Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Plenty of room for guests

Wentworth Woodhouse:  east front

Wentworth Woodhouse: east frontThe Sheffield Star for May 21st 2011 announces 1,500 jobs in £200m plans to open Black Diamonds stately home, the first public news that Wentworth Woodhouse, the vast Palladian mansion on the borders of Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley, will become accessible to the general public for the first time, possibly by 2015.

Without doubt this is one of the greatest classical Georgian houses in the British Isles – actually two houses, because the rarely seen “back front”, a baroque west wing built for the Lord Malton who became 1st Marquis of Rockingham, is overshadowed by the enormous Palladian east wing designed by Henry Flitcroft for the 2nd Marquis, who served as prime minister from in 1765-6 and again briefly in the year of his death, 1782.

Flitcroft’s façade is 606 feet long, with pavilions each the size of a small country house.  The great rooms inside include the magnificent Great Hall, decorated with fluted Ionic columns in Siena scagliola, embellished, like the wooden doorcases, with verde antico, and the Whistlejacket Room, which still houses a reproduction of Stubbs’ famous painting (c1762) of a Fitzwilliam stallion, now in the National Gallery.

This house figures in architectural, political and social history as strongly as the celebrated Stowe, which survived as the centrepiece of a public school, its landscape now maintained by the National Trust.  Arguments over the family inheritance, leasing to the county council as a teacher-training college, the malicious excavation of the park by a vindictive Minister of Power, Emmanuel Shinwell [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Shinwell], and the family’s refusal to resume the liability when the college closed in 1986 have made Wentworth Woodhouse a mystery house.

The circumstances in which the family loosened and then released its grip on the place are vividly described in Catherine Bailey’s superb Black Diamonds (Viking 2007).  The house and ninety surrounding acres were sold as a private residence in 1989 to Wensley Haydon-Baillie, who went voluntarily bankrupt nine years later.  Latterly it was sold by the administrators to a retired London architect, Clifford Newbold, who at the age of 85 is setting out on a scheme to incorporate a seventy-bedroom hotel and a spa while opening the main house as a museum, in anticipation of up to 150,000 visitors.  In this scheme John Carr’s stable block, built to house a hundred horses, will become a business park.

This development represents a very welcome change of direction, after years when the house and its immediate surroundings were strictly off limits to locals and visitors.  Now, with the backing of English Heritage and Rotherham Borough Council, Mr Newbould’s scheme is the first piece of optimistic news about the house since the Fitzwilliams packed up their possessions at the start of the Second World War.

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.

Last resort in Norfolk

Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

Former Grand Hotel, Mundesley, Norfolk

As you drive along the tortuous coast road through the Poppyland area of north Norfolk, after passing through Overstrand, Sidestrand and Trimingham you may notice on the horizon two large Victorian hotels looming incongruously over the landscape.

This is Mundesley, a former fishing village that was aggrandised into a resort in the mid-1890s as the railway at last penetrated to this remote corner.  The station opened as the terminus of a line from North Walsham in 1898.  In 1908 it was extended through to Cromer Beach.  Its three platforms, each six hundred feet long, were never remotely necessary.  It closed in 1964 and is now virtually obliterated.

The East Coast Estates Company was established in the 1890s by an architect with the unfortunate name of Mr Silley.  Streets were laid out on the West Cliff and given the name Cliftonville.  Two brickworks opened.  The Clarence Hotel (1891), which is now a care home, and the Grand Hotel (Herbert John Green 1897), which is apparently being converted to apartments, stare out to sea, grandiose statements of opulence and unfulfilled ambition.  The Manor Hotel, built around an earlier dwelling to a design by John Bond Pearce in 1900, remains in business – http://www.manorhotelmundesley.co.uk.

Indeed, the most successful enterprise in Mundesley was the Sanatorium, opened in 1899 with an initial capacity of twelve patients, a fine timber prefabricated building by the Norwich architects Boulton & Paul.  This became the Diana Princess of Wales Treatment Centre for Drug and Alcohol Problems in 1997 and closed in 2009:  see http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=18049, which links to http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?p=182326#post182326.

One of its early patients was the golfer Harry Vardon (1870-1937), who laid out the Mundesley Golf Club [http://www.mundesleygolfclub.com] in 1901.  He was treated for tuberculosis in the Mundesley Sanatorium in 1903-4, during which time he achieved the only hole-in-one in his entire career.

Of the holiday towns along the Norfolk coast, Mundesley really is the last resort.  Though the population of this quiet place has continued to grow through the twentieth century, the visitors were always thin on the ground.  That’s its unique selling point.  It has a beautiful beach, beach huts, a quiet village atmosphere.  It’s the ideal place for an away-from-it-all British seaside holiday.  No tat.  No razzamatazz.  The real thing.  Enjoy!

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.

Breakfast in style

Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer:  dining room

Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer: dining room

I’ve stayed twice at the Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer [http://www.cliftonvillehotel.co.uk], so I’ve observed the architecture at close quarters over a full English breakfast.

The dining room is an impressive example of the exuberance of the Norwich architect, George Skipper, but the archaeology of the building is odd.

According to the material I surfed in the local-studies section of Cromer Library, a local retailer, William Churchyard, built a residence designed by A F Scott in 1894 on the site of Skipper’s later extension.  This was a dignified Victorian villa which looks on the only photograph I could find quite different to the existing hotel.

Within a couple of years Churchyard had the elaborate corner building constructed by an unknown architect, and then appears to have demolished the house and replaced it by Skipper’s elaborate wing of 1898, which includes a grand staircase, a ballroom and an elegant dining room with a minstrel’s gallery.  Why would someone knock down a four-year-old house to extend a hotel over the site?

I could find no clear indication of a domestic structure lurking within the shell of Skipper’s 1898 work.  The rooms and floor-levels are entirely logical for a hotel, and I couldn’t discern any odd changes of level or oddly positioned doors and windows.

The spaces are impressive and the surroundings – marble fireplaces, dark woodwork and stained glass – add to the enjoyment of staying there.  And the owners have taken care to preserve the electric-bell boards and the instructions for operating the original lift.

I’m still wondering if the history of the building is even more interesting than it looks.

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.

O, brave new world

Woodhead station and tunnel, Derbyshire (1975)

Woodhead station and tunnel, Derbyshire (1975)

I was born in 1947, and so grew up in a particularly special transition period in British history.

As part of the post-war recovery, many aspects of 1930s life simply continued in the late forties and fifties:  factories and coal-mines churned out their products;  people shopped at Woolworth’s and Burton’s and collected their “divvy” at the Co-op;  cinemas had one screen each and a queue outside twice nightly if not more;  British cars were built with British badges;  British Railways ran trains just about everywhere and served curly sandwiches in buffets with crockery and silverware;  radio announcers talked in clipped accents.

And yet, on the horizon a brave new world could be glimpsed – supermarkets, motorways, television, high-rise buildings, nuclear energy.  It was a moment when so much was about to disappear, and so much that was new was understood dimly and with optimism.

It came back to life for me when I was browsing through the British Pathé website and came across a clip of the opening of the electric railway from Sheffield to Manchester through the new Woodhead Tunnel:  http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=62457.  This was the brief moment when post-war British railways seemed to have a future that was directly connected with their Victorian origins.

The original Woodhead tunnels were a saga of Victorian engineering, notorious for appalling working conditions and the contractors’ bloody-minded exploitation of their workers, vividly described in Terry Coleman’s 1968 book, The Railway Navvies, now long out of print.  54 workers lost their lives, and many more were injured.

The gradients were a nightmare:  up to five steam locomotives were needed to shift a single coal train up the 1 in 201 inclines.  Electrifying the route required a completely new Woodhead tunnel, which opened in 1953.  This project had started before the Second World War, using 1,500-volt DC traction, which was incompatible with the post-war standard 25KV AC system.

Once the new trains were running, the two original single-track tunnels, Woodhead 1 and 2, were handed over to the Central Electricity Generating Board to carry a 400KV power-cable underground, rather than disfigure the landscape with pylons.

The Manchester-Sheffield-Wath electrification, as it was called, closed in 1981.  The 1953 tunnel, Woodhead 3, figured in schemes, most of them barely practical, to carry the M67 motorway across Woodhead:  see http://pathetic.org.uk/unbuilt/m67_manchester_to_sheffield_motorway/maps/Woodhead%20East.shtml.

In recent years National Grid PLC has expressed increasing concern about the deteriorating condition of Woodhead 1 and 2, and lobbied to be allowed to move the power line into Woodhead 3.  This precludes the restoration of the rail route for the foreseeable future, and has attracted considerable opposition:  http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/save_the_woodhead_tunnel.

No doubt, the arguments will continue to roll back and forth about whether a tunnel, constructed to carry electric trains “under the hill”, as the railwaymen called it, should carry cars or a power line – or trains.

The brave new world of 1953 was remarkably quickly shunted into a siding and scrapped.

The Flute

Monsal Dale Viaduct & Headstones Tunnel, Derbyshire (1970)

Monsal Dale Viaduct & Headstones Tunnel, Derbyshire (1970)

My friend Richard is a serious walker.  He doesn’t think twice about twenty-five miles in a day, and goes walking with people who’ll tackle the West Highland Way (94 miles) carrying their own rucksacks.

So a walk along the Derbyshire Monsal Trail [see Changing trains in the middle of nowhere: Miller’s Dale Station] counts as a gentle stroll.  This is the former railway line between Derby and Manchester that has so many tunnels the railwaymen called it “the flute”.

Richard told me that as he walked across Monsal Dale Viaduct on a hot day in a T-shirt recently he was suddenly confronted with a blast of cold air.

This turned out to be the draught from Headstones Tunnel, which for years has been bricked up with a locked steel door for inspection parties.  Now the tunnel mouth is open again, and work proceeds to make it accessible to walkers, complete with lighting.

This welcome development is flagged on the Peak District National Park website:  http://www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/index/visiting/cycle.htm.

One might ask, what happened to the proposal to reinstate the railway line from Matlock to Buxton, which at present stops at the PeakRail terminus at Rowsley [see Rails across the Peak].  The most probable answer is not that there’s a bridge missing across the A6 road at Rowsley, but that there’s a problem a little further west.

UPDATE:  Richard told me (riding through another railway tunnel on a train, on our way to a Friday night at Anoki [see Cosy Curry]) that the Monsal Trail tunnels are now open:  http://www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/index/news/news-display-page.htm?id=24902.

Modern architects in Liverpool

Unity Building, Liverpool

Unity Building, Liverpool

It’s a sign of the times that the guide to the twenty-first century buildings in the city centre of Liverpool, is already in its second edition. The New Liverpool:  modern architecture for a modern city in fact includes buildings back into the 1990s.

Andrew F Robinson’s survey lists and describes Liverpool’s new buildings in five well-mapped itineraries around the city-centre, and occasionally indicates what is proposed for currently empty sites.  His list shows how prolific are such architectural practices as Falconer Chester Hall [http://www.fcharchitects.com].  He also nods to the buildings lost to these new developments and, in some cases refers to structures conserved, retained as façades or rebuilt in replica.

He provides the sort of informal insights that don’t crop up in volumes of the Pevsner series – which architect designed his mother’s name in Morse code into a building (Paul Monaghan at the Unity Building, 2007), which building was topped out by its occupant and the architect wearing pink hard hats (Herbert’s ‘Bling’ Building, 2006) and which architect omitted to provide waste disposal in an apartment block (no names, see page 9…).

Sometimes he’s obliged to note “architect and builder unknown”, a recognition that information about new buildings isn’t easy to come by.  Newly-built buildings don’t always show up on the internet or, indeed, in Liverpool’s excellent local studies library.  In one case, Andrew Robinson reports that a builder flatly refused to disclose details for publication (no names, see page 27…).

The New Liverpool fills a gap between publications of record, such as the Pevsner volumes, and the current architectural press, which is aimed primarily at professionals, so that people who are simply interested in buildings and those who live in and with developing cities can identify who designed what and why in their community.

The New Liverpool:  modern architecture for a modern city is obtainable from West Derby Publishing, 279 Eaton Road, West Derby, Liverpool, L12 2AG for £3.00.  [ISBN 978 1 871075 09 0].

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Younger architect in Liverpool

Liverpool Cathedral

Liverpool Cathedral

The achievement of Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, winning two competitions to design what became St George’s Hall, Liverpool, between the ages of 25 and 27, is remarkable;  even more surprising was the result of the competition to build Liverpool Cathedral fifty years later.

1880s plans to build an Anglican cathedral on the St John’s site, backing on to St George’s Hall, came to nothing:  no-one could find a way of building a church that would sit comfortably alongside Elmes & Cockerill’s great classical temple.

The eventual site, St James’ Mount, was chosen and the customary architectural competition organised, with a controversial stipulation that Gothic designs would be preferred.

When the 103 anonymous entries were assessed, the judges were disconcerted to discover that the winner was the 21-year-old Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott, who had designed, amid much else, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station.  To add to their discomfort, Giles Scott was a Roman Catholic.

The committee asked him if he’d designed anything before.  Yes, he said, a pipe-rack for his sister.  In the end, Scott was given the commission, as was his right, but under the supervision of one of the assessors, the veteran Gothic Revival architect, George Frederick Bodley.

Bodley’s influence is apparent in the florid decoration of the first section of Scott’s cathedral, the Lady Chapel, begun in 1904.  It was an uncomfortable arrangement:  Giles Scott’s resignation was ready to post when he heard the news of Bodley’s death in 1907.

By the time the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1910, Scott went to the building committee and calmly proposed a radical redesign.  Instead of twin towers, he wanted a single tower above a majestic central space.  This was not straightforward, for the foundations of the two towers were already in place, which is why the cathedral as built has twin transepts and twin central porches, one of which stares vacantly over the chasm of St James’ Cemetery.

The 331-foot Vestey Tower, named after the Dewhurst butchers’ dynasty that paid for it, contains the highest and heaviest ringing peal of bells in the world.  The central space below could accommodate Nelson’s Column if Nelson took his hat off.  The tower was completed in 1941, in the darkest days of the Second World War.  “Keep going, whatever you do, even if you can only go on in a small way,” King George VI advised on a wartime visit.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott died in 1960, his final contribution the Nave Bridge which frames the vista towards the High Altar.  The west end was eventually finished, to modified designs by his professional partner, Frederick Thomas in collaboration with Roger Pinckney, and dedicated in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1978.

Sir Giles and Lady Scott’s remains lie before the west door of the completed cathedral.  The Winter 2010-11 edition of C20 – the magazine of the Twentieth Century Society mentioned that the stone marker of [their] grave has been removed and that they rest “in an unmarked grave as cars and delivery vans to the café and shop frequently drive over [them]”.

That may be true, but it can’t be right.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

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

Young architect in Liverpool

St George's Hall, Liverpool (1979)

St George’s Hall, Liverpool (1979)

A couple of years ago I showed a group of gifted and talented Wirral school students nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century buildings in Liverpool city-centre as part of a NADFAS North-West Area Young Arts educational event.

I pointed out to these bright teenagers that some of Liverpool’s most remarkable buildings were designed by young architects no more than ten years older than them.

One such was Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1813-1847).  In 1839, aged twenty-five, he won anonymously a competition to design two concert halls, respectively seating 3,000 and 1,000, within one building at an estimated cost of £35,000.

The following year Liverpool Corporation set up a second competition for the design of assize courts on an adjacent site, which Elmes duly entered anonymously and – extraordinarily – won.

He then revised his two designs, combining concert-hall and courts into one building.  The result was St George’s Hall, 490 feet long, with two law-courts at opposite ends of a large rectangular hall, and a circular smaller hall above the public entrance at the apsidal north end.

The Great Hall, 169 feet long and 74 feet wide, is based on the ancient Roman baths at Caracalla, which Elmes could only have known from publications.  Its sides are punctuated by red granite Corinthian columns with bronze-effect plaster capitals, supporting the 600-ton tunnel-vault, constructed to the design of the engineer Robert (later Sir Robert) Rawlinson.

The heating and ventilation system was designed by the same Dr Boswell Reid who drove Sir Charles Barry to distraction in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster:  manually operated by squads of workmen, it represented the first approach to air-conditioning of a major public building in Britain.

Elmes’ design, described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “the best example of Neo-Classical architecture in Europe”, absorbed much of what remained of his short life.  His health, never strong, gave way when the Hall was partially completed.  He left to winter in Jamaica in 1847 and died there aged 34, leaving the completion of the design with Rawlinson, who finished the Great Hall vault in 1849.

In 1851 the Corporation appointed Charles Robert Cockerell to supervise the decoration of the Great Hall and its superb encaustic-tile floor – still to this day in mint condition – by Minton, Hollins & Co.  He also designed the circular Concert Room with its balcony supported by graceful caryatids of hollow plaster.  This magical early-Victorian interior uses the most modern materials of its time – cast iron for the balcony trelliswork, papier mâché for the frieze and pilasters that surround the detached grained deal panelling, plate glass mirrors behind the elaborate Corinthian columns at the back of the stage and a gas-lit cut-glass chandelier, recently restored, by F & C Osler of Birmingham.

Elmes specifically asked that “there will be no organ at the end of the Hall, so that you can stand on the Judge’s Platform in one court, your eye glancing along the ranges of ruddy columns at either side,…[until it] finally rests upon the further Judge’s Throne.”  Instead, in the fashion of the day, Cockerell designed a gigantic case for the vast ‘Father’ Willis organ, which was completed in 1855, the year after the Hall opened.

St George’s Hall is a gem of world architecture – by an architect who if he was alive today would be recently out of college.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Taking the train for tea

Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station:  loco no 12 Hutchinson

Isle of Man Railway, Port St Mary Station: loco no 12 Hutchinson

My Isle of Man host John and I watched the Royal Wedding, toasted the happy couple in Sauvignon Blanc (because the island – or at least the island’s co-op – had apparently run out of champagne) and wondered what else to do for the afternoon, rather than watch Huw Edwards busking while waiting for something to happen.

We caught the steam train one stop, from Port St Mary to the end of the line at Port Erin, and went for tea at the utterly seaside Cosy Nook Café [http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g616277-d1863309-Reviews-Cosy_nook_cafe-Port_Erin_Isle_of_Man.html], walked back up the hill and took the same train back an hour later.  For £4.00 return, rather than £3.20 on the bus.

It is of course a delight to travel, even for a few minutes, in a wooden railway compartment with windows that let down on leather straps.

Even more, it’s satisfying to be able to use a Victorian heritage line as practical transport.

As we watched the red locomotive and carriages chug off towards Douglas, I remarked that this railway wasn’t designed to be cute.

When it opened in the 1870s this was practical modern transport, scaled down to the geography of the island.  It opened up towns like Port St Mary and Port Erin, and enabled people to travel across the island quickly and relatively cheaply for the first time.

The system of four lines, run by two companies, survived because it worked, and because the manager between the wars surreptitiously subsidised the steam trains from the revenues of the bus routes.

The routes to Peel and Ramsey eventually expired in the 1960s, and the remaining Douglas-Port Erin line was in effect nationalised in 1977.

It’s now heavily marketed as a tourist attraction, which rivals the bus-service in speed though not in frequency.  When the TT annually blocks the island’s road-system, it provides a much-needed commuter service.

Meanwhile the Peel and Ramsey trackbeds remain substantially intact as footpaths [see Walking the Manx Northern Railway].

Details of the Isle of Man Railway services services appear at http://www.iombusandrail.info/imr-steamrailway.html.

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.

All sorts of stories about Beulah Road

Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

I will always have a particular regard for the Hillsborough Leisure Centre, the third and smallest of Sheffield’s World Student Games sports facilities, because members of its staff saved my life when I had a cardiac arrest in the gym.  It’s because of Mel who pressed the panic button, Ryan who ran for the defibrillator and John who kick-started me to excellent effect that I’m here to write this.

Until the Centre was built in 1991, Beulah Road was lined with typical Sheffield artisan terraced houses, which before they were demolished figured as a location in the gloomy, award-winning Barry Hines/Mick Jackson TV film, Threads (1984).  My mate Phil’s uncles lived here, and there are glorious family tales of their fanatical devotion to Sheffield Wednesday FC.  One of the uncles apparently threw himself in the River Don once when his team lost.  The river is at least a foot deep at this point.

Sheffield Wednesday is so-called because it was originally a butchers’ side, and they played on early-closing day which was, in the late-nineteenth century, Wednesday.  Though the ground is officially called Hillsborough, it more or less stands in Owlerton, which is why the team are called the Owls, and devoted fans go to considerable lengths to acquire car-registrations ending in OWL.

(Sheffield United’s colours are red and white, apparently because of the red headscarves of the formidable buffer girls who polished the blades of Sheffield-made cutlery, which is probably why their team is known as the Blades.)

But the Beulah Road landmark that means most in Sheffield’s history and popular culture is the factory of George Bassett & Co, whose salesman accidentally tipped his display box of liquorice sweets all over a customer’s shop counter, and before he could replace them neatly in their compartments was offered an order for them as they were – “all sorts”.