Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

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.

Boomtown Cromer

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Hotel de Paris, Cromer, Norfolk

Hotel de Paris, Cromer, Norfolk

Until 1877 Cromer was regarded as a “fashionable watering place”.  Its attractions, for those who could afford to stay there, were the cliff scenery, the activities of the fishing trade, and the opportunity to bathe, either in the actual sea using bathing machines, or in bath houses.  Through much of the nineteenth century Cromer remained a very small settlement, and much of the surrounding land remained part of the Cromer Hall estate.

The East Norfolk Railway, first promoted in 1864, opened to North Walsham in 1874, to Gunton two years later, and eventually reached Cromer High Station, a mile away from the town-centre, in 1877.  Ten years later the Eastern & Midlands Railway completed its branch from Melton Constable to the more accessible Cromer Beach Station in 1887.

This provoked a carefully managed expansion of the little town, seeking affluent visitors in small numbers.  A major contributor to this development was the ebullient Norwich architect, George Skipper.  With his brother Frederick, he built the Town Hall (1890), followed by the restrained Grand Hotel (1890-1) on part of the Cromer Hall estate as the flagship development for the western extension of the town.  It was demolished after a fire in April 1969.

A different syndicate employed George Skipper to build the Hotel Metropole (1893-4, demolished 1970s), a more flamboyant design than the Grand, with oriel windows and Skipper’s favourite Flemish gables to enliven the roofline.

Though the Grand and the Metropole have now both gone, Skipper’s Hotel de Paris, built in 1894 for the proprietor, Alex Jarvis, remains in business.  A virtual rebuilding of a more reticent Georgian building that had been a private residence before it became a hotel in 1830, the Hotel de Paris is the prestigious embodiment of its proud name, with an asymmetrically placed entrance surmounted by a landmark domed tower.  Enlivened by Skipper’s favourite material, terra-cotta, it is the most prominent and endearing building in Cromer.

George Skipper’s final work in Cromer was the extension of the Cliftonville Hotel in 1898, providing a grand staircase and an elegant dining room that also remains in hotel use.

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 belly of the beast

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Crossness Pumping Stsation, London

Crossness Pumping Station, London

I received some very strange looks on a train recently, reading Paul Dobraszczyk’s Into the Belly of the Beast:  exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Spire 2009).  It’s a perfectly sensible subject, with an entirely respectable cover, but maybe the title is a little over-wrought.

(The last time I got funny looks on a train was years ago when I first read Sue Townsend’s delightful The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ [1982]:  I was rolling around the carriage at the Christmas lunch scene where Adrian is lusting after his aunt’s prison officer girlfriend, and ends up eating the wing of the turkey because he’s too embarrassed to ask for any other part of its anatomy.)

Paul Dobraszczyk’s book is a very interesting addition to the somewhat limited literature about what the Victorians called the “sanitary question”, the great environmental issue of the nineteenth century – how to provide the rapidly growing urban areas with clean drinking water, sewage disposal and a dignified, hygienic way of disposing of the dead.

Dr Dobraszczyk analyses how Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Metropolitan Main Drainage system, constructed at huge expense and upheaval, initially between 1859 and 1868, is represented by the illustrative material left behind – maps and drawings, photographs and press coverage.

Among the insights he uncovers is the fact that before Bazalgette could begin to lay down a coherent drainage system for London he needed the area to be surveyed systematically.  All the previous maps had stopped at some arbitrary district boundary, and they were all at different scales or levels of detail.

Another revelation is the identity of the architect of the great steam pumping stations which are the glory of London’s industrial archaeology – Crossness (1862-65), Abbey Mills (1865-68) and the less flamboyant sites at Deptford (1859-62) and Pimlico (1870-74).  This was Charles Henry Driver (1832-1900), who also worked for the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, provided architectural detail for the seaside piers at Llandudno (1878) and Southend-on-Sea (1887-90), and collaborated on the Mercado Central [Central Market], Santiago, Chile (1868-70) and the Estação da Luz [Station of Light], São Paulo, Brazil (1897-1900)*.

I was concerned that I’d never encountered Driver’s name before, and began to feel I needed to keep up, until I read a review of Dr Dobraszczyk’s book in the Victorian Society’s magazine, The Victorian, which admits “this reviewer had never heard of Charles Driver”.  The reviewer was Stephen Halliday, whose book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Sutton 1999) I greatly admire.  If the name is news to Stephen Halliday, then Charles Driver is a real discovery.

*  The Estação da Luz suffered a disastrous fire, in which one firefighter died, in December 2015:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-35157694.

Abbey Mills Pumping Station is a working installation operated by Thames Water and is very rarely accessible to the public.

The pumping stations at Abbey Mills and Crossness feature in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Temples of Sanitation.  For details, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness 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.

Yorkshire railway with potential

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Wensleydale Railway

Wensleydale Railway

The Wensleydale Railway [http://www.wensleydalerailway.com/index.html] at present is, in essence, a seventeen-mile railway siding through some of the most attractive landscape in Yorkshire.  Its staple rolling stock consists of those wonderful 1950s diesel railcars when you can sit at the front looking over the driver’s shoulder at the track ahead.  It potters through stations serving the towns and villages of the eastern end of Wensleydale – Bedale, Finghall, Leyburn.  It has really exciting potential, and a hard-headed management team that shows every sign of achieving its targets.

The line served as a link between the East Coast Main Line near Northallerton and the Settle & Carlisle Railway at Garsdale.  Opened in stages between 1848 and 1878, the section east of Hawes was owned by the North Eastern Railway;  west of Hawes belonged to the Midland Railway but the through service was operated by the North Eastern.  The stretch west of Redmire was dismantled after 1964, while the line east remained in use for quarry traffic until 1992.

In response to the imminent threat of final closure, the Wensleydale Railway Association was formed in 1990, initially committed to restoring environment-friendly passenger transport to the towns and villages of the dale and – given the assurance that the long-threatened Settle & Carlisle would after all remain open – ultimately dedicated to the long-term reinstatement of the whole line.

Assisted by a Ministry of Defence undertaking to use the line to transport military vehicles from Catterick, the Association agreed terms with Network Rail to lease the existing track and reopened passenger services between Leeming Bar and Leyburn in 2003.  The service was extended to Redmire the following year.

Though the line uses historic rolling stock, including on occasions steam haulage, it is not so much an exhibition line as a serious transport route.  Its administration is committed to hastening slowly, first upgrading the well-used existing track, next reinstating a link into Northallerton [http://www.wensleydalerailwayassociation.com/resources/NorthallertionOptionsAssessmentNov+09.pdf] and then extending from Redmire to the popular tourist destinations of Castle Bolton and Aysgarth Falls [http://www.wensleydalerailway.com/091009_Final_Wenselydale_Railway_Socio-economic_Study_Issue.pdf].  The more ambitious project to restore the missing link to Hawes and Garsdale – which requires repurchasing land, rebuilding bridges and in effect constructing a new railway – must wait.  Earning revenue by providing a service comes first.

For the moment, this admirable line provides an enjoyable outing between Leeming Bar, just off the A1, to Redmire, linking with a vintage single-deck bus service to and from Ripon, calling at Jervaulx Abbey, Castle Bolton and Aysgarth Falls.

One day, it will be possible once more to make a round trip along the East Coast Main Line, the Wensleydale Railway and the southern part of the Settle & Carlisle.  Serving that traffic will need more than a couple of diesel railcars.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Yorkshire railway with tradition

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Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, Keighley, West Yorkshire: British Railways loco 41241 (1975)

Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, Keighley, West Yorkshire: British Railways loco 41241 (1975)

Among the preserved steam railways of Great Britain, the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway [http://www.kwvr.co.uk] was notably quick off the mark.

British Railways closed the branch from Keighley to Oxenhope in 1962, the year before the publication of the Beeching Report, and the Keighley & Worth Valley Preservation Society had the line running again by 1968, the year that steam traction finally disappeared from main line British railways.  (For comparison, the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway opened in 1951;  the standard-gauge Bluebell Railway in Sussex opened in 1960.)

As a result the K&WVR remains the only British heritage railway that operates a branch line in its entirety, and in its relatively short five-mile length it offers the traveller connection from the main line at Keighley, two tunnels, a significant viaduct and a succession of stations with attractions of ranging from rolling-stock displays to tearooms.  The penultimate station on the ride up to Oxenhope is Haworth, the key location in understanding the writings and personalities of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne.  (Their brother Branwell was, briefly, a ticket clerk at Luddendenfoot station on the Manchester & Leeds Railway:  he was not a success.)

The line also benefitted, both financially and in terms of publicity, as the location for the Lionel Jeffries’ 1970 film The Railway Children and John Schlesinger’s 1979 film Yanks.

One of its other proud claims to fame is that it is the only railway that serves real ale in its buffet car.  The railway’s real-ale festivals are, by all accounts, jolly affairs.

This branch, opened in 1867 and operated from the outset by the Midland Railway, was not the only railway in the valley.  The rival Great Northern Railway reached Keighley in 1882 by a contorted system connecting Bradford, Halifax and Keighley linked by an unusual triangular station at Queensbury.  The Queensbury-Keighley route trailed into the Worth valley through the 1,533-yard Lees Moor Tunnel, built on a ninety-degree curve that was no fun to drive a steam loco through.  Almost all of this improbable network has disappeared and can be best explored at http://www.lostrailwayswestyorkshire.co.uk/Queensbury.htm.  Lees Moor Tunnel became, of all things, a caravan park:  http://www.forgottenrelics.co.uk/tunnels/gallery/leesmoor.html.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

Bingley Five Rise

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Bingley Five Rise, Leeds & Liverpool Canal, West Yorkshire

Bingley Five Rise, Leeds & Liverpool Canal, West Yorkshire

The Leeds & Liverpool Canal, begun in 1770, climbs the valley of the Yorkshire Aire on its way to the watershed leading to Lancashire.  As you walk up the towpath through Bingley you encounter one of the 91 locks, then a staircase of three, the Bingley Three Rise, and then a further staircase of five, the Bingley Five Rise.

This magnificent piece of engineering was one of the wonders of England when it opened to traffic in 1774.  Thirty thousand people came to see the first boats along the canal, and the Leeds Intelligencer reported –

This joyful and much wished for event was welcomed with the ringing of Bingley bells, a band of music, the firing of guns by the neighbouring Militia, the shouts of spectators, and all the marks of satisfaction that so important an acquisition merits.

The first journey down the Five Rise, a fall of 59 feet 2 inches, took 28 minutes.

The Five Rise is a staircase, which means the bottom gate of the top lock serves as the top gate of the next lock down:  once a boat starts to ascend or descend it has to keep going to the level pound at the end.  Now that the traffic consists entirely of leisure cruising a professional lock-keeper supervises all transits:  his name is Barry Whitelock, a man so celebrated that he was awarded an MBE for services to inland waterways in the North of England.

This is an excellent spot for the spectator sport of gongoozling:  gongoozler is the boatman’s term for people who stand and stare at other people working hard. [See the completely straight-faced entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gongoozler.]

The Five Rise is also a place to contemplate the energy and pride of the eighteenth-century canal builders, hoisting the country into the industrial age.  Take a look at the impeccable stonework, the robustness of the gates and paddles, and the utterly straightforward management of water under gravity.  It’s not actually true to say they don’t make them like that any more:  the moving parts were renewed as recently as 2006.

To see the stretch of canal before and after the Five Rise, go to http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/ll/bingleyfiverise.htm.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps 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.

The above image is available as a greetings card, price £2.95 for one or £11.95 for a pack of five, or as a notelet to order. For the entire range of Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times greetings cards, please click here.

Pub with no beer

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Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

The temperance movement is one of the aspects of Victorian social history that has strong resonances in the twenty-first century:  powerful moral interests raged against the perils of the demon drink, while much of the population cheerfully imbibed without actually coming to much harm, in much the same way that current political hysteria about illegal substances conflicts with a widespread and partly respectable black market in drugs, some of which appear to be less risky than legal commodities like alcohol and tobacco.

I’ve been reading some research by Andrew Davison into the history of the temperance movement and the buildings that arose from it.  In many British towns the temperance hall was the most comfortable – and often the only – public meeting-place available for hire other than the upstairs room of a pub.  Temperance billiard halls were common:  Rochdale had six in 1916.

The most startling, to modern eyes, were the coffee palaces, the temperance answer to gin palaces, designed to offer the working man everything he’d find in a pub, but without the temptations of alcohol.

One of the most visible of these is the Ossington Coffee Palace in Newark, Nottinghamshire, designed by Ernest George & Peto and opened in 1882, boasted a ground-floor coffee room instead of a bar, a first-floor assembly room with a reading-room, a library and a club-room and, on the second floor, a billiard room and sleeping accommodation.  There was a tea garden, an American bowling alley and stables for fifty horses.

It is now the Newark branch of the Zizzi restaurant chain and – so they say – haunted:  
http://www.zizzi.co.uk/restaurants/newark.

Its original name is a reminder that it was built, at the considerable cost of over £20,000, as a memorial to John Evelyn Denison, Viscount Ossington (1800-1873), Speaker of the House of Commons from 1857 to 1872, by his widow, Charlotte (1805-1889).

She was the third daughter of the 4th ‘Farmer’ Duke of Portland, and sister of the eccentric 5th ‘Burrowing’ Duke [see More country-house railways and Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey] and his political brothers, Lord George and Lord Henry Bentinck.  Another sister married Lord Howard de Walden.

Denison’s forbears were Leeds wool merchants, but he inherited the Ossington Hall estate, near Newark, in 1820:  he was educated at Eton and Oxford and served as an MP from the age of 23.  His brothers were respectively Archdeacon of Taunton, Bishop of Salisbury and Governor successively of Tasmania, New South Wales and Madras.

John Evelyn Denison was not thought sufficiently grand to court Charlotte.  Her father resisted an engagement until she seriously threatened to elope.  (The story is related in a chapter of Charles J Archard, The Portland Peerage Romance (1907) which can be found at http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/portland1907/portland4.htm.)  They married in 1827, but had no children.

Charlotte, Viscountess Ossington’s bequest to the town of Newark appears not to have been a commercial success.  Which is a pity, because some police officers will tell you that they don’t spend their Saturday nights arresting out-of-control cannabis takers – or coffee drinkers.

Andrew Davison’s essay, ‘”Worthy of the cause”: the buildings of the temperance movement’ appears in Geoff Brandwood (ed), Living, Leisure and the Law:  eight building types in England, 1800-1914 (Spire Books/Victorian Society 2010):  see http://www.spirebooks.com/lll.html.  It supplements Mark Girouard’s account in the first part of chapter 8 of Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press 1984), which is out of print.

 

Summer house

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Lyveden New Bield, Northamptonshire

Lyveden New Bield, Northamptonshire

The last of Sir Thomas Tresham’s three buildings is in some ways the most intriguing.  Whereas the Triangular Lodge is a complete entity, Lyveden New Bield is incomplete, presumably abandoned on Sir Thomas’ death in 1605.  It has sat on its hilltop in the wide Northamptonshire countryside for over four hundred years now, and only recently has it begun to make sense fully, thanks to a smart National Trust researcher and the German air-force.

The architecture is actually quite easy to read.  It was clearly intended as a small residence, capable of supporting a small number of guests for meals and probably overnight.  There is, for instance, a kitchen with a bread-oven.  But the building seems never to have been roofed or floored.

The façades have the same combination of classical proportions and Elizabethan mullion-and-transom windows as the Rothwell Market House.  Lyveden New Bield, however, is much more obviously cruciform in plan, and it bristles with religious symbolism that quietly asserts Sir Thomas’ Catholic faith.

The cruciform plan, for instance, consists of five squares.  Sir Gyles Isham explained, in the National Trust guide-book, that the end of each wing has seven faces each five feet wide, because in Christian numerology five is the number of salvation and seven is associated with the Godhead.  The Biblical and liturgical inscriptions around the entablature each have eighty-one (9×9) letters, adjusted so that the names ‘Jesus’ and ‘Maria’ appear symmetrically on the wall alongside the end bay.  The frieze between the two principal floors carries carvings of the symbols of the Passion, Judas’ money bag, the scourge, the pillar, the crown of thorns and the sceptre of reeds, together with the two Christograms, ‘IHS’ and ‘XP’ representing the name of Christ.

If you were a pious Jacobean Protestant, you might accept that the theme of the decoration is the Passion of Our Lord.  If you were a knowing Catholic, you’d realise that it also celebrates the sufferings of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows.  Catholicism in that dangerous age was a sort of Freemasonry, communicating to its adherents through secret signs and signals.  In the year that Sir Thomas died, a group of Catholics including his son, Francis, attempted an audacious act of terrorism that we still commemorate on November 5th.

So what was it for?  The answer has recently become clearer.  From the main house down in the valley, Lyveden Old Bield, of which very little now remains, guests were invited to walk up through Sir Thomas’ new fruit garden, climb to the top of a spiral mount that was restored in the 1990s, where their ultimate destination, the New Bield, was suddenly revealed in the distance.  Once there they could enjoy the view with refreshments in comfort.  Sir Thomas might have kept “secret house” there when the Old Bield was being cleaned.  I’d be very surprised if he didn’t also intend to celebrate Mass:  no Protestant spy could get within a quarter of a mile of the place without being seen.

We owe a clearer understanding of this layout to a the crew of a German spy-plane who photographed the site in 1944.  Chris Gallagher, National Trust gardens and parks curator, found the images in the US National Archive in Baltimore, and realised that they showed that a previously unsuspected labyrinth formed part of Sir Thomas’ formal garden.  [See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8112577/Photos-taken-by-the-enemy-in-Second-World-War-shows-lost-Tudor-garden.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327165/Luftwaffe-WW2-photograph-reveals-lost-Tudor-garden-National-Trust-site.html.]

As a result the site has been regraded to Grade I by English Heritage.  It will be exciting to watch its restoration over the next few years.

The Old Beild, more commonly known as Lyveden Manor, was acquired by the National Trust in 2012 so that, in due course, the two properties will be reunited and both open to the public:  http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM66XE_Lyveden_Old_Bield_Near_Oundle_Northamptonshire_UK.