson:  it was first played in 1940.

It’s a beautiful building to visit – light, spacious, peaceful, welcoming.  The glass tints the interior blue, Gabriel Loire’s preferred colour because, he said, “La paix donne la joie.” (Peace gives joy.)  There are two labyrinths, one on the forecourt and the other at the west end of the nave – mysterious aids to meditation based on the medieval original at Chartres.

There’s something curiously Californian about this inclusive, relaxed place that takes itself seriously with delicacy.

The Grace Cathedral website is at http://www.gracecathedral.org.

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

Gothic New York: St Patrick’s Cathedral

St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City

St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City

When building began on the site of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, New York City’s Catholics complained about how far out of town it was.  The cathedral fills the block between 50th and 51st Streets, Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue.

In mid-Victorian times the area was barely populated;  now it’s in the midst of “the most expensive street in the world”, directly opposite the Rockefeller Center, from where it’s possible to gaze down on the 333-feet-high spires of James Renwick Jnr’s very conventional English and French Gothic Revival church.

The church, built of brick faced with white marble, was dedicated in 1879, and the towers added in 1888;  Charles T Mathews designed the Lady Chapel addition which was finished in 1906.  It was eventually consecrated, having being declared free from debt, on October 5th 1911:  it had cost, up to that time, around $4 million.

The impact of twentieth-century development on its surroundings is stunning.  Yet, inside its dark portal, the seductive darkness of soaring Gothic arches provides a dramatic sense of entering a different world with different priorities to the world outside.

Over the years it has been the centre of solemn events not only for New York’s Catholics but for its wider population:  here in June 1968 Edward Kennedy eulogised his dead brother Robert, the New York Senator;  here also were ceremonies to remember the victims and heroes of 9/11.

Somehow, the thick walls and dark glass shut out the noise of Manhattan.  Here is a haunting, dignified, echoing space in which to rest and be thankful.

I’ve visited New York City repeatedly, and even if I’m only there for a day or two I always try to visit St Patrick’s.

The St Patrick’s Cathedral website is at http://www.saintpatrickscathedral.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

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

 

Chatterleys not at home

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall may have provided the nucleus of the idea for D H Lawrence’s characters Clifford and Constance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because the marriage of William Arkwright, the last owner, was blighted by the consequences of a hunting accident.

Sutton Scarsdale is not, however, Lawrence’s “Wragby Hall” – “a long, low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction”.  It’s generally agreed that Lawrence was visualising Renishaw Hall, in the north-east corner of Derbyshire, though the actual house is anything but lacking in distinction.

The late eighteenth-century owner, Sitwell Sitwell (his name is another story) built the elegant apsed dining room in 1794, and the grand east wing, with plasterwork by the local sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, in 1803-8.  When it was finished the Prince Regent visited, and made Sitwell Sitwell a baronet.

Lawrence and his wife Frieda met Sir Osbert Sitwell, who invited them to call at Renishaw on one of their rare visits to Derbyshire in the 1920s.

When they eventually visited there was no-one at home but the butler, who took against the odd-looking couple:  it’s likely that their accents wouldn’t quite fit the bill, he the son of a Derbyshire miner, she the daughter of a German baron.

Consequently, all they saw of the house was the front hall.  They were shown in the front door and straight out the back into the garden – with the result that Wragby Hall is based on, but is only a shadow of, the actual Renishaw Hall.

The gamekeeper called Mellors, by the way, worked at Welbeck.

UPDATE:  The Observer of November 13th 2011 contained an edited reprint of Dame Edith Sitwell’s account of the Lawrences’ visit.  Evidently they met only once.

“He talked to us a great deal about our parents, explaining their characters to us.  Mrs Lawrence…explained the natives of Bloomsbury to me…”

Afterwards, in a lecture she gave in Liverpool, Dame Edith described Lawrence as the head of the Jaeger school of poetry – hot, soft and woolly.  The Jaeger company took exception, saying that their clothes were indeed soft and woolly, but not hot.  Dame Edith was contrite, and told Messrs Jaeger that “their works were unshrinkable by time, whereas the works of Lawrence, in my opinion, are not”.

Renishaw Gardens, Museum and Galleries are open regularly through the summer.  The Hall can be visited only on pre-booked tours.  Details are at http://www.sitwell.co.uk.

The survival of Sutton Scarsdale

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Southbound travellers on the M1 in Derbyshire are sometimes intrigued by a splendid ruin on the offside which is virtually invisible travelling north.  This is Sutton Scarsdale Hall, second only in scale to Chatsworth among the surviving classical country houses of Derbyshire.  It has survived, but only just.

It was built in 1724-9 for Nicholas Leake, 4th Earl of Scarsdale by the major provincial architect Francis Smith of Warwick.  Smith’s grand façades are oddly oriented because he built around a much older core which stands alongside the medieval parish church, so the main entrance is on the north front.  When the house was intact its chief glory was the plasterwork by the Italian stuccadores Giovanni Battista Arturi and Francesco Vasalli.

Lord Scarsdale died without heirs and deeply in debt, and Sutton Scarsdale passed through a succession of owners until it was bought by Richard Arkwright of Willersley, the financier son of the cotton inventor, for his younger son, Robert Arkwright, who married the “single-minded, simple-hearted” actress Fanny Kemble.

Their descendant William Arkwright is thought to be the model for D H Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley, though the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not set at Sutton Scarsdale.

After the First World War, the Arkwrights sold up the Sutton estate, but couldn’t get rid of the house, which was first vandalised and then stripped by a speculator for the value of its materials.

Fifty tons of lead were removed from the roof, and a collection of interiors including the drawing room, the main staircase and some fireplaces were shipped to the United States.

Three rooms, their proportions altered and their provenance irreparably confused, can now be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, purchased by William Randolph Hearst for San Simeon, remained in a New York warehouse in packing cases until it was bought by Paramount Studios and used as a set for the film Kitty (1945).

This was donated in 1954 to the Huntingdon Library, Pasadena, but remains, apart from two doorcases, in storage.

Chairs made for the 1724 house are now at Temple Newsam House, Leeds and in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection.

The shell of the house stood abandoned, until it was rescued by Sir Osbert Sitwell in 1945, just before bulldozers were about to clear the site.

By the time his nephew, until then Mr Reresby Sitwell, inherited it in 1969 the ruins were unstable.  Sir Reresby found himself caught in a bureaucratic maze:  the then Ministry of Public Buildings & Works wouldn’t help because Sutton Scarsdale was built after 1700, while the Historic Buildings Council, as part of the Ministry of Housing, couldn’t support a building which, being roofless, was no longer a house.

Eventually, after a change of legislation, it was taken over by what is now English Heritage, and travellers who can find their way through the by-roads from the M1 junction 29 at Heath may wander the ruins that were very nearly flattened in 1945.

Opening arrangements for Sutton Scarsdale Hall can be found at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/sutton-scarsdale-hall.

Des res

Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire (1976)

Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was a big hitter in the politics of the reign of King Henry VI.  He made a great deal of money and owned five major houses, two of which still survive – Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire.  (The other three were Collyweston Manor House, Northamptonshire, Lambley Manor House, Nottinghamshire, and Ampthill Castle, Bedfordshire.)

Its position at the top of a steep hill, its dry moat and its robust High Tower indicate that it was seriously defensible, yet Wingfield has a much more domestic atmosphere than Tattershall.  Nevertheless, it was – and is – a magnificent complex of palatial dimensions.  John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, commented, “Winfield, or Wenfield, in Derbyshire, is but a maner place, but yt far passith Sheffeld Castel”.

Significantly, when it passed on Cromwell’s death in 1455 to the 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, it needed no major extension for the grander nobleman.  Only when the 6th Earl, long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick, used it to accommodate the captive Mary, Queen of Scots were extensions made.

Mary took against it, saying the air made her ill, and Shrewsbury retorted that “the very unpleasant and fulsome savour in the next chamber” came from “the continual festering and uncleanly order of her own folk”.

It was slighted – rendered indefensible – after the Civil War, and the Great Hall was adapted as a two-storey residence by the astronomer Immanuel Halton (1628-1699), whose connection with the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, is explained in http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1996JBAA..106…22B.

His successor, Immanuel Halton III, took stone from the ruins to build his Georgian house in the valley below.

Wingfield Manor has been for generations the site of a working farm, so that although it is conserved by English Heritage, public access is extremely limited.  Arrangements are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/wingfield-manor/visitor-information.

Otherwise, public access to the site is strictly prohibited.

Camp castle

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Tattershall Castle is a designer castle – practically capable of being defended but primarily intended to make a statement.

It was built by Ralph, Lord Cromwell (1403-1455) who did very well out of the post of Treasurer of England under King Henry VI.  His badge of office was the tasselled purse and crossed money-bags.  Tattershall was one of his five residences.

He was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “a tenacious man with a great gift for administration, a tidy mind, a faith in accurate records, and an ability to steer a safe course amid the intrigues of the age of Henry VI.”  He built the huge brick Great Tower within the inner bailey of an earlier castle, and established a college of clergy – the customary medieval insurance against damnation – to worship in the adjacent parish church.  In his will he asked his executors to restore to their previous owners lands worth almost £5,000 “for conscience’s sake”.

The Great Tower is a series of splendid state apartments, stacked one on top of the other rather than laid out in a line.  From the roof it’s possible not only to drop missiles on unwelcome visitors, but to see the towers of Lincoln Cathedral and Boston Stump.

This medieval skyscraper was characterised by the guide-book writer Dr M W Thompson as reminiscent of “the self-dramatisation so characteristic of fifteenth-century life”.  The finished building would have been startling to contemporary eyes, just as its surviving remains are impressive to ours.  It was designed for someone who had a clear idea of the effect he wished to create.

It’s possible that the whole tower was originally rouged with ochre.  It’s not so much a masculine building as a butch one.

We owe its survival to a particularly quirky personality in early twentieth-century politics, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon (1859-1925), who went through life, poor man, encumbered with the anonymous undergraduate ditty –

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

This much derided, stiff, unhappy man, when he wasn’t working incredibly hard in the “Great Game” of British politics in which he rose to be Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-24), purchased the derelict site of Tattershall Castle in 1911, renovated the Great Tower, restored the moats and reinstated the original fireplaces which had been crated up ready for sale to the USA.  His action provoked the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.  He bequeathed Tattershall to the National Trust, along with Bodiam Castle in Kent which he bought in 1916.

Tattershall Castle is open to the public throughout the year, but not every day:  see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-tattershallcastle for up-to-date details.  The ladies of the parish serve excellent tea and cakes in the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity most days between Easter and the end of September:  check at http://www.httf.org/heritage.html.

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

 

High-speed designer

Sheffield Midland Station (1985): British Rail High Speed Train 253 001

It’s an interesting challenge to name ten modern British designers – almost as difficult as naming ten modern British engineers or, notoriously, ten famous Belgians http://www.famousbelgians.net.

One of the greatest modern British designers was Kenneth Grange (1929-2024).  His first major commission was the original British parking-meter, now a rare artefact, in 1958.  He went on to design the Kenwood Chef food-mixer, the Kodak Instamatic camera (1968), the Adshel bus-shelter (1993) – another great British bus-shelter designer was the late David Mellor (1930-2009) – and an acclaimed new version of the London black taxi (1997).

Kenneth Grange’s own favourite was the biggest of all his designs – the InterCity 125 High Speed Train, introduced by British Railways in the early 1970s.  He didn’t engineer the entire train;  indeed, he was originally commissioned only to design the livery, but as he explained to Rachel Cooke [The Observer, July 17th 2011], “…I decided to have a go at the aerodynamics, testing it in wind tunnels with the help of an engineer I was employing.  I showed it to [the British Railway Board] with some trepidation.  It was a bloody nerve, to be honest…But they weren’t difficult to persuade in the end because the argument was sound:  the design made the train more efficient.”  It’s instructive to compare the prototype with Kenneth Grange’s more familiar production model, illustrated above.

Over the years, train passengers took the HST for granted:  after all, it’s still in limited service, upgraded, re-engined, rebadged, and still going strong.  Some operators have replaced it with newer models, not all of them fully satisfactory, while others have indicated that with further modifications these trains could run until at least 2035 when they will be approaching sixty years old.

The High Speed Train is a credit to British engineering:  the prototype broke the world speed record for diesel traction (143 mph) which is now held by a production-version HST (148 mph).  Introducing the HST to the Western and East Coast main-lines and other routes in the late 1970s and early 1980s significantly increased passenger numbers and pushed up house-prices in such towns as Reading, Swindon, Huntingdon and Peterborough.

The design was exported to Australia as the basis for the XPT train, introduced in 1982 and still operating on five routes out of Sydney.  It’s oddly reassuring for a Brit to stand on an Australian station platform as one of these instantly recognisable beasts glides in.

Back home, its proudest passenger was its long-lived designer, who travelled on HSTs regularly from his home in Devon to work in London.  He featured in this BBC News clip celebrating forty years of HST operation:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/36188805.

Kenneth Grange was awarded a knighthood in the 2013 New Year Honours.  He died on July 21st 2024, a few days after his ninety-fifth birthday.  He designed his own coffin.

Grand hotel

Grand Hotel, Scarborough

Grand Hotel, Scarborough

The Grand Hotel, Scarborough dominates the resort’s South Bay.  Its eggcup domes provide an unmistakable skyline, and the wedge-shaped plan, built into the cliff-side, enables it to overlook both the South Bay and the Valley.

Designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, the architect of Leeds Town Hall and the Leeds Corn Exchange, it belongs to the first generation of British hotels on the American pattern of public rooms combined with suites and bedrooms.

Brodrick provided an elaborate top-lit central hall and staircase, and the coffee-room and drawing room each measured 110ft × 80ft with bow windows facing South Cliff and the Spa.

Nikolaus Pevsner characterised its style as “Mixed Renaissance…[with a] touch of Quattrocento…a High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence, of denial of frivolity and insistence on substance”.  It cost £66,000 to build and opened in 1867.

Legend has it that Brodrick contrived the design to include four towers to represent the seasons, twelve floors for the months, 52 chimneys for the weeks and 365 bedrooms for the days of the year.  If so, it’s a measure of the opulence of the place that the modern configuration, with en-suite facilities, provides 382 bedrooms.

Nowadays the Grand is “grand” in the Yorkshire sense.  After years as a Butlin’s hotel it now belongs to the Britannia chain which owns, among others, the Liverpool Adelphi.  As such it offers budget accommodation in palatial surroundings, with sometimes interesting dissonances.  The last time I walked in the PA system was playing Gene Pitney’s 1964 hit ‘Twenty-four hours from Tulsa’.

In recent years the Grand Hotel has had some unfortunate publicity.  The building now wears a vast hairnet because, apparently, the mating cries of the seagulls disturbed the guests.  In other places, the reverse might have been the case.

The Wikipedia entry is interesting, but its neutrality is disputed:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hotel_(Scarborough).  For the moment, the entry carries a health warning.  As well it might.

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 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.

Midland Grand renaissance

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras: grand staircase (1977)

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel:  grand staircase (2011)

How very satisfying to see the former Midland Grand Hotel finally restored and fully operational as the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which opened in May 2011.

And what a pleasure to be shown round by the Hotel Historian, Royden Stock.  Royden has been associated with the building throughout its recent restoration, and has an unrivalled archaeological knowledge of the building.

I learnt from him, for instance, that English Heritage insistence that the grand staircase should be restored to its 1901 decoration, red with gold fleur-de-lis, obscures the much lighter original scheme, cream with a dado rail and scroll decoration to echo Skidmore’s ironwork.

He also reports that what were thought to be iron spandrels underneath the stair-treads are in fact fibrous plaster, which makes me wonder whether George Gilbert Scott would ever sanction such deceit, or whether they too date from 1901.

There is, oddly, no photograph of the staircase dating before 1901.

The original stair carpet was, unsurprisingly, unusable and a sample length woven to the original colours proved wildly garish because it was designed for the original cream colour-scheme, so the fitted carpet that stretches three floors up and down the staircase and reappears elsewhere in the building is newly woven to the faded colours of the original.

There’s an inevitable tension in taking a historic tour of a working hotel.  Royden Stock is adept at circumnavigating ongoing events to show visitors on any particular day as much of the building as possible.  He can’t, of course, provide access to the private apartments on the Euston Road wing of the building.  The smart advice, from a man who ought to know, is that tours booked at the weekend are likely to be more comprehensive than those in the middle of the week.

The refreshments at the end of the tour were worth waiting for, though the service was several stars short of the Renaissance aspiration, perhaps because the hotel was extremely busy on the day I visited.  Some members of my group were put out by this, but I considered Royden’s guiding alone was worth £20, and to me the pot of tea and an empty croissant was incidental – welcome, but not serious hospitality.

I hope Royden writes a book about St Pancras.  His knowledge will add greatly to the existing literature on the station and the hotel.

Tours of St Pancras can be booked at www.stpancrasrenaissance.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture on St Pancras Station and the Midland Grand Hotel please click here.

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

 

Iron curtain at the Abbeydale

Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield:  auditorium (1987)

Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

While the Adelphi Cinema lay dark Sheffield’s other listed cinema building found a practical use as a performance building.

I’ve a soft spot for the Abbeydale Cinema.  Though I only ever once saw a film there, I repeatedly visited it in the 1980s when it was an office-equipment showroom – an unexpected fate for a superannuated cinema.  The company that bought it, A & F Drake Ltd, sold filing cabinets and office desks in the stalls and balcony, and separately operated the former ballroom and billiard hall in the basement as a snooker club.  The Drakes and their manager, Ian Humphreys, repeatedly allowed me to take adult-education groups to see the place from top to bottom, and on one occasion Ian McMillan and Martyn Wiley broadcast Radio Sheffield’s Saturday morning show live from the Abbeydale auditorium.

Because the Drakes had the imagination to find a productive use for the building – they regarded it as a better customer attraction than an anonymous box on a trading estate – it survived intact long enough to attract the attention of a Friends’ group who are restoring it as a venue for film and amateur dramatics.  Cinemas in the 1920s featured live performance as well as silent movies, and the Abbeydale had an organ – long ago destroyed – and still has a full-scale stage with wings, fly-tower and dressing-rooms.

Even more interesting is the iron safety-curtain, which has remained in situ even after Drakes jacked up the stage-floor six feet to create more space for their wares.  This must date back to the 1920s, but its unique interest is the complete set of painted advertisements that faced audiences between films.  Clifford Shaw, the greatest expert on Sheffield cinemas, has dated the existing adverts to the 1950s.  Ian Humphreys observed to me in the 1980s that all but one of the businesses advertised had by that time folded.  The Cinema Theatre Association reports that, to the best of their knowledge, no other cinema safety-curtain survives with contemporary advertisements, and for this reason is supporting the proposal to upgrade the listing.

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