Hug another Odeon

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Former Paramount Cinema, Manchester (1996)

Former Paramount Cinema, Manchester (1996)

The New Victoria Cinema (latterly the Odeon), Bradford stands mouldering because its owners have pointedly neglected it for ten years and English Heritage has seen insufficient evidence to list it and secure its survival.

The Paramount Cinema, Oxford Street, Manchester, which finally closed in 2004, is in an even worse state.

Like the New Victoria, Bradford, it was opened in 1930 – in this case the very first Paramount cinema in the British provinces.  Designed by the Paramount house-architects, Frank T Verity and his son-in-law Sam Beverly, it seated 2,920 in an elaborate baroque auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ which survives in Stockport Town Hall [http://www.voxlancastria.org.uk/ltot01.htm].  Certainly it’s been knocked about a bit:  it was repeatedly subdivided in 1973, 1979 and 1992, and photographs show that the removal of the organ did no favours to the organ case.

The developers, Manchester & Metropolitan, carried out what they described as “limited and entirely lawful exposure works in anticipation of the forthcoming redevelopment”.  This involved ripping out easily accessible decorative features and discouraged English Heritage from listing, though a substantial amount of the original auditorium decoration remained.

Websites discussing the potential future of the Paramount include http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk/press/pr02_2007.htm, http://www.g7uk.com/photo-video-blog/20070519-manchesters-odeon-cinema-subjected-to-a-damaging-systematic-and-methodical-assault-to-prevent-preservation.shtml and – a more matter-of-fact view – http://www.aidan.co.uk/article_paramount_manchester.htm.

The parallels with Bradford are instructive.  A hopelessly large auditorium is subdivided in the 1960s to maintain its commercial viability;  by the end of the twentieth century the game is up and redevelopment is seen as the answer.  Finding a creative solution to preserve such a building is understandably off the developer’s script while its true architectural and historical significance is hidden.

Yet both these erstwhile Odeons stand within a potentially lucrative cultural quarter.  The Bradford building is next to the Alhambra Theatre and is within sight of the National Media Museum.  The Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin (September/October 2010) suggests that the Manchester Odeon could have had a future use as a supplementary conference venue alongside Manchester Central, the former G-Mex.

Alternatively, the building next door is a J D Wetherspoon’s pub – called, suggestively, the Paramount.

Probably the last urban-explorer images of the Paramount, taken shortly before demolition started in January 2017), are at https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/odeon-nee-paramount-cinema-manchester-jan-2017.t107194.

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

Hug the Odeon

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

When the New Victoria Cinema, Bradford opened in September 1930 it was the third largest cinema in the UK, seating 3,318 patrons.  Designed by the Bradford architect William Illingworth, its exterior is punctuated by two domed entrance towers.  The fan-shaped auditorium, elaborately decorated with classical pilasters and friezes, is surmounted by a 70-foot diameter dome.  There was a tea lounge, a 200-cover restaurant and a high-ceilinged ballroom with its own separate entrance.

The proscenium was 50 feet wide by 35 feet high;  the stage, 70 feet by 45 feet, was equipped with a full grid and ten dressing-rooms, because in 1930 live shows were a requirement and there was no guarantee that the fashion for new-fangled, technically unreliable talkies would last.

The original Wurlitzer survived a 1946 flood, because someone had the presence of mind to park the console at the top of its lift:  it now resides in the deliberately named New Victoria Centre, Howden-le-Wear, Co Durham.

The New Victoria became the Gaumont in 1950.  At the end of the 1950s decline set in:  the ballroom closed in 1961 and the Wurlitzer was removed when the building was subdivided in 1968.  Illingworth’s auditorium was so vast that, instead of the usual practice of dropping a wall from the balcony end to create additional screens in the rear stalls, the balcony itself was divided into two screens by a vertical partition and a floor across to the proscenium, and the stalls area became a 1,000-seater Mecca bingo hall. The twinned cinema reopened as the Odeon in August 1969.  In 1988 a third screen was opened within the otherwise unused ballroom.

After the bingo-club closed in 1997 and the multiplex cinema followed in 2000 the building stood empty.  It was sold first to a developer and later to Yorkshire Forward:  both planned to demolish the Odeon completely, and repeated redevelopment schemes excited vociferous opposition led by the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group [BORG], who in 2007 arranged for a thousand people to link hands and hug the entire building.

Public-sector bodies such as Yorkshire Forward and Bradford Centre Regeneration [BCR] claimed that the building had no historical value and was deteriorating, which it might well be after a decade without active maintenance.  English Heritage remained unconvinced that it is worth listing, and interested groups such as the Twentieth Century Society and the Cinema Theatre Association had difficulty gaining access to prove otherwise.

In the end, it fell to urban explorers, those curious obsessive aficionados of dereliction, to provide incontrovertible evidence that the original decorative scheme remained.  The 1968-9 conversion proved to be a shell built within the original space, and the ballroom conversion simply involved installing a suspended ceiling;  Odeon Cinema, Bradford – Whatevers Left.

To see some of what remains, check –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ6cmoURRU&feature=related.  It’s an eye-opener.

There’s a detailed history of the New Victoria Cinema at http://www.bradfordtimeline.co.uk/newvic.htm.  The present owners of the New Victoria Wurlitzer are at http://www.netoa.org.uk.

In September 2012 the agreement with the developer who intended to demolish it fell through, prompting a fresh search for an economic solution:  http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/9941717._All_viable_options_open__after_Odeon_deal_collapses and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-20097997.

The Homes & Communities Agency, to which the building had devolved, proposed to sell it to Bradford City Council for £1, and to provide £4.1 million to secure the building.  A structural survey revealed that, after all, the building was in better condition than had previously been suggested.

Irna Qureshi’s article in The Guardian (September 21st 2012) surveys the fall and rise of the New Victoria Cinema’s fortunes:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/sep/21/bradford-georgegalloway.

A 2014 film by Mark Nicholson and Vicky Leith shows how the building revealed itself as the 1970s accretions were stripped away:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Eidel-etU.

An urban-explorer report, presumably dating from early 2017, shows the extent of the cavernous spaces inside the New Victoria waiting to be restored: http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/15377618.23_PICTURES_____Urban_explorer____photographer_gets_a_rare_glimpse_inside_Bradford_s_Odeon_building/#gallery0.

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

Family portraits

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Fulbeck Manor, Lincolnshire

Fulbeck Manor, Lincolnshire

One of the delights of the 2010 Country Houses of Lincolnshire tour was visiting Fulbeck Manor, where Julian Fane shows some four centuries of family portraits.

There is always something special about being invited to a country house that is still a home, and being shown round by the owner rather than a bought-in guide.  Fulbeck Manor is exceptional because Mr Fane describes and shows his direct ancestors back to the sixteenth century.

One participant’s evaluation comment said, “To have a direct descendant of all the famous people portrayed explain their history, family connections, national importance, was both illuminating and a privilege, especially from someone with such a fund of stories.”

Alongside the direct line of Fanes there are of course cousins.  I particularly enjoy the story behind a pair of paintings by Harry Hall of the horses ‘Agility’ and ‘Apology’ which celebrate the embarrassing racing successes of Rev John William King (1793-1875).

Despite his use of a nom de course, Mr Launde, Agility’s twenty wins and £6,000 prize-money, followed by Apology winning the fillies’ Triple Crown (the 1,000 Guineas, the Oaks and the St Leger) in 1874 as well as the Home Bred Sweepstakes at Newmarket, the Coronation Stakes at Ascot and the Ascot Gold Cup provoked the Bishop of Lincoln to demand that as a clergyman he choose between the Church and the Turf.

In reply, Rev King sent the bishop a card on which he wrote the one word, ‘Apology’.

Fulbeck Manor is open to groups of up to twenty-five people by written appointment only:  details can be found at http://www.statelyhomes.com/areas/details.asp?HID=2329&ID=1006&path=12,32,38,1006&town.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  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.

No shrinking Violet

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Harlaxton Manor: present-day faculty common room

Harlaxton Manor: present-day faculty common room

The interwar rescuer of Gregory Gregory’s vast Harlaxton Manor was as formidable and eccentric as the building – the English daughter of a coal porter and a washerwoman who invented Shavex, the first brushless shaving cream, Mrs Violet Van der Elst (1882-1966), the widow of a Belgian artist.

A succession of Gregory’s descendants had inherited this unforgiving pile and, with varying degrees of success, tried to live in it.  When Thomas Sherwin Pearson Gregory died in 1935 his son put it on the market with 500 acres “or as required”:  80 bedrooms are mentioned, though there was only one bathroom.  Jackson Stops & Staff’s plaintive advertisement in The Times – “To save from demolition…noble ancestral seat…probably the supreme example of domestic architecture of its period” – ignored the possibility that Salvin and Burn’s architecture was so substantial that demolition would be uneconomic.

Mrs Van der Elst paid £78,000 for the building and its surrounding land, renamed it “Grantham Castle”, vigorously modernised the plumbing and installed electricity on a suitably grand scale, and was invariably to be found at the great country-house sales of the time – Clumber, Rufford and so on – picking up furnishings, fixtures and fittings at bargain prices.  She made the estate an animal sanctuary, extending her protection even to the domestic mice in the Manor.

A glimpse of the house in Mrs Van der Elst’s day exists as a 1939 Pathé newsreel clip:  http://www.britishpathe.com/video/grantham-castle.

She was famed for her vehement campaigns against capital punishment, regularly turning up in her Rolls Royce outside prisons at the time of an execution.  She also made a practice of holding séances to contact her dead husband, and kept his ashes in an urn in the library, a dark, low room dominated by antique barley-sugar wooden columns.

Having shared the building with the RAF First Airborne Division during the Second World War, Mrs Van der Elst ran out of money and sold the house in 1948 for only £60,000.  When the house contents were auctioned Mr Van der Elst’s ashes were accidentally knocked down to an unsuspecting bidder and had to be discreetly retrieved.

The manor passed successively to the Society of Jesus, the University of Stanford, California, and then the University of Evansville, Indiana, who use it as their English campus.

Harlaxton Manor features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  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.

Abandoned but not forgotten

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St Mary's Church, West Tofts, Norfolk: reredos

St Mary’s Church, West Tofts, Norfolk: reredos

Last summer I was privileged to visit, with the Victorian Society during their AGM weekend in Norwich, the church of St Mary, West Tofts, in the midst of the Ministry of Defence’s Stanford Battle Area.

The 30,000-acre training site was cleared of its population in 1942, to provide a battle-training area in preparation for Operation Overlord, the Battle of Normandy which followed D-Day in 1944.  Six villages – Buckenham Tofts, Langford, Stanford, Sturston, Tottington and West Tofts – were emptied within four weeks.  Four of these settlements, Langford, Stanford, Tottington and West Tofts, had functioning parish churches at the time.

At the end of hostilities the villagers’ expectations of being allowed to return were denied, and still the area is sealed and in regular military use.  Indeed, a replica Afghan village, staffed – if that is the word – by ex-Ghurka soldiers and amputee veterans, was constructed in 2009 at a cost of £14 million to assist in the current conflict.  The site was also used as a location for outdoor sequences of the TV series Dad’s Army, which was set in nearby Thetford [see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/holidaytypeshub/article-587698/Take-trip-Dads-Army-country.html].

Access to West Tofts Church is necessarily limited, and its isolation gives it an odd atmosphere.  West Tofts was of particular interest to the Victorian Society because it was restored in the late 1840s by the great Gothic Revival architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who rebuilt the chancel and added the quirky vestry and organ loft on the north side of the chancel, prompted by the wealthy parson, Rev Augustus Sutton (1825-1885), younger son of a Nottinghamshire baronet.

The transept contains an elaborate memorial to Sutton’s wife, Mary Elizabeth;  his more modest tomb lies in an external recess under the chancel wall.  The organ was transferred in the 1950s to the church of All Saints’, South Pickenham:  it has a spectacular organ-case, with leaves that open out in the manner of a triptych.

The likelihood of the battle area becoming safely accessible to the general public is virtually zero:  the military necessity remains and there is an accumulation of live ammunition.

There is a beautifully written and illustrated account of West Tofts and the other battle-area churches at http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/battlezone/battlezoneintro.htm.  Detailed accounts of the requisitioning of the Stanford Battle Area are in the excellent BBC WW2 People’s War series at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/62/a3258362.shtml#top, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/07/a3258407.shtml#top and http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/20/a3291220.shtml.

The BBC website has an audio-slideshow of another deserted village, Imber on Salisbury Plain:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11345287.  [Further background on Imber is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imber with a cross-reference to the entry on Tyneham, Dorset, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyneham.]

The Ministry of Defence discourages requests for access to West Toft Church and other sites in the Stanford Battle Area, and priority is given to those with a personal or family connection.

 

Quirks of fate

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Wentworth Woodhouse: east front (detail)

Primogeniture is a risky business.

Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920-2004) wasn’t expected to inherit until his older brother Billy was shot by a sniper in France in September 1944.  For the rest of his life, Andrew Devonshire was haunted by a feeling of stepping into his brother’s shoes:  “I’m Duke of Devonshire owing to a marksman killing my brother, so I’m here by proxy and I remind myself every morning when I wake up and again when I go to bed, that I am one of the luckiest men alive. And it does make me uneasy. I mean, it’s not right!” [Lynn Barber, ‘The Original Thin White Duke’, The Observer, October 22nd 2002].

Indeed, at the time that William, Marquess of Hartington died, it was possible that his wife of four months might have conceived – but it turned out she hadn’t.  Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington was the daughter of the former US Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy:  two of her brothers were Jack, the future US President, and his brother Bobby.

Her marriage did not go down well, particularly with her mother, Rose, because the Kennedys were staunch Boston Catholics whereas the Dukes of Devonshire were firmly Protestant. In fact, the only Kennedy to attend the wedding was Kathleen’s oldest brother, Joe Jnr, who was himself killed in action over Suffolk in August 1944.

The extraordinary grief of losing a brother and a husband within a matter of weeks would crush many people:  Kathleen Hartington wrote to a friend, “…life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage and death before the age of 25”.

She made a life for herself in post-war London, and fell in love with the unhappily married Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam.  Not only were the Fitzwilliams intransigently Protestant, but the necessity for a divorce was anathema to Rose Kennedy.  In the hope of persuading Joseph Kennedy Snr to accept their relationship the couple flew to the South of France in a private plane which encountered a thunderstorm and crashed into a mountain in the Ardèche region of France in 1948, killing all on board.  Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington is buried at Edensor, in the grounds of Chatsworth House:  her grave carries the epitaph “Joy she gave;  joy she has found”.

The Fitzwilliam title, the family seat at Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, and the extensive estates passed to Eric, 9th Earl, an alcoholic bachelor.  The next heir was not only distant but in doubt – one of two brothers, great-grandsons of the 5th Earl – of whom the elder, Toby, had a son and grandson, but whose legitimacy was uncertain, while Tom, the younger, had no male heir.  A court-case settled in favour of Tom, who duly succeeded as 10th Earl and died in 1979, taking the title with him.

So the Devonshire dynasty continues through the line of Billy Hartington’s younger brother and Chatsworth thrives;  the Fitzwilliam estates remain in the ownership of the 10th Earl’s descendants and the estate village of Wentworth is maintained by the Fitzwilliam Wentworth Amenity Trust, but the vast house, comparable in scale with Chatsworth or Blenheim, was sold off in 1989, and was until recently inaccessible to the public, though the East Front has always been visible from the bridleway that runs through the park.

The twentieth-century history of the Fitzwilliams is told in Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: the rise and fall of an English dynasty (Viking 2007), a remarkable achievement by a first-time author, not least because of the notorious secrecy of the family.  Tom, 10th Earl, ordered the destruction of those family documents that hadn’t been weeded by his predecessors:  the sixteen tons of papers took three weeks to burn.

Read the book.  It’s compelling.

For further articles on Wentworth Woodhouse and Wentworth Castle, simply type either name into the search box at top right of this page.  For detailed information about activities at and around Wentworth Woodhouse click here.

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.

Chatelaine of Chatsworth

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

There was a time when Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire could claim to be non-literary.  When her friend Evelyn Waugh sent her a copy of his biography of the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, he inscribed it “For Darling Debo, with love from Evelyn.  You will not find a word in this to offend your Protestant sympathies”, and she noticed that every page was blank – “the perfect present,” as she described it, “for a non-reader”.

Her two masterly descriptions of her home, The House:  a portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan 1982) and The Estate:  a view from Chatsworth (Macmillan 1990), showed her to be a charming, lucid and informative writer, with an unerring facility for the apt anecdote.

Since that time she has written extensively and has published an autobiography, Wait for me!  Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (John Murray 2010), which is characterised by the candour that contemporary memoirs allow, discussing her miscarriages and her husband’s alcoholism, with the comment, “Sixty years ago none of this would have been discussed:  it would have been swept under the carpet…in the pretence that it was not happening”.

(Andrew Devonshire, shortly before his death, wrote his own memoir, Accidents of Fortune [Michael Russell 2004], honest and modest, as befits a man who declared he won his Military Cross “for being cheerful”.)

In everything the Duchess writes, and in the interviews she gives, there is a characteristic astute common-sense, tipped with asperity – wondering, in a Sunday Times interview with Rosie Millard [September 7th 2008], if the media reporters who hounded her nephew Max Mosley had dull private lives, and vastly preferring Attlee to Blair among Labour prime ministers.

The survival of Chatsworth as a great house and a functioning landed estate is entirely attributable to the courage of Andrew, 11th Duke and to the business acumen of his duchess, Deborah.  When Edward, 10th Duke, died in 1950 four months too soon to escape death duties, it would have been an easy option for his son to sell up, pay the 80% duty and live the life of a prosperous publisher.

Instead, Andrew Devonshire took the view that he and his wife were “life custodians of what has been at Chatsworth for centuries”:  he sold outlying land, handed over Hardwick Hall to the National Trust and gave items from the Chatsworth collection worth four-fifths of the duty owed.  The debt on the actual death duty was settled by 1967;  paying off the accrued interest took until 1974.  Then, with a further sale of a single Poussin and a collection of 69 Old Master drawings, he set up a £21 million trust to maintain Chatsworth.  Visitor entry pays about one-third of the running costs;  the rest is met by the Chatsworth House Trust.

His Grace was always the first to give credit for the way his Duchess turned the estate into an extremely effective cash generator.  She took great pride in the fact that “there are no merry-go-rounds”;  her personal interest has always been in making the house and the estate popular and good value:  “I love shopkeeping better than anything.”

It’s Her Grace’s flair that created the Chatsworth Farm Shop [http://www.chatsworth.org/shop-eat/the-farm-shop], the Cavendish Hotel and Restaurant in Baslow [http://www.cavendish-hotel.net] and the Devonshire Arms Hotel, Bolton Abbey [http://www.thedevonshirearms.co.uk].

When the 11th Duke died in 2004 the title and the Devonshire estate passed to his son, Peregrine, and his wife Amanda.  They are now making their own mark on the house and the estate:  details of the Chatsworth Masterplan can be found at http://www.chatsworth.org/the-chatsworth-masterplan.

Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire died on September 24th 2014 at the age of 94, and is buried with her husband at Edensor on the Chatsworth estate.

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.

History’s foot-soldiers

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Princess' Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

Princess’ Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

I’m glad I came across the Jason Donovan edition of Who do you think you are? [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tndyd] because it explored parts of Australia I visited a few months ago.

Jason Donovan was born in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern in 1968, the son of an English father and an Australian mother.  The programme set out to explore his Australian roots, and I was interested to recognise location shots of Melbourne and Sydney, as well as footage of Tasmania and the Blue Mountains which I hope to explore on a future visit.

One of the locations I’d visited was the Princess’ Theatre, Melbourne, the one surviving auditorium where Jason’s great-grandmother, Eileen Lyons, had performed.  She was a singer who entered show-business at the age of sixteen (a year younger than Jason when he joined the soap-opera Neighbours).  Here in the auditorium-gallery, he was shown contracts, bill matter and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation audition-review dug out of the archives by a local historian.

Elsewhere, he followed his blood-lines to a Tasmanian convict-settlement and, most intriguing of all, to a connection with Dorset-born William Cox (1764-1837) who reached Australia commanding a contingent of transported convicts and went on to engineer the first road from Sydney across the Blue Mountains in 1814-5.

Jason Donovan is therefore descended both from a transported convict, and from a British army officer in charge of transporting convicts.  He’s a living example of the Australian claim to be a classless society.

Each step of the way, as in each of these programmes, the subject is assisted by archivists and local historians who have undertaken the spadework of detailed research that threads the story together.

Just as volunteer enthusiasts make possible the living-history museums, historical re-enactments, preserved railways and steam and motor-vehicle rallies that offer the general public weekend entertainment, so the nuts and bolts of local- and family-history research depends on individuals quietly beavering away in their specialist patch, building up a body of knowledge that the rest of us can tap into.

Jason Donovan’s realisation of a stronger sense of his Australian identity was made possible because he gained access to detailed information in libraries, archives and the files of people who investigate history for their own interest.

Those of us who explore our local or family history without the benefit of a BBC research team have even more reason to be grateful to the foot-soldiers who catalogue, index and retrieve the minutiae of past lives.

 

Tried and tested

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Sheffield Assay Office

Sheffield Assay Office

When my mate retired as a dentist, he surprised me by trotting off to the Sheffield Assay Office [http://www.assayoffice.co.uk] with a jamjar.  It turned out that he’d been collecting scrap gold fillings for thirty-odd years to cash in on his retirement.  Melted down into a dull-looking ingot (the colour, I’m assured, caused by the presence of other precious metals), this produced a healthy little nest-egg.  The Assay Office provides a certificate of the metallic content which is immediately acceptable to precious-metals dealers and offers virtually instant conversion to a satisfying cheque.

It’s an indication of Sheffield’s status as a manufacturing city of fine metalwork that, like Birmingham, it supports an assay office alongside the capital cities of London, Edinburgh and Dublin.  Eighteenth-century manufacturers of cutlery and silver ornaments in Sheffield collaborated with the metal workers of Birmingham to obtain the right to test the quality of local precious-metal products in 1773.  The meetings to campaign for the necessary Act of Parliament took place at the Crown & Anchor pub on London’s Strand:  as a result of the toss of a coin, it is said, Birmingham took as its place-mark the anchor and Sheffield the crown.  (The crown symbol was changed in 1975, and now Sheffield ware is identified by a Tudor rose.)

I had an opportunity to tour the Sheffield Assay Office earlier this year with the Art Fund South Yorkshire Group [http://www.artfund.org].  Emma Paragreen, the Assay Office’s Librarian/Curator, gave an introductory talk, and there was a tour of the analytical and marking areas of the new Guardians’ Hall, opened in 2008.

The interiors of the new premises in Hillsborough are decorated with oak panelling from the previous building, carved with the complete sequence of Sheffield date marks from 1773 onwards.  A selection from the Assay Office collection of silver is displayed, including new items which are commissioned from local craftsmen and women annually.

The culture of the Sheffield metal trades combines practicality with elegance.  The clothes brushes in the splendid gents’ lavatory are hand-made.  We do things properly in Sheffield.

Cosy curry

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Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

The other rite-of-passage at the age of sixty, after the bus pass, is the Senior Railcard.  It has to be after the bus pass because there is a cost and it’s not worth having until the first time you use it:  if you buy it the first day you need it, you have more days to use it at the other end (assuming you live that long).

We chose to launch my mate Richard’s railcard by taking the train from Sheffield to Derby, a mere forty minutes, to visit the Brunswick Inn in the Railway Village, three minutes’ walk from the station:  http://www.brunswickderby.co.uk.

Take a close look at the Railway Village houses and it’s obvious that this is polite architecture, not speculative artisan housing – actually by Francis Thompson, company architect of the North Midland Railway – built very early in the railway age, 1840-2.

The pub, occupying the apex of the triangular street-pattern, is distinctly elegant:  apparently it was originally the Brunswick Railway & Commercial Inn – catering for commercial travellers by offering storage for sample-cases, telegram facilities and generous opening hours.

The houses and the pub were scheduled for demolition in 1970, and were rescued by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust.  The Brunswick reopened in 1987, and a microbrewery was added in 1991:  the place collects awards, including UK Beer Pub of the Year, 2001.

From the Brunswick, we walked round to London Road, where there is a superlative Indian restaurant called Anoki [Derby | Anoki].  Anoki’s chief claims to fame are its superb food – £35 buys a multi-course banquet that leaves you full but not bursting – and its assiduously attentive staff.  The male waiters, who are in a majority, wear the sort of elaborate uniforms I associate with Indian border guards – hats with fans and shoes with curly toes.  The place is high camp:  the immaculate gents is liberally provided with fluffy white towels, the floor scattered with rose-petals.

Its historical claim to fame is that the building is the former Cosy Cinema, built in 1913, and later renamed the Forum (1939) and finally the Cameo (1950).  As the Cameo it featured an adventurous and unsuccessful line in French avant garde films;  better business was done by placing an advertisement at the exit to Derby Midland Station to attract long-distance passing trade.  Occasionally, when the house-lights went up, patrons would be found wearing dressing-gowns and pyjamas, refugees from the Infirmary across the road.

After the cinema closed in 1959 it became a furniture showroom:  installing display windows wrecked the ornate baroque façade.  The restaurant occupies the balcony level, built across to the former proscenium.  The barrel ceiling and caryatides are beautifully decorated and, where the original screen would have been, an endless loop of Bollywood clips is projected.

The place has impeccable style.