Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

No sign of Mrs Rochester

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North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, Derbyshire

North Lees Hall, near Hathersage in Derbyshire, is a highly significant building, built for the Jessop family of Broom Hall who belonged to the sphere of influence of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, custodian of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots and long-suffering husband of Bess of Hardwick.

Many of the Earl’s associates built “high houses”, with tall turrets, gridiron mullioned windows and skied chambers and galleries.  The plasterwork at North Lees Hall includes the arms of the Rodes family of Barlborough Hall;  other families with Shrewsbury links and comparable houses included the Sandfords of Thorpe Salvin Hall and the Hewitts of Shireoaks Hall.

Because North Lees Hall was more or less continuously let from the mid-seventeenth century until after the Second World War it was hardly altered, but at times unoccupied.  Sometime before 1792 the tenancy came to one Thomas Eyre, whose descendants stayed here until 1882. Their occupation had an interesting effect:  a whole procession of scholarly visitors assumed a quite spurious connection with the ancient and prolific Catholic family of Eyre.  The resulting legends are extremely attractive.

A more famous connection came from the 1845 visit of Charlotte Brontë, who is often assumed to have based Thornfield Hall at least partly on North Lees in writing the novel she entitled Jane Eyre – “…three stories high, of proportions not vast, though considerable…battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery.”  She may have taken her heroine’s family name from the occupants, and named the nearby fictional village Morton after the actual landlord of the George Inn, Hathersage.

After the Second World War the house was neglected, and at one stage was used for storing grain.  It was converted it into holiday accommodation by Lt-Col Hugh Beach.  It was purchased by the Peak Park Planning Board in 1971, and in 1987 it was leased to the Vivat Trust, who restored and reopened it as self-catering holiday apartments in 1989.  A further restoration took place in 2002, and it is now let as a residence.

Other sites associated with Jane Eyre are described and illustrated at http://walk2read.com/books/jane_eyre.html.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley 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.

No place to rest

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Tower of Elphinstone, Dunmore Park, Scotland (1982)

Tower of Elphinstone, Dunmore Park, Scotland (1982)

Before the Murray Earls of Dunmore built Dunmore Park House, the place was called Elphinstone, after the family that had lived there in the sixteenth century, and the residence was a substantial 57-foot-high tower, alternatively known as the Tower of Elphinstone or Elphinstone Tower.

A curious structure with enormously thick walls, and major rooms on the first, second and third floors, it seems to have been unoccupied after the 3rd Earl of Dunmore bought the Elphinstone property in 1754, until in 1836 the barrel-vaulted ground-floor room was converted into a mausoleum.

In 1840 the two-storey service wing was cleared away to give space for St Andrew’s Church, a modest Gothic building with a bell-turret.

By the time I visited the place in 1982 the Tower had collapsed, and St Andrew’s Church had been completely demolished, leaving free-standing wall monuments surrounded by thin air.

Since then, the Tower has been neglected and vandalised, and the Falkirk Local History Society’s website [http://www.falkirklocalhistorysociety.co.uk/home/index.php?id=126] indicates that it may not survive for many more winters.

The corpses that had been interred in the vault have apparently been removed, but not – so it seems – the coffins, which were left to tempt passing vandals.  The 2009 state of the place, and also the ruins of Dunmore Park House, are illustrated at http://urbanglasgow.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1532&start=0.

It’s not a pretty sight.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

 

 

Could have done more

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Dunmore Park House, Scotland (1982)

Dunmore Park House, Scotland (1982)

When I stayed at the Dunmore Pineapple in 1982, we walked across the park to the ruins of Dunmore Park House, which was built for George Murray, 5th Earl of Dunmore (1762-1836), son of the builder of the Pineapple, by William Wilkins (1778-1839).

Wilkins is best known for his work in the Greek Revival style such as the National Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge and the Yorkshire Museum in York.  He could turn his hand to other styles, however, and had built Dalmeny Castle in what was called ‘Tudor Revival’ for the 4th Earl in 1817.

It follows that Dunmore Park House, built for the same family in the same style as Dalmeny, is an architecturally significant building.  The Murrays left Dunmore in 1911, but the house remained a home until 1961.

When we explored it in 1982 it was already derelict, having been abandoned after a short spell as a girls’ school in 1964.  Since then, it has become entirely a ruin, and remains the subject of seemingly intractable planning debate, which figures on the Scottish Buildings at Risk register http://www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk/BAR/detail.aspx?sctID=1393&region=Falkirk&div=&class=ALL&category=AT%20RISK&Page=1&NumImg=5.  (See also http://www.ads.org.uk/what_we_do/design_review/reports/295_restoration-and-residential-development-of-dunmore-park-house.)

The house is illustrated at http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=5742, a series of images shot in 2007.

Edmund Burke’s sonorous remark that “The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing” is customarily applied to more grave and significant matters than planning policy, but the fact remains that while private owners and public bodies prevaricate, a worthwhile and once habitable building disintegrates.

Living in a pineapple

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The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

The Pineapple, Dunmore Park, Scotland

Some time ago, I stayed with some mates for a week in the Dunmore Pineapple, near Stirling, one of the most appealing of the many delightful holiday experiences provided by the Landmark Trust [http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/].

I don’t like the pseudo-architectural term “folly”, because the builders of strange buildings usually had (indeed, have) their own reasons for spending their money as they wish, but the Pineapple is most certainly one of the oddest architectural statements in the whole of the British Isles.

The Pineapple marks the entrance to the south-facing 6½-acre kitchen garden of Dunmore Park.  The sixteen-foot-high brick retaining wall on the north side incorporated furnaces to heat glasshouses to grow expensive, exotic and highly prized fruit which marked the wealth and status of an aristocratic host.

The lower part of the structure, incorporating a scrupulously correct Palladian archway entrance, was built in 1761 for John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (1732-1809).

He became the last, contentious royal governor of Virginia between 1771 and 1776, and ultimately returned to Scotland, having lost control of the colony.

Because the two halves of the structure, the garden entrance and the pineapple, are built from exactly the same stone and there is a 1761 date-stone, some historians have assumed that is the date of the whole structure.  Atop the cool classicism of the entrance, the octagonal gazebo segues into the pointy doors and windows of eighteenth-century Gothick, and then simply sprouts into a forty-five-foot-high pineapple.

It’s likely that, in conformity with the sailors’ custom of placing a pineapple on the gatepost on returning home from the tropics, Lord Dunmore had the elaborate and skilfully constructed pineapple gazebo built above the entrance to his kitchen garden sometime after his return in 1777.

The pineapple itself is a superb piece of craftsmanship, with each of its leaves individually drained to prevent frost-damage.  Folly it certainly isn’t.

It’s a diverting place to stay, even though you have to step outside to get from bed to breakfast, and the foxes tend to grab their breakfast from the dustbin.  The interior of the octagonal gazebo is entirely circular in plan, which my guitar-playing mate proved has resonant acoustics.  You could probably hear his eighteenth-century amplification a mile down the road in Airth.

Ghost trains

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New Holland Pier Station, Lincolnshire (1981)

New Holland Pier Station, Lincolnshire (1981)

When I was an undergraduate at Hull University in the late 1960s, one of our innocent pleasures was to catch the Humber ferry from Hull Corporation Pier to ride across to New Holland and back.  The boats in those days were still, literally, paddle-steamers, Wingfield Castle and Tattershall Castle (both 1934) and Lincoln Castle (1940).  The bar was customarily open once the vessel had left dry land.

The only time I ever set foot on New Holland Pier was a week before the ferry-service ended in 1981.  Here there was a rail service south to Grimsby to join the main railway network.  The New Holland ferry started out in the early nineteenth century as a legally dubious operation, named after Holland’s Gin.  Its latter-day function was as an extension of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later the Great Central Railway and latterly the LNER and, of course, British Railways).  It was eventually superseded by the opening of the Humber Bridge.

The informative and well-illustrated Disused Stations website [http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/n/new_holland_pier/index.shtml] tells me that the New Holland Pier and its rail-connection still survive as a grain and animal-feed terminal.  Passenger rail services continue between Cleethorpes and Barton-on-Humber.

There is also an intriguing parliamentary service that runs three times a week between Cleethorpes and Sheffield via Gainsborough Central.  Parliamentary trains were originally a bottom-of-the-range penny-a-mile compulsory service intended by the so-called “Gladstone Act” of 1844 to guarantee cheap travel and encourage mobility of labour.  They were satirised by W S Gilbert in The Mikado:

The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
On Parliamentary trains.

Nowadays they are a device which allows railway operators to pretend to provide a service over lines that they no longer wish to operate without going through the cumbersome procedure of legal abandonment.

By modern standards, this parliamentary service is actually quite good:  parliamentary trains in other parts of Britain run once a week, often in one direction only.  Details, some of which may be out of date, can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_train.

An article in the Birmingham Press (February 4th 2011) illustrates the reasons for maintaining – at some expense – stations and routes that have little current practical purpose:  http://www.thebirminghampress.com/2011/02/04/the-train-not-standing.

A recent account is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KiZGRA_yCE.

And an example of a parliamentary bus that thinks it’s a train is at Chiltern Railways’ ‘ghost bus’: Is this Britain’s most bizarre route? – BBC News.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber 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.

No expense spared 2: Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool

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Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Alongside the three Horsfall churches I mentioned in Liverpool 8 Churches (1), the Toxteth area is studded with fine Victorian places of worship.  Almost next door to St Margaret’s, Princes Road (1868) is the Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue (1871), and across the road the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas (1870).  Round the corner, as Princes Road widens into a leafy dual carriageway where the trams once ran on a reservation, stands the Adult Deaf and Dumb Institute (1886-7) which had an octagonal chapel so that the whole congregation could see the minister’s signing, and further down on the opposite side is the desperately sad wreck of the Welsh Presbyterian Church (1868), apparently the richest and finest of them all, now a largely roofless shell.

Of all the Christian places of worship in Liverpool 8, perhaps the most surprising is the Ullet Road Unitarian Church, designed by Thomas Worthington and his son Percy in two stages, 1896-9 and 1900-1.  Unitarianism is a very individualistic creed, centred on the belief in the single personality of God, which regards Jesus Christ as a prophet rather than a divine person of the Holy Trinity.  It comes as a surprise to the non-Unitarian visitor, then, that the Worthingtons’ church has virtually all the features of an Anglican parish church, pews, pulpit, lectern, choir-stalls and reredos, all in the finest Gothic Revival style using the very best materials.

The place is an opulent essay in Gothic and Art Nouveau, with reliefs and wall paintings by George Moira and Morris & Co stained glass mostly designed by Edward Burne-Jones.  The electroliers that light the nave are original, and tucked away behind the chancel arch are original 1890s electric lamps.

This was a congregation that wielded heavy political clout in nineteenth-century Liverpool:  the previous church in Renshaw Street included among its members the poet and anti-slavery campaigner William Roscoe, William Rathbone V, who was Mayor of Liverpool in 1837-8, his son William Rathbone VI, who was MP for Liverpool from 1868 to 1880 and helped found University College Liverpool and the University College of North Wales, and Robert Durning Holt, the last Mayor and first Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1892-3.

The generation that moved their church out of the city-centre to Sefton Park could command serious money.  Robert Durning Holt’s mother, Mrs George Holt, didn’t like the idea of an interior in bright red Ruabon brick, and paid for it to be faced in dignified Runcorn sandstone.  The cloister and meeting hall were funded by Sir John Brunner, whose chemical company later formed the basis for ICI, and Sir Henry Tate, whose name lives on in the sugar company and the gallery that he gave to the nation.  Sir John Brunner appears in one of Moira’s wall-paintings as the philosopher Aristotle.

To see all these places of worship around Sefton Park would take two days minimum.  Even to see a couple is a forcible reminder that this was a city of huge mercantile wealth a century ago, a place where adherents of every faith sought to assert their presence with the finest architecture of their day.

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.

No expense spared 1: Liverpool 8 churches

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St Agnes' Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

St Agnes’ Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

A couple of years ago I spent a fascinating four days researching and photographing places of worship in suburban Liverpool, south of the city, to add to my ‘Liverpool’s Heritage’ lecture and study-day for NADFAS [the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies].

I found a whole collection of fabulous Victorian buildings, and met some particularly interesting people in the process.

One group of Anglican churches is the series founded by the Horsfall family over two generations.  Robert Horsfall commissioned the great Gothic Revival architect, George Edmund Street, to build St Margaret’s, Princes Road, in 1868, at least partly because the diocese was vehemently low church, and he wished to promote elaborate, Anglo-Catholic worship.  This magnificent building, sumptuously embellished with wall paintings and stained glass, much of it designed by Maddox & Pearce and Clayton & Bell, is much loved by the local community, but desperately short of funds.

Robert Horsfall may well have been provoked by the statement of his low-church younger brother George’s project to build Christ Church, Linnet Lane (1867-71), not far away.  This church, by William Culshaw and Henry Sumners, has an elaborately sculpted exterior and a much plainer, though costly interior.  Its peculiar gabled aisles are particularly difficult to keep watertight, and the parish apparently struggles financially.

Robert Horsfall’s son, Howard Douglas Horsfall (1856-1936), was responsible for St Agnes’, Ullet Road, opposite Sefton Park.  Designed by the architect of Truro Cathedral, John Loughborough Pearson, this large but outwardly modest brick church has a dramatic interior, like a miniature cathedral, rich in carvings, stained glass and alabaster.  Pearson’s aim, in his own words, was to design “what will bring people soonest to their knees”.

The controversies of the Victorian Church of England are difficult to grasp in an age when Anglicans fall out about female and gay priests and bishops.  The second vicar of St Margaret’s went to jail for contempt of court over a liturgical dispute with the first Bishop of Liverpool, J C Ryle.  There were serious fears that the consecration of St Agnes’ would be interrupted by “some disturbance” following “heated newspaper agitation”.  Within weeks of the opening, the first vicar of St Agnes was in disagreement with Bishop Ryle over “the illegal use of Eucharistic Lights, Wafer-Bread, the Mixed Chalice, the Agnus Dei and the hymn sung during Holy Communion” and waited twelve years before the bishop backed down.

All three of these superb buildings still house congregations, though the days of packed pews and arguments over ritual are long gone.  Rev Robert Gallagher, the former vicar of St Margaret’s, wryly observed, “the capital used for St Margaret’s beginnings came largely from Liverpool merchants’ involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade and down through grandparents’ bank accounts…an irony not lost on a parish that is now the heart of Liverpool’s black community.”

The Ship of Fools’ mystery worshipper describes the “pious gaiety” of St Agnes’ at http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2012/2330.html.

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.

Slow boat to Cromford

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Cromford Canal, Butterley Tunnel west portal (1963)

Cromford Canal, Butterley Tunnel west portal (1963)

The history of inland waterways in Britain has gained a fresh chapter within the past generation.  When the author Tom Rolt (1910-1974) struggled to navigate silted and derelict waterways before and after the Second World War in his narrow boat Cressy it seemed inevitable that water transport had at best a minimal place in the future economy.

Not least through the campaigning energy of Rolt and his quarrelsome colleagues who founded the Inland Waterways Association, political momentum built up, first to save barely navigable waterways from destruction and ultimately to resuscitate canals that were thought irretrievably lost – among them, the Rochdale, the Huddersfield Narrow, the Chesterfield, the Hereford & Worcester, the Lancaster, the Manchester, Bolton & Bury and the Montgomery.  Now canals that were proposed over two centuries ago and never built, such as the link between the Sheffield and Chesterfield Canals, are seriously discussed:  Rother Link – Wikipedia.

There is clearly much more to this than air-headed enthusiasm.  The growth of leisure boating (of which Tom Rolt was a famous pioneer), the real-estate possibilities of waterside property and the recognition that waterways are an amenity not an eyesore have led to an environmental revolution.

My first personal experience of inland waterways was exploring the Cromford Canal in Derbyshire in the early 1960s, just as its course was repeatedly broken up by mining subsidence, opencasting, road upgrading and industrial development.

Fifty years later, the upper five miles from Ambergate to Cromford is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI] while the bottom three miles from Ironville to Langley Mill has been completely obliterated by opencast mining.  In between, the obstructions include industrial installations, at least one bungalow and a major trunk road.

Repeated collapses within the Butterley Tunnel put paid to through traffic as far back as 1900 and provided easy justification for abandoning this particularly scenic waterway.  In fact, now that coal mining has ceased in the area, the tunnel appears to be stable, and an intrepid canoeist, Robin Witter, surveyed a substantial length of it in 1979:  Butterley Tunnel | Friends of the Cromford Canal.  Tina Cordon made a more extensive exploration from both ends of the tunnel in October-November 2006:  Microsoft Word – Butterley Tunnel Survey Edited.doc (tinas-sliderules.me.uk).

It’s no longer facile to suggest the restoration of long-vanished canals.  There are now sufficient examples of resurrected waterways to provide economic and amenity arguments for schemes that in Rolt’s time seemed utterly impractical.

In each case, it won’t happen quickly, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

For more information see the website of the Waterway Recovery Group – http://www.waterways.org.uk/wrg.

‘Concrete’ Cockrill

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Winter Garden, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Winter Garden, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Sometimes a man of talent is so attracted to a locality that he invests energy in one place that would otherwise have propelled him to wider fame.  John William Cockrill (1849-1924) left his mark, quite literally, on the neighbouring resorts of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston.  Indeed, Kathryn Ferry’s study of his work is entitled ‘The maker of modern Yarmouth…’.

Borough Surveyor for forty years from 1882, he gained the nickname ‘Concrete’ Cockrill, and seems to have enjoyed being identified with this practical and versatile material:  “The reason for so much concrete work in Yarmouth was, of course, its extraordinary durability and cheapness since sand and shingle were provided free of all cost on the beach in such abundant quantities that thousands of tons have been sent to other towns.”

He laid out promenades at Yarmouth Marine Parade and in Gorleston, and designed the Gorleston Pavilion (1900), together with Yarmouth’s Wellington Gardens, which included an extensive shelter, seating up to seven hundred, and a domed bandstand built of Doulton columns and tiles.

He was responsible for the innovative Wellington Pier Pavilion (1903), using Art Nouveau motifs in a way that prefigured the stripped modernism of inter-war architecture.  It was built around a steel frame, clad in a patented fireproof material called Uralite, a brand-name which Punch thought hilarious.

He also arranged to purchase the Winter Garden from the borough of Torquay, where it had made little profit since its construction in 1878-81, and to re-erect it – without breaking a single pane of glass – in 1904 beside the entrance to the Wellington Pier.

His son, Ralph Scott Cockrill, designed the Yarmouth Hippodrome (1903) and Fastolff House, Regent Street (1908).

When J W Cockrill retired, the Yarmouth Mercury commented,–

If he had set his sails towards other spheres he could have commanded a much more remunerative position but he elected to stay in the place of his birth, because he loved the old town, which he helped to bring up-to-date, and abreast with many seaside resorts.

Cockrill’s unbuilt schemes to turn the wooden jetty into Yarmouth’s third pier show flair and ambition to make even more of the resort:  private enterprise might have made more of his talent, but he chose to remain a public servant in his home town.  Cockrill may not have gained fame or fortune, but he deserves credit in Yarmouth for being the genius of the place.

Kathryn Ferry’s study of J W Cockrill forms a chapter in her collection Powerhouses of provincial architecture, 1837-1914 (Victorian Society 2009), obtainable from http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk.

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.

Village of millionaires

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Methodist Church, Overstrand, Norfolk, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1898

Methodist Church, Overstrand, Norfolk, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1898

The writer Clement Scott (1841-1904) first visited Overstrand by accident in 1883, staying with the local miller because there were no vacancies in Cromer.  He was so attracted to the quiet North Norfolk coast that he described it in a series of romanticised articles in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere.  He called it “Poppyland“.

Five years later, when land for development came on the market, Overstrand rapidly attracted some of the richest people in Britain – a small colony of bankers and lawyers, most of them Liberal in politics, cultured and socially extremely well connected.  Part of its appeal was that it was not Cromer, by then regarded as popular, if not exactly vulgar.

At one time there were six millionaires in the village – among them Cyril Flower, Liberal MP and later Lord Battersea, Lord Hillingdon, one of the few Tories in the village, and the financier Sir Edgar Speyer who became chairman of the original London Underground.  Their holiday neighbours included Sir Frederick MacMillan, son of the founder of the publishing empire, Edward Lyttleton, headmaster of Eton, and the classicist Gilbert Murray.

Though these incomers lacked the landed status of earlier generations of Cromer-based bankers, Barings, Gurneys and Hoares, they knew how to spend money and they had taste.  The rising young architect Edwin Lutyens received two domestic commissions in Overstrand, The Pleasaunce (1888) for Cyril Flower and Overstrand Hall (1898-1900) for Lord Hillingdon.  Cyril Flower, as Lord Battersea, provided Lutyens with his only opportunity to build a Methodist chapel (1898).

Celebrated visitors flocked to stay with such opulent hosts.  Queen Alexandra visited the Hillingdons.  Lady Randolph Churchill, often with her sons Winston and Jack, stayed repeatedly with either the Speyers or with the powerful lawyer Sir George Lewis, who lived in the Danish Pavilion, which he’d transported direct from the 1900 Paris International Exhibition.  Sidney and Beatrice Webb stayed with Lord and Lady Battersea, whom they disliked, on a working break with their fellow Fabians, George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas.

The heyday of Poppyland was all over so quickly, killed – as much as anything – by the effect of the First World War.  After 1919 the millionaires moved away and died off, and by the mid-1930s all the major houses had been converted to hotels, nursing homes or apartments.  By that time the only major modern hotel in the village, the Overstrand Hotel, was at risk of sliding over the fast-eroding cliffs:  it eventually burnt down in 1947.

Overstrand remains an attractive and interesting place to visit.  It carries the implicit message that you can’t take it with you.